April 11th...2011

Later on we'll explain and apologize appropriately for whatever it was that happened or didn't happen here on this blog in the month of March. I'll just tell you up front that it was a totally justified silence, and involved an escaped circus tiger, a missing suitcase and a hidden message detected in the hem of a ball gown for an understudy in the New York Ballet. Like I said, we'll get to it, and it's not a very interesting story anyway.

We're here to talk about this month. This April. This cruelest month as what's his name described it in Thanatopsis WRONG WRONG WRONG it was Eliot in THE WASTELAND and fie on me for my faulty memory of lines which have tumbled in my head for a decade (wet blanket that he was.)This remains true...Eliot was a wet blanket...though he did like the Groucho Marx a lot...apparently. Not in the way he meant it, April is turning out to be a cruel month indeed though. We've altered our schedule a bit for a couple reasons, chief among them that we really coudn't manage without alcohol this month. More on that later.

This month we are doing without digital media. Sort of. Well, it's our media ecology month anyway, an experiment in decreasing the amount of time we spend in our lives gazing into the flickering firelight of a computer screen. Our distant ancestors who spent their lives pitched in ceaseless combat against the whips and scorns of outrageous nature (see escaped circus tiger above) knew better than we do that it is simply a bad survival tactic to stare INTO the fire. It ruins the eyes for night work, Likewise, staring into these screens that have become in so many ways principle arbiters of the world seems like it must be a bad survival tactic. At any rate it is good to acknowledge their power over us and take a closer look...away from them.

The other day I was at a research panel review meeting, where diffierent institutions were highlighting their work in a number of fields (chiefly blowing things up and measuring the effects of this or that modelling software in predicting what blows up and how). The man running the show spoke late in the afternoon on the final day of the conference and announced that the results would be made available in an online tool because, as he put it blatantly, nothing is real until it's on the internet. He paused after he said it, so I think it was a joke, but no one laughed.

There's been enough diatribe and doomsay against the internet, and we're not about that here. I'm not anyway. Anyway, I'll let R write about it more since she's read THE SHALLOWS and Neill Postman with more assiduity than I. But on the other hand, I've read Verner Vinge's wonderful book RAINBOWS END, which I highly recommend and will excerpt and write about later.

Essentially that's all I can report today, that I will write more about some other stuff later (see escaped circus tiger above). Well, that's not entirely true. I can tell you about the rocky start we had to this month, which began with the difficult admission of just what this month meant. Drastic reductions in internet and no watching movies or television shows. There are essentially four websites i ever visit, so I didn't anticipate the first being difficult or feeling drastic (http://google.com , http://forum.dansimmons.com , htto://www.audiotool.com , http://facebook.com ). Well, for the first week or so it's been more of an exercise in undoing habitude. I have consciously checked myself quite a bit, stopping myself from checking my email more than once or twice a day, from looking at facebook....at all....which isn't a great loss...I still hate facebook...and from weighing in on political discussions etc. But I have been a bit intentional about it and not Draconian. I still research on google books, I still check my email, but the intent has been to decrease and examine and it's been interesting.

The movies are brutal though.

I realized that I tend to come home from work, having already read on the train for at least an hour, having cudgeled my brain all day in the office, having sat through or run meetings, having jostled and bumped against people on trains heading this way or that way through the city, and the thought of doing anything other than cooking, getting the kids to bed and then having a thoughtful or provacative or funny or interesting story told to me, while I sit and enjoy it...is overwhelming.

I'll say this much, after the first few days of it, I got more into the groove of writing in evenings, and I've written more consistenty in the last week, adding several pages a night almost to my novel (which is totally at sea and I'm not feeling all that great about it and don't want to talk about it). That's been good. But not watching films really feels like a fast, feels privative. I think in terms of really examining how we spend our days and nights, I am feeling the impact of not watching films more than anything else. It hasn't been terribly pleasant, but a little unpleasantness was I think, part of the purpose of this week, to understand, appreciate and be aware of each thing we do in our lives.

Now, about the circus tiger....