Is this art! Coprophia and vinly covers and don't forget Facebook and Ezekiel 4:12-13

Well I’m still exploring Facebook. I’m discovering that it’s the visual that everyone pays attention to (need we keep repeating that people don’t read anymore). Can’t say that I’ve done anything original on it or very creative – but then I guess that is not its purpose. What I can say is that all these Internet applications tend to enhance my time on the web (I need to go back to camping to get away from the Internet) – now I’m learning more about Goolge Earth. I tried a number of apps for Facebook but they all seem so dorky (and the ones that weren’t I couldn’t get to work)– stupid little games and my ‘faves’ (as if voting creates value – well it does, but only for what you've given careful consideration of – but not when you give a thumbs up or thumbs down to every thing you see – that’s just dumb!). Then Ben and I have a discussion about what is art but he has to get back to his roast – don’t want to burn the coffee. She says that the album cover (vinyls) show that he has up has gotten a lot of comment – he didn’t realize how much it would intersect with our concept of race – yes, I say, that’s what makes it art – I makes one consider one’s basic concept, opens us up to self-contemplation – art expands our sense of consciousness.

As a reviewer, when reading, I was, as it was, interrupting what the writer had to say, with the pleasure of my need to write my few hundred words and this had much the same effect as not listening to someone’s remarks because one is thinking how to answer them – Stephen Spender – World Within World, 1974 r p170

I am plotting all the places I visited last spring and early summer on Google Map. There should be a way that I can do a trip map and share it, don’t you think. I just put a pin in the form of a green teepee in Chaco Canyon.

I resisted learning poems by heart, because in recollecting them I did not want to hold them word by word in my mind, in exactly the same form as when I read them. I wanted to remember not the words and lines, but a line beyond the lines, a sensuous quality which went, as it were, into the lines before they were written by the poet and which remained after I, the reader, had forgotten them – Stephen Spender – World Within World, 1974 p58

Today’s news – parents allowing their kids to eat candy either as a reward or as a way to pacify them may be leading them into a life of crime – the handicapped are 50% more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than are the non-handicapped – and while on the subject of kids the more exposure that they have to media the more health problems they will later have.

Our salivary glands, which are located on the inside of each cheek, at the bottom of the mouth and under the jaw at the front of the mouth, churn out about two to four pints (one to two liters) of spit every day.
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And Robert wanted to know if coprophagia would cause death in humans (he though it did – having read Pynchon – and I don’t think he was an expert on the topic, I told Robert) – I could not find any specific health problems documented but most health experts seem to believe it leads to number of bacterial infections (E coli – salmonella) – then why is this not documented – dogs do it, rabbits do it – but I don’t recommend you do it – it’s occurrence in man is dealt with as a mental disorder – Bedouins have recommenced it as a remedy for bacterial dysentery (North African soldiers in WWII seemed to have tried it and agreed). God deals with it in Ezekiel 4:12-13. I don’t think Robert wanted to give it a try but was only curious why many animals practice coprophagia and yet it was deadly for man (what genetic selection process was at work here is the jest of his interest).

What was unbearable was to think that there is a non moral awakening, that we creep from moment to moment, sometimes happy, but never knowing the answer, never seeing things as a whole – Stephen Spender – World Within World, 1974 r p210

The Berkeley grand dames - wives of long dead white professors. Women on a peripheral of academia all their adult lives - students, hostesses, Berkelities. An Eddy Bauer shopping bag and a white wine - au courtier. Back at home they have gardens to tend and book clubs to go to. Doing something naughty right now - but not too naughty, she is studying up on how to win at poker. She would never, ever even considered cheating. She is determined to win by the rules. And win she is determined to do even if some of the rules have to be rewritten. They all will adhere strictly to Roberts Rules of Order. To hell with Orwell’s smelly masses, we can always retreat to our well cared for rose gardens. Our sympathies are with you and we will put a check to you in the mail. Berkeley be with you brother

Bats navigate by bouncing sonar off solid objects in the dark. We would like to know…what it feels like to do this…. Searle

The woman next to me scoots two tables together and sits cuddled up in the corner. Like me she is busy writing. But unlike me she has built a fort around her with shopping bags. Her handwriting in minute and covers all the former white space of her spiral-bound notebook. It (her writing) is rapid, decisive and continuous. She occasional refers back to an earlier passage. She tears out a sheet and starts anew.

And from the radio I hear “If I had a million dollars…” What she is doing is a manuscript of some sort. She has a second notebook in which she writes. She tears out some of the pages and inserts them into the first notebook.. This second notebook is in her lap. The first notebook is on the table in front of her.

I am drinking a China Black tea and reading Clifford Geertz’s “Works and Lives”. Right now while I write Geertz's book is lying upside down in front of me.

The lady has taken off her pink jacket and she has on a charcoal gray woolen jacket. She appears to be on the inside of a comfort zone. She is now sketching in the notebook. Is she working on the script - designing the scene for the play. A Yellow postit message is attached to the open pages of her manuscript. She stops writing and takes her blank notebook off of her lap and braces it against the top of the table and her abdomen. She takes a drink from a paper cup. She is not distracted for long, maybe ten seconds at the most. Then its back to writing. Occasionally she will place her right hand with the pen in it against her chin for a moment of reflection, but never for more than a few seconds. Mostly she writes.

Cities have often been likened to symphonies and poems; and this comparison seems to me a perfectly natural one: They are in fact objects of the same nature…something lived and sometimes dreamed - Levi-Strauss

She closes the notebook that has lain in her lap. She neatly places it on top of the manuscript. She raises her eyeglasses to the top of her head. She sits pensively, looking out of the window onto the rainy Fillmore Street night. She lets out a soft wistful sigh and puts both notebooks into a plastic bag that was lying next to her on the bench. She goes back to being pensive again, staring out the window again, watching it rain again. Her hands form balls against which she rests her chin. Her elbows are on the table. She sits there still for several more minutes. She then gets up from her fortified corner and goes to the back of the shop - probably to the restroom. Her pink jacket and her bags (all except for one) lie on the bench. A limp “Whole Foods” plastic bag lies on the table next to the window. A black fine tipped felt pen lies in the middle of the table with it nib pointing in the direction in which she had been sitting. About five minutes later she returns. She gathers up her things and puts on her pink jacket. She leaves. A swizzle stick is all that remains at the table in the corner where she had been sitting surrounded by her plastic bags – her little fort.

As you will have seen, we are having a new government with Charlie Chaplin and Father Christmas in the ministry. All words fail – Christopher Isherwood in a letter to Stephen Spender (Berlin - Jan. 1933)