(news)letter 1:19

[Chris Porter]

(news)letter



"Say the thing with which you labor."

Thoreau


from the porter micro.press

Volume 1, Number 19 June 29, 1994
_________________________________________________________________

Happy Independence Day!

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I hate waking up late in the morning because then I go through
the day looking for a smile instead of providing one.

They Call it 'The Big City'
I went to New York City this past week: much thanks to Janet for
providing a piece of floor upon which to read and recuperate, and
an electrical socket for the laptop. This is the first time I've
been to the Big City without doing the tourist thing, without
feeling compelled to dash about the city taking in this sight and
that, running through museums and as a result seeing nothing
completely. The only thing I made myself do was to visit the
Museum of Modern Art, and again I ended up in the sculpture
garden frazzled by the heat, my brain imploded from taking in too
much art at one time.
In my circuit of the museum, I was inspired by many
different works of art. I particularly enjoyed the Books and
Prints room, Eluard's Liberté as a book made up of one long piece
of paper folded up into a book; seeing a Jackson Pollock piece in
person always amazes me -- in pictures his works look so flat,
they lack the depth of the actual piece, the globs of paint and
the interaction between the solid colors; the Photography exhibit
of course -- I love seeing great photographs, especially when I'm
wearing my camera: I leave the museum and take pictures of fire
hydrants and window sills, but of course my pictures never turn
out as if they deserve to be on a wall; I enjoy drawings, too --
the simplicity of only a pencil on paper and the things some
people can do with those limited resources; Duchamp's
conglomeration titled "Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy?" (little cubes
of marble cut to look like sugar cubes in a miniature wooden cage
with a thermometer wedged in the bars); de Chirico's "Double
Dreaming of Spring" and the intricate colors of Miro; Lee
Friedlander's exhibit "Letters from the People" -- photos of
signs with letters or numbers in them, store fronts, graffiti,
street scenes; women minimalists of the '90s; I especially liked
the inclusion of Paul Signac's "Opus 217" in the Catherine
Rockefeller collection: it looked more like a psychedelic rock
poster from Haight Asbury than the other staid works
But I had the most fun watching the people and walking the
neighborhoods than anything else. Canal St. on a Sunday afternoon
with the endless crush of people and overcrowded Chinese
storefronts; all the banners and people in Little Italy
celebrating the presence of the Italian team in the World Cup
(they lost to Ireland in the Meadowlands Saturday); Irish
supporters mobbing the ticket counter at the Port Authority for a
bus ride to the game, a sea of drunken, weaving green; the Bohos
and their galleries; the gays in town for their own version of
the Olympic games; seeing so many people that I know that it felt
just like a small town with lots of people in it. There were so
many people to see that it left little time to do anything else
except think and write.

"Hey Jack Kerouac, Have You Called Your Mother?"
I did read during the trip Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I first
read this book years ago when I was about to make my own cross-
country trip, and it certainly made me eager to travel. The
overriding image of this book is energy -- the writing style of
Kerouac, given his work habits (he originally turned this book in
as a manuscript of one long roll of paper); whether the folks
making a cross-country jaunt will have enough money and gas; and
of course the bundle of energy that is Dean Moriarity (Neal
Cassady):

But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and
I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people
who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad
ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be
saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who
never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn
like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders
across the stars and in the middle you see the blue
centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" (8)

I kept getting an impression of Walt Whitman in the way these
characters were so open to anything and everything -- like "Song
of Myself" On the Road is a journey of self-discovery taking
place in America with the help of Americans, undertaken by an
overbearing hero or heroes, whom the reader might not love, but
who deserves credit for being so gregarious and open to what he
might find. Whitman such a bear he might knock you down with a
hug, Cassady stealing all of those cars in Denver; Whitman would
share his last shirt with you; Cassady could give you his girl.

Quantum Brains ...
The June issue of Discover magazine features David Freedman's
"Quantum Consciousness" (89-98), about the efforts of Roger
Penrose, a British physicist and an American anesthesiologist
named Stuart Hameroff. They have proposed that there are
electrons which follow quantum laws within the brain, more
specifically in something called "microtubules." The problem with
which Penrose is concerned is what gives the brain consciousness.
The brain is just a lump of matter like everything else, but
somewhere within the makeup of that lump is a series of processes
which give humans the capacity to love and hate, to feel sad and
happy, to be conscious of ourselves as a "self." What it boils
down to is that the laws of quantum physics might apply to
structures within the brain. According to quantum physics, a
particle can exist in two different places, it can be a whole
series of different states until it is interfered with and in
effect forced to choose a state. Penrose and Hameroff propose
that electrons within the microtubule network are in that same
flux, that there is enough room in there for electrons to carry
about without having to choose a state. Somehow their interaction
and the process of choosing a state might make us conscious
beings.
And what does that all mean? I have no idea. But it would
give us a clue as to why we can't give a computer consciousness -
- we can make computers follow orders but maybe because we can't
instill that quantum mystery, a computer cannot act on its own,
or fall in love, or lead other computers in a spontaneous
rebellion.

... And More of the Same
And since I was reading about quantum physics, I decided to re-
read Tom Stoppard's Hapgood. I wanted to clarify in my mind a
couple of the principles of physics that are central to the
action. I realize the danger of reading fiction to help clarify
reality, especially with Stoppard, who loves to present the
audience with a tableau that he will then proceed to dismantle,
to show the audience how untrustworthy that "reality" might be.
One reason I feel safe with his character's elucidation of some
properties of physics: the natural laws themselves are so strange
that they explode "reality" themselves, they don't need
Stoppard's manipulation. The infamous Russian spies show up at a
drop but do they escape with the right bag or not? Who's spying
for which country here? Are the English passing real secrets to
the Russians or giving them bogus information, something they
want the Russians to believe? The Russian defector Kerner is a
double agent who just might be a triple agent. In trying to
explain his status to an English agent, Kerner explains about
electrons:

There is no explanation in classical physics. Somehow light
is a particle and a wave. The experimenter makes the choice.
You get what you interrogate for. And you want to know if
I'm a wave or a particle. (12)

He doesn't know -- it depends on which way you want to look at it
and when you decide to take the look.

(* Comments *)
I received a letter from David Smith of Austin, Texas, who had
several comments about issue number seventeen. Regarding my
disappointment in the Internet Yellow Pages, he proposes that if
I'm not willing to buy into the online corporate model (read, pay
more money), then I shouldn't expect too much:

there are two visions of the information highway: the
corporate and the community. The corporate model sees us as
an extension of current business practices; the corporate
model connects businesses with consumers by offering online
services. The community model connects people with people by
offering communication. I don't think you'll find anything
that Fully might want in the Yellow Pages. That's not the
place to look.

That is a good point: one shouldn't disparage an apple for not
being an orange, but I'm still down on the Internet Yellow Pages:
there is information available out there that has been offered by
and to the online community, and there are resources with which
to find it. Enough people believe in the freedom of information,
and I'm convinced that the corporate model is not the only way to
access information and services on the net.
And on another point he asks me, "If sanctions don't work,
how do you propose Clinton tackle human rights abuses?" My answer
is that new thinking should be brought to the problem. In his
audiotape, "How to Change Ideas," Edward De Bono talks about what
he means by lateral thinking: if one considers the action of
trying to solve a problem analogous to digging a hole, one might
find a better solution by digging a different hole instead of
digging deeper in the same hole. Sanctions don't work -- we've
seen that repeatedly -- they only serve to punish the weak. Why
not flood the offending country with goods and pamphlets
disparaging the rulers we despise, not allowing them to take
credit for the boom. That might be a poor example, but I think I
make my point -- if the logical answer doesn't work, discard the
logic.

You Can't Go Home Again
I remember an article I read years ago, this was in the early
1980s, during one of those droll days when I couldn't find
anything interesting to read. I raided Fully's bookshelf, finding
a Critical Inquiry from Spring, 1980. Leo Steinberg's "The Line
of Fate in Michelangelo's Painting" (411-454), influenced me
because I realized for the first time how enlightening
scholarship might be. Last week I hunted it down in the library
because it influenced me so much in gaining an appreciation for
scholarship, for digging behind the "there" to find larger issues
unapparent to the casual observer. Steinberg uses different
Michelangelo paintings to show that he often used a line that
would go from the top right to the lower left of the frame. The
viewer's eye, through the composition and details in the work,
might subconsciously realize the lines but they had never been
written about. My memory of it was more flattering to Steinberg
than this last look -- like so much of scholarship that writes so
blithely of influence and effect and purpose but when it boils
down to it, it's a subjective call. I couldn't agree with the
conclusions he reached -- one of his major points of evidence
depends on artists who copy a work: if they leave out or alter a
detail, what does that mean? Are they protecting the artist from
a possible heresy (as is possible in the "Last Judgement"), or
did they just not pay very close attention to different parts of
the painting? Art criticism is different from literary criticism
in this way because when an art critic writes of influence in
art, the reader can see the illustrations, can make his own snap
judgement, especially in paintings that aim for realistic
details. The reader has the means at hand to immediately
disagree.

OJ Agonistes
Neighbor Ted suggested this title and it certainly fits: an
"agonist" is someone engaged in a struggle and as used in the
tragic sense there is the implication that that person is
suffering for all of us in one way or another. OJ is certainly
suffering for our joy in gossip and "Hard Copy"-type journalism.
The press is overdoing their coverage of the OJ case, but I
wonder how many of us that complain about the coverage would be
irritated if the press laid off the case? How many of us are
addicted to the OJ news?
The best OJ joke, that I found in a list at the Internet's
rec.humor home page on the World Wide Web (maintained by Derek
Cashman at ODU), was kind of dry: "I tried to watch the Knicks
game last night, but all I kept seeing were those Ford Bronco
commercials." Most of the jokes were lame and in some way deal
with OJ's potential sex life in jail, Hertz (both the company and
the adjective), OJ's running style and the verb "to choke" used
in conjunction with his former team the Buffalo Bills.
And let's not forget Al Cowlings and Ronald Goldman, and the
prices paid for friendship. Or for that matter Nicole Brown ...

Woofies
I saw several movies in the past couple of weeks, none of which I
enjoyed. Go Fish makes no apologies for itself -- it is a movie
by and for lesbians. It is a stark, black-and-white, independent
production about a group of lesbians in Chicago, and their
efforts to get two of their members together. It's the kind of
movie that just wasn't for me, though I do think it was "good." I
saw it in NYC on a rainy afternoon and out of a crowd of fifty
there were three males. I will give them a lot of credit,
especially after learning from Newsweek how difficult is was to
make the movie (they had to shoot on weekends because the actors
are real people with jobs during the week). And I never knew how
erotic clipping fingernails could be!
Wolf is a Jack Nicholson-Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle, and such
a movie should be worth paying to see. But when the most
memorable scene is Jack Nicholson in the bathroom "marking his
territory," then there's something uninspired. What a perfect
role for Nicholson, too, the werewolf character who has free
reign to act like an animal, but the story's so flat, with only
one real surprise, that I have to wonder if those responsible for
it weren't just going through the motions, filling a quota of
some sort.
And it's weird that in such company Woody Harrelson and
Kiefer Sutherland would look good in contrast. Cowboy Way doesn't
pretend to be anything but what it is, a feel-better story with
plenty of laughs. Woody Harrelson really surprised me with his
character in White Men Can't Jump, and I was impressed by his
effort here until I realized that he was playing the same
character: the big-talking country boy come to save the day. So
what if it is largely unbelievable? Too many places strain the
credibility of the story and the nitpickers would have a field
day listing them all (a horse catching up to the subway?), but
it's cute and there's room in the world for cute. I wouldn't
spend a bunch of money to see it, but for a rainy day matinee it
serves a purpose.

Quote of the Week
After being there, I was ready to read Luc Sante's account of the
history of 19th and early 20th century New York City in Low Life.
In it he writes of the allure of the city:

The firmament that is New York is greater than the sum of
its constituent parts. It is a city and it is also a
creature, a mentality, a disease, a threat, an
electromagnet, a cheap state set, an accident corridor. It
is an implausible character, a monstrous vortex of
contradictions, an attraction-repulsion mechanism so extreme
no one could have made it up. (ix)

After roaming the streets like a vagabond I can agree with this;
I might have thought it a bit hyperbolic having done only the
tourist sites. It is an electric place, isn't it?