Uppity White Leftists

[pyro...@my-deja.com]

In high school it's funny how the White kids from multi-million dollar
homes think they are bad asses. I mean, these kids pretend as though
they are from the ghetto or something. They really think they are
tough. Well, that's the way White liberals are. They grow up in a
Beaver Cleaver-esque household, move on to an Ivy League college (or
one similar), and because they have made a couple of Black "friends" at
the university or work (most likely token niggers for the system of
quotas), they suddenly think they empathize with the poor! Because
they have watched a few episodes of Geraldo and Springer, and have seen
how distasteful those "bigots" (who are most likely staged) are, they
have begun establishing their identities as persons who are, or at
least can relate to, the oppressed. They really believe that they are
outside of the system, that they are not a part of the elite. But
that's exactly what they are: just look at where they grew up, the
universities they go to, the jobs they get. Of course, this is a bit
oversimplified, after all, I don't intend to write a book on
the "wannabe" tendencies of the human race and, in particular, the
uppity Whites. I just think it's funny that those who attack the so-
called system are the very Whites and Jews who control it. I believe
there is a clear case of deception and self-deception going on. And
this deception has gotten to a very perverse level.

If discussions on oppression are going to take place, let's end the
insincerity! Let's end the pretence! By all means, let's discuss how
to improve society! This crap about crying over what happened 400
years ago, about restitution for some and not others, about monitoring
the words people say, ideas which others find "offensive", establishing
a monopoly on historical discussions, and so forth, has got to go!
That's not what America's Founding Fathers had in mind! That's not
even what the Enlightenment thinkers had in mind!

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

[jum...@my-deja.com]

Source: Publishers Weekly, May 31, 1999 v246 i22 p78.
Title: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA VERSUS THEODORE JOHN KACZYNSKI:
Ethics, Power, and the Invention of the Unabomber.(Review)
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Mello, Michael

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Cahners Publishing Company

Michael Mello. Context Books [PGW, dist.), $24.95 (368p)
ISBN 1-893956-01-6

The Unabomber described in these pages is not the terrorist who killed
three and maimed two others. Rather, he's a frustrated defendant who
was unable to exercise all the legal options available to him, because
his lawyers kept him in the dark about their insanity-defense strategy
until it was too late. Mello (Dead Wrong, etc.), a law professor and
outspoken critic of capital punishment, corresponded with the
imprisoned Theodore Kaczynski. He argues that Kaczyinski's lawyers
were selective in presenting evidence in order to support a viewpoint
highly prejudicial to their client's best interest. For example, they
brought Kaczynski's cramped cabin from Montana to California so they
could show it to a jury as proof of their client's dementia. What they
did not bring, as one observer pointed out, was the beautiful mountain
landscape the cabin inhabited. By entering a guilty plea in exchange
for three life sentences, Kaczynski's legal team may have saved him
from a death sentence, Mello writes, but they also kept him from
getting his day in court and publicizing his ideas about the evils of
technology and environmental degradation. Having made his point, Mello
tries to draw a parallel between Kaczynski and John Brown. But it is
hard to imagine Sierra Club members flocking to a Sacramento courtroom
to defend Kaczynski's assaults on professors and businesspeople only
vaguely associated with environmental destruction. Kaczynski, despite
Mello's sympathy, comes across as someone who believes himself to be
superior to anyone who doesn't subscribe to his anti-technology
agenda. Mello is a penetrating critic of the legal system. However,
though he doesn't try to make Kaczynski a hero, he will have hard time
convincing most readers to take Kaczynski seriously as a social
critic. (June)

FYI: Context Books will publish Kaczynski's own manifesto, Truth
Versus Lies, in August.

==========================================================

Source: Library Journal, Oct 15, 1997 v122 n17 p80(1).
Title: Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America
Author: Nora Harris
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: West, Cornell
Sealey, Kelvin S.

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1997 Reed Publishing USA

West, Cornell. Beacon, dist. by Farrar. Oct. 1997. c.224p.
ed. by Kelvin S. Sealey. ISBN 0-8070-0942-3. $25. SOC SCI

How is hope created and maintained? In his Race Matters (LJ 3/15/93),
West said that there was an "eclipse of hope and the collapse of
meaning in much of black America." With this book he returns to the
topic of hope and meaning in the African American community by
conducting a series of interviews with leading politicians, writers,
musicians, journalists, and scholars, including Bill Bradley,
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Wynton Marsalis, and Maya Angelou. Each talks
of how hope can be created and nurtured through the strength of the
traditional black church, the love of close families, and the
experience of shared cultural history and traditions. The
interviews--thoughtful, intimate, and intriguing--make the reader
believe that hope in black America can indeed be restored. Recommended
for all libraries.
--Nora Harris, Marin Cty. Free Lib., San Rafael, Cal.

============================================================

Source: Publishers Weekly, Sept 5, 1994 v241 n36 p33(2).
Title: Race Matters._(audio-visual reviews)
Subjects: Audio-visual materials - Reviews
People: West, Cornell

Full Text COPYRIGHT Reed Publishing USA 1994

West, a professor at Harvard's Divinity School and Department of
Afro-American Studies, opens this tape with a poignant story of his
recent difficulties as an African American trying to hail a taxi cab
in Manhattan. In the course of the telling, West weighs the logic of
eloquent philosophical thought against a powerful personal anger. It's
a polarity that resonates throughout this production, which
unflinchingly attempts to analyze "how much race matters in the
American present." The 1992 events following the Rodney King verdict
in Los Angeles are discussed in terms of "social rage." Supreme court
justice Clarence Thomas is examined in terms of his "black
authenticity." And the current crop of African American political
leaders are weighed against the historical precedents set by Martin
Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. West's densely worded and
intellectually irascible narration is broken up with poignant quotes
read by his mother, Irene West. The sum production in this effort,
while biting in its various social criticisms, is at heart a spirited
call to social action. Reading aloud, Professor West builds his
arguments with handsome verbal acuity that exhibits a deep grasp of
the beauty of the spoken word. Based on the 1993 Beacon book.

===========================================================

Source: Harper's Magazine, April 1999 v298 i1787 p63(1).
Title: LISTENING FOR SILENCE.
(silence in short supply in modern life)
Author: Mark Slouka
Abstract: Modern life - with its pagers, cellular phones,
canned laughter, and piped-in music - leaves virtually no
room for silence. Many people have noticed the influence of
the visual age, but it seems that the changes to the aural
landscape have gone unnoticed. However, while we can 'turn
off' our sight by closing our eyes or drawing the blinds,
we can only combat unwanted noise with additional noise,
and we even hear in our sleep. Money can buy space, which
in turn buys silence, but most people have little control
over the lack of silence.
Subjects: Silence - Appreciation

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Harper's Magazine Foundation

Notes on the aural life

Music, Claude Debussy once famously remarked, is the stuff between the
notes, an observation that resonates, pardon the pun, from the
flawless spacing of a Billie Holiday tune to the deletions--whether
generous or cruel--in our daily lives. Essentially neuter, neither
balm nor curse, silence, like light or love, requires a medium to give
it meaning, takes on the color of its host, adapts easily to our fears
and needs. Quite apart from whether we seek or shun it, silence
orchestrates the music of our days.

I'm well aware, of course, that one man's music is another man's
noise, that the primary differences between a cork-lined room and
solitary confinement are the lock on the door and the sensibility of
the inmate. I wish not to define silence but to inquire about its
absence, and I ask the question not to restate the obvious--that
silence, in its way, is fundamental to life, the emotional equivalent
of carbon--but because everywhere I turn I see a culture willing to
deny that essential truth. In my idle moments I picture a god from my
son's book of myths (with an Olympian straw and sucked-in cheeks)
drawing the silence out of the land, and if the conceit is fanciful,
the effect, sadly, is not: as silence disappears, the world draws
tighter, borders collapse, the public and the private bleed and
intermix. Victim to the centripetal pull, the imagination crackles
with the static of outside frequencies, while somewhere in the
soul--listen!--a cell phone is chirping. Answer it quickly, before
someone else does.

At the close of the millennium, a new Tower of Babel, monolingual
(despite the superficial mixture of tongues), homogeneous (because
almost invariably pitched in the vernacular of the marketplace), casts
its shadow over the land. Ubiquitous, damn-near inescapable, it is
rearranging the way we live, forcing crucial adjustments in our
behavior, straining our capacity for adaptation. If it continues to
grow, as I believe it will, future generations may one day distinguish
our age not for its discovery of Elsewhere, as E. B. White called the
world beyond the television screen, but for its colonization of
silence.

Ensnared in webs of sound, those of us living in the industrialized
West today must pick our way through a discordant, infinite-channeled
auditory landscape. Like a radio stuck on permanent scan, the culture
lashes us with skittering bits and bytes, each dragging its piece of
historical or emotional context: a commercial overheard in traffic, a
falsely urgent weather report, a burst of canned laughter, half a
refrain. The pager interrupts lectures, sermons, second acts, and
funerals. Everywhere a new song begins before the last one ends, as
though to guard us against even the potential of silence. Each place
we turn, a new world--synthetic, fragmented, often as not jacked into
the increasingly complex grid that makes up the global communications
network--encroaches on the old world of direct experience, of
authentic, unadorned events with their particular, unadorned sounds.

Although a great deal has been said about our increasingly visual age,
the changes to our aural landscape have gone relatively unremarked.
The image has grown so voracious that any child asked to sum up the
century will instantly visualize Einstein's hair and Hitler's
mustache, mushroom clouds and moon landing; this despite the fact that
each of these visual moments has its aural correlative, from the blast
over Hiroshima to the high-pitched staccato ravings of the Fuhrer, to
Neil Armstrong's static-ridden "giant leap for mankind."

But make no mistake: sound will have its dominion. The aural universe,
though subtler than the one that imprints itself on our retina, is
more invasive, less easily blocked. It mocks our sanctuaries as light
never can. If my neighbor decides to wash his car in front of my study
window, as he does often, I can block out the uninspiring sight of his
pimpled posterior by drawing the shades; to block out his stereo, I
must kill noise with noise. We hear in our sleep. There is no aural
equivalent for the eyelid. In our day, when the phone can ring, quite
literally, anywhere on the planet, this is not necessarily good news.

I have nothing against my aural canal. I adore music (though I make it
badly). I have nothing against a good party, the roar of the crowd.
But I make a distinction between nourishment and gluttony: the first
is a necessity, even a pleasure; the second, a symptom. Of what? In a
word, fear. One of the unanticipated side effects of connectedness.
Perhaps because it's never enough, or because, having immersed
ourselves in the age of mediation (as Bill Gates refers to it),
accustomed ourselves to its ways and means, we sense our dependency.
Or because, finally, like isolated apartment dwellers running the TV
for company, we sense a deeper isolation beneath the babble of voices,
the poverty of our communications. So, adaptable to a fault, we
embrace this brave new cacophony, attuned, like apprentice
ornithologists, to the distinguishing calls of a mechanical phylum.
Capable of differentiating between the cheeps and chimes of the cell
phones, portable phones, baby monitors, pagers, scanners, personal
digital assistants, laptop computers, car alarms, and so on that fill
our lives, we've grown adept, at the same time, at blocking them out
with sounds of our own, at forcing a privacy where none exists.

At the supermarket, a middle-aged man in a well-cut suit is calling
someone a bitch on the phone. Unable to get to the ricotta cheese, I
wait, vaguely uncomfortable, feeling as though I'm eavesdropping. At
the gym, the beeps of computerized treadmills clash with the phones at
the front desk, the announcements of upcoming discounts, the disco
version of Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind." A number of
individuals in Walkman earphones, unaware that they've begun to sing,
bellow and moan like the deaf.

"I love a wide margin to my life," Thoreau remarked, quaintly,
referring to the space--the silence--requisite for contemplation, or,
more quaintly, the forming of a self. A century and a half later,
aural text covers the psychic page, spills over; the margin is gone.
Walking to work, we pass over rumbling pipes and humming cables,
beneath airplane flight corridors and satellite broadcasts, through
radio and television transmissions whose sounds, reconstituted from
binary code, mix and mingle, overlap and clash, and everywhere drifts
the aural refuse of our age.

Thus may the stuff between the discordant notes of our lives
require--and I'm not unaware of the irony here--a few words in its
defense. Begin anywhere. The cottage in which I spend my summers is
silent yet full of sound: the rainy hush of wind in the oaks, the
scrabble of a hickory nut rolling down the roof, the slurp of the dog
in the next room, interminably licking himself ... I've never known
perfect silence. I hope to avoid making its acquaintance for some time
to come, yet I court it daily.

My ambivalence toward silence is natural enough: the grave, the
scythe, the frozen clock, all the piled symbols of death, reinforce an
essential truth, a primal fear: beneath the sloping hood, death is
voiceless. Silence spits us out and engulfs us again, one and all, and
all the noisemakers on Bourbon Street, all the clattering figurines in
Cuernavaca can't undo the unpleasant fact that el dia, properly
understood, always ends in la muerte, that quiet, like a pair of great
parentheses around a dependent clause, closes off our days. Sorry.

But if it's true that all symphonies end in silence, it's equally true
that they begin there as well. Silence, after all, both buries and
births us, and just as life without the counterweight of mortality
would mean nothing, so silence alone, by offering itself as the
eternal Other, makes our music possible. The image of Beethoven
composing against the growing void, like all cliches, illuminates a
common truth: fear forces our hand, inspires us, makes visible the
things we love.

But wait. Does this mean that all is well? That the pendulum swings,
the chorus turns in stately strophe and antistrophe, the buds of May
routinely answer winter's dark aphelion? Not quite. We are right to be
afraid of silence, to resist that sucking vacuum--however much we
depend on it--to claw and scratch against oblivion. The battle is in
deadly earnest. And therein lies the joke. Resistance is one thing,
victory another.

Left partially deaf by a childhood inflammation of the mastoid bones,
Thomas Edison throughout his life embraced the world of silence,
reveled in its space, allowed it to empower him; as much as any man,
perhaps, he recognized silence as the territory of inspiration and
cultivated its gifts. Deafness, his biographers agree, acted like an
auditory veil, separating him from the world's distractions, allowing
him to attend to what he called his business: thinking.

I mention these facts, however, not for the small and obvious
irony--that a man so indebted to silence should do more than any other
to fill the world with noise--but to set the context for a scene I
find strangely compelling. In June 1911, hard at work on what would
eventually become the disk phonograph, Edison hired a pianist to play
for him (as loudly as possible) the world's entire repertoire of
waltzes. And there, in the salon at Glenmont, either out of
frustration at not being able to hear the music to his satisfaction
or, as I'd like to believe, out of sudden desperate love for the thing
he'd missed (as charged as any of love's first fumblings), the
sixty-four-year-old Edison got on his hands and knees and bit into the
piano's wood, the better to hear its vibrations. Will Edison's fate be
our own? Afloat in the river of sound loosed upon the world by
Edison's inventions, having drunk from it until our ears ring, we now
risk a similar thirst.

Tacked to the wall above my desk, staring out from a page torn from
the back of The New York Times Magazine, are the faces of seventeen
men and women whose portraits were taken by KGB photographers more
than half a century ago, then filed, along with hundreds of thousands
like them, in the top-secret dossiers of Stalin's secret police. Over
the years, I've come to know the faces in these photographs nearly as
well as I know those of the living. I study them often--the woman at
the left whose graying hair has begun to loosen, the beautiful young
man at the right, the fading lieutenant at the bottom corner whose
cheeks, I suspect, had the same roughness and warmth as my
father's--because each and every one of them, within hours of having
his or her picture taken, was driven to a forest south of Moscow and
executed; because all, or nearly all, knew their fate at the time
their pictures were taken; and because, finally, having inherited a
good dose of Slavic morbidity (and sentimentalism), I couldn't bear to
compound the silence of all of those lives unlived by returning
them--mothers and fathers, sons and lovers--to the oblivion of yet
another archive, the purgatory of microfiche. On my wall, in some
small measure, they are not forgotten; they have a voice.

Today, as the panopticon reveals to us, as never before, the agony of
our species, the lesson is repeated daily. We read it in the skulls of
Srebrenica, growing out of the soil, in the open mouths of the dead
from Guatemala to the Thai-Cambodian border, whose characteristic
posture--head back, neck arched--seems almost a universal language:
the harvest of dictatorship, properly understood, is not death, but
silence. Mr. Pinochet's "los desaparecidos" (like Slobodan
Milosevic's, or Heinrich Himmler's), are really "los callados" (the
silenced), the snuffing of their voices only the last, most brutal
expression of a system dependent on silence as a tool of repression.
The enforced quiet of censorship and propaganda, of burning pages and
jammed frequencies, is different from the gun to the temple only in
degree, not in kind.

And yet who could deny that silence, though both the means and end of
totalitarian repression, is also its natural enemy? That silence, the
habitat of the imagination, not only allows us to grow the spore of
identity but, multiplied a millionfold, creates the rich loam in which
a genuine democracy thrives. In the silence of our own minds, in the
quiet margins of the text, we are made different from one another as
well as able to understand others' differences from us.

In the famous John Cage composition 4'33", the pianist walks onstage,
bows, flips the tail of his tuxedo, and seats himself at the piano.
Taking a stopwatch out of his vest pocket, he presses the start
button, then stares at the keys for precisely four minutes and
thirty-three seconds. When the time is up, he closes the piano and
leaves the stage.

Nearly half a century after it was first performed, 4'33" rightly
strikes us as hackneyed and worn, a postmodern cliche intent on
blurring a line (between art and non-art, order and disorder, formal
structure and random influence) that has long since been erased. As
simple theater, however, it still has power. Cage's portrait of the
artist frozen before his medium, intensely aware of his allotted time,
unable to draw a shape out of the universe of possibilities, carries a
certain allegorical charge, because we recognize in its symbolism--so
apparently childlike, so starkly Manichaean--a lesson worthy of
Euripedes: art, whatever its medium, attempts to force a wedge beneath
the closed lid of the world, and fails; the artist, in his or her
minutes and seconds, attempts to say--to paint, to carve; in sum, to
communicate--what ultimately cannot be communicated. In the end, the
wedge breaks; the lid stays shut. The artist looks at his watch and
leaves the stage, his "success" measurable only by the relative depth
of his failure. Too bad. There are worse things.

But if silence is the enemy of art, it is also its motivation and
medium: the greatest works not only draw on silence for inspiration
but use it, flirt with it, turn it, for a time, against itself. To
succeed at all, in other words, art must partake of its opposite,
suggest its own dissolution. Examples are legion: once attuned to the
music of absence, the eloquence of omission or restraint, one hears it
everywhere--in the sudden vertiginous stop of an Elizabeth Bishop
poem; in the space between souls in an Edward Hopper painting; in
Satchmo's mastery of the wide margins when singing "I'm Just a Lucky
So and So." In the final paragraph of Frank O'Connor's small
masterpiece "Guests of the Nation," an Irish soldier recalls looking
over a patch of bog containing the graves of two British soldiers he's
just been forced to execute, and observes, simply, "And anything that
happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again." Such a
black hole of a line, dense with rejected possibilities, merciless in
its willingness to sacrifice everything for a quick stab at truth.

Silence," wrote Melville, only five years before withdrawing from
writing more or less for good, "is the only Voice of our God." The
assertion, like its subject, cuts both ways, negating and affirming,
implying both absence and presence, offering us a choice; it's a line
that the Society of American Atheists could put on its letterhead and
the Society of Friends could silently endorse while waiting to be
moved by the spirit to speak. What makes the line particularly
notable, however, is that it appears in Pierre, or, the Ambiguities, a
novel that, perhaps more than any other in American literature, calls
attention to its own silences, its fragility. Offering us a hero who
is both American Christ and Holy Fool, martyr and murderer, writer and
subject, Melville propels him toward his death with such abandon, with
such a feel for what Thomas Mann would one day call "the
voluptuousness of doom," that even his language gets caught in the
vortex: in one particularly eerie passage we watch the same sentence,
repeated four times, pruned of adverbs, conjunctions, dependent
clauses, until it very nearly disappears before our eyes.

There's nothing safe about this brinksmanship, nothing of the
deconstructionists' empty posturings. "He can neither believe,"
Hawthorne wrote, "nor be comfortable in his unbelief." Melville had
simply allowed his doubts to bleed into his art. As they will. Having
"pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated," he quite naturally
took his writing with him.

Reading Pierre is an uncomfortable business, akin to watching an
artist painstakingly put the finishing touches on his own epitaph. One
naturally hopes for a slightly more redemptive vision, a vision that
shifts the stress from the inevitability of doom and the triumph of
silence to the creative energy these release to the living. Within
Melville's own work, we don't have far to look. In Moby-Dick, the book
he wrote just before Pierre, Melville also engineered an apocalypse
yet managed to remain far enough away to avoid its pull, to save
something, to offer us a metaphor that captures perfectly the tensions
essential to our work and our lives. Something survives the Pequod's
sinking; though silence may reign over the waters, the vortex
eventually slows. The coffin bursts to the surface. And on that coffin
are the hieroglyphics of our art.

If one of the characteristics of capitalism is that it tends to shut
down options, narrow the margins, then perhaps what we are seeing
these days is one of the side effects of the so-called free market:
most of the noises we hear are the noises of buying and selling. Even
the communication between individuals has been harnessed to the
technologies that make them possible: to be deprived of the fax
machine, the cell phone, the TV, the pager, etc., is to be relegated
to silence, Communication, having been narrowed into whatever can be
squeezed into binary code, has been redefined by the marketplace into
a commodity itself.

Yet capitalism, we know, always tries to feed the hungers it creates,
to confect its own antidotes--so long as the price is right. As the
vast silences of the republic are paved over by designer outlets and
shopping malls, a kind of island ecosystem remains, self-conscious in
its fragility, barely viable. The proof is detectable in any upscale
travel magazine: there you will find exclusive spas advertising the
promise of silence--no pagers, no cell phones, just the sounds of lake
water lapping--as though silence were a rare Chardonnay or an
exclusive bit of scenery, which, of course, is precisely what it now
is.

That silence, like solitude, is now a commodity should not surprise
us. Money buys space, and space buys silence; decibels and dollars are
inversely proportional. Lacking money, I've lived with noise--with the
sounds of fucking and feuding in the airshaft, MTV and Maury Povitch
coming through the walls, in apartments with ceilings so thin I could
hear the click of a clothes hanger placed on a rod or the lusty stream
of an upstairs neighbor urinating after a long night out. I've
accepted this, if not gracefully at least with a measure of
resignation. The great advantage that money confers, I now realize, is
not silence per se but the option of silence, the privilege of
choosing one's own music, of shutting out the seventeen-year-old whose
boombox nightly rattles my panes.

But if the ability to engineer one's own silence has been one of the
age-old prerogatives of wealth, it's also true that the rapidly
changing aural landscape of the late twentieth century has raised the
status (and value) of silence enormously. As the world of the made, to
recall e. e. cummings, replaces the world of the born, as the small
sounds of fields at dusk or babies crying in the next apartment are
erased by the noise of traffic and Oprah, as even our few remaining
bits of wilderness are pressed thin and flat beneath satellite
transmissions, Forest Service bulldozers, and airplane flight
corridors, we grow sentimental for what little has escaped us and
automatically reach for our wallets. Like a telltale lesion that
appears only on those who are desperately ill, value--even outrageous
value--often blossoms on things just before they leave us, and if the
analogy is an ugly one, it is also appropriate; the sudden spasm of
love for the thing we're killing, after all, is as obscene as it is
human. As we continue to pave the world with sound, we will continue
to crave what little silence escapes us, an emptiness made audible by
its disappearance.

Mark Slouka is the author of Lost Lake, a collection of stories
published last year by Knopf. His most recent piece in Harper's
Magazine, "Hitler's Couch," appeared in the April 1998 issue.

=========================================================

Source: Library Journal, June 1, 1998 v123 n10 p165(1).
Title: Lost Lake._(book reviews)
Author: Patrick Sullivan
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Slouka, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 Reed Publishing USA

Slouka, Mark. Lost Lake. Knopf. 1998. c. 192p. ISBN 0-375-40215-2. $21.

This lyrical and beautifully written collection of short fiction is a
complex meditation on memory, loss, and the meanings we create from
our family histories. The narrator of these stories is a middle-aged
man whose experiences as a young boy at his family's vacation cabin on
a small, idyllic lake have clearly been among the most important of
his life. The narrator's memories are richly and appealingly
nostalgic, but what is perhaps most noteworthy about this collection
is the way Slouka balances this nostalgia with insightful reflections
about the more problematic aspects of his narrator's life experiences.
"Jumping Johny," for example, is a poignant, bittersweet story about
the narrator's relationship with his father, who has just had a heart
attack. The narrator's encounter with his father in the hospital
inspires a surge of musings, emotions, and memories of his father at
the lake that are deeply moving and exquisitely rendered. Recommended
for both public and academic libraries.

==============================================================

Source: Booklist, May 1, 1998 v94 i17 p1506(1).
Title: Lost Lake.(Review)
Author: ALLEN WEAKLAND
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Slouka, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 American Library Association

Slouka, Mark. Lost Lake. May 1998. 192p. Knopf, $21 (0-375-40215-2).

These well-crafted love letters, in short story form, are addressed to
the fishing life. Slouka, who debuts with this collection, offers a
secondary theme as he traces Czech ancestors to forge a strong link
with his rod-wielding subject matter. In "The Shape of Water," with
its elegant opening (."Some say the soul tempered by firew--tortured
true--is the better for the trial.... But I was born between the
wars."), the lake takes on an almost placental function. Intrigued by
beginnings, Slouka crafts in "Genesis" a paean to a man who
singlehandedly constructs 23 cabins around a lake--one of which the
narrator's father ultimately buys. One quibble is that four
"sketches"--short extracts, one would think, from unfinished
works--are included. Fillers for a short volume, they nevertheless
distract. One would much prefer one more memorable story, of which
this author is certainly capable. But perhaps he took the "I'd rather
be fishing" bumper-sticker literally. An impressive new voice,
nonetheless. Several of these stories have been published previously
in Harper's magazine.

=============================================================

Source: Publishers Weekly, April 6, 1998 v245 n14 p59(1).
Title: Lost Lake._(book reviews)
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Slouka, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 Cahners Publishing Company

Mark Slouka. Knopf, $21 (192p) ISBN 0-375-40215-2

"A particular forty acres of water," a peaceful, manmade lake not far
outside New York City, connects these 12 poignant short stories and
the vital, multigenerational cast of characters inhabiting them. A
narrator named Mostovsky (we never learn his given name), the son of
Czech immigrants now grown into a husband and father himself,
pensively plumbs his boyhood memories--real and apocryphal. The often
lyrical pieces not only portray his experiences fishing and exploring
but also recall tales he heard or imagined about the lake's creation
near the start of the century, about war, intrigue and bloodshed back
in his family's homeland. Others deal with the subtle dynamics among
his neighbors and with private thoughts he could not have understood
as they were happening. Slouka's prose is elegant and rich in
unexpected metaphor as he explores the varying forms and faces of
expatriation. He finds patterns and forces of nature as evident in the
lives and history of the people around him as in the wind, trees,
fish, animals and insects of the lake. One of these story. "The
Woodcarver's Tale," won a 1997 Harper's National Magazine Award in
Fiction. It is the harbinger of what should be an impressive career.
(May)

==============================================================

Source: Harper's Magazine, April 1998 v296 n1775 p51(7).
Title: Hitler's couch: when history makes an unexpected
entrance.(Holocaust)
Author: Mark Slouka
Abstract: A writer of Czechoslovakian descent recalls Hitler's
reign of terror during World War II. Later, in college, he
held a job helping the elderly and briefly worked for a
woman who told him tales of the Holocaust.
Subjects: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) - Personal narratives
People: Hitler, Adolf - Conduct of life

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 Harper's Magazine Foundation

When history makes an unexpected entrance

This was the Angel of History! We felt its wings flutter through the
room.

Schwerin von Krosigk

I.

If Stephen Dedalus, that fearful Jesuit, was right, if history, in the
century of Bergen-Belsen and Nanking and Democratic Kampuchea, is a
nightmare from which we are all--even the most effectively narcotized
among us--trying to awake, how then do we explain the dream that
foreshadows the event, the actual nightmare that precedes the waking
one?

When he was eight years old, my father was visited by a nightmare so
powerful that half a century later the mere retelling of it would
stipple his skin with gooseflesh and lift the hair on the back of his
arms. He himself would wonder at his own bristling body, the shameless
atavism of fear. "Look at this," he'd say when I was young, shoving
one big arm across the table. "It never fails." And seeing the coarse,
familiar fur rise as by some conjurer's trick to the memory of a dream
decades gone, I'd know that the immaterial world was a force to be
reckoned with.

In the dream (although nothing translates as badly as dreams--no
grief, no scent, no earthly grammar), my eight-year-old father
hurries, clockwise, down a white spiral staircase. The stairwell has
no windows, no central shaft; its sides are as smooth as a chambered
nautilus. Just ahead, the left-hand wall continuously extends itself,
emerging out of the seam.

He stops, suddenly aware of a sound coming from far below. He can make
it out clearly now: the heavy scrape of footsteps, as harsh as steel
on marble; behind these, what he assumes at first is the suck and hiss
of a factory steam engine, then realizes is actually the sound of
huge, stentorian breathing. The man coming up the stairs, he knows, is
gargantuan, grotesquely fat; he fills the stairwell plug-tight, like a
moving wall of flesh. Getting past him is impossible; the corridor is
sealed. Resistance is inconceivable; if my father remains where he is,
he'll be crushed.

Turning, my father starts back up the stairs he just descended. He
begins to run. Whenever he stops to catch his breath, he can hear the
metronome tread, the fat man's breathing. He rushes on, confident of
his speed. The man is slow, after all, barely moving. He'll simply
outrun him, or keep ahead forever. The stairs unwind like a ribbon in
the wind, rising into the dark. It's then that he remembers there is
no exit; the stairwell ends in solid stone. Having entered the dream
already descending the stairs, he can only return to where he began.
Instantly sick with terror, my father turns toward the unseen thing
heaving itself up the stairs behind him, toward the enormous bellows
of the lungs, already filling the corridor with their sound, and his
own scream wrenches him awake. The year is 1932.

II.

Seven years later, on March 18, 1939, my father, not yet sixteen,
stood with his friend, Cyril Brana, peering excitedly through the
heavy blue curtains of his friend's second-floor apartment onto Veveri
Street, in Brno, Czechoslovakia. It had rained the night before. The
dripping cables of the trolley cars, catching the light, looped thin
and delicate across, the city's drab pigment. Even though it was a
weekday, my father said, there were no cars passing in the street
below, no umbrellas hurrying down the cobbled walks or stepping over
puddles as if they were fissures into the earth, nor any crowding the
midstreet islands to the clanging of the trolley bell, their number
suddenly doubled like inkblots on an opened paper.

Three days earlier, in an official radio message that must have seemed
as unbelievable to those listening to it as the formal announcement of
their own deaths, Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist. The message was
delivered, as all subsequent communications would be delivered, in the
declarative, staccato tones of an authority accustomed to ruling by
decree, to establishing fact by fiat: Bohemia and Moravia were now the
Protektorat Bohmen und Mahren, under the control of the
Reichsprotektor; Slovakia, henceforth, would be an "independent" state
under the German-backed Catholic clergyman Jozef Tiso.

Although the exact route the Fahrer's motorcade was to take through
Brno had not been divulged, it was easy enough to figure out by the
placement of the soldiers, my father said. Already that morning, in
the drizzling half-light of dawn, long lines of dark forms could be
seen along certain streets and avenues, slowly coalescing into human
shapes.

The motorcade was to pass through Brno around eleven that morning. By
eight, a deep, unnatural silence had settled over the city; all public
transportation had been stopped, all automobile traffic forbidden.
People lingered in the hallways of their apartment buildings, saying
little. Military loudspeakers echoed outside, announcing that all
windows onto the street were to remain closed until 2:00 P.M. By
nine-thirty, Brno was deserted.

Tired of waiting, Cyril and my father went to the kitchen for a snack.
Taking turns holding a crusty loaf tight against their stomachs, they
cut thick slices that they then covered with butter and a generous
sediment of sugar. Half an hour later, realizing that no one would
stop them--neither Cyril's father, standing strangely still a step
back from the curtains of the second window, nor his mother, sitting
by the piano, soundlessly crying into a red handkerchief--they made
themselves some more.

Returning to the window, the two boys looked through the crack in the
curtains toward the square. In the building opposite, all the curtains
were drawn. Directly in front of the bookseller's shop, a German
soldier in a gray-green uniform stood beside a box of small German
flags on round wooden sticks. There had been no one to distribute them
to. "Tak neplac"--don't cry--said Cyril's father at one point, without
turning around, so that for a moment, my father said, he seemed to be
speaking to the city before him as much as to the woman behind.

"Uz iedou"--here they come--said Cyril. The motorcade passed quickly,
my father recalled, headed north, fifteen or even twenty black
limousines surrounded by twice as many motorcycles, as tight as a
swarm. Hitler's personal limousine, an open car, perhaps fifth in
line, rode slightly apart from the others. Hitler himself, when my
father saw him, was just sitting down, his features from that
second-floor window--except for a quick glimpse of jaw and
mustache--almost completely obscured under the visor of his military
cap. He had been standing, though to what purpose, and for whose
benefit, in that dead, unmoving city, one can only guess.

III.

Adolf Hitler sat down. The motorcade passed, disappearing into the
curtain's edge. My father took a bite of bread. Over the next six
years, nearly fifty million souls would disappear into a furnace so
profound it would forever wither any attempts to reckon its magnitude,
caking the brain, leaving only a still, unsounded dust for which there
could be no analogies, no accounting, out of which could emerge no
saving truth. All that remained were apparent facts, recorded dates,
accounts of events and motivations so jarring, so emotionally
dissonant that they seemed to refer to some other world, a realm from
which both humanity and sense had been seamlessly removed.

During the last days of the Third Reich, for example, as the
concussions of Russian heavy artillery jingled the crystal in the
cabinets of the Reichschancellery in Berlin, Propaganda Minister
Goebbels would while away the long after-dinner hours reading to
Hitler from Thomas Carlyle's history of Frederick the Great. Imagine
the scene: Hitler, perhaps, at one end of a plum-colored damask sofa,
his head tilted to his right hand, absentmindedly running his middle
finger along the center of his brow; Goebbels in a comfortable chair
opposite, one leg draped over the other, the fire companionably
puffing and spitting ...

And there, in one of the well-furnished rooms of the armor-plated,
concrete -reinforced bunker beneath the Chancellery (only six years
after passing through the line of sight of a fifteen-year-old boy
standing behind a thick blue curtain), Adolf Hitler wept, touched by
Carlyle's apostrophe to the long-dead king in the moment of his
greatest trial: "Brave King! Wait yet a little while, and the days of
your suffering will be over. Already the sun of your good fortune
stands behind the clouds and soon will rise upon you."

Sixty feet over their heads, the nine-hundred-room Chancellery, with
its polished marble halls and hundred-pound chandeliers, was
methodically being pounded into dust and rubble: stacks and columns of
books taken from the Chancellery libraries blocked the tall windows
looking out onto the wrecked Wilhelmstrasse, short, ugly barrels of
machine guns poking between the spines; bulky crates of crosses and
oak leaves barricaded the main entrance. A month earlier,
Anglo-American armies had crossed the Rhine.

None of this mattered, apparently. Sensing a promise, an omen of
redemption in Carlyle's description of Frederick's deliverance, Hitler
and Goebbels sent a guard to retrieve the Reich's official horoscopes.
And there it was: proof that, just as Prussia had been saved in the
darkest hours of the Seven Years' War by the miraculous death of the
Czarina, so the Third Reich would survive her harshest trials. History
would save her. "Even in this very year a change of fortune shall
come," Goebbels proclaimed in an eleventh-hour message to the
retreating troops. "The Fuhrer knows the exact hour of its arrival.
Destiny has sent us this man so that we ... [can] testify to the
miracle...."

A few days later, Goebbels had his miracle, his Czarina. Returning to
Berlin late on the night of April 12, the capital around him rising in
flames, he was approached by a secretary with urgent news: Franklin
Roosevelt was dead. Phoning the news to Hitler in the bunker beneath
the burning Chancellery, Goebbels was ecstatic. Here, blazingly
revealed at last, was the power of Historical Necessity and Justice.
The news, he felt, would revive the spirit of hope in the German
people. His feelings seem to have been shared by most of the German
Supreme Command. "This," wrote Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk
in his diary, "was the Angel of History! We felt its wings flutter
through the room."

Less than two weeks later, in the cramped air-raid shelter of the
Ministry of the People's Enlightenment and Propaganda, Goebbels's six
children lay dead, their lips, eyes, arms, and legs turned blue from
the potassium cyanide pills given to them by their father. Goebbels's
wife, Magda, who had apparently dressed her children in their lace
nightgowns and curled their hair for the occasion, was also dead, shot
by her husband, who then poured gasoline on her and set fire to her
skirt. Goebbels himself, after killing his family, poured gasoline on
his clothes, set fire to a trouser leg, then turned the gun to his
temple. Across the Wilhelmplatz, German gunners lay buried beneath the
crumbled barricades of books, the high-ceilinged rooms behind them
wavering in the heat of raging fires. In a small room in the bunker
below, having rejected poison after watching the agonized deaths of
the Chancellery dogs, Adolf Hitler sat down on a deep-cushioned,
brocade sofa next to the body of his bride, Eva Braun, put a gun in
his mouth, and pulled the trigger. Blood flowed down and coagulated on
the brocade. The Angel of History fluttered its wings.

IV.

Thirty-four years later, on one of those drizzling October afternoons
in New York City when dusk sets in at noon, they fluttered again. An
undergraduate at Columbia College at the time, I'd found myself that
fall more than usually broke, and reaching the limits of my
inventiveness on the hot plate, I decided to find a job. In a small
office off the claustrophobic circular hallway in the basement of Low
Library, I answered an ad for something called Student Help for the
Elderly. After filling out a long questionnaire, I was given the name
of one Beatrix Turner, an address on 69th Street off Broadway, and
told when to appear. The job paid $3.50 an hour.

I didn't want it. Between classes and sleeping with a young woman I'd
met at Barnard that fall (or rather not sleeping, never sleeping), I
felt exhausted, perpetually late to everything, always sprinting
bleary-eyed up Claremont Avenue or leaping puddles on the way to some
overheated classroom where a professor whose name I couldn't remember
would already be discussing whatever author--Hobbes or Locke,
Nietzsche or Kant--I'd failed to finish reading the night before. When
I added to this the hundred-block walk down Broadway and back (I
begrudged the bus fare), the fact that it always seemed to be raining
on the days I had to go, and, finally, that I'd be skipping two
classes a week (I'd had to lie on my application to get the job), it
seemed like a bad deal. I took the job anyway.

I don't remember Beatrix Turner very well, just a small, well-kept
woman in a bone-white dress given to straight talk and strong
opinions. I remember that her apartment, small even by dormitory
standards, was very cluttered, very still. Everything sounded louder
there: the door down the hall, the spoon in the cup, the tiny steps of
the minute hand drawing its harvest of days on the mantle. She showed
me how to make tea for her with whole cinnamon, cloves, and ginger,
and for years afterward, though I'd never particularly enjoyed being
there (she was cranky and irritable; I, no doubt, sullen and
impatient), these smells were my mildly unpleasant madeleines,
dragging me, willy-nilly, back to that apartment on 69th Street, my
unmourned Combray by the Hudson.

And so, on the misty, gray afternoon of October 2, I started down
Broadway to Beatrix Turner's apartment, moving quickly through the
crowd, dodging trucks on 110th Street, checking out the
nickel-and-dime bodegas where I bought the odds and ends I needed for
my dormitory room. To compensate for my jeans and sneakers, I'd thrown
on my one good jacket. Ten blocks north of Sherman Square, with the
rain beginning to come down in earnest and umbrellas opening all
around me like strange black blooms, I took it off, folded it under my
arm, and sprinted for 69th Street.

I found Beatrix Turner in a reflective mood that afternoon. The tea,
as I recall, had already been made; the chores, she said, could wait.
Toweling off as best I could, I wiped my steaming glasses on a napkin
and, balancing my cup and saucer awkwardly on my lap, sat down in the
chair she indicated. I looked around the apartment. I'd never noticed
the mementos before--the framed letters, the ribbons, the statuary.
There was something oddly moving about that crowded menagerie.
Everywhere I looked the small faces of men and women (many in British
or American World War 11 uniforms, some with their arms around each
other, all very young) smiled down out of the photographs that lined
the bookshelves and the walls of that apartment, a tiny eternal
audience come to witness the final act of Beatrix Turner's long
performance. A pretty young woman in an Air Force cap sat on the hood
of a jeep. A rough-looking young man in a black sweater (his teeth
closed tight and his brow furrowed as though he were squinting into
the sun) looked out from what I took to be the loops and bars of his
own overbold signature, written across the sky.

The spiced tea tasted good that afternoon. Every now and again the
radiator, as though harboring some furious apartment gnome, would
begin to clang and ping and whine. Past the safety grates and the
slowly rusting fire escape, I could see the rain. The blinds in the
windows across the airshaft were shut. Inexplicably mellow that
afternoon (or perhaps just resigned to my ignorance), Beatrix Turner
began to talk. Her voice, ordinarily strong, decidedly ungentle, now
softened. It seemed to me then, though the details are lost, that
she'd been nearly everywhere, done almost everything--drank ouzo with
Hemingway, danced with Dos Passos. Some of her accounts, admittedly,
were more obscure, and for long stretches I listened to stories of
people I'd never heard of, places that held no meaning for me,
selfishly grateful that I didn't have to scrub an already spotless
sink or took, yet again, for the reading glasses that she had just had
a second before; grateful too, I'll admit now, for the fact that I was
closing in on $10.50 without yet having done a stitch of work.

But then I started to listen. Beatrix Turner, I realized, had been a
war correspondent through much of 1944 and 1945. She'd been with the
American First Army when it met the Russians at Torgau on the Elbe
River. And on May 3 or 4, traveling on foot, she'd entered Berlin.

The city had fallen the day before. Where the crumbling outlines of
foundations and rooms showed through the piled rubble, they seemed, as
though escaping their own reality, to hearken backward or forward to
the very ancient or the purely ephemeral, to some Neolithic
civilization, recently unearthed, or to a child's sandcastle, broken
by the tide. On the bullet-chipped walls and columns of the Reichstag,
now a blackened shell, Russian names, scrawled by the living,
memorialized those who had died for victory. Somehow making her way to
the Chancellery through that heaped, smoldering city--whether alone or
accompanied I don't remember--Beatrix Turner arrived to discover that
Russian engineers had already burned the hinges off the heavy steel
doors facing the charred and smoking garden.

( cont'd )

[jum...@my-deja.com]

She leaned forward. "You know, of course, that Adolf Hitler shot
himself in his bunker beneath the Chancellery."

I began to say something, but she waved it away.

"Oh, that's all bosh about Paraguay and Argentina," she said. "He shot
himself. Eva Braun took arsenic." I didn't say anything.

Beatrix Turner took a sip of tea. "I was one of the first ones down,"
she said.

I don't remember if Beatrix Turner told me how she talked her way past
the guards that day, nor can I be certain whether the image I have of
her descending those endless pitch-black stairs by candlelight or
flashlight is based on the description she gave me or the ones I've
read since then. In the entry I wrote in my journal later that night,
there's no mention of the cold, dank smell of extinguished fires, of
the charred picture frames, like overdrawn metaphors, still hanging
from the walls, of the black water, ankle deep, that covered the
carpets.

But one memory remains as clear as on the night I wrote it down.
Sensing my skepticism, perhaps, Beatrix Turner put down her cup and
saucer and went to a closet near the front door. "I have something to
show you," she said. "A little souvenir." I stood up, thinking to help
her, but she was already carrying an ordinary cardboard carton.
Placing it on the table, she opened it, removed another, smaller
carton, and from this a carefully folded wad of tissue. Unwrapping
this bundle, she revealed a fragile piece of cloth with a strange,
almost Egyptian -looking pattern, marred by an ugly dark stain.

I looked at the thing, uncomprehending.

"I cut this piece out of the sofa in the bunker," Beatrix Turner said.
She pointed. "That's Adolf Hitler's blood."

Before I could say anything, she was leafing through an old issue of
Life she'd brought out of the closet with her, and suddenly there it
was: a photograph of correspondents, one holding a candle, inspecting
the richly patterned brocade sofa on which Adolf Hitter and Eva Braun
had committed suicide. In the photograph one could see the pattern of
the sofa clearly, a repeating motif of male figures dressed in
traditional folk garb standing next to huge, orchid-like blooms, or
fanciful palms, or exploding fireworks. Each figure held a short leash
that dipped in a lazy U to the neck of a prancing stag.

On the right armrest, a dark, vaguely phallic bloodstain had soaked
the brocade, obliterating half a leash and half a stag. I looked at
the piece of cloth I now held in my hand. The stag was nearly gone;
only its hooves and hindquarters remained. The pattern matched.

I left the apartment soon afterward. Waiting for the elevator, I
noticed a door at the far end of the hall. I pushed it open. Four
flights down a badly lit stairwell brought me to a locked door.
Looking around, I saw another, smaller door. Forcing it open, I saw
that it let out onto a fire escape. A fixed steel ladder dropped
twenty feet to the alley below. I climbed out, soiling my jacket
against the rusting frame. Even today I can remember the good strong
sting of the rain against my face. At the bottom of the unlit,
cluttered alley rising like a canyon to the sky, I pushed open the
heavy iron gate to 69th Street and started to run.

CODA

Pleasure and pain are immediate; knowledge, retrospective. A steel
ball, suspended on a string, smacks into its brothers and nothing
happens: no shock of recognition, no sudden epiphany. We go about our
business, buttering the toast, choosing gray socks over brown. But
here's the thing: just because we haven't understood something doesn't
mean we haven't been shaped by it. Although I couldn't understand what
I'd seen in Beatrix Turner's apartment that autumn afternoon in 1979,
although I ran the way a child will run, stopping up its ears, from
something dark and grotesque, something far beyond its years, the deed
had been done. That cloth, in its own pathetic way, dealt a featuring
blow to my life.

What I reacted to--instinctively, I suppose--was the terrible
smallness of the thing, the almost vertiginous compaction of the
symbol. Behind that ridiculous cloth with its vaguely shit-brown
stain, I could sense the nations of the dead pushing and jostling for
space, for room, for a voice; it was as though all the sounds of the
world had been drawn into the plink of a single drop, falling from the
lip of a loosened drain. One could resist the implicit lesson,
recognize the obscenity of linking that worthless piece of fabric to
the murder of millions, even note the small irony of it being
preserved, like some unholy relic, from the disintegration it implied,
and yet still be moved by an inescapable thought, a thought both
unjust and unavoidable: that it should come this, O God asleep in
heaven, a tattered piece of cloth in an apartment on 69th Street.

But of course it didn't. History resists an ending as surely as nature
abhors a vacuum; the narrative of our days is a run-on sentence, every
full stop a comma in embryo. But more: like thought, like water,
history is fluid, unpredictable, dangerous. It leaps and surges and
doubles back, cuts unpredictable channels, surfaces suddenly in places
no one would expect. How else can one explain the dream that
foreshadows the event? Or a fear immaculately conceived? Or a will to
resistance that reemerges, inexplicably, continents and generations
from where it fell?

And so, perhaps, it comes down to this: that the irresistible march of
events through time--the cup raised, the drink taken, the sudden knock
on the door--is the only truth we have and yet, and I don't mean to be
clever here, the greatest lie we tell. The empire of facts is
irrefutable; death will have its dominion. Recognizing the limits of
chronology, resisting its unforgiving dictates, is our duty and our
right. There is no contradiction.

Mark Slouka is the author of Lost Lake, a collection of stories, to be
published this May by Knopf. His short story "Feather and Bone"
appeared in the October 1997 issue of Harper's Magazine.

==============================================================

Source: National Review, Oct 14, 1996 v48 n19 p81(3).
Title: War of the World: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault
on Reality._(book reviews)
Author: James Gardner

Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Slouka, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1996 National Review Inc.

I WOULD have written this review sooner, but my computer broke down. I
am not sure why it went dead, but since it did so just after I punched
it, I would guess that there was some sort of connection. Why did I
punch my computer? To punish it, of course. I had recently gotten on
the Internet. After crawling -- not surfing -- along for about an hour
and a half in search of some specific item of information, I had come
just within reach of what I wanted when a stupid little screen display
popped up and declared that Netscape, suffering from sensory overload,
had had the cybernetic equivalent of a nervous breakdown. It was then
that I punched my laptop.

In Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Sherry
Turkle presents us with a somewhat romanticized vision of the evolving
interaction between computers and people. She notes that she has named
her computer Miss Beautiful -- a sobriquet for her daughter -- and she
tells of one of her students who named a computer program that
organized her daily schedule after an ex-boyfriend ("I love to see him
do my menial tasks"). To me such personification is totally alien,
even if I confess to feeling a little sorry for having acted
aggressively against a machine that had served me irreproachably for
the past year. Though I refuse to personify my computer, however, I do
spatialize it. That is, as I peer into the blue, lacustrine depths of
the Windows program, with its delightful frieze of parti-colored icons
along the top, I feel as if I were floating in a post-modern swimming
pool somewhere on Ischia or Capri. In other words, I feel at home in
my computer and I am comfortable and happy there.

Still, that does not qualify me as a "computer person," and I even
take a little pride in not being one. This was one reason I had
delayed for some time before subscribing to an Internet service.
Another reason was that I failed to see what consequence this
technology could possibly have for my life, why I really needed it.
What finally convinced me to subscribe was the prospect of sending and
receiving e-mail, not to mention a commercial in which Barry Farber
seemed to suggest, if I understood him correctly, that I would
essentially be able to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles from
the intimacy of my bedroom.

I was soon undeceived. The first thing one notices about the Internet
is that it has been vastly overrated. Though you will have heard of
the Information Super-Highway, what awaits you is rather a high-tech
single-lane dirt road where an excess of traffic has brought
transportation almost to a standstill. Though you will also have heard
about "surfing" the Internet, the gliding swiftness implied by that
word will mean little to those who seem rather to limp or stumble than
to surf. And to the extent that the surfing analogy has any validity,
it is only in the sense that any moment a big wave -- as in more data
than your fragile modem can handle --will overwhelm the whole
contraption.

The second thing one notices is that the Internet is the subtlest
thief of time. By making you wait for each parcel of data you want, it
steals a minute here and four minutes there until, before you know it,
two hours of your life are gone beyond recall. And during this period
of waiting, because these deposits of time are so tiny, you are unable
to engage in any other activity. Add to this the fact that, once you
arrive at the site, you are apt to find a poorly written document
whose loopy, time-consuming graphics are as appealing as public-access
cable television in all its ranting, unedited profusion. There are
many polished web sites, but most of these turn out to be little more
than advertisements for providers of commercial goods and services, or
they are documents provided by non-profit organizations. The idea that
one can surf through the shelves of the public library may one day
become a reality, but we are very far from that now.

The Internet works in two ways. By typing in a web address, you can go
directly to a specific site that has information that you know you
want. But to surf the Internet is different. This suggests going along
for the ride and not quite knowing where you are going. You do this by
typing in the name of the subject or person you want to research. A
moment later, the search mechanism, in my case Netscape, applies its
various inscrutable criteria to come up with the nearest matches to
what you seek. Naturally I began by typing in my name to see how many
people on the Internet had mentioned -- dare I hope it -- my articles
or my book. Here I ran into one of the most common problems with the
Internet. The searcher cannot give you the object itself, but only
matches of greater or lesser probability and a synopsis of each site.
Thus when I entered the name James Gardner, it told me that it had
found 86,754 Jameses and 23,456 Gardners and then proceeded to give
examples in which the two words occurred in the requisite proximity.
Unfortunately my name is not an uncommon one, and so I had to get
through several entomologists and chiropractors, two naval engineers
and a masseur before finding any reference to myself.

For some time I continued in this way to putter around on the
information dirt road, accomplishing little and gradually coming to
understand that the Internet, for all that people have said about it,
is a more or less total waste of time and a not inconsiderable waste
of money.

AND it was at precisely that moment that something happened which
caused me suddenly to appreciate what everyone has been talking about
for the last two or three years. What I understood was that the
Internet can be viewed as a massive encyclopedia. But whereas all
earlier encyclopedias, simply by virtue of their existing as physical
objects, were in a sense dead and out of date as a precondition of
their very existence, the Internet by contrast is the Encyclopedia of
NOW. As it happens I am finishing up a book on fringe groups, a
subject which the Internet is uniquely qualified to tackle. I found at
my fingertips abundant information about flat-earthers, Andrea
Dworkin, snuff films, Queer Nation, the John Birch Society,
creationism, and Islamic Jihad.

Another thing the Internet teaches you is that, no matter how obscure
your interests, there are other people out there in cyberspace who are
as passionate about them as you are. Though I know very few people
whose interest in Latin is as energetic as my own, I soon found that I
could correspond in that language with a group of college men in the
Netherlands as well as an old professor in Finland and someone else in
South Africa. What I find important and emblematic about this fact is
that the futuristic Internet can be an agent by which the past is
preserved and reinvigorated.

When I understood that, I confess that I had something of a conversion
regarding not only the Internet, but also the great information
revolution which is said to be getting under way. As of this moment
mankind is entranced by the possibilities of computing. The almost
obsessive insistence with which people seem to talk of nothing else,
with which the Internet haunts our business pages, publishers'
catalogues, and the graphics of advertisers and television producers,
suggests that something almost incalculably big is afoot. To some
degree this fascination resembles the interest in the atom 50 years
ago and in space exploration 25 years ago. But neither of these
technologies ever really promised, and surely neither ever produced, a
direct and material effect upon our daily lives. With the Internet, by
contrast, there is a nervous, giddy sense that, at long last, we are
approaching some kind of critical mass. There is a buzz running so
loud through all the breadth of human society, an electric excitement
so jolting and so unexpected, that one could be excused for thinking
that we are on the verge of some great new age. And though books, if
we believe the prophets of doom, are soon to vanish from the earth,
there is nothing publishers seem to find more attractive or salable
than volumes that promote and explain this instrument of their
allegedly imminent demise.

The People magazine approach to the information revolution can be
found in Road Warriors, by Daniel Burstein and David Kline. For these
two investigative journalists, despite a useful introduction that
reveals their deep understanding of what is at stake, the information
revolution is essentially a re-enactment of earlier heroic ages of
capitalist free-enterprise. But instead of the Fisks and the Goulds,
we have shakers and movers ranging from John Malone and Ray Smith to
Viacom, Sprint, and the Federal Communications Commission.
Nevertheless, the authors are too hard-headed and rationalistic to be
taken in by the euphoria of the revolution at hand, or to allow that
enthusiasm to affect the tenor of their reportage.

Far different is The Road Ahead, by Bill Gates, the prophet, if not
the Messiah, of the information movement. His book can be read, if one
is cynically inclined, as an extended sales pitch for Bill Gates. But
Mr. Gates, despite his open and irrepressible enthusiasm for
computing, has written a surprisingly candid and useful book. For
Gates, the future of computing is the future of mankind, with
technology becoming ever cheaper, more powerful, and more pervasive.
As he expresses it in his chirping way:

I've already said I'm an optimist, and I'm optimistic about the impact
of the new technology. It will enhance leisure time and enrich culture
by expanding the distribution of information. It will help relieve
pressures on urban areas by enabling individuals to work from home or
remote-site offices. It will relieve pressure on natural resources
because increasing numbers of products will be able to take the form
of bits rather than of manufactured goods.

What makes The Road Ahead so surprisingly useful is that it seems to
be a fair, even-handed, and sober appraisal of the situation and very
clearly explains complicated ideas to laymen like myself. The author
simply lays out one concept after another -- the Internet, the
information super-highway, high-definition television, and fiber
optics -- with the result that those of us who are not techies finally
understand all the terms that have been buzzing around in our heads
for the past five years.

Naturally the information revolution is not without its dissenters.
Few are as dourly pessimistic as Mark Slouka in War of the Worlds.
This book seems to me to overreach somewhat by buying into the whole
virtual-reality racket -- which I predict will remain decidedly
ancillary to the information revolution -- and by supposing that this
and other developments will spell the end of reality as we know it. As
for the Internet itself, it "combines the worst of television -- its
addictiveness, its passivity -- with the worst of on-line
communication -- its self-conscious glorification of superfice [sic],
its pop-culture chattiness, its pointless immediacy."

Mark Dery's Escape Velocity in one sense goes even further. Dery seems
at once to mock and to believe recent "post-human" speculations that
advocate or predict a literal, physical merging of man and machine
into a digitized, dehumanized whole. His book is a highly detailed
discussion of cyberculture: that is, those new forms of art,
literature, music, and attitude that have arisen at the corners of the
information revolution. In his pages we encounter all the
technopagans, virtual anarchists, cyber-novelists, performance
artists, and cult film-makers for whom the information revolution is a
virtual Bohemia joined in cyberspace to an equally virtual, if
dystopian, Wild West.

THE fixation on the future that all these books exhibit to a
remarkable degree has been a fixture of Western discourse for the last
two hundred years: starting with Restif de la Bretonne, and extending
through Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and William
Gibson. The problem with books that seek, as these do, to discuss the
future is that the future really is an undiscovered country from which
imaginary travelers come back bearing more outlandish tales than Sir
John Mandeville with his one-eyed anthropophagi. And because anyone's
guess is as good as anyone else's, there seems to be an overwhelming
impulse to exaggerate in the most shameless fashion imaginable, since
it is the deformation professionnelle of all writers to want at all
costs to have something to say.

And yet futurologists, even when they are more circumspect in their
predictions, always make the same fundamental mistake, whether they
view the future as a light-filled, pyramid-powered Eden or as a
cybernetic Hell. Indeed, it is precisely the same mistake that many
historians make when writing about the remoter past. And this mistake,
it seems to me, is to suppose that to change the material
circumstances of life is to alter fundamentally the sense of life
itself. But life as it is lived is always pretty much the same, with
the same protocols of boredom and excitement, the same glare of midday
and gloom of eventide, the same petty ambitions, existential doubts,
and immortal longings. We can certainly create the circumstances of
greater freedom or greater oppression, but the range of possible
variation in life itself, in the simple, irreducible sense of being
alive, is far narrower than our chattering classes usually appreciate.

At the same time, it would be foolhardy and unfair to reason from this
that change never happens. We have undergone great changes in this
century; and though the Internet is still in its earliest infancy, it
promises to grow up quickly. From a purely technological perspective,
many users of the Internet already have far more efficient modems than
I have. And through Moore's Law, which states that every 18 months
computers double in power as their prices drop by half, we can expect
that we all shall soon be getting better Internet service for less
money, which means that fewer users will feel the need to punch their
laptops.

Earlier in my life, as a callow adolescent, I was so disenchanted with
the paltriness of industrial civilization -- this was in the late
Seventies -- that I almost felt, foolish as it sounds, that I'd like
to repeal the modern age entirely. As each day passes, however, I find
myself strengthened in the hope that, with the arrival at long last of
the information revolution, human society will become more
enlightened, more various, more efficient, cleaner, less expensive,
freer, and more fun than it has ever been before. One feels privileged
to be alive and conscious at this moment in history and can hardly
wait to see what humankind will come up with next.

==============================================================

Source: Harper's Magazine, Oct 1997 v295 n1769 p80(7).
Title: feather and bone.(short story)
Author: Mark Slouka
Subjects: Short stories

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1997 Harper's Magazine Foundation

I was three, no more, when I spotted for the first time the paleness
of his shirt moving like some small ghost against the darkening trees.
Even now, the image remains, fixed in the scent of moldering wood: a
man standing on a stone porch at dusk, his left hand crossed below his
chest, smoking a pipe. It's June. Unaware of us approaching through
the darkness under the trees, he stares ahead into the gathering night
as though the past itself were engraved there, as though the dip and
weave of swallows in the last light were inscribing his fate on the
disembodied air. From the path below, holding my father's hand, I see
him above us. Fireflies rise around him in slow, languid gusts like
sparks from some missing fire.

It's been nearly twenty years now since I last saw Rheinhold Cerny,
since my feet, barefoot or sneakered, negotiated the footpath to the
cabin on the hill. From where it left the dirt road to where it opened
into the meadow, that path was as familiar to me as my own mother's
face. I could have run it blind, stutter-stepping through the marshy
grass, swinging wide around the poison ivy, hitting the plank over the
brook, right, left, right, then up and over the boulder with its
little opaque windows of mica before leaping the strange, jointed root
on the second turn past the shed ... as though my feet, hitting earth
and stone and wood, had stamped, by some alchemy of correspondence,
each and every feature into the soil of my heart.

It would be Mrs. Cerny I saw first, standing in the garden wearing an
oddly formal dress and a wide straw hat, pulling blooms past their
prime, loosening soil with a spade. She'd turn or straighten when I
called from the bottom of the meadow, then walk up with me through the
uncut grass into the chill shade of the cottage, where she'd pour mint
tea with honey and ply me with pieces of jahodovy tac -- strawberry
tart -- that left crisp flakes of pastry on my lips and chin. The
cottage itself, always dark despite the cut flowers still blooming on
the windowsills and tables, smelled of smoke and stone, wool blankets
and sweet tobacco, and I'd linger happily, dangling my feet off the
rough oak bench by the dining-room table. We didn't talk and didn't
need to. I'd sit and eat, and she'd busy herself in the living room or
the kitchen, coring a piece of fruit or sweeping the crumbs off the
counter into an open palm with quick, expert movements I found
strangely reassuring. Nearly sixty at the time, she still had about
her an old-world style, an unthinking diplomacy and tact.

We both knew, of course, that it wasn't the honeyed tea or the
jahodovy tac that brought me dashing down the path every Saturday
morning, and just about the time I'd begin to fidget and peer out the
living-room window, she'd be standing by the back door, calling
"Rheinholde, mlady Mostovsky je tady" -- young Mostovsky is here --
and soon after that I'd spot him (momentarily caught in the frame of
the kitchen window like some forest spirit escaping its own portrait),
walking through the knee-high bracken. Spare and tall, inescapably
patrician in his grass-stained khakis and small, frameless glasses
(despite the weeds caught in the straps of his sandals and the dirt
caked on his hands), he'd first wash his arms to the elbows in the
basin by the door, then carefully brush the dry dirt off his soles
with a few strokes of a stiff-combed brush that hung from a nail above
the bench. Only when these things were done would he look in.

"Vitame vas," he'd say, never smiling despite the absurd formality of
the greeting. "I see you've fortified yourself well for the rigors of
the day. Truly a chip off the old block, eh?" he'd add to his wife.
"His father, too, is always prepared." Mrs. Cerny, answering from the
kitchen, would mumble something inaudible, to which he'd chuckle, then
beckon me through the doorway with a sweep of his arm like a coachman
in a medieval fairy tale. "Pujdeme?" he'd ask. Shall we?

The teasing, mild enough and diluted still further by a very real
affection, meant little to me then. If it ever made me uncomfortable,
if I ever sensed a touch of condescension beneath the banter, I assume
I accepted it as somehow justified, given my own family's flailings
and failures, or ignored it by virtue of the mercenary single vision
of childhood. Rheinhold Cerny, you see, built or brought or showed me
things, week in and week out, and for this, more than anything else, I
loved him.

While my own father was off in the one-room shed that had once served
as a ham radio station, typing on the old Underwood with the broken e
and c keys, Cerny was pointing to the bloodred crest of a woodpecker
as long as my arm, pounding fist-size holes in a summer oak, or
showing me, through an opening he'd cut in the shoreline thickets, a
pickerel and its shadow in the sunlit flat by the swamp. A luna moth,
ghostly and pale, that he'd trapped against the screen at night, an
old coffee tin with a half-dozen turtle eggs wrapped in, moss, a
barred feather, perfect and huge, that he'd found in the garden --
each week it was something new.

The pain of returning to the city every Sunday night from September to
June would be lessened, time and again, by the wonders in the trunk of
the car or on the seat next to me, wonders a quiet six-year-old well
down the first-grade pecking order could ride, like a pet panther,
into the hearts of all the Sherrys and Susies and Samanthas for the
short space of each week's show-and-tell, eclipsing utterly the urban
Lotharios reduced to peddling their fathers' collections of
watermarked three-cent stamps. Sometimes, indeed, my contributions
required an advance call or two -- as much for courtesy as clearance
-- to prepare teachers for, say, a small colony of paper wasps buzzing
inside a gallon jar, or a milk snake in a box with a sliding glass
lid, or an outraged baby heron -- given to both fish puree delivered
through a paper straw and rhythmic and unremitting shrieking --
standing onelegged at the bottom of a parrot cage.

Distracted as they may have been by their own lives, my parents were
nonetheless quick to recognize the power and status these things
conferred, and rarely stood in my way. Whatever their feelings for
Cerny (and I was alert enough to pick up, even at that age, their
growing resentment of the man -- of his brusqueness, his patrician
airs, his position in the emigre community ... ), they couldn't help
but appreciate (at least partly because they may have suspected, in
their weaker moments, that Cernys condescension was not entirely
unjustified) his kindness to me. In a world without grandfathers,
Cerny had, with a certain amount of rough grace, stepped into the
role, and if relations with the middle generation were a bit strained,
well, that was not unusual even among real families. Our apartment on
the fifteenth floor above 63rd Road in Queens soon took on a strangely
animate cast -- feathered, furred, and antlered -- and my father,
burying whatever jealousy he may have felt for my benefit, simply
stepped, like a rejected suitor, back into the shadows. My mother,
though temperamentally more cautious, less quick to concede,
eventually followed suit.

They would have done well to pay attention. I can say this now, of
course, because time, like an inverted telescope, shows clearly what
was once too close, what proximity (and love) kept hidden. Eye to the
lens, fully thirty-five years and more since those summer afternoons I
spent in his company, I see again the square-fingered strength of his
hands, the veins in his pale wrists where they emerged from his shirt
always rolled one button up, the way he would peel his rimless glasses
from his face to wipe the sweat or grime with a clean handkerchief. I
remember the comfort of his silence, his old-man's smell of tobacco
and cologne, the nod of approval I'd receive for understanding
something he'd shown me, or applying it well. The burst of tart on my
lips, the smell of orange mushrooms (laid out to dry in the sun like
battalions of fingersize soldiers), the stench of the mud where the
goldenbloom grew ... all these I remember. All these I see.

But the landscape now reaches easily from sun to dark, skirting depths
I never knew: Cerny's descriptions -- always precise, analytical -- of
nature's horrors; his chuckle on finding the oddly human head of the
mantis he had kept for months in a tabletop cage (the cat had
apparently moved the lid), staring up from the living-room carpet like
some ghastly green mint. Or the particular look in his eyes --
detachment, perhaps -- that morning we watched a mud-dauber wasp,
iridescent and thin, battling for its life in a spider web under the
eave of the outhouse. Wrenching, thrashing, buzzing furiously, it
tried to bring its abdomen around but found itself bound in coil after
coil of gossamer silk. Something about the drawn-out desperation of
the thing moved me, I recall, and I thought of bringing a stick down
through the web to set it free, but one glance at Cerny put the
thought from my mind. We watched the wasp disappear, bit by bit, leg
by leg, until all that was left was the buzzing, and then even this
grew muffled, and the spider, straddling his trussed and broken feast,
delivered the fatal sting to the pathetic cocoon dangling in the
shadow of the eave.

I am aware, of course, that none of this troubled me then, that I felt
nothing but love for this man -- for his gruffness, his way with the
world -- and saw nothing but love returned. I am aware, too, of how
easily the past is shaped by our fantasies and fears. I have heard,
finally, those who say that the past, like any distorting medium, like
water, bends whatever enters it, and that the truth or lie of the
broken oar is something we can never know.

I am reminded of all these things by a small, perfect skull, hardly
larger than my fist, which sits on a pile of books on my desk.
Rheinhold Cerny gave it to me two days before my seventh birthday, and
I can remember still, with absolute clarity, the thrill of expectation
rising in my chest as he led me by the hand to the compost heap and
then -- carefully, almost tenderly -- began digging in the dirt with a
small stick. I remember the bones growing up out of the soil, seeing
for the first time the sockets of the maxilla, the rounded ball joint
at the base, the perfect and beautiful ferocity of the canines. I
remember the way he brushed it clean with an old toothbrush he took
from his pocket, the way the skull fit the jaw like a lid on a
well-made box -- hinged and tight -- and I remember him holding it up
to me, in front of his face, and opening and closing its jaws in time
with his own.

And I look at it now (still held together by the wires he twisted
himself that same afternoon almost forty years ago), and I say to
those who claim the past is forever unknown to us, fuck you gentlemen,
fuck you all, for I have run my hand the length of the broken oar, and
I know what is bent, and I know what is whole. Rheinhold Cerny, almost
smiling behind his rimless glasses, his hands, hinged at the wrist,
dramatically opening and closing the jaws of that long-lost raccoon
for the benefit of a little boy stunned with gratitude, is someone I
loved like a father. This much is true. And this also is true: in his
own particular way, he was a monster beyond reckoning.

It began, I suppose, the night my father turned the old Desoto off the
blacktop onto the rutted dirt road that ran around the lake. Already
sleeping, my face pressed into the crease of the seat, I woke to the
sound of the grass between the wheel ruts swishing against the steel
beneath me, and mentally began ticking off each familiar turn and
lurch. Thinking I still slept, my parents were quiet. Every now and
then I could hear them whisper to each other in the dark, a word or
two, no more.

"What's that in the road?" said my mother suddenly.

"I don't know," said my father.

By the time he'd eased the car to a stop in the darkness and turned
off the motor, I was up and staring bleary-eyed at what appeared to be
a dog-size stone or lump of mud set down at the end of the headlights'
beam. Taking the flashlight from the glove compartment, my father
turned off the headlights. It was as though the car around us had
suddenly disappeared. Night was everywhere. Insects sawed back and
forth in the trees, wild, arrhythmic, an army of elfin woodsmen.
"Let's have a look," he said.

It wasn't until we were ten feet away that we realized the thing was a
turtle, its huge, rocklike shell brown with age. It seemed emerged
from some other world, accidentally caught in the land of families and
electricity and cars. Leeches big as my father's thumb clung to its
scales; its skin, loose and leathery, bulged around its head and legs.
It struck at us as we came near, once, twice, hissing with each
awkward lunge, then settled back, its gaping mouth pale in the
flashlight's beam. The smell of mud rot and carrion rose in the air.

My father, squatting with the flashlight in one hand and a crooked
stick he'd picked up off the road in the other, shook his head in
wonder. "Ty ses mne obluda" -- you are a monster -- he said quietly to
the turtle hunkered down in the dirt. Then, practicing his newly
acquired English: "How are you? What's up?" The turtle hissed softly.
"Fine, thanks," said my father. "Not much. And you?" He chuckled.

"Je pozde, Pavle" -- it's late, Paul -- said my mother. "Stop
tormenting the poor turtle with your English."

"Nothing like this back home, Helen," father said, and, squat-stepping
forward a few feet, he waved the stick in front of the snapper's jaws.
"Na toto jsme emigrovali." For this we emigrated. His words were
punctuated by a hissing lunge and the clack of jaws. A foot-long piece
of my father's stick lay in the dirt.

Rather than move the thing, we drove around it, I recall, the car
bumping and scraping up and over the shoulder to the soft ground of
the meadow, then back onto the dirt. Looking back through the rear
window, I saw it sprout its Pleistocene head and clawed legs and begin
plodding, heavily, through the redness of the taillights toward the
still waters of the lake.

From that day forth, the snapper filled my child's need for unseen
things to fear; reeking, primitive, it moved, always, somewhere below
the surface, lending that border a magic, a resonance, it might never
have had without it. Every swirl, every half-glimpsed shadow, every
sensed or half-sensed thing moving in the deep green rooms cut by the
shadows of trunk and branch, hinted at its presence; hinted, that is,
until, on some still afternoon, gentle as a Corot painting, an angler
in a rowboat, lulled into disbelief, would start at the sudden
apparition risen by his side: ungainly, anachronistic, a griffin on a
table.

I see him standing at the end of his dock at dusk, a large salad bowl
of crusted bread cradled in the crook of his arm. With his free hand
he tosses handfuls of bread, like flakes of light, to a family of
swans. They duck and glide around him, wriggling their feathered
tails. One rises, flopping, its wings momentarily pinned against the
dark water. Getting down on one knee, like a suitor proposing to his
spell-locked love, Cerny reaches out. Although I can see little else,
I see this tableau, as though frozen in time: his body, balanced and
sure, the paleness of his extended arm, her neck dipping gently down.

I remember the swans above all, but Cerny's love was hardly that
selective. A practical, rational man for all the years I knew him, he
nonetheless had one weakness. No fewer than half a dozen bird feeders,
some with suet, some with seeds, surrounded his cottage; houses for
wrens and grosbeaks and woodpeckers, lovingly built and situated,
peeked from under eaves and branches or nestled in the crotches of
oaks. A pair of ancient Zeiss binoculars, bulky and strong, were never
far from his reach, and his ear, like a trained musician's, could pick
out the slightest change in the twittering, peeping ensemble
performing round the clock, it sometimes seemed, for his benefit and
his alone.

Calls, nesting habits, migration patterns and flight characteristics,
identifying marks both at rest and on the wing (and all the possible
variations thereof), all these he had learned like the irregular verbs
of some dying language, until he was able not just to speak it but to
understand it, inhabit it. On certain spring mornings, I remember, I
would find him standing with his eyes closed in some far corner of the
garden, the expression on his hypnotized features -- the slight,
involuntary movements of his lips and eyes beneath their lids --
suggesting a beatitude bordering on rapture. Feeling slightly awkward,
I'd wait silently for the spell to pass. He always knew I was there.
"Poslouchej, Mostovski," he'd say quietly, his right hand raised like
the hand of Adam to some ascendant god. "Poslouchej." Listen. "To je
krosa." That is beauty.

I wasn't there when it happened. I didn't see the swan, pushing
eagerly through the shallows to Cerny's dock, suddenly jar, then
plunge like a child's cork beneath the surface. I didn't see the one
wing cutting the boiling water, or the upward gush of bloody quills,
rising out of the dark.

But I'd seen it before and accepted it somehow. During the course of
every summer, fully half the ducklings would die, abruptly wrenched
into oblivion. And every May, the survivors would be back, paddling
the shallows, nesting in the reeds. Life seethed and sank and rose
again. More profound than profligate, nature threw its endless
battalions into the consuming fire, then drew them forth again.
Everywhere it was the same: the frog, I knew, spasmodically kicking
its way down the snake's expanding throat, had left strings of milky
pearls in the shallows of the brook; the cottontail, still running in
the taloned air, had fathered dozens... "Only waste is wrong," my
father had told me once, and of all his lessons that faltered or
failed, that one stayed true.

But Rheinhold Cerny, standing in his rowboat, helplessly plunging a
wooden oar into the watery dark where bits of down now seemed to jerk
and swim like hot ash over an open fire, reckoned his world by some
other, starker calculus: creation, like a stuttering watch, had
revealed its flaw and had to be made right. Calmly, he presented his
case: the turtles were ugly, served no discernible purpose, regularly
killed the waterfowl whose beauty and grace were cherished by every
local resident, young and old. He himself had seen them pull down a
full-grown swan. Clearly, it was time to reduce their numbers, to lend
a shaping hand to a situation badly out of control. He himself would
do the work, take care of all the details. All he asked of his
neighbors was their leave to do what, regretfully, needed to be done.

My father alone tried to protest the plan, to ask questions, though
even he, frustrated as always by the older man's reasoned maturity,
his air of seasoned wisdom, his perfectly calibrated condescension,
soon found himself helpless. Sitting with my mother on the cerny's
stone porch one deep summer evening, yellow citronella lamps
flickering and a Mozart aria playing softly from inside the cottage,
my father, hunching foward in his wicker chair, tried to raise the
subject. Why not wait to see if the depradations continued? he asked.
Why not call some expert for advice? Or why not simply pick up a few
of the nesting turtles and transport them to another lake?

Leaning back, one trousered leg draped easily over the other, Cerny
picked a pouch of tobacco off the table, opened the sumptuous, black
foil, and began to stuff his pipe. A single flick of his wrist and a
match flared. Holding it to the bowl, he took two meditative puffs,
each accompanied by a slight popping sound of the lips. "Mily pane
Mostovsky" -- my dear Mr. Mostovsky -- he said finally, his voice
wearily descending the syllables like a parent lowering itself to
speak to a particularly obtuse child: "The depradations have continued
long enough. Experts can only confirm what we already know. And as for
wandering about the countryside, hoping to stumble across a wayward
turtle now and again, well, that is a solution that strikes me as
singularly ineffectual. No, my dear sir" -- and here I could see my
mother gently place her hand on my father's arm -- "what must be done
must be done, and, as the Americans are fond of saying, a job worth
doing is worth doing well."

That would depend on the job," said my father quietly, his jaw set.

"Jak rozumite" -- suit yourself -- said Cerny, and then, to his wife:
"What about that cake you've been promising us, my dear."

Ever competent, ever thorough, like a carpenter in his workshop, he
gathered his tools: thirty plastic gallon jugs, carefully rinsed of
milk or vinegar or carburetor fluid; forty yards of doublegauge wire,
rolled off the wooden spool at Washburn's store; fifty stainless-steel
hooks, size 6/0, from the small, saltwater fishing section of
Mazolla's Bait and Tackle.

Mazolla's son, Paul, bagged the hooks for him. "Bluefish?" he asked,
substituting, by the usual hunter's shorthand, the object of the quest
for subject and verb and everything else.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You goin' for bluefish?" He pointed. "The hooks."

"Ah, yes. No." Then, after a pause: "Turtles, I'm afraid."

"Turtles?" asked Mazolla, uncomprehending. "What for?"

Cerny accepted the bag and change. "Because, young man, they're a
nuisance." The little brass bell over the door had already jangled his
exit when Mazolla spoke again.

"That's a lot of turtles," he said, nodding toward the small paper
sack.

Cerny paused in the open door. "All of them," he said quietly.

But then nothing happened. Those few who had given the matter any
thought in the first place simply forgot about it, assuming, with some
small relief, that Cerny had quietly taken care of things in his own
way or abandoned the plan altogether. Labor Day came and went,
bringing with it the return exodus to the city. By late September, the
majority of cottages hidden behind the trees stood locked and silent.

My family was usually among the few who insisted on pushing the
season, yet that year, hindered by my father's obligations in town, we
came rarely. I remember long, hazy days spent playing on the city
playgrounds or in vacant lots, the huge blocky shadows of the
buildings advancing a strange silence across the heated asphalt,
dulling, as though underwater, the far drone of the freeway. I argued
and cried, of course, for a last weekend, a last escape, before the
long rain of November set in, but there was no help for it.

You can imagine my joy, then, and my parents' relief, when the
Goldsteins, our neighbors at the lake, offered to pick me up early one
Friday morning in mid-October, take me with them, and have me home in
time for dinner. They were going, they said, to clean and lock up for
the winter. I was welcome to come along. At six o'clock the next
morning, I was waiting with my father in the first light along 63rd
Road, holding only a lunch bag, a two-piece rod, and a tackle box into
which my mother had slipped a change of socks.

The first thing I remember from that day is smoke rising straight as
an exclamation point above the trees from the Cernys' cabin. The
second is seeing something white burst above the water under the
overhanging trees, disappear, then rise again a few yards down.

I had rowed quite close before I realized the thing was a plastic jug,
wired like a huge cork to something under the surface. I tried to
catch it with an oar, but each time I approached, the jug -- as though
alive, and not merely an indicator of something living below -- would
plow a panicked furrow under the surface, reappearing a few yards
away. I chased it along the shoreline for a while, and then -- I don't
know why -- instead of rowing on to the Cernys' dock, slid the rowboat
into the reeds and set off on foot.

There were no omens, no premonitions. The garden was empty, the house
strangely silent. Smoke like a quickly blurring ghost still issued
from the stone chimney. I didn't call or hallo the cottage or the shed
but instead walked around the house and into the woods as though
following a string, straight to the top of a small, wooded rise.

Below me, inside a chicken-wire enclosure nailed to a circle of trees
and carefully staked to the ground, was Rheinhold Cerny, in hip boots
and work gloves, moving about an old stone garden. A wheelbarrow lay
on its side, its third wheel slowly spinning. To the left, by the
fence, lay a pile of white plastic jugs, each connected to what
appeared to be a fist-size rock. I was about to call when a movement
in the far end of the enclosure caught my attention. A stone was
climbing the wire fence.

The mind runs slower than the eyes -- it took me a moment to grasp
what I saw. When I did, I vomited in the ferns.

Distracted by his work, Rheinhold Cerny never noticed the little boy
crouching like an animal in the bracken. To this day, if he lives, he
lives unsuspecting that someone saw what he did that October day, that
someone watched, like Dante over the ninth abyss, as he walked among
the dying and the damned still dragging at the end of a yard-long wire
the jugs by which he'd drawn them from the deep; how he pulled them to
the wooden circle, one by one, their thick clawed legs scraping
resistant furrows in the dirt; how he placed a foot on their useless
shells, drew out their leathery necks by the wire still clamped to the
hook in their throats, then severed their heads with two or three
blows of a well-honed hatchet.

Even now I see them crawling, their reptilian hearts too stubborn or
dull to die, past their own sudden heads (still twisting and snapping
like animate roots wrenched from troubled soil), past the growing pile
of jugs by the fence, past their own brothers, who might hiss, if
able, or continue on, mute like themselves, to the fence, which last
barrier they would then begin to climb -- unbelievably, absurdly -- as
though the memory of freedom had somehow outlived both their
comprehension of it and their need for it, as though stopping their
lives on the other side of a chickenwire fence were a matter of some
importance.

Pausing in his work, Rheinhold Cerny pushed up his glasses with his
shoulder (his right arm pointing straight ahead as though indicating
something in the distance to an unseen companion), then walked to the
fence. Carefully removing one soaked glove with the other, he hung
them over the top wire like a pair of small bodies, freshly killed,
then reached for something he'd left in the crotch of a tree. The
lenses on his face sparked, then died. I watched him reach into his
shirt pocket, then tilt his head in that familiar gesture I'd come to
know so well, but by then the branches were already whipping at my
face and I was flying headlong from the petrified silence of that
place (marred only by the scrapings of claws on dirt) and the sight of
Rheinhold Cerny seated on an overturned bucket, one leg draped over
the other, enjoying a smoke before completing his work.

I said nothing, revealed nothing, quick, like most children, to feel
shamed by the shameful acts of others. I removed that day from my
memory like a photograph from an album. The next season, I saw Cerny
again. I smiled at his teasing, listened to his anecdotes, accepted
his gifts. And if, like any absent or invisible thing, that emptiness
ordered the world around it, if it affected my life in any way at all,
it did it in the time-honored way of troubled ghosts and buried
memories, by supplying action and effect without agent or cause, by
rearranging the portraits and the furniture of my life in ways I could
neither control nor fully understand. I developed a lifelong affinity
for the silent and forgotten, for those who couldn't scream. I swerved
around snakes, stopped for tortoises, picked snails off rainy
sidewalks. It was as though, forty years dead and buried, even the
bone of their shells reduced to dust, the snappers still stumbled
inside of me, as though their indomitable blood were somehow my own,
as though the compassion never shown to them had been passed, through
the offices of my own shuttered heart, to all their kind.

just so will evil sometimes undo itself, give birth to the sons and
daughters who bury its fondest dreams.

[jum...@my-deja.com]

Source: Harper's Magazine, Sep 1996 v293 n1756 p47(8).
Title: The shape of water.(short story)(Brief Article)

Author: Mark Slouka
Subjects: Short stories

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1996 Harper's Magazine Foundation

Some say the soul tempered by fire--tortured true--is the better for
the trial. Perhaps it is so. But I was born between the wars. My
adventures were of the survivable kind, my tragedies ambiguous and
undramatic, observed as much as felt. What formed me were
anecdotes--often inconclusive, generally unheroic--connected to a
particular forty acres of water. An unexceptional place. I did not
choose it. And yet, if I could ever open myself, I suspect I'd find
its coves there, its sleeping silt, its placental water smooth with
algae . . . and the faces of those I'd known, revealed as clearly as
if mine had been that lake of legend said to reflect the hidden heart.

I. DREAM

I don't remember much: a small yellow fire burning on a flat rock,
spongy ground that leaked warm as pee into my sneakers, a crushed
circle of cattails, an old kerosene lantern throwing huge shadows out
over the lake. I remember other men, shapes, appearing by the
shoreline, then gone; my father sitting hunched on an overturned
bucket; the huge night crowding in on our little circle and the lake
glass black and still and hardly like water at all. I remember the way
sky met sky at the opposite shore, and I remember being afraid of that
near horizon--windowless, blank, unmoored in a night of troubling
doubled stars.

And I remember my father dragging a huge fish smelling of mud and
vegetable rot up into the lamplight. It had scales like silver dollars
and a round, ugly mouth that kept kissing at the air, and I remember
watching it flop heavily in the crushed reeds, leaping in and out of
the shadows like a thing accustomed to the earth, thumping the damp
grass. But most of all I remember my father down on the ground
struggling to take out the hook, holding the great glancing body
pinned under the space between his knee and foot, its head flat with
his right hand, working with the thumb and forefinger of his left--and
the hook not coming out. I remember the broad bend of his back beneath
his shirt, the rolled sleeves, the shine of sweat in the dark hair on
his arms. He held the flashlight in his mouth, trying to see where the
hook had cut into the dark red gills, raspy and stiff as combs, his
hand starting to shake from the strain, and then suddenly he looked
up--he was turned half around from me--and I saw the beam leap up over
the reeds and disappear into the sky as he let his hands find their
own way around steel and flesh, and then the barb was free and he had
the fish in his arms like a child and had slipped it into the water
and the water closed over it like a door. When we shone the light
down, there was nothing there--just the beam disappearing in green
water as into some bottomless well and tiny motes of dust, myriad and
fine.

Years later when I asked my father about this he didn't remember. He
said he'd never gone fishing for carp at night as far as he knew, and

this much was true, he'd never cared for fishing much, and anyway, who
would the other men be? And where would the carp come from? Our lake
had never had carp in it, and no one had heard of any being caught
there. And even if he had caught a carp that size, why would he let it
go? My parents were Czech immigrants. My mother had been making carp
fillets and carp roe soup for as long as I could remember. Another
lake? We hadn't spent time on any other lake when I was that
young--three, four at most--and the few relatives my parents might
have let me go night fishing with weren't due to emigrate for another
five years. And there were no cattails on the lake we knew and no
extended shore without, on any given night, at least one lamp in a
window to break the darkness.

II. Loss

I'm not sure when I first knew about the bottles behind the green
half-curtain my mother had hung under the kitchen counter to hide the
garbage can. Or when I first knew they were important. I used to go
look at them sometimes when nobody was home. My favorite was a clean
glass bottle with a red cap and a red label with a picture of a man on
an old-fashioned sleigh pulled by huge black horses. He had red cheeks
and a heavy beard and was dressed in a black bristly coat that looked
like it had just come off a bear. There were great pines bent with
snow and it made me think of Christmas.

It was around this time that the yelling started and my father slammed
the door one night and the ceramic Indian by my window fell and broke
off a part of his headdress. In the fall I slept under a hill of
blankets in a small wooden room like a cave or a den, and when I woke
up I could tell it was morning by the jays and the light coming
through the two cracks in the wallboard by the door. Sometimes I could
see my breath. My father would usually be up by then, and I could hear
him slowly crunching the newspaper into loose balls and then the snap
and spit of the wood catching and the good, sharp smell of smoke, and
I'd leap out of bed and run to the big wicker chair where my pants and
shirt and socks were already warming in the heat. He slept alone on
the old gray couch by the wall. It had soft worn lumps like the hair
on an old poodle. The cushions would be stacked on the table, and I'd
sit down on the sheets to pull on my socks and sometimes they'd still
be warm from when he'd gotten up. The couch was a little short. I
never realized that the wooden chest--shoved flush against the
couch--was anything more than a lampstand.

"Mamma still sleeping?" I'd ask.

"You're up early," he'd say from the kitchen. "Why don't you put a
sweatshirt on."

But that's not what this is about. This is about the time my father
went fishing. I was about eight years old then. I spent a lot of my
time elsewhere. A while before dusk my father would walk out on our
dock and whistle me in for dinner. He had a good whistle and I could
hear him all the way out at the dam. When I heard my mother call
instead I got scared. As I ran down the small catchroot path below the
orchard I could see the boat was gone. I thought first that somebody
had taken it or it had floated loose and he was out looking for it.
But I knew that wasn't it.

"Come and eat your dinner," my mother said, already walking into the
cabin.

"Where's Dad?"

"He's gone fishing," she said.

We could see him as we ate dinner, sitting out on the empty float, the
boat off the corner, drifting in half-circles like a tethered horse.
The float was maybe twelve feet square, a painted wood frame with a
four-step ladder wired to eight empty oil drums and anchored to the
bottom by a cable. As kids we played hide-and-seek between the drums,
diving under to catch each other's legs, splashing water on the
spiders that built their webs in the barred gloom beneath the boards.
In the summer I'd lie on the hot wood and cup an eye to a crack and
watch the bluegill and yellow perch drift up out of the cool green,
disappear to the side, then drift back to view, hovering by the
barrels.

It scared me to have him sitting out there with the sky turning dark
and the insects starting up in the trees. My father could fix things
and a friend had talked him into going bowhunting once when I was
young, but mostly he sat at the table or up in the shack that used to
be the old ham-radio station, typing. He'd never gone fishing, never
wanted to, hardly ever talked to me about it. With one exception. It
was over dinner. I'd been going on about a bass I'd lost in the cove.
"You want to catch something worthwhile, you go out in the deep
water," he said suddenly, sounding almost angry. He pointed with his
fork. "It may be boring but you sit it out unless you want to piss
around all your life." My mother had started to argue, in Czech,
saying what was the difference, he should let me do what I wanted, it
was ridiculous, and what did he know about fishing anyway. I didn't
say anything.

He picked up his plate. "Fine," he said, as though I'd been saying
something. "Suit yourself."

Just before dark my father sunk a hook into something that snapped the
old surf-casting rod he'd found in the shed into a deep C. I saw the
tip plunge under water, jerk up, then plunge again. He stood up,
fumbling awkwardly at the reel. I saw him glance around as though
looking for help, then his arms jerked forward and he started walking,
grudgingly following whatever it was he'd hooked down there as it
circled the float. My mother stood up suddenly as though to go
outside, then slowly sat down again. I stared out into the near-dark,
watching him do everything wrong, forcing it, holding the butt of the
rod jammed to his stomach like a curved spear--so that from a distance
it looked as though he were struggling to wrench himself free of this
thing, to pull it out of his body--fighting for every foot of line
hissing off into the water like it was his birthright, wanting it
desperately now when five minutes earlier he'd neither wanted nor
expected much of anything at all.

It took almost twenty minutes. He must have had it close, because I
saw him drop to one knee and, shifting the rod to his left hand, start
reaching for the line. When the hooks finally straightened and the rod
snapped straight to the dark sky he lurched back, then dropped to the
other knee. For a moment he didn't move at all. When he put out his
hands and fell on all fours like a man kicked in the stomach about to
vomit, my mother got up quickly and walked to the kitchen. I went out
into the dark. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. He was
sitting up now, perfectly still, the boat still floating obediently on
its leash.

I didn't want to say anything. I sat on the end of the dock watching
the bats, knowing he couldn't see me against the shore. At some point
his voice came over the water and it was like he was sitting right
next to me. "Go to sleep, kid," he said. "It's late."

He sat out all that night as the boat swung half the clock face in a
slow pendulum and back, watching the shore, finally falling asleep on
the cool boards, perhaps peering down like a boy into the dark heart
of that lake, hoping to glimpse whatever it was that had escaped him.

III. LOVE

Odwin--I never knew his full name, or whether Odwin was his first or
last name--was suddenly just there. I don't remember him coming to the
lake and I don't remember him leaving. One day there he was in the
gray rowboat, anchored in the middle of the cove in a cold June rain,
and it seemed to me he'd always been there--I just hadn't noticed him.
And then one day the cove was empty and the boat half-swamped with
rainwater and rotting in the muck, still tied with a rope at the bow
to a post of the wooden dock, but by then it seemed like years since
he'd left and I found I didn't remember much about him at all.

He was married then, to a blonde girl with a pale, pretty face,
considerably younger than himself. He'd never held a rod until one
afternoon at a neighbor's cabin when, out of sheer politeness, he
asked old man Klein about the spinning rod standing in the corner by
the door. He held it the wrong way, with the reel sticking up into the
air instead of hanging down below. Klein showed him how to hold it,
how to catch the monofilament on the tip of his index finger--not
letting it slip into the crease at the joint--how to flip the bail
with his left hand, how to cast overhead and sidearm, releasing the
line at just the right moment.

Odwin tried everything, opening and closing the bail, reeling the
small, silver-bladed spinner up to the top guide, then letting it fall
to the ground, his glass in its little wicker holder on the table next
to him, while the three of them, growing restless, began to talk of
other things, then drifted back to the kitchen for more drinks,
finally returning to the living room filled with the sound of rain on
the windows and barred with strange watery shadows moving up the
furniture and across the walls. Odwin stood there with the rod. He had
an odd, soft smile on his face. He seemed mildly surprised.

"Where could I buy one of these?" he said.

By the next afternoon, Odwin was on the lake. Rumor had it he didn't
row in until well after midnight. From that day on he was
unrelenting--twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day. In two weeks he
was an expert. Rain meant nothing to him. If he was sick, we'd hear
him hacking out on the water and then at some point he wouldn't be
sick anymore. He bought spinning reels, spin-casting reels,
bait-casting reels and rods to match, dozens of spools of monofilament
of various test strengths for different conditions. And
lures--hundreds and hundreds of lures. Jitterbugs and Hula-Hoppers
with multicolored skirts, Rebels and spinners and Daredevil spoons,
Bottom-Bumpers and Flatfish and plastic worms in every color of the
rainbow. He'd fill up one big-belly six-drawer tackle box and start
another. And everything would be treated well: every reel lubed and
smooth, every knot snugged, every point on every treble hook honed and
perfect.

I don't remember much of any of this. I was only four and a half when
he arrived on the lake. All I know I heard from someone else. And all
I remember of Odwin is an impossibly tall man with black hair and a
long, sad, bony face. But I remember some things. I remember watching
him pull up to his dock early one evening. At night he'd bring a
portable toilet with him. While there was daylight, though, he'd have
to row in. I watched him pull in after eight or ten hours on the
water, and when he tried to stand up his body remained in a sitting
position. It took him some time to get out of that boat. He had to
crawl out on his hands and knees. Once out of the boat he slowly lay
out his entire length on the boards. He lay like that for a few
minutes, staring up at the sky, then started going about the business
of standing up. That's all I remember.

His wife left in the middle of the second summer. At ten in the
morning she put two suitcases into the car and drove away, but not
before she'd taken every lure out of every tackle box and thrown them
off the front porch into the trees. There were lures everywhere, gaudy
and sharp, some in the ferns, some up in the white birches, others
hanging festively off the pines. Great blue-gray nests of monofilament
littered the living room, the kitchen, rolled like ghostly tumbleweeds
over the stones and under the potted plants . . . Odwin was out on the
boat. He didn't come in until late that afternoon. By then he was the
only one on the lake who didn't know.

Everybody watched him pull up, throw the noose over the middle post,
hoist himself painfully out of the boat. By dusk he was back on the
dock. We could barely make him out. It must have been June because
there were fireflies and he stood there for what seemed like a long
time and I remember swallows flicking down around his head and you
could smell the rain. The lamp in the Bauer cabin went on, making a
yellow trail on the water. It ran a few feet out from Odwin's dock
like a path. You could see the water all pocked and busy, but it
wasn't rain yet, only gnats and mayflies and the lapping rings of fish
sipping off the surface. I don't remember seeing him get into the
boat, but suddenly the pale rectangle of the dock was empty and
undisturbed and the dark bulk of the boat was gone and there was just
the steady creak and thump of a loose oarlock bumping against the
wood.

There was much talk about all this, and Odwin wasn't a strong man, or
a ruthless one. My father was the only one who'd speak to him still,
and even he did it not for Odwin, not out of love or respect or mercy,
but because no one else would, which to my father had always seemed
like a fine reason for doing anything. So no one was surprised when
Odwin barely lasted out the season, packed his things and left.
Certain kinds of love can stand only so much resistance.

And Odwin was the greatest of lovers in his own sad way. It wasn't
obsession that kept him out on that boat as the moon rose and set and
the stars wheeled on their axis like a slowing merry-go-round. It was
love. On a small road after dark one night (a grown man now), I heard
voices on a wide porch and thought for a moment they were speaking in
the language I hadn't heard since long before my father died. I was
wrong, it was just a trick of the breeze or the night, but in those
few seconds before I realized my mistake my breath had caught in my
chest and tears had gushed to my eyes and I felt like a child
stumbling up the final steps to home. I understood Odwin then, though
I could never know the particular deserts he'd traveled, the specific
thirst he hadn't even known he was enduring until, like some mad
Bedouin wandering the empty quarter, he stumbled upon the thing he'd
forgotten he'd been searching for and in that moment lost not his mind
but his heart.

The bend of reed, the shallow bulge of water, the tucked ecstasy of
damselflies linked on his sleeve--these things and a thousand like
them he loved. The rods, the reels, the lures--these were just the
paraphernalia of courtship. He fished the way suitors of old would
play cribbage or gin rummy, not because they cared for cards but
because it was their ticket into the sanctum, into the presence of
their intended. Like them, he could hardly bring himself to pay
attention to the game, and, also like them, he couldn't seem to lose.
The lake offered up its prizes to him, and he happily dragged them
home.

Two fish--extravagant, absurd--stand out from all the others. The
first was a bass twenty-three inches long with a big potbelly and a
mouth twice the size of a man's fist, this out of a lake where
anything over fifteen inches would magically attract small knots of
boys who would hover nearby, whispering and pointing, and who wouldn't
leave until the fish (gutted, cleaned, and wrapped) had disappeared in
the freezer.

But the other was unforgettable. My father woke me early one morning
to see it. "You don't want to miss this," he said. "Odwin's dragged up
something special." It was laid out on the stones of the veranda when
we got there, a gleaming yellow-green beast fully half the length of
an oar. I was six and a half that summer. I'd never seen a pickerel
before. I remember there was moss and little tufts of grass growing
between the rocks. My father walked out back to look for Odwin.

It was getting hot. I stared at the canary-yellow diamonds on its
sides, the sharp white teeth in the partly open mouth still locked on
the diving minnow lure he'd caught it on, the way the colors faded
into the dark-olive back . .
. I remember the yellow jacket that settled on its long, bill-like
snout and
moved down the jaw, tentatively touching the cartilage flap of the
mouth, the teeth, then the dark green cheek plate near the eye. The
fish didn't move. I stood away. There was something horrible about
this: the delicate, strangled body, the venomous yellow abdomen
twitching spastically, edging toward that great staring eye. I half
expected the fish to start thrashing at any moment and I remember I
thought of walking away, and even started to, but the wasp was already
at the rim of that clouding pool. And I saw its forelegs dip
down--gently, almost respectfully--and it was like a swimmer testing
familiar water, or an acolyte paying homage at some long-forgotten
shrine.

IV. FEAR

They moved into the cabin up the hill in midsummer, the year I turned
twelve. One day we heard a man laugh and then a woman squealing, "Put
me down, you bastard, I swear I'll kill you, I'll . . .," and we saw
him walk out on the dock holding on to her legs and her beating on his
back with her fists, and then he grabbed his hat, turned once, and
flung her fully clothed and furious into the water. "Looks like
neighbors," my father said. From that moment on the lake adjusted to a
new topography. My world circled around them like a plate on a pin.

It was particularly hot that summer, or maybe I just remember it that
way. Every morning the cicadas would ratchet up and by breakfast the
sky would start to whine and all day a thin head of clouds would build
to the west but nothing ever happened. Even swimming didn't help--the
top three feet were as warm as the air. We'd dive down into the olive
dusk, cold as mud, and hug the boulders of the old pasture wall to
keep from floating up, but that only made the surface and the
overheated air still worse. Sitting on the boat I'd listen to the
birds fighting in the locked maples over the road. I was like the
blackwater pockets in the spillway by the dam--choking, crazy with
life.

On a boat one afternoon with the water stamped flat and hot, I pulled
in a small bass with a minnow still sticking out of its throat. I
tugged on the minnow's tail and it slipped out of the creamy vortex of
guts as easily as a cooked almond slides out of its skin. All
afternoon I'd been dunking my head over the stern. And suddenly I did
something I didn't know I was going to do: I put the tip of my finger
where the minnow had been, to see what it was like. The inside of the
fish's throat was smooth as tapioca pudding, and when I pushed deeper
it started to swallow at me with quick, hard draws and I jerked my
hand out quick and threw that bass out over the water so hard it
skipped. It seemed like everything was like that. I hardly knew what
I'd do next. I was quick to anger, quick to tears, an utter mystery to
myself.

Things would change in ways I didn't expect. Cleaning fish, for
example. I'd been doing it since I was seven. I'd hold them in an old
pink towel with just their head sticking out and give them a good
whack with a smooth, bent iron, then put the tip of the knife into the
shithole and cut up through the belly to the gills. The knife would
make a soft, ropy sound and the white skin would collapse a bit like a
man pulling in his cheeks, and if you lifted up a side you could see
the guts all connected. The heart was right up front, tucked under the
gills: small, dull-red, easy to pop. It reminded me of the thin little
bubbles we used to suck and twist out of the tatters of burst
balloons. Back behind the liver was the stomach, sort of a mud-colored
bag: inside you could sometimes find whole minnows, crawfish . . .
once I found a small frog turned creamy white and another time a fake
gold earring. I never went near the gall bladder. I'd cut it once by
accident, and it leaked thick and yellow and smelled like old men's
pee and reminded me of that time at the city train station a man had
stood next to me looking straight up at the ceiling like there was
some message written there and all the time shaking his wrinkled cock
like an old dog wags its tail.

Against the vaulted roof of the spine was a dove-gray bladder you
could poke with your finger. I'd always liked doing this but that
summer for some reason I started trying not to. I'd make little bets
with myself, imagining rewards, picturing horrors if I didn't stop.
Usually I'd do it anyway. It wouldn't hiss or pop but only tear thin
and sweet, and I'd wash the meat clean under the outside faucet,
picking out the little bits of blood with my fingers. It was that way
with everything, more or less.

There were three of them, the oldest hardly twenty-two, polite and
somehow dangerous, and it surprised no one when the state police
appeared on the dirt road and pulled into their drive, only that they
left soon afterward, taking no one with them. There was one who'd call
out to me sometimes when I rowed by. He'd be sitting up on the stone
porch with his boots up on the rail wearing only a pair of pants and a
big broad hat with a turned rim, and he'd ask me how the fishing was
or where I thought he'd have the best luck, and sometimes somebody
else would say something from inside and he'd say "Why don't you shut
up, Tucker" without even turning around, and I'd row away, repeating
the words he'd said and the way he'd said them, flattered that he'd
talk to me at all. Sometimes I'd see her leaning in the lark of the
doorway, eating something off a paper plate with her hands, then
licking her fingers. It was always hot, and sometimes she'd turn half
away and lift the hair off the back of her neck with her forearms.

Every night as lightning flashed like some rapid code above the
horizon of trees they'd be out on the boat, setting a trotline from
the end of their dock to a branch hanging over the water. The next
morning one of them would lift the line with a grunt, and there,
dangling on the end of a dozen small leaders, would be footlong
bullheads, black-speckled crappies, sometimes a bass or a small
snapping turtle. Then somebody would go out and pull hand over hand
along the line, cutting the fish into the boat with a pair of
scissors, dumping the rest over the side. I'd never seen a trotline
before.

"Hell, easy," said the one who talked to me. "Come on by and I'll show
you how to skin a catfish."

The sky had been rumbling since noon, and where the path left the
uncut meadow and entered the trees it was like dusk. It was hot, and
when I slapped at the gnats and deerflies that circled around my face
they stuck to my skin and hair and I had to pick them loose with my
fingers. They were all sitting on the porch when I got there. Music
was coming from inside and I could see him already working on the
fish, straddling a bench with a cleaning board nailed to it crossways,
the fish jammed in a bucket of water by his side.

She was lying in a hammock strung between a hook in the cabin wall and
another sunk into the tree at the corner of the porch, wearing only a
long skirt and a man's sleeveless T-shirt, and I could see the sweat
on her arms and her throat and the damp curve of her breathing. The
hammock was barely moving. She'd pulled up her skirt to get some air,
and one raised knee tipped outward slightly, then closed with each
swing of the pendulum. Her arm, hanging loose over the side, trailed
slowly over the rocks. She'd been facing my way when I appeared by the
side of the cabin. She didn't say anything--if her eyes had been
closed I'd have thought she was sleeping--and after a few moments
simply turned her head the other way. One of the men got up and walked
into the cabin. No one else said anything either.

He must have known I was there all along. "Well, come over here,
boss," he said, without turning around. "You ever see this before?" I
could see sweaty curls of black hair sticking out from under his hat.
Reaching into the bucket, he pulled out a foot-long bullhead, lay it
bellydown on the board, and quickly poked a small hole in the top of
its skull with the tip of the fillet knife, then, reaching up to the
railing, picked up what looked like a wheat straw and slipped it into
the hole. Suddenly I felt myself swallowing high up in my throat like
I was going to be sick. The tail trembled with current. He moved the
straw, delicately, as though mixing a small drink, and the fish
shuddered again and was still. "See that?" he said.

A man's voice said something from the house, and I could hear her
laugh behind me. "Why don't you give your little friend a drink,
Troy?" Her voice was like her fingers tracing over the rocks. Again
the other said something I couldn't make out. She turned to the house.
"Maybe I will, asshole. At least he'd know what to do with it."

I couldn't move. I couldn't say anything. I was suddenly just scared.
I could see the lake, still and dark as oil, but everything looked
different from here--the tilting, unfamiliar dock, the float on its
barrels, too close to the cove, like the cables had snapped or the
anchor broken loose . . . Through a space in the leaves I could see my
father walk out on our dock, and it was as though I were seeing him
from another world. I willed him to stay. I watched him light a
cigarette with quick, familiar movements. After a while he turned and
walked back, disappearing. A fish swirled tight by the shore.

"You make a cut here," the man said, and I watched him slice in a
half-circle behind the gills and again at the base of the tail and
four more lengthwise and then, grabbing a small flap of skin with a
pair of pliers, peel the brown skin down like you would a banana,
baring the clean white meat underneath. Two quick moves and the
whiskered head, spine, and tail dropped on an open newspaper. He
reached for another. I wanted to run.

I don't know how long I stood there, trapped by things I didn't know:
the spotted blade, the blood-marked straw, the pliers going about
their business, and at my back the gently creaking mesh, the small
sounds of exhaustion--a long sigh, a stretching yawn.

I knew he was there before I heard the hammock move behind me.
"Hello," she said, startled.

I turned around. "I thought I might find you here," he said quietly,
looking at me. "If you're hungry, it's time for dinner."

We went back up the hill and into the light of the meadow, neither of
us saying anything. Here and there I could see the lake through the
trees, rearranging itself. A flash of light crackled low on the
horizon and a few fat drops hit the tall grasses, making them jerk and
nod in the still air.

"Come on, let's run," said my father.

V. TRUTH

And then there was the water at the dam that spilled over the boards
in their iron sleeves and down around the rocks and small islands with
whippy three-foot saplings doomed to only a season, maybe two, before
the next big rain in May or June ripped them loose and sent them
rushing down the current.

This was small water: a short, undercut bank, a thigh-deep hole along
a toppled tree still partly rooted, its branches now growing
vertically like trees in their own right but still feeding off that
troubling, recumbent soil. No one over twelve would notice it. Where
the spillway flattened out and ran under the one-lane wooden bridge,
it slowed to a stream less than five strides across. The bridge was so
low you couldn't stand up, and when cars rumbled over, sand and small
pebbles would hiss into the water and the boards would groan and you'd
wonder if this was the time they'd give and crack and the steel belly
of some car would come crushing down into the wet, dark place you were
hiding in. That stream was crammed full of fish (trapped by the dam on
one end and a long, sandy shoal on the other) that had been carried
over the spillway as fingerlings: bluegill and pumpkinseed and redear,
the occasional bullhead or perch or small bass. The shadows were
ridged and thick with their backs, and they'd churn across the
shallows in great, nervous schools. We'd chase them back and forth for
hours with our nets, herding them like sheep into the dead ends under
the rocks and banks and back under the bridge against the base of the
spillway, trying to see how many we could get to a scoop.

It had been raining for a week and now it had stopped, though
everything still ran water and the clouds scraped low and heavy over
the hills. The lake was brown, the trees along the shore a foot deep
in water. I went down to the stream to see what it was like, carrying
a long-handled salmon net I used for snapping turtles on the open
lake. It had a two-inch mesh, much too big for anything I might find
there, but I'd torn the netting on my other one so I took it with me
anyway.

I could hear the water long before I got to the bridge, bigger now,
bulging up over the fallen tree and rushing in a straight gray line
through the woods. The water looked barren--scoured smooth and dead. I
sat on the bridge for a while, watching broken half-tunnels of bark
and leafy branches appear from under the wood and disappear downstream
and then, having nothing better to do, got up to walk along the bank.
Fifty yards down I recognized a small, sink-sized pool, relatively
unchanged, and stuck the handle in to test the strength of the
current.

A tail wide as a dinner plate slapped the water and disappeared. I
stared as though a large pig had stuck its snout above the surface,
snorted, and vanished. It was simply impossible. This was a bluegill
hole hardly bigger than a kitchen pot. A fish that large would have to
be curled like a doughnut to fit at all.

At age ten the eyes still occasionally win over the mind; I spun the
net like a baton, stabbed it into the hole (so narrow the rim just
made it), and, leaning in, forked a huge fish with big silver scales
out onto the bank. It promptly flopped out of the mesh. I tackled it,
literally wrestled it flat. I probably screamed when it finned me in
the stomach (it must have hurt, and I flaunted the neat row of small
black puncture holes like a certificate of honor for weeks), but I
don't remember.

I do remember leaving the net behind and dragging the fish by the
gills (which also cut me fairly well, as I discovered later), almost
half a mile back down the grassy middle of the road as it started to
rain again and the fish revived every few minutes just enough to
thrash loose and leap across the dirt and into the roadside weeds.
Pictures were taken. No one had ever seen a carp around there before.
It measured thirty-four inches by the yellow cloth tape my mother kept
in her sewing kit, the one in the circular case with the button that
sucked it all back in when you pressed it. My mother wanted to keep
the fish for soup, but it would have been a big job and it was raining
and the fish still alive, its plate-size gills working hard, so we
picked it up and hauled it to the end of the dock and threw it like a
log into the water. It lay stunned just beneath the hissing rain, then
churned into the dark. "Be a lonely life," my father said. "Nothing
like him in this puddle, that's for goddamn sure."

It had probably come up from the river with the big rain, he'd said.
It would be years before I'd remember a circle of lamplight stamped
from the darkness, a horizon dark as dream, my father dragging a fish
with scales like silver dollars into the sudden air--years before I'd
be old enough to believe that life, like water, will sometimes
engineer its own logic, adjust itself to fit the form of our desires.

===================================================================

Source: World Press Review, May 1996 v43 n5 p28(2).
Title: The illusion of life. (virtual reality in American culture)
(reprinted from New Statesman & Society, Jan 12, 1996)
Author: Mark Slouka
Abstract: Americans' experiences and perceptions of real life
are becoming increasingly subsumed by virtual reality.
Bill Gates is planning to capitalize on this trend, with
his vision of a future in which people conduct everyday
activities from within their homes.
Subjects: Virtual reality - Social aspects
Reality - Social aspects
People: Gates, Bill - Attitudes

Full Text COPYRIGHT Stanley Foundation 1996

On Nov. 18, 1995, Mickey Mouse's birthday, the first 352 residential
units went on sale in the Walt Disney Co. virtual town of Celebration.
Located just five miles south of Disney World's Magic Kingdom, the
$2.5--billion project, billed as "a 19th-century town for the late
20th century," will feature a real post office, a real town hall, and,
eventually, 20,000 real residents. [With Celebration, Disney fulfills
its ambition to create a planned community, once envisioned as a city
of the future at Epcot Center. Instead it is a city of the past, with
a set of covenants to ensure authenticity and, presumably, order.
--WPR! If Celebration succeeds (and there's every reason to expect it
will), it will suggest the extent to which the blurring of reality
with corporate fantasy has become a genuine cultural phenomenon.

Not that we need more roof. The general breakdown of the barrier
separating original from counterfeit, fact from fake, is visible
everywhere. In the U.S., the slow bleeding of reality into illusion is
systemic.

The image of O. J. Simpson dodging travelers or hurdling luggage en
route to his Hertz Rent-a-Car blurs with the images of O. J. on the
lam, O. J. clowning with Leslie Nielsen in the Naked Gun movies, O. J.
and Harvard attorney Alan Dershowitz (or is it actor Ron Silver,
playing Dershowitz?) hurdling land mines on the way to acquittal in
Reversal of Fortune II. The horrific videotape of the Rodney King
beating melds with the images of South Central rioting that in turn
look just like the "real-life" scenes of Los Angeles mayhem found on
Police Quest: Open Season, a video game designed by former police
chief Daryl Gates. In the culture of illusion, furniture swims, walls
bulge and bend.

Is any part of American culture exempt from the assault of virtual
realities? Apparently not. Politically, the U.S. is already a virtual
republic, a country run less by elected officials than by the men and
women who package and sell candidates to an electorate increasingly
willing to believe--in the scripted words of tennis star Andre
Agassi--that "image is everything."

In American courts of law, professionally rendered
reenactments--scripted, rehearsed, directed, and edited--are
admissible as evidence. Nothing is too extreme. Was your hand crushed
at the factory? Were your kids burned to death in an automobile
accident? For a fee, a company will provide a video simulation
complete with realistic screams, horrified bystanders, and virtual
blood. Juries, weaned on 57 television channels in the age of Oliver
Stone, find such displays very effective.

As we plummet through the looking glass, however, we would do w to
bear in mind that beyond that Orwellian and seemingly ubiquitous
adjective "virtual" is a marketing scheme of unrivaled audacity,
unprecedented scope, and nearly unimaginable impact: a scheme (worth a
potential $3.5 trillion, by one reliable estimate) that is designed to
sell us copies of the things we already have available to us for
free-life itself. Soon, writes Bill Gates in The Road Ahead, "you will
be able to conduct business, study, explore the world and its
cultures, call up any great entertainment, make friends, attend
neighborhood markets, and show pictures to distant relatives--without
leaving your desk or armchair. . . . Your network connection . . .
will be your passport into a new, mediated way of life."

The "mediated life," of course, aided by one of the great migrations
of human history--the movement inside our own homes--is already here.
As more of our days are spent in synthetic environments, partaking of
electronic pleasures, life itself is turned into a commodity. As the
natural world fades from our lives, the unnatural one takes over; as
the actual community wanes, the virtual one waxes full and fat.
Gates's plan takes advantage of the social momentum. He wants a piece
of the action. (And he is not alone.) The new, mediated world, he
promises, will be one of a "low-friction, low-overhead capitalism in
which market information will be plentiful and transaction costs low."
What he neglects to mention, understandably, is that the road to
"shopper's heaven" goes right past him, and he happens to be manning
the tollbooth.

Gates's vision of a "friction-free" virtual world, one must admit, has
a certain Singaporean charm. From his proposal that we apply something
like the Motion Picture Association's movie ratings to social
discourse to his suggestion that a virtual forest of hidden
surveillance cameras be installed "to record most of what goes on in
public," he is out to make the world free from friction--and safe for
commerce.

What Gates seems to overlook (there's no way to put this delicately)
is that friction in social life, as in the bedroom, has its virtues.
The "friction" he would spare us, after all, is the friction of direct
experience, of physical movement, of unmediated social interaction.
Cultural life, one wants to remind him, requires friction. As does
democracy.

It's always possible that democracy or a thriving social life is not
what Gates and his fellow enthusiasts are after because they trust
believe that these notions (like sex or physical space), will be the
vestigial limbs of the virtual world, cherished only by a handful of
die-hard humanists. It's possible, as well, that the latter-day Nathan
Hales really believe in the "liberty" of electronic shopping, of being
able, as Gates prom to order the "cool" sunglasses Tom Cruise wears in
Top Gun while simultaneously watching the movie.

Whether or not they actually believe in their virtual world is
ultimately beside the point. They're building it, regardless. And in
the friction-free future, jacked into "shopper's heaven," we have the
"liberty" of living (or rather, of buying the illusion of living)
through the benevolent offices of a middleman as nearly omnipotent as
God himself. Freedom? A more perfect captivity is difficult to
imagine.

All of which, finally, makes Mickey's excellent adventure in Florida
real estate more than a little unsettling. There's no off" button in
Celebration, no escape: The illusion is seamless, and the corporate
menu of options defines the boundaries of life itself.

RELATED ARTICLE: American Topics

Taking Africa Seriously?

Clinton"s Trade Ploy

At last, sighed the businessman, the U.S. has decided to take Africa
seriously. After all, President Bill Clinton had sent none other than
his secretary of commerce, Ronald H. Brown, to Africa to deliver the
message personally. And Brown is the first U.S. secretary of commerce
to make the trip for 14 years, so that has to be good news for Africa
. . . doesn't it? Well, yes, possibly.

There is no denying the U.S. wants to replace aid with trade. Its aid
budget is being carved to ribbons, and President Clinton is putting
the onus on the private sector to pick up the pieces. In the absence
of massive aid inflows, "it is only trade and investment that will
bring sustainable development and with it jobs and prosperity for the
people of Africa," said Brown. "Africa is important to the U.S.
because of the vast economic potential of its people." Noble
sentiments, straight from the White House. But wait a minute . . . . A
detailed look at the policy reveals it to be a starting pistol without
bullets. The 58-page report [on the policy] contains no budget or
schedule for implementation, and no achievement targets. What it does
contain are "initiatives," 55 of them. But 30 contain [language that]
fails to inspire confidence that such "initiatives" [are anything new].

The plain fact [is] that the U.S. suffers a big and growing trade
deficit with sub-Saharan Africa. Over the last five years, the region
has exported $37 billion more goods and commodities to the U.S. than
it has imported. By far the biggest export to the U.S. is oil
(primarily from Nigeria), accounting for 70 percent of the total. . . .
There is little [Clinton] can do about trimming African exports,
especially oil, but he can balance the flow a little by stimulating
sales of U.S. goods and services to the region. This was re-termed
"trade and investment" in the paper Brown carried with him.

=========================

Source: Technology Review, April 1996 v99 n3 p71(2).
Title: War of the Worlds.
Author: Ellen Spertus
Subjects: Technology - Research
People: Slouka, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1996 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alumni
Association

By Mark Slouka Harper Collins, $20.00

Almost 50 years ago, the essayist E. B. White foretold that modern
technology would create illusions vivid enough to encroach on people's
lives. Just months after his prediction, Americans were panicked by
Orson Welles's radio broadcast of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, for
which Mark Slouka's book is named.

Slouka, who teaches literature and culture at the University of
California at San Diego, voices the same concerns as White, but with a
focus on technologies that White never got to see. What concerns him,
he explains, is how online culture could change our ideas about what
is real. Viewers of television sometimes have trouble distinguishing
between the actors and the characters, and with the Internet and
virtual reality, the potential for confusion is arguably much greater.
Not only can we see an imaginary piece of wood, for example, but we
can feel its weight and swing it around. Problems can also arise as
people adopt different identities online and are treated accordingly.

War of the Worlds is not the only recent book questioning the benefits
of cyberspace; Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil and James Brook and
Iain A. Boal's Resisting the Virtual Life come immediately to mind.
And such skepticism is much needed, especially since not everyone
singing the praises of computer technologies is to be trusted. After
all, it is in companies' interest to convince people that they need
virtual reality and Internet access in order to lead full lives.

Unfortunately, too, little criticism has met Kevin Kelly, who argues
in Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization that
individuality is an illusion and will be swept away as human beings
are fused with computer networks into a global "hive mind." Kelly, as
it happens, is not a harmless crackpot but the executive editor of
Wired, the hugely successful magazine on cyberspace and business. Then
there is the troubling fatalism common among cyberspace advocates,
such as John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a group that fights for free speech in cyberspace. When
Slouka asked Barlow about the advantages of leaving the physical
world, he replied that they are "damned few... it's less a matter of
advantage than inevitability." Slouka wisely calls our attention to
this claim before it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Misrepresenting the Net

But although Slouka's paeans on the superiority of reality over
artificiality are compelling, his attempts to illustrate his arguments
with concrete examples of Internet behavior are less so. First of all,
he misrepresents the Net by ignoring some of its best and most popular
features. The only discussion groups he mentions are "alt"
(alternative) groups, such as alt.satannet and alt.hangover, which are
known to be the dregs. He entirely ignores the fact that there are
groups for thoughtful discussion of literature, philosophy, and all
branches of science. Likewise, Slouka never mentions the popular World
Wide Web, which contains artwork, scientific and literary
publications, and, incidentally, a panel discussion on virtual
communities in which Slouka is a participant.

After dismissing discussion groups, Slouka takes aim at MOOs, virtual
communities where users create and manipulate characters and places.
Many players view their favorite MOO as a second home and spend
considerable time enhancing the virtual environment, interacting with
other people, and even engaging in cybersex (which is like phone sex,
only with a computer keyboard). This, and future enhancements promised
by Future Sex magazine, greatly disturbs Slouka, who rails that a
virtual embrace is not a real embrace. What he fails to recognize is
the distinct possibility that most participants in virtual embraces
would prefer the real thing, if only the opportunity were available
and there weren't physical risks. They don't necessarily believe
virtual sex is better than or the same as real sex; they may just
consider it better than the options available to them.

Slouka also criticizes the lack of diversity to be found on the Net,
when the truth is that a wide variety of intelligent opinions are
available there. Political and nonprofit groups have flourished, able
to easily present their material to others; Amnesty International
reports are as accessible as corporate product information. Firms with
large PR and advertising budgets no longer have a monopoly on reaching
the masses. To be sure, companies will become more of a presence
online as money-making applications of cyberspace develop, but the
Internet will still be available to others as an inexpensive channel
for mass distribution of information.

[jum...@my-deja.com]

Finally, Slouka's repeated statement that what one finds online are
not "real" friends or "real" communities is questionable. Just as one
can experience real friendship with an old-fashioned penpal, one can
do so through the Net. What's more, communities form online that would
be impossible in physical space. For instance, female computer
scientists are too geographically dispersed to have a physical
community, but through cyberspace they can readily share news and give
one another advice.

Slouka is rightly disturbed, however, by some cyberists' contempt for
the material world in general and the body in particular, which they
scornfully refer to as "meat." Such contempt is not new--MIT professor
emeritus Joseph Weizenbaum wrote 20 years ago about hackers so
obsessed with the computer that they became "oblivious to their bodies
and to the world in which they move"--yet instead of discussing the
history of this mind-set in computer subcultures, Slouka chooses to
concentrate on deconstructionism, a literary theory that claims a text
has no objective meaning but only subjective interpretations.
Cyberspace, he writes, represents "the marriage of deconstruction and
computer technology--a mating of monsters if ever there was one," and
he goes on not so much to analyze the situation as to blame feminism
and complain about cyberists' "airy, relativistic attitude [and] their
complete disinterest in, if not animosity toward, the hard facts of
history." His complaints are ironic in light of his own ignorance of
the history of (male-created) computer cultures.

War of the Worlds is worth reading nevertheless. The immensity of
recent and upcoming technological advances makes it vital to consider
their effects on our worldview, and while Slouka's book paints too
dark a picture, it does point out that some of the technological
futures advocates have hailed are really dystopian. One only wishes
the author had balanced his uncompromising love for the real world
with some careful attention to the realities of virtual worlds.

Eleen Spertus, a PhD candidate in electrical engineering and computer
science at MIT, is a visiting scholar at the University of Washington.

=============================================================

Source: The Futurist, March-April 1996 v30 n2 p56(1).
Title: War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault
on Reality._(book reviews)
Author: Lane Jennings
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Slouka, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT World Future Society 1996

In War of the Worlds, author Mark Slouka examines how cyberspace and
its accompanying technologies are blurring distinctions between the
real and artificial worlds.

"I believe it is possible to see, in a number of technologies spawned
by recent developments in the computer world, an attack on reality as
human beings have always known it . . . and that its implications for
our culture are enormous," says Slouka, a lecturer in literature and
culture at the University of California, San Diego.

This phenomenon did not just begin with present-day cyberspace, the
author points out, but has its roots in one of the first artificial
realities of this century - radio. In 1938, Orson Welles's radio
reenactment of the Martian invasion from H.G. Wells's War of the
Worlds sent many listeners into a panic. "For the thousands who rushed
north to escape the Martians' onslaught, Welles's electronic illusion
easily triumphed over common sense and reality," says Slouka.

And therein lies the problem, says the author. If illusions generated
in the artificial environments of cyberspace can supplant common sense
and reality, a potentially dangerous precedent is set - the creation
of an amoral universe where people have no limits or responsibility.

"The [real] world provides context, and without context, ethical
behavior is impossible," says Slouka. Very real factors such as birth,
pain, pleasure, and death force us to make value judgments, giving
order and structure to an otherwise chaotic existence.

This usurping of reality could also have some very tangible effects on
issues of major importance, such as war in the Balkans and the
shrinking biodiversity of the environment. People are apathetic enough
as it is, says Slouka, so why should they even care about these
real-world problems if they can simply escape into ideal, artificial
worlds within cyberspace?

If we are not careful, one of the greatest casualties of this attack
on reality will be our health, says Slouka. With the growth of
communication via cyberspace, the possibility exists that face-to-face
contact will become a thing of the past. That, he says, would not be
to our benefit.

Slouka cites research connecting social interaction with improved
physical health. An evening with friends, for example, can measurably
enhance the immune system for two days, while face-to-face meetings of
cancer support groups can actually double survival times of
participants. The isolation of communicating by computer only could,
in the long run, have a very real, detrimental effect on our health
and longevity.

War of the Worlds is a good read, with short chapters that are easy to
get through. With an accessible style of writing, Slouka enables us
all to understand the important issues of cyberspace, as well as the
changing nature of reality.

========================================================

Source: New Statesman & Society, Jan 19, 1996 v9 n386 p35(2).
Title: War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault
on Reality._(book reviews)
Author: Marek Kohn
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Slouka, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1996 Statesman and Nation Publishing Company Ltd.

Shortly before the beginning of the Gulf war, at the New Age seaside
camp and business park of Findhorn, I was introduced to virtual
utopianism. The Internet, a software entrepreneur explained to me, was
more than a communications network. It was an inherently democratic
phenomenon, and a force for peace. in his view, discussions on
electronic bulletin boards had prevented hostilities from already
breaking out. Around this time, Jean Baudrillard proclaimed that the
Gulf war could not take place.

Curiously, Baudrillard was right, in one non-trivial sense. There was
no war, because the Iraqis did not join in. What took place was the
enactment of a battle plan, the final stage of a military-political
strategy. It was this process, not the trilling of the modems, that
had delayed the start of the shooting. Had they been asked to assess
the power of cyberspace, either Saddam or Schwarzkopf might reasonably
have asked: "How many divisions has the lnternet?"

For cyber-visionaries, however, the fact that the Gulf war occurred
may be secondary to the fact that gratifying conversations about it
took place on the Net. Devotees can live in a virtual world where wars
don't happen and the only flames are nasty messages. More importantly,
they can delude themselves that this world is of equal importance to
the real one.

The similarity to left-radical projects of the I970s and 1980s, in
which many participants felt that conducting politically satisfactory
meetings was far more important than producing magazines or whatever,
is not coincidental. Nor is the similarity to more recent tendencies
on the left, in which "struggle" over texts has replaced struggle over
anything material.

Cyber-sceptic Mark Slouka sees deconstruction as the theory and
hypermedia as an attempt at the practice. While the deconstructionists
could only argue, that nothing exists outside us - that reality is
just personal perspective - the cyberists had machines that could make
it so."

Slouka's book is an affirmation that the virtual is not real, that
reality is more important, and that we should check back into it. Much
of what he opposes is here already. He begins with the telling
anecdote of a woman who, asked by a reporter whether she believed a
claim that her neighbour's wife had been murdered by an unknown black
man rather than the neighbour himself, replied: "I don't know; I'm
dying for the movie to come out so I can see how it ends.. The movie
duly did, less than a year later.

Slouka believes that the woman was neither cynical nor flippant. She
really was dependent on a TV representation of the crime and was
prepared to trust it implicitly. Slouka would no doubt endorse the
rationale behind a recent public safety film aimed at black youths,
which showed a teenager in pain from a gunshotwound. The idea was that
youths at risk - who presumably have close second-hand experience of
the effects of gunfire - are so cognitively dominated by screen images
of violence that they need to be told that being shot hurts.

The Internet, Slouka argues, is working hand in glove with television
to loosen our sense of reality. He rests his case largely on two Net
species, cyber-visionaries and cyber-casualties. The former prophesy
the emergence of "hived creatures", integrated into a global
collective mind, while the unhived become "mere meat at the fringe",
in the words of Robert Coover. Slouka recoils at the totalitarian
overtones of the hive vision. He does not, he drily remarks, fancy
himself as "road-kill on the digital highway".

Cyber-visionaries like Nicole Stenger hail cyberspace as a domain in
which, liberated from our physical bodies, we may become "highly
unstable, hermaphrodite angels". Devotees of MUDs ("multiuser
dungeons", as in Dungeons and Dragons) can adopt any imaginary form
they choose - with results strikingly similar to a William Burroughs
novel. When one such creature "raped" another, Mugwump style, all hell
broke out in the dungeon. The episode was documented at extraordinary
length in the Village Voice, an account cited by Slouka as evidence
that the MUDlarks had lost (or renounced) the ability to distinguish
between reality and metaphor.

Well, maybe. Like Slouka I marvelled at that article, but to me it
illustrated above all the American enthusiasm for construing oneself
as an outraged and loquacious victim. And is it surprising that
somebody who adopts the identity of a Haitian trickster-spirit will
make the most of an opportunity for further self-dramatisation? More
intriguing, and piquant, is Slouka's friend Avram, who in the persona
of a woman has become embroiled in a "lesbian" cyber-affair. Avram's
wife knows nothing of this relationship, which involves one-handed
typing. Nor does Avram know whether the person at the far keyboard is
male or female.

A more significant tendency is the use of cyberspace as a refuge for
those who abjure the flesh, or "meat". Prophecies of the joining of
all minds in cyberspace, or even their downloading into digital
memories, are a technophilic version of the Rapture anticipated by
fundamentalist Christians. Unlike the Rapture, however, the idea of a
Telecosm - a new state of human being prophesied by guru George Gilder
- has a certain influence in the world of business.

Slouka observes that virtual" is equivalent to "spiritual". Yet,
having identified the cyber-prophets as a variety of religious
millennialists, and professing disdain for their cyber-babble, he
still talks as though they are on to something. This is a bit like
condemning cult leaders while accepting their claims of impending
Armageddon. Cyber-pseuds are no more than froth on the electronic
tide.

Thy do, however, get a lot of publicity, and so do the newsgroups. For
somebody who is sceptical about the media, and often delightfully
sharp in his observations, Slouka is surprisingly ready to accept
media representations of the ecology of cyberspace. His acquaintance
with it seems largely confined to newsgroup chatter, which he
implicitly characterises as the heart of the Net. This is like an
account of radio that only discusses phone-ins. You have to look a bit
harder to find where the grown-ups are.

Slouka's prescriptions for "essentialism" are little ones. Turn the TV
off now and again; get involved with a community issue; go for a walk.
But we can do all these things and be wired, too - usefully so.
Cyberspace has permitted the development of communities, in a
meaningful sense of the term, which tackle issues that span the globe.
We can't stop wars on the Net, but we can do some modest good we
couldn't do otherwise. That doesn't amount to changing the world.
Conversely, a cyberspace dystopia is no more likely than a cyberspace
utopia. try: http://www.paragon.co.uk/extras/race-gallery.html
Marek Kohn's "The Race Gallery" is really published by Cape

=============================================================

Source: New Statesman & Society, Jan 12, 1996 v9 n385 p32(1).
Title: The illusion of life is dearly bought.
(criticism of plans to market virtual reality)
Author: Mark Slouka
Abstract: Bill Gates and other advocates of a future in which
virtual reality replaces real-life experiences claim that a
world mediated by electronic simulation will be a paradise
free from friction. However, it will also be a world in which
corporate middlemen will be marketing the illusion of living.
Subjects: Virtual reality - Evaluation
Computer simulation - Evaluation
People: Gates, Bill - Forecasts

Full Text COPYRIGHT Statesman and Nation Publishing Company Ltd. 1996

On 18 November last year, Mickey Mouse's birthday, the first 3 5 2
residential units went on sale in the Walt Disney Company's virtual
town of Celebration. Located just five miles south of the Magic
Kingdom, the $2.5-billion project, billed as "a 19th-century town for
the late 20th century", will feature a real post office, a real town
hall, and, eventually, 20,000 real residents. Think of it as a
computer game--Sim City, say, or SimLife--writ large. If it succeeds

(and there's every reason to expect it will), it will suggest the
extent to which the blurring of reality with corporate fantasy has
become a genuine cultural phenomenon.

Not that we need any more proof. The general breakdown of the barrier

separating original from counterfeit, fact from fake, is visible

everywhere; in the U S, the slow bleeding of reality into illusion is
systemic. The image of O J Simpson dodging tackles or hurdling luggage
en route to his Hertz Rent-a-Car blurs with the images of O J on the
lam, O J clowning with Leslie Nielsen in the Naked Gun movies, O J and

Harvard attorney Alan Dershowitz (or is it actor Ron Silver, playing

Alan Dershowitz?) hurdling legal landmines on the way to acquittal and
Reversal of Fortune Il. The horrific videotape of the Rodney King
beating melds with the images of rioting in south central LA, which in

turn look just like the "real-life" scenes of Los Angeles mayhem found

on Police Quest: open season, a video game designed by former LA
police chief Daryl Cates. In the culture of illusion, the furniture
swims, the walls bulge and bend.

Is any part of American culture exempt from the assault of virtual

realities? Apparently not. Politically, the US is already a virtual

republic, a country run less by elected officials than by the men and

women who package and sell them to an electorate increasingly willing

to believe--in the scripted words of tennis star Andre Agassi--that

"image is everything". In American courts of law, professionally
rendered re-enactments--scripted, rehearsed, directed and edited--are

admissible as evidence. Nothing is too extreme. Was your hand crushed

at the factory? Were your kids burned to death in a car accident? For

a fee, a company will provide a video simulation complete with

realistic screams, horrified bystanders and virtual blood. Juries,
weaned on 57 channels in the age of Oliver Stone, find them very
effective.

As we plummet through the looking-glass, however, we would do well to

bear in mind that beyond that Orwellian and seemingly ubiquitous

adjective "virtual" is a marketing scheme of unrivalled audacity,
unprecedented scope, and nearly unimaginable impact: a scheme that is
(worth a potential $3.5 trillion, by one reliable estimate) designed

to sell us copies of the things we already have available to us for

free--life itself.

Soon, writes Bill Gates in The Road Ahead, "you will be able to
conduct business, study, explore the world and its cultures, call up

any great entertainment, make friends, attend neighbourhood markets,

and show pictures to distant relatives--without leaving your desk or

armchair ... your network connection... will be your passport into a

new, mediated way of life".

The mediated life, of course, aided by one of the great migrations of
human history--the movement inside our own homes--is already here. As

more of the hours of our days are spent in synthetic environments,

partaking of electronic pleasures, life itself is turned into a
commodity. As the natural world fades from our lives, the unnatural

one takes over; as the actual, physical community wanes, the virtual
one waxes full and fat. Bill's plan (and he's not alone) is to take
advantage of the social momentum. He wants a piece of the action. The
new, mediated world, he promises, will be "a world of low-friction,
low-overhead capitalism, in which market information will be plentiful
and transaction costs low". What he neglects to mention,
understandably, is that the road to "shopper's heaven" leads past him,

and he happens to be manning the tollbooth.

Bill's vision of a "friction-free" virtual world, one must admit, has
a certain Singaporean charm. From proposing we apply something like
the Motion Picture Association's movie ratings to social discourse, to
suggesting that a virtual forest of hidden surveillance cameras be
installed "to record most of what goes on in public", Bill is out to
make the world free from friction and safe for commerce. What he seems
to have overlooked (there's no way to put this delicately) is that

friction in social life, as in the bedroom, has its virtues. The
"friction" he would spare us, after all, is the friction of direct
experience, of physical movement, of unmediated social interaction.
Cultural life, one wants to remind him, requires friction. As does
democracy.

It's always possible, of course, that democracy, or a thriving social
life, are not what Bill and his fellow enthusiasts are after because
they truly believe that these notions (like sex, or physical space)
will be the vestigial limbs of the virtual world, cherished by a
handful of die-hard humanists, and no one else. (In the digital
future, Nicole Stenger of the University of Washington reminds us,
"cyberspace will be your condom".) It's possible, as well, that these

latter-day Nathan Hales really believe in the "liberty" of electronic

shopping, of being able, as Gates promises, instantly to order the
cool' sunglasses Tom Cruise wears in Top Gun while watching the movie.
It's possible, finally, that it is simple naivety that has Gates and
Co whistling past the authoritarian graveyards as they usher in
Bentham's Panopticon, andnot some fellow feeling for those buried
within.

Whether they believe in their virtual world or not, however, is
ultimately beside the point. They're building it. And in the
friction-free future, jacked into "shopper's heaven", we'll have the
"liberty" of living (or rather, of buying the illusion of living),

through the benevolent offices of a middleman as nearly omnipotent as
God himself. Freedom? A more perfect captivity is difficult to
imagine.

All of which, finally, makes Mickey's excellent adventure in real

estate more than a little unsettling. There's no "off" button in

Celebration, no escape: the illusion is seamless, and the corporate

menu of options defines the boundaries of life itself.

===========================================================

Source: Harper's Magazine, August 1995 v291 n1743 p35(12).
Title: What are we doing on-line?. (debate on the social
consequences of online communications; includes excerpts
from online chat sessions about Internet addiction)(Panel
Discussion)(Cover Story)
Author: John Perry Barlow, Sven Birkerts, Kevin Kelly and Mark Slouka
Abstract: Four experts on the impact of modern computing and
telecommunications technology debate the effects of such
technology on modern society, with special reference to the
supposed inevitability of the information superhighway.
Subjects: Technology and civilization - Analysis
Information superhighway - Analysis

Full Text COPYRIGHT Harper's Magazine Foundation 1995

"We become what we behold," Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964. "We shape
our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." The medium beheld with
the most interest in McLuhan's day was television. Now, thirty years
later, we have shaped for ourselves a new communications tool--the
millions of networked computers that make up the Internet. It is a
medium that is both like television--in that it involves people
staring at glowing screens, sharing experiences, real and imagined,
over vast distances--and unlike television--in that it is
decentralized, interactive, and based on the written word.

Although considerable attention has been directed to the superficial
aspects of the on-line world--its entertainment value, its investment
opportunities, its possible abuse by child pornographers and drug
runners--little has been said about how this tool we are shaping is,
in turn, shaping us. To answer that question, Harper's Magazine turned
to four observers of the Internet and asked them to consider the
message of this new medium.

The following forum is based on a discussion that took place this
spring in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Paul Tough, a senior editor of
Harper's Magazine, served as moderator.

JOHN PERRY BARLOW is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a group formed to protect civil liberties in cyberspace.
He was a participant in "Is Computer Hacking a Crime?" a forum that
appeared in the March 1990 issue of Harper's Magazine.

SVEN BIRKERTS is the author, most recently, of The Gutenberg Elegies:
The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, published by Faber and
Faber, an excerpt from which appeared in the May 1994 issue of
Harper's Magazine.

KEVIN KELLY is the executive editor of Wired magazine and the author
of Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-biological Civilization, published
by Addison-Wesley, an excerpt from which appeared in the May 1994

issue of Harper's Magazine.

MARK SLOUKA is the author of War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the
Hi-tech Assault on Reality, published by Basic Books. His short story
"The Woodcarver's Tale" appeared in the March 1995 issue of Harper's
Magazine.

JOHN PERRY BARLOW: I have said on numerous occasions, and I still
believe, that with the development of the Internet, and with the
increasing pervasiveness of communication between networked computers,
we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event
since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the
biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back
farther. There has been much written both celebrating and denouncing
cyberspace, but to me this seems a development of such magnitude that
trying to characterize it as a good thing or a bad thing trivializes
it considerably. I also don't think it's a matter about which we have
much choice. It is coming, whether we like it or not.

MARK SLOUKA: I get anxious when you say that talking about whether
this is good or bad is beside the point. It seems to me it has to be
the point. We can't talk about these emerging technologies without
taking a look at the impact they're going to have on average human
lives. And if, in fact, these new technologies are so vastly
transforming, we have to take a look at where they're leading us. What
direction are we going in?

BARLOW: We don't know.

SLOUKA: Why shouldn't I be terrified of that fact?

BARLOW: Well, what are you planning to do about it?

SLOUKA: I think that there are a lot of things we can do about it.
I've heard this word "inevitable" used by everyone from Bill Gates to
Newt Gingrich. I've certainly read it in the writings of both Kevin
Kelly and John Perry Barlow. But it seems to me that "inevitability,"
when it's tossed around too lightly, is a way of declaring by fiat
something that should still be open to discussion. We are entering
uncharted territory. We have no idea what the health implications of
these technologies are. And yet they are being embraced uncritically.

BARLOW: Let me tell you what I do for a living these days. I go around
and tell people that something really weird is happening. Some
fundamental shift is taking place that will have many consequences
that I cannot imagine. But I think it's time we all started thinking
about those consequences so that collectively we can make the little
decisions that need to be made. That is all I do. I don't say that
these changes are good. I certainly don't claim we're creating a
utopia. I mean, I love the physical world. I spent seventeen years as
a cattle rancher in Pinedale, Wyoming. I was basically living in the
nineteenth century. If I could still make a living there, I would. But
the fact is, there is very little economic room in the physical world
these days. If you are making something you can touch, and doing well
at it, then you are either an Asian or a machine.

SLOUKA: That is a hell of a generalization.

BARLOW: But it's largely true. There is not much room to exist in that
part of the economy any longer, and I wish there were. Now, given
that, I think there are a lot of forces that tend to head society
toward cyberspace, whether it wants to go there or not. There are
times when I honestly believe that we would have been better off if
we'd gone the way of the Aborigines, who have been sitting out in the
Australian desert for the last fifty thousand years and have come up
with precisely three tools. They did not make of their minds a very
open ecology for the formation of tools. And as a result they are
probably a lot more connected to the soul of the universe than we are
at the moment. But however I may feel about it, I'm not sure there is
a damn thing I can do about it, except try to be helpful to the people
around me who might be suffering some kind of paroxysm as a result of
this profound change in their lives.

SVEN BIRKERTS: This theme of inevitability pervades both your writing
on the subject and Kevin's: "Go with it because it is inevitable, and
adjust yourself as well as you can." Mark and I are questioning that
inevitability. I want to know whether this is a juggernaut that is out
of our control. It appears to be moving with a sort of
self-proliferating logic of its own. I'm just curious about what is
underwriting it.

BARLOW: You know what's underwriting it? It's the thing that sets
human beings apart from all other species on this planet--a permanent
hardwired dissatisfaction with the ecosystem they find themselves in.
And a desire to adapt it to them, instead of to adapt to it. That itch
is at the root of the human spirit.

SLOUKA: Hang on. I am not dissatisfied with the ecosystem I inhabit. I
think the drive to get on-line is not so much this alleged
dissatisfaction. I think it's 3.5 trillion dollars. It has been
estimated that the business coming out of these technologies is going
to amount to that sum. That's a nice pile of cash, and it's going to
generate a need to convince us that we should follow along, that we
should buy these things. I think that is one answer. The other answer
is that the wired world is a response to certain cultural changes over
the last two or three generations--the breakup of the family, the
breakdown of the community, the degradation of the physical
environment. I grew up in a little place up near the Catskills, Putnam
Lake. It's gone. Every place I've loved in this world has been paved
over, malled over, disappeared. As we observe this assault on the
physical world, we feel ourselves losing control. I think alternative
worlds become more appealing to us.

BIRKERTS: We're looking to technology to solve what it has wrought.

SLOUKA: And I think it's a culture-wide cop-out. Why bother fighting
for those last stands of old growth in the Pacific Northwest when you
can live on the new electronic frontier? I think the real answer has
to be in the physical world. The only choice we have is to resuscitate
our failed communities, to bring back Pinedale and Putnam Lake--to
align ourselves with physical reality now, before it's too late. The
answer is not in a-physical space. The answer is not virtual reality.
Yet that is precisely the direction we're headed.

BIRKERTS: The last two words in my book are "Refuse it." I don't mean
that this is necessarily a realistic mass proposal. I mean that
speaking subjectively, for myself, this is what my heart tells me to
do.

BARLOW: If you can find a way to refuse it and make that refusal work
for yourself, I think you should do precisely that. I'm pro-choice, to
the extent that choice is possible.

BIRKERTS: But I am going to quote you to yourself, John. This is from
the Utne Reader. "But really it doesn't matter. We are going there
whether we want to or not. In five years, everyone who is reading
these words will have an e-mail address, other than the determined
Luddites, who also eschew the telephone and electricity." So that's
the choice you're offering me: I can be a "determined Luddite."

BARLOW: You can.

BIRKERTS: In living my own life, what seems most important to me is
focus, a lack of distraction--an environment that engenders a
sustained and growing awareness of place, and face-to-face interaction
with other people. I've deemed these to be the primary integers of
building and sustaining this self. I see this whole breaking wave,
this incursion of technologies, as being in so many ways designed to
pull me from that center of focus. To give you a simple example: I am
sitting in the living room playing with my son. There is an envelope
of silence. I am focused. The phone rings. I am brought out. When I
sit down again, the envelope has been broken. I am distracted. I am no
longer in that moment. I have very nineteenth-century, romantic views
of the self and what it can accomplish and be. I don't have a
computer. I work on a typewriter. I don't do e-mail. It's enough for
me to deal with mail. Mail itself almost feels like too much. I wish
there were less of it and I could go about the business of living as
an entity in my narrowed environment.

BARLOW: There is something so beautiful about that vision. I don't
know that I could do it as elegantly, but if I were to describe my
aspirations I wouldn't use many different terms from the ones you just
did. Nietzsche said that sin is that which separates. And I think that
information, as it has been applied primarily by broadcast media, and
to a great extent by large institutions, has separated human beings
from the kind of interaction that we are having here in this room.
There was a long period when I adhered to your point of view, which is
that the only way to deal with the information revolution is to refuse
it. And, as I say, I spent seventeen years driving a four-horse team
around, living in very direct contact with the phenomenal world and my
neighbors. And what I finally concluded was that there were so many
forces afoot that were in opposition to that way of life that the only
way around technology was through it. I took faith in the idea that,
on the other side of this info-desert we all seemed to be crossing,
technology might restore what it was destroying. There's a big
difference between information and experience. What you are talking
about, Sven, is experience. That is the stuff of the soul. But if
we're going to get back into an experiential world that has substance
and form and meaning, we're going to have to go through information to
get there.

BIRKERTS: But that implies that the process--going through the
information world--isn't going to change us beyond recognition and
warp the aspiration itself. That's my fear. I'm going to throw another
set of terms in here that belong to Rilke. He said two different
things that have struck me as very relevant to this. And again, we are
dealing with a very romantic, poetic perspective. Speaking of poets,
he said, "We are the bees of the invisible." The ultimate human
purpose is to transform. And the other thing he said is that
ultimately, when you kind of look down the long turnpike of the
future, "Nowhere will world be but within us." I always read those two
statements as saying that our collective evolutionary destiny is the
conversion of contingent experience into soulmatter. But what I see
happening instead is our wholesale wiring. And what the wires carry is
not the stuff of the soul. I might feel differently if that was what
they were transmitting. But it's not. It is data. The supreme
capability that this particular chip-driven silicon technology has is
to transfer binary units of information. And therefore, as it takes
over the world, it privileges those units of information. When
everyone is wired and humming, most of what will be going through
those wires is that sort of information. If it were soul-data, that
might be a different thing, but soul-data doesn't travel through the
wires.

KEVIN KELLY: I have experienced soul-data through silicon. You might
be surprised at the amount of soul-data that we'll have in this new
space. That's why what is going on now is more exciting than what was
going on ten years ago. Look, computers are over. All the effects that
we can imagine coming from standalone computers have already happened.
What we're talking about now is not a computer revolution, it's a
communications revolution. And communication is, of course, the basis
of culture itself. The idea that this world we are building is somehow
diminishing communication is all wrong. In fact, it's enhancing
communication. It is allowing all kinds of new language. Sven, there's
this idea in your book that reading is the highest way in which the
soul can discover and deepen its own nature. But there is nothing I've
seen in on-line experience that excludes that. In fact, when I was
reading your book I had a very interesting epiphany. At one point, in
an essay on the experience of reading, you ask the question, "Where am
I when I am involved in a book?" Well, here's the real answer: you're
in cyberspace. That's exactly where you are. You're in the same place
you are when you're in a movie theater, you're in the same place you
are when you're on the phone, you're in the same place you are when
you're on-line.

BIRKERTS: It's not the same at all. The argument is very attractive:
"Well, it's just a word. It's a word on a screen, it's a word on a
page. Same thing." But that's a limited way of looking at it. The
larger picture has to include the particular medium through which we
convey the word. When you write the word across a football stadium in
skywriting, you're not just writing the word, you're writing the
perception of the word through the air. When you're incising a word on
a tombstone, you're not merely writing the word, you're writing a word
as incised on a tombstone. Same for the book, and same for the screen.
The medium matters because it defines the arena of sentience. The
screen not only carries the words, it also says that communication is
nothing more than the transfer of evanescent bits across a glowing
panel.

BARLOW: I would agree with you completely that media have an
enormously transforming effect. A word written in the sky by jet
fighters is not the same as that word spoken by a lover.

BIRKERTS: Right.

BARLOW: But part of the reason that I'm guardedly optimistic about
these new technologies is that the word that is incised on a page in a
book has to be put there by a large institution. Sitting between the
author of that word and the reader of that word is a huge mediating
organism made up of organization and capital.

BIRKERTS: I can't really deny that.

BARLOW: And all that mediation has a great effect on that word. But
between the word that I type into my computer and e-mail to you and
the word that comes out on your end there's nothing but the digital
transformation taking place. It is not mediated. It's as intimate as
it possibly could be without me whispering it into your ear.

SLOUKA: But it seems to me that the kind of writing that's done in the
electronic media has a sort of evanescence to it. There's an
impermanence to it. A book, though, is something you can hold on to.
It is a permanent thing. There is something else going on here, too.
And that is what happens in the process of reading. When you read a
book, there's a kind of a silence. And in that silence, in the
interstices between the words themselves, your imagination has room to
move, to create. On-line communication is filling those spaces. We are
substituting a transitional, impermanent, ephemeral communication for
a more permanent one.

BARLOW: You know, I'm beginning to realize that the principal
difference between you and me, Mark, is that I take a considerably
longer view of things. I mean, I think that the book is pretty damn
ephemeral, too. The point is not the permanence or impermanence of the
created thing so much as the relationship between the creative act and
the audience. The big difference between experience and information is
that with an experience, you can ask questions interactively, in real
time. Sven, because you're sitting here, I can ask you questions about
your book. As a reader I can't.

BIRKERTS: But as a writer I didn't want you to.

BARLOW: Well, you may or may not. But in order to feel the greatest
sense of communication, to realize the most experience, as opposed to
information, I want to be able to completely interact with the
consciousness that's trying to communicate with mine. Rapidly. And in
the sense that we are now creating a space in which the people of the
planet can have that kind of communication relationship, I think we're
moving away from information--through information, actually--and back
toward experience.

BIRKERTS: But that wasn't what I wanted in writing the book. The
preferred medium for me is the word on the page, alone, with an
implicit recognition that I'm not going to be there to gloss and
elucidate and expand on it. It is what drives me, as a writer, to find
the style that will best express my ideas. I would write very
differently if I were typing on a terminal and my readers were out
there already asking me questions. Writing a book is an act of
self-limitation and, in a way, self-sublimation into language and
expression and style. Style is very much a product of the print
medium. I don't think that Flaubert, for example, could have written
the way he did on a screen. In the move to on-line communication, the
aspiration to the kind of style that seeks a sort of permanence,
symbolized by immobile words on a page, vanishes. Okay, no big deal,
except that I also believe that language is our evolutionary wonder.
It is our marvel. If we're going to engage the universe, comprehend it
and penetrate it, it will be through ever more refined language. The
screen is a linguistic leveling device.

BARLOW: You say that the point of language is to evolve. Well, it
seems to me that evolution occurs a lot more rapidly and better in
open, unconstrained environments than in constrained environments.

BIRKERTS: But language is what communicates the subtlety of that
evolution to us. We may be evolving on all fronts, but we only
comprehend ourselves by way of language. And I think that the deep
tendency of the circuited medium is to flatten language.

KELLY: Here you are wrong. If you hung out on-line, you'd find out
that the language is not, in fact, flattening; it's flourishing. At
this point in history, most of the evolution of language, most of the
richness in language, is happening in this space that we are creating.
It's not happening in novels.

BIRKERTS: I wish some of this marvelous prose could be downloaded and
shown to me.

KELLY: You can't download it. That's the whole point. You want to
download it so that you can read it like a book. But that's precisely
what it can't be. You want it to be data, but it's experience. And
it's an experience that you have to have there. When you go on-line,
you're not going to have a book experience.

BIRKERTS: Well, I want a book experience.

KELLY: You think that somehow a book is the height of human
achievement. It is not.

SLOUKA: But there is a real decline in the kind of discourse taking
place. I go back to what John said in an interview that I read not too
long ago. He said that the Internet is "CB radio, only typing." That
really stuck in my mind, because there's an incredible shallowness to
most on-line communication. I realize that there are good things being
said on the net, but by and large the medium seems to encourage
quickness over depth, and rapid response over reflection.

KELLY: My advice would be to open your mind to the possibility that in
creating cyberspace we've made a new space for literature and art,
that we have artists working there who are as great as artists in the
past. They're working in a medium that you might dismiss right now as
inconsequential, just as the theater, in Shakespeare's day, was
dismissed as outrageous and low-class and not very deep.

SLOUKA: You've pointed out that one of the advantages of the net is
that everybody can publish: it's a free medium. There's something very
appealing and attractive about that. You can cut out the
middleman--the publisher and the agent and everybody else. But when
you open the floodgates entirely, you don't get egalitarianism. You
get babble. My shopping list becomes as valuable as Cormac McCarthy's
latest book. And then you go back to thinking, "Well, wait a minute,
maybe those middlemen had some function, however flawed they were."

BIRKERTS: "I want my hierarchy!"

BARLOW: You said it!

BIRKERTS: I said it with quotes around it, but I said it.

BARLOW: There's a hell of a lot of babble in life, and there's a hell
of a lot of babble in cyberspace. But there are certain expressions
that rise above the noise. The ones that are most intimately familiar
to me are things of my own creation. When my lover died last year, I
e-mailed her eulogy--the words that I spoke at her funeral--to about
sixty friends. Just to tell them that she had died and to tell them
what I was thinking. One of them posted it someplace, another posted
it someplace else, and the next thing I knew, I had received a
megabyte of e-mail from all over the planet--thousands and thousands
of pages. People I'd never met talking about the death of a loved one,
talking about things they hadn't talked about with anyone. What I
wrote had self-reproduced.

BIRKERTS: Well, as the psychologists say, "How did that make you
feel?"

BARLOW: It made me feel like my grief was not just my own, that it was
something I had shared, inadvertently, with the rest of my species.
And my species, in some abstract way, had answered.

SLOUKA: But the reason you did that was probably because you didn't
have a community of friends around you, a Pinedale, where everyone
would have known your lover and would have shared your grief. And
instead of writing back to you and saying, "John, we're sorry," they
would have, I don't know, God forbid, hugged you.

BIRKERTS: Baked you a pie.

SLOUKA: Shown up at your doorstep. My point is not that you can't find
compassion and communitarian values on the net. You can. But you can
find them just as well, and better, in a real community. One
phenomenon I encountered on the Internet was that people would put
words like "grin" or "smile" or "hug" in parentheses in a note. It's a
code meaning cyberhugs, cybersmiles, cyberkisses. But at bottom, that
cyberkiss is not the same thing as a real kiss. At bottom, that
cyberhug is not going to do the same thing. There's a big difference.

BARLOW: Yes, there is a difference. But I wasn't without the warmth of
my friends. I got a lot of hugs during that period, and I still get
them. My community was around me. I mean, it wasn't a case of
either/or. I didn't have to give up the human embrace in order to have
this other, slightly larger form of human embrace, a kind of
meta-embrace. One supplemented the other.

SLOUKA: At some point do you think the virtual world is basically
going to replace the world we live in? Is it going to be an alternate
space?

KELLY: No, it's going to be an auxiliary space. There will be lots of
things that will be similar to the physical world, and there will be
lots of things that will be different. But it's going to be a space
that's going to have a lot of the attributes that we like in
reality--a richness, a sense of place, a place to be silent, a place
to go deep.

SLOUKA: But the question that I keep asking myself is: Why the need?
Where does the need come from to inhabit these alternate spaces? And
the answer I keep coming back to is: to escape the problems and issues
of the real world. I've talked to a lot of people who go on to the net
and take on alternate personas. I mean, why the hell would you do
that?

BARLOW: Because you want to experiment.

SLOUKA: Why are you experimenting? Because you're threatened by the
reality you inhabit.

BARLOW: Is there something wrong with experimenting?

SLOUKA: There is if it distracts us from the problems at hand. One of
the people I interviewed for my book was a man who posed on the net as
a woman. He wanted to see what it's like to be a woman and what it's
like to be hit on by another male. He wanted to get away from sexism,
ageism, racism--all the collected "isms" that go along with life in
the real world. Instead of dealing with those issues, though, he was
side-stepping them.

KELLY: Have you ever been to Europe?

SLOUKA: To Europe? Yes.

KELLY: Why? You have your own community. Why go to Europe?

SLOUKA: Because I wanted to experience another physical community.

KELLY: Yes.

SLOUKA: I underscore the word "physical."

KELLY: Well, even though we're physical beings, we have an
intellectual sphere. It's like reading a book, one that you lose
yourself in completely. Why does one do that? Do I have to be really
messed up to want to lose myself in a book?

SLOUKA: I hope not.

BARLOW: Well, why would you want to flee the physical world into a
book?

BIRKERTS: I agree--reality is often not enough. But I think we have
diverged here from the central point. If we're merely talking about
this phenomenon as an interesting, valuable supplement for those who
seek it, I have no problem with it. What I'm concerned by is this
becoming a potentially all-transforming event that's going to change
not only how I live but how my children live. I don't believe it's
merely going to be auxiliary. I think it's going to be absolutely
central.

BARLOW: You know, it's possible that both of those things can be
perfectly correct. In terms of your life span, I don't think that
there's any reason you can't go on leading exactly the life you lead
now, living with the technology you find most comfortable, reading
your books--of which there are likely to be more over the period of
your lifetime, by the way, rather than less. I see no reason why you
can't personally "refuse it." But over the long haul, I'd say that
society, everything that is human on this planet, is going to be
profoundly transformed by this, and in many ways, some of which will
probably be scary to those of us with this mind-set, some of which
will be glorious and transforming.

BIRKERTS: But even if I've pledged myself personally, as part of my
"refuse it" package, to the old here and now, it still impinges on me,
because it means I live in a world that I find to be increasingly
attenuated, distracted, fanned-out, disembodied. Growing up in the
Fifties, I felt I was living in a very real place. The terms of human
interchange were ones I could navigate. I could get an aura buzz from
living. I can still get it, but it's harder to find. More and more of
the interchanges that are being forced on me as a member of
contemporary society involve me having to deal with other people
through various layers of scrim, which leaves me feeling disembodied.
What I'm really trying to address is a phenomenon that you don't
become aware of instantly. It encroaches on you. I do believe that we
gain a lot of our sense of our own reality and validity through being
able to hear an echo, by getting our words back, by being mirrored.
And community, in the old-world sense, was about being mirrored
immediately. You know, you yell for Clem, and Clem yells back, and you
understand the terms of your world. Now you type something to, say,
Kiichi in Tokyo, and it comes back a few hours later. You're being
mirrored in another way. Maybe it's because I'm not on-line, but it
seems to me, as an adult human being living in 1995, that the signal
is getting weaker. I find that more and more I navigate my days within
this kind of strange landscape. People have drawn into their houses,
and the shades are down. You go into a store and the clerk isn't
looking at you, he's busy running bar codes. And you multiply that a
thousandfold: mediation, mediation, mediation. I want an end to
mediation. And I don't think I can break the membrane by going
on-line.

[jum...@my-deja.com]

BARLOW: Sven, you and I are in absolute, complete agreement on this.
But the alienating engine that I perceive in society is broadcast
media, particularly television. I mean, the reason people are
hermetically sealed in their homes is that they are worshiping the
glass tit of fear, which is telling them that the world is too scary
to go out in. I live part of the time in New York, which is widely
known to be a terrifying, dangerous place. I never feel in danger
there. Not ever. But if I watched television, I'd never set foot on
the island of Manhattan. Nor would I ever leave my suburban home, I
suspect. But this is the result of a one-way medium of communication.
It's the same species of communication as your beloved book. Neither
the book nor the television is face-to-face in any form.

KELLY: Sven, I think part of what you're saying is true. You're
ignoring the center of the culture, and therefore you feel sort of cut
off. The culture has shifted to a new medium. But it's not going to be
the only medium there is. The introduction of fire produced great
changes in our society. That doesn't mean that everything is on fire.
Digital technologies and the net can have a great effect without
meaning that everything has to be the net. I listen to books on tape.
I have for many years. I couldn't live without them. I listen to the
radio. I read books. I read magazines. I write letters. All of these
things are not going to go away when the net comes.

BIRKERTS: But don't you think it's a push-pull model? If you send out
a net that allows you to be in touch with all parts of the globe, you
may well get a big bang out of doing that, but you can't do that and
then turn around and look at your wife in the same way. The psyche is
a closed system. If you spread yourself laterally, you sacrifice
depth.

KELLY: I question that trade-off. That's my whole point about this
kind of environment. It's not that we're going to deduct the book,
though the book will certainly lose its preeminence. The flourishing
of digital communication will enable more options, more possibilities,
more diversity, more room, more frontiers. Yes, that will close off
things from the past, but that is a choice I will accept.

SLOUKA: See, the confusion is understandable because so much of the
hype surrounding the digital revolution revolves around this issue of
inevitability.

KELLY: But it is inevitable.

SLOUKA: Well, which is it? Is it inevitable or isn't it?

KELLY: It's inevitable that the net will continue to grow, to get
bigger, to get more complex, to become the dominant force in the
culture. That is inevitable. What's not inevitable is what you choose
to do about it.

SLOUKA: So I have the option of being marginalized?

KELLY: That's right. You can be like the Amish. Noble, but marginal.

SLOUKA: It seems to me that we have to keep a balance. The balance
right now, as I see it, is tipping toward virtual technology, toward
virtual reality, toward mediated worlds, and that mediation is
dangerous both culturally and politically. Culturally, it sets us
apart from one another. Politically, it opens us up to manipulation.
Someone can manipulate the reality I'm getting on-line more easily
than they can manipulate the reality I get face-to-face. So the answer
is to go carefully, to take a selective look at what we're losing
along the way, to discuss what's happening.

KELLY: And after we've discussed it, what do we do?

SLOUKA: My answer, to quote Sven, is that you refuse it.

BARLOW: And you can do that. You can be just as conservative as you
want to be.

SLOUKA: That's not a word that most people associate with me, but all
right.

BARLOW: But in fact that's what you are. We are all, at this table,
basically old hippies. There are two kinds of old hippies. There are
two kinds of old hippies now, and yours is actually the dominant form.
What I find distressingly common among these heretofore world-changing
types is a kind of obdurate conservatism that would have shamed their
fathers.

BIRKERTS: But I see world-changing as different. There was a
world-changing spirit that precisely recognized the insidious effect
of mass phenomena, of huge governmental agencies, of technology. You
know, the back-to-the-land initiative. It was a community initiative.
And I see people who've gone online as having turned against that old
spirit.

BARLOW: The reason I got interested in all of this stuff was because I
actually did go back to the land, unlike many old hippies. And after
seventeen years I recognized the historical trends that nobody can do
anything about, any more than the Indians could do anything about the
historical trends that changed their society. And I decided, Okay, how
can I find a way to preserve the values that I care about? Is there a
context in which those values might be nurtured? Is there a way to
dismantle these great creatures of corporate power? And my answer, and
it is tentative, was that it looked like the net might have some real
potential there.

BIRKERTS: So what you did is you substituted a virtual community for a
real one. You found a community in cyberspace. And I guess I'm
wondering if it's a community in a way that keeps the meaning of that
word viable.

BARLOW: I'm not certain that it is. I mean, I went in there looking,
and I can't say I've found it yet. But at the same time, I've watched
what has happened to my own community, where I still live, my little
town in Wyoming, as a result of broadcast media. I see what happened
to that culture as soon as the satellite dishes bloomed in the
backyards. And it has been devastating.

BIRKERTS: You don't see cyberspace as the extension of the satellite
dish?

BARLOW: Absolutely not. If you had experienced this to any large
extent, if you had been around it in the way that Kevin and I have,
you would see that it is absolutely antithetical to the satellite.

KELLY: I wasn't joking when I said that when you're reading a book,
you're in cyberspace. Being in cyberspace is much closer to reading a
book than it is to watching TV. A lot of the things you seem to be
looking for in the culture of the book, Sven, can actually be found in
the culture of the screen.

BIRKERTS: It's not necessarily that all of these changes, if they were
occurring over a sufficient length of time, would be so bad. But
what's happening is that we're being evolutionally tyrannized. We are
being forced to adapt by a pressing social consensus that seems to say
that if you don't have "x" you're out of the loop. You're going to be
marginalized in your workplace. If I don't have a disk to send my
articles in to a journal, I feel like there's a problem. If I don't
have a fax machine, I'm losing business. If I don't have a
phone-answering machine, God knows what might happen. The attitude is,
"If you're not on the bus then forget it, man. You're just rooting
around for potatoes." I don't want to be forced into that either/or. I
want to be able to say, "Let me think about it." Maybe in ten years
I'll get a fax machine. I don't want to feel that if I'm not receiving
a fax every second I am no longer existing in the cultural community
in which I want to exist.

BARLOW: Again, all I see dividing us is temperament. There's nothing
you just said about the desire to have your choices that I don't
support. Nobody I know is more devoutly prochoice than I am. Just
because I'm observing that a great social transformation is taking
place because of technology doesn't mean that I like every single
aspect of it. But I do try to adapt to that which I can't change. I do
have my own personal sense of whether or not technology is working for
me. And that really takes me back to Nietzsche's statement about sin.
If it feels to me that technology separates me, I try to reject it. If
it feels like it has within it the opportunity to bring me closer, on
some spiritual level, to the rest of humanity, I accept it.

============================================================

Source: Publishers Weekly, July 10, 1995 v242 n28 p50(1).

Title: War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault
on Reality._(book reviews)

Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Slouka, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT Reed Publishing USA 1995

Mark Slouka. Basic, $20 (208p) ISBN 0-465-00486-5

As millions of computer users plug into the Internet, access online
services, play computer simulation games and explore virtual
realities, abstract communication replaces firsthand experience,
entertainment becomes mere spectatorship and ordinary human contact is
devalued, declares Slouka. His thoughtful, provocative critique
deflates the giddy, messianic claims of digital-revolution proponents.
A lecturer in English and popular culture at UC San Diego, Slouka
deftly skewers the notion that universal access to an information
superhighway will empower the weak and foster community. Attacking
cyberspace enthusiasts who envisage a "digital hive" wiring together
countless computer buffs into a "global mind," Slouka argues that such
fantasies betray a collectivist mentality and a deep distrust of the
individual. His withering broadside makes a compelling case that the
so-called digital revolution is distraction on a grand scale. $25,000
ad/promo; author tour. (Aug.)

============================================================

Source: Harper's Magazine, March 1995 v290 n1738 p67(8).
Title: The woodcarver's tale. (short story)

Author: Mark Slouka
Subjects: Short stories

Full Text COPYRIGHT Harper's Magazine Foundation 1995

These are the facts as my father told them. In the old country during
the Second World War, in the forests and villages of Czechoslovakia
west of Brno, a man named Machar, or Machac, made a name for himself
as a smuggler, moving entire families across the Moravian border near
Trencin, then across Slovakia to Hungary where others would take them
on. His was the first and most dangerous leg in that human relay, a
route as treacherous for its mazework of forest paths as for the
fields and towns and cemeteries that stitched the landscape tight and
close; windows were everywhere.

But Machar could do what others could not. He was the son of a lesnik,
a gamekeeper and expert woodsman. It was said that he knew the
Moravian landscape as no one else; that he would move through the
forests of spruce and fir, the mustard fields folded into the hills,
use them to his advantage, with the thoughtless surety of an animal;
that in winter dark, with the bowled smoothness of the trail filled
with snow, and no moon or stars, he would find his way by the changing
shape of sky showing through the trees.

From time to time word would come back from those he had helped
across. This was of no small importance. Refugees were easy prey: They
brought everything. No one knew they were going. No one would know if
they didn't arrive. And every spring, bodies would thaw out of
snowbanks all along the Hungarian border, coatless, shoeless, gold
fillings wrenched from their mouths. Unlike some others, apparently,
Machar would not steal or kill.

My father said he thought he might have met Machar himself in 1938,
the spring before Munich. It was in Zdar. My father was stationed
there, a member of the officers' corps put in charge of organizing the
local militias. Machar (if, in fact, it was Machar) was a powerful,
not overtall, awkward man. A peasant, slightly stupid, instinctively
suspicious. My father remembered him standing against the wall,
sullen, generally unwilling, hands hidden in the baggy pockets of his
gray canvas pants, giving not the slightest indication of hearing,
much less understanding, anything being said. The only reason My
father noticed him at all was that Machar was already known in the
region south of Hlinsko, in a small way, as something of a curiosity,
an anatomical freak. Although the rest of his body was normally
proportioned, his hands, apparently, were monstrous: not misshapen or
hideous so much as simply outsized to the point of deformity. My
father never saw them himself since the man by the wall never took his
hands from his pockets.

But his hands alone would never have been enough to pull the man up
from the floodplain of obscurity. Nor would his work as a smuggler
have done so. Machar was an unlikely candidate for sainthood: gruff,
uncommunicative, pathologically intense, frightening even to those he
helped. The only reason anyone ever had cause to recall Machar at all
was a story that was heard toward the end of the war, in 1944. In
January of that year, in a scene so unlikely, so ridiculously dramatic
it had to be true, Machar, while leading a family with three small
children at night through the forests south of Bosany, was surprised
by two German soldiers on either side of the trail. One only had time
to yell, Halt! Wer da? before Machar had seized them both around the
neck, pressed his huge thumbs into the soft space beneath their chins,
and snapped their spines like a pair of spring rabbits. He lay them in
the snow along the trail, and the group continued on. A testament not
to bravery but to outrageous brute strength, the explosive fuel of
fear. In any case, it was enough. His name, for a short while,
flickered in the great dark; then it, too, went out.

The war ended (quietly, ambiguously, like the fine breath of rot
raised by a thaw) exactly on April 26, 1945. It wasn't much, my father
said: no Soviet tanks bucking across the soaking fields, just one man
on horseback, a Cossack, at dawn, watching only his own slow passing
in the dark windows, riding slowly up Zeyrova Street to the foot of
the vineyards, then slowly back.

After him came others, two: three at a time. This was the liberation:
no regiments, no heavy artillery. Nazi snipers still held the hills
outside Brno. At night they would pick off the silhouettes of the
Soviet soldiers against the fires of boards and bench slats blazing in
the road until some of the men, my grandfather among them, couldn't
stand it anymore and went out and said for the love of God stay to the
side, why die for no reason? And apparently, the story goes, one of
them looked up from where he squatted by the flames, then out into the
vague darkness my grandfather had indicated, then back to the fire. Da
nicego. Nas mnogo, he said. There are many of us. My grandfather had
already crossed the street when the man spoke again, not looking up
from the fire. Hide your women, old man. We're not the last.

The havet, the vermin (General Malinowsky's troops) came later. Spina,
my father called them, dirt, the after-scum of the general army:
illiterate, ragged, undisciplined, many of them two and three years on
the front. They moved through from the southeast, a bestial tide,
monstrously unpredictable, unafraid to die. Some, like stunned
children, were capable of small, absurd gestures of generosity. Some
gobbled toothpaste, squeezing it on their bread like pate. My
grandfather, hearing the sound of breaking glass and the crash of
piano keys, came downstairs to find one, pants pulled down around his
ankles and rifle by his side, using the Austrian baby grand as a
toilet. When he was done, he left. Some raped a ten-year-old girl. She
died. Four months later, they were gone.

By the fall of 1945, President Benes had returned from exile in
London. By winter, the free press had returned to Czechoslovakia. And
Machar was out of work. He went back, as far as anyone knew, to
whatever it was he had been before the war. He disappeared.

The rest is almost too thin to tell: it offers no resistance, takes no
shape. It slips through the sieve like water. Some remembered that
Machar had worked in the strojirna, the factory, in Zdar. That he
drank. That he had a foul temper. That he married a woman from Trebic,
and that the marriage for some reason had gone bad. Some recalled
hearing about his father, a lesnik, a gamekeeper, tortured and killed
by poachers sometime after the first war.

A man from Javornik whom my father once met on a train claimed he had
heard that Machar had escaped to Vienna after the Communist coup in
1948. Or maybe to Munich. That he had returned across the fences for
his wife. Another time for his child. That he had been seen in the
refugee camps near Innsbruck in the winter of 1949, where
intellectuals and journalists threw bricks to each other to roughen
their hands and improve their chances of being farmed out for
laborers' jobs in Australia and Brazil. That he had returned to
Czechoslovakia years later. Alone. That he'd been living, a broken
man, somewhere near Jindrichuv Hradec.

My father shrugged. Lives are such baggy things, he said. Sometimes
there are pieces left over. He looked out the window, not seeing the
snow, the trees, the burdened wires. That's all, he said.

But of course it's not. In death as in life we push against the
universe of facts, make a space, force our way like pups to a teat.
And the world adjusts. Eternity, such as it is, is in the echo. Our
lives continue to sound long after we are gone.

My Story

Years before I had heard of Machar, sixteen years, to be exact, before
that long winter afternoon when my father told me what he remembered
of a man he had probably never met, a drunk in a green Trabant dropped
me and a woman I had been living with at a crossroads not far from
Telc, Czechoslovakia. It was a hot, late afternoon in july of 1974. We
were hitchhiking back to Brno and from there to Vyskov, to visit her
parents. All day long she had been picking herbs along the wayside;
they filled the huge shoulder bag she carried with her everywhere she
went. She smelled like herbs. She was naked under her crumpled skirt
and loose cotton sweater. She had fine golden fur on her legs and arms
and stomach, and a small white scar on her left breast. We were both
giddy with making love. Neither of us could remember eating anything
and neither of us was hungry. I was not yet twenty-two years old.

With the sun still high in the poplars bordering the road, we started
down a long hill thick with the smells of manure and cut hay and
somewhere, coming from the village below, the fresh sweep of water. We
seemed to unfold the season as we went. By the time we reached the
bottom she was glad for the sweater. A fast, clattering stream ran
behind the village along the base of a steep hill, then cut to the
center and under the main road. We stood on the bridge and listened.
Except for the water and the bark of a dog, everything was quiet. In
the little town of white houses with clay-colored roofs and small,
cramped gardens, I soaked my head under a pump while she went into a
store to ask directions. She came out with two bottles of sticky
sweet, yellow limonada. We drank them sitting on the rim of the well.
The last bus would be coming through in an hour. A few doors down,
apparently, there was a woodcarver's studio. I cupped my hands and
drank some water.

There was no sign. It took a while for him to open the door, a big man
with a heavy drinker's face and small, close eyes. A growth of white
chest hair, stark against his reddened skin, sprouted from his
unbuttoned woolens. Ano? he said, stooping slightly forward under the
door frame, one hand behind the half-opened door, the other propped
behind the wall. She explained why we'd bothered him. He stared at
her, mouth slightly open, rocking forward with each labored breath,
until she started to say it again, then reached for a set of keys and
shuffled past us down the walk.

A stone path, sunk into the earth and overgrown with weeds, ran along
the house, then bisected a poor, shady garden with kohlrabi and radish
and a few ragged heads of lettuce. A chicken on the gate of a wooden
fence turned nervously, then squawked to the ground. We passed through
to a thick-walled shed, plastered and rude, maybe five meters square.
He unlocked the door, the key clinking minutely against the steel,
then moved aside.

We stepped into a white plaster room with a small, dusty window set
deep and off-plumb, a cracked cement floor, rough pine-board shelves
running the length of the walls from floor to ceiling. In the center,
a hardback chair and a small table. The carving, arrayed like
infantry, lined the walls. Of the hundreds there, perhaps a dozen were
of square-legged horses or faceless turtles or small, moored rowboats
with pencil-thin oars. The rest were devils. Some were medieval, with
straight, ropy hair and chiseled faces, sharp as an ax. Some were fat,
grinning, tall as my forearm. There were small groups of miniatures,
each the size of a man's thumb, with horns as tiny as a grain of rice.

Me znaji've Vidni, he said suddenly from the doorway. They know me in
Vienna. He stopped, standing away from the wall like a rooted tree,
hands in his pockets. I nodded. Very nice, I lied. My friend nodded
her agreement. This one's wonderful, said, gently taking a small,
naked devil off the shelf The wood had dried badly. A small crack ran
lengthwise from the nape of the neck, halfway down the back. He didn't
say anything.

I brushed past her, pretending to be absorbed, and walked further
along the Wall, wondering how soon we could leave and whether we would
have to buy something. I could feel the way her sweater slipped easily
over her skin. I wanted to be outside.

In the end we bought a carving and left. I'm not even sure who picked
it. We missed the bus that afternoon and ended up walking away from
the road, straight through patchy woods and briar tangles and across
small streams thick with stinging kopriva to a place by a deserted cow
pond, where we made love on our clothes laid out like a crazy blanket
against the stickers. Afterward we left the crushed space we'd made
and waded around in the over-warm water, no more than thigh deep, and
splashed and laughed.

Inherited the statue. Twenty years later it stands on a bookshelf,
suddenly eloquent, and I almost believe I remember noticing it that
first time, wedged there between those ranks and battalions of devils,
no more than a foot in height: the deformed figure of a man,
grotesque, almost abstract, with huge, amphibious hands and feet,
kneeling in supplication before an unseen judge, his head forced to
his chest as though crushed from above, like jesus on the cross except
that rather than nailed to the horizontal wood, his hands, monstrous
and heartbreaking, reach out ahead, palms out, as though begging
forgiveness, or offering themselves as explanation for some
irrevocable wrong.

It has been four years now since my father, noticing the statue
perched precariously on the edge of the living-room bookshelf, began
talking of the war and a man named Machar, or Machac, who was said to
have huge, outsized hands and whom he thought he might have met once
over half a century ago. And I remember the man at the door, the
grizzled cheeks, the wisps of uncombed hair, fine as an infant's, and
I have no way of knowing if it was him.

The odds are less than small. I never actually saw the old man's
hands. There was nothing in his face or manner. The town we had found
ourselves in that summer afternoon was nowhere near Jindrichuv Hradec,
the town Machar was said to have returned to. And, not least, my
father had always been a storyteller, a magician for whom even the
most sober handkerchiefs tended to burst into tropical bloom at the
slightest provocation. Perhaps there was no Machar. Or perhaps he was
a composite of other men, of other stories overheard, misread,
misremembered, from a war already half gone to fiction. Perhaps all I
had, all I would ever have, was a wooden statue with hands as round
and deep as a pair of catcher's mitts, chosen from a roomful of demons
by a woman I'd once known and cared for.

At the end of every life is a full stop, and death could not care less
if what remains of the story is only a fragment. It is up to us, the
living, to supply a shape where none exists, to rescue from the flood
even those we never knew.

We all, like beggars, must patch the universe as best we can.

The Woodcarver's

Tale

As Frantisek Machar was being born into a wooden room thick with the
smell of lamp oil and women's sweat, the brittle shelves of ice that
covered the ruts on the roads sloping to the river were caving quietly
under a hard March rain. Streams and rivulets threaded the meadows,
gushed into roadside gutters, dug tunnels beneath old snowbanks, and
swept on. The river loosed and groaned. The midwife cleaned up the
mess and lowered the lamp. On her way home, she flung the afterbirth
to the pigs. It was 1915, the second year of the war. The little boy
was the son of the village lesnik. It would be a year before the
father returned from the front.

The child grew quickly, not all that different from the others who
survived: tough, resistant, slow to cry and quick to forget. By the
time he was five, he was spending his days in the forests with his
father. They would rise at dawn in the cold. If it was raining, he
would look down at his shoes walking up the dirt road and listen to
the rain drumming on his hood like fingers on a wooden table. To keep
his direction, he watched his father's legs, the black huntsman's
boots with the heavy wool pants tucked in at the top, his father's
hand with the tufts of black hair on each finger curled around the
heavy, big-bore rifle he had brought home from the war. Where the road
ended, the two of them would climb up through the soaking grass, away
from the town, the river, to the fogged silence of spruce and pine.

In the forests the rain seemed only a distant hissing, a spray of mist
across his face. The needles and moss sponged beneath his feet. He
didn't talk, he listened, and his father's voice (low, clear, rough as
a pine burl) seemed measured to the place, to the creak of trees, the
spaces between the wind.

This, rather than any desk or pew, was his source. To him, the things
his father's voice explained or touched were scripture; the questions,
the answers, a forest catechism; every blood-tipped quill, every
broken reed, every flash of color in the gloom, a parable of survival
or death. What about this? Machar's father would say, indicating a
yellow-stemmed mushroom prodding up to the air, a cap of loam still
perched on its velvety head. And the boy would have to recite what he
had learned: no skirt, no sheath, gills burnt orange and closely
layered, swollen like pages left in the rain, a smell like crushed
walnuts ... Dobry, he would say. It's good. And his father would dig
beneath the loam with his hands, not pleased, and a finger's depth
down his thumb would touch the rim of a ghostly sheath, thin as
membrane. Eat this you'll die, he would say to the boy. Remember that.

Years of stories build around a core of fact. If a skrivanek burst
from the edge of the meadow, his father would point out the flash of
yellow on the underwing, the looping glide. They're nervous, quick to
fly, he would say. When you see one, be careful. They tell you
something's moving. That flower, bright as arterial blood? It's Vlci
Mak, the wolf poppy. Eat the bulb at the center for pain. And he told
him about Petr Vaculik, a logger from Rasna, who, crushed by a freak
fall, a wrist-thick branch jammed through his body like a spear, had
walked out of the forests on a bent-limb crutch, eyes like a saint,
his mouth and chin dark with pollen, a bouquet of crimson poppies
clutched in his bonewhite hand.

And wood: always the smell, the roughness, the company of wood. His
father's saw raining softly, piling small hills of dust: orange, pink,
white. The boy would run his fingers over the crosscut, reciting,
pith, heartwood, sapwood, bark. The pith was the eye, he knew.
Heartwood was next, bone-hard and dead. Sapwood was lighter: living
cells that shrink and warp. It would clasp the saw, admit the chisel,
endure badly. Oak had clean, well-defined rings. It was strong,
flexible, hard to cut, held the nail like a mother her child ... Ash
had a clear border, a frontier between heart and sap. Beech was
reddish-white throughout: no heart, or sometimes a false one, soft and
unworkable. Good, his father would say, when he had done well.
Remember it.

And he would. He would remember it all: the long days, the grasses
frozen in the meadows at noon ... He would remember his own legs
trembling down the tilting fields toward home, the evening star like a
speck of mica in the blue above the hills, how his dreams would be
filled with the sad soughing of trees and the burbling of water and
his father's voice asking, What is it? What are they saying? and him
knowing he could answer, easily, without effort, forever.

They found the severed head of the buck the week before he turned
seven, His eyes had caught the dull light of bone before he saw they
were teeth, drawn back from the gums, before the head itself had
leaped into shape. It rested on the blood-soaked ground in a blue
tangle of guts, just off the trail. His father squatted beside it.
Poachers, he said. Fanning away the iridescent cloud with the barrel
of the rifle, he turned the head carefully over, then turned it back.
Looking up, he squinted off into the near distance of the forest. The
poachers had left it there for him. To think about.

His father didn't speak but, knowing instinctively that death must be
made familiar, deflated, made no more of than what it is, stood,
picked a sturdy stick off the forest floor, and jammed it into the
cavity of the neck. Hoisting the thing over his shoulder like some
ghastly parody of a vagabond's sack, he set off straight across the
woods, the boy following, until the random streams of ants crossing
and recrossing the trail grew thicker and faster and there, fifty
meters ahead, stood a swarming, chest-high mound of needles set
against a spruce. Machar stood there beating the ants off his shoes
with a fir branch, watching his father walk steadily toward it,
carrying that grisly offering. When he touched the buck's head to the
mound, the darkness boiled up like a cloud.

He was eight when the poachers roped his father to a hill just like it
in the forests outside Branna and the world should have jarred on its
axis, the sun struggled to rise, but nothing happened. The river ran,
the rain fell. No one told him how his father died. No one spoke to
him about it. But he knew. And the lesson seemed clear: evil was
everywhere, in the sheath on a mushroom, the opaque eyes of a
butchered buck, and if you let it in the door, if you died, if things
went wrong, it was your fault, your failure. The evil, in some dim
way, was yours.

No one told Machar this; he figured it out himself, as he thought his
father would have wanted him to. In the spring he and his mother moved
away, boarding the train to Brno with a suitcase each, Machar carrying
his father's death like a peach pit lodged halfway down his throat. It
was in town that his hands, big and floppy as a puppy's since birth,
first became a burden to bear. At home there had been the usual
fistfights; here his hands seemed a particular curse, and he dragged
them on like a badly anchored ship through the tedium of school (ero,
eras, erat), through the three years at the prumyslovna, the technical
institute, then the strojirna in Jdar. When the war came, he did what
he did without thinking about it much. The work of a smuggler came
easily to him. And then the war was over.

The peace was nothing. The country gasped for air like a swimmer
caught in heavy surf, only to be buried again. Machar married his wife
in January 1948. The coup came on February 24. On April 9, young
Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's last hope of a return to the days of the
first republic, plunged seven stories from Cerninsky Palace to the
cobbles. Machar's son was born the next winter.

He came first for her, true, but it was for him that Macha'r left,
crossing the open farmlands south of Mikulov to Drasenhofen, then
through the Soviet zone to the English sector of Vienna. It was for
him that he cut through the fences, at that time still free of
electric current, slipped past the wooden towers, and slogged miles
through the muddy dark toward the Austrian oil fields gusting up like
candles in the distance.

Like a fox ferrying pups, he brought her across, then crossed again,
running the gauntlet, returning one last time across the still,
February fields, eleven hours each way, for the pinched red face that
did not know him, the wisp of black hair, the tiny spastic arms,
softer than anything he had ever known or would again in this life. He
wrapped him in a gray blanket and started back. The baby was sick. He
cried, his small, animal wail sounding through the muffled pines.
Terrified, Machar held him close to his chest with his huge hands and
crashed on through the crusted snow. It was not until dawn, crossing a
vast, white field ridged and furrowed by wind, that he stopped and
unwrapped his hands from around the quiet bundle he had held for hours
in the warm cave of his coat. It took him a long time to realize the
child was dead.

And the world ran out like a marble down a long, dark tunnel, and then
there was only silence. And voices, somewhere, trying to talk to him.
She left sometime later, and he did not try to stop her. It was his
fault, he knew, his utter responsibility and guilt, just as it had
been his father's, except that his father's mistake had been fast and
final and killed only one; Machar's had taken three. He would stop
now, on roads, in doorways, his face suddenly collapsing like a
child's that has been struck for no reason, and remain there, long
after the pain had gone, with that surprised, inward look of a man
still listening for the murmur of his own dead heart. For a time he
existed in the refugee camps near innsbruck, then, having nowhere else
to go, returned to Czechoslovakia, alone.

When he returned he was arrested, though no punishment had ever meant
less to a man. The nine years passed like sleep. He dug potatoes,
worked the roads, fought when he had to. On a warm September
afternoon, the bus dropped him off at the crossroads, and for the
first and also the last time he walked down that long hill and over
the bridge with the water clattering below. The house was owned by an
uncle he had met once as a boy. Years ago he had heard he was living
here. He took Machar in, then died. When no one came to claim the
house, Machar stayed on.

And time built its slow rings around his guilt, hardening pain into
truth. When a weasel slipped through the coin-sized knothole in the
wall of the chicken house, he read the lesson in the carnage of
feathers and blood. He saw it in the torment of a mole batted about by
a cat on the front walk, tossed in the air, batted again. In the
squeal of piglets eaten by the sows, in the demonic grunting from the
pen.

It was not long after Machar arrived that he picked up a hunk of cedar
from the splitting log. He turned it slowly, suddenly remembering his
father cupping big handfuls of wet sawdust to his face, breathing in
the rough perfume. It seemed to him that in the dead solid shape of
the heartwood was the suggestion of a face, and he went to the shed
for a chisel and hammer, took out his pocketknife, and started hacking
him free: small, straight horns, curved nose almost touching the thick
upper lip, the rude first progenitor of many generations to come,
truer and more lasting than the generations of men.

And that is where he would stay, alone, unbothered, not well but not
dangerous, frightening only to children who like being frightened,
staggering on under the weight of his days until the morning he tried
to rise from his chair at the table and found he could not, then laid
his head on the wood by his half-eaten breakfast and died.

And yet this could not have been all. Months earlier, there was an
October afternoon threatening snow that found him, like every other
afternoon, in the workshop, moving carefully through the living cells
to the dark striping of the heart. There would be no salvation here.
No love. No redemptive vision of midges suspended above the river and
naked children swimming till late in the flatwater by the dam. Only
mercy, perhaps: unbidden, emerging as of its own volition with each
lifting curl of the unshaped wood, revealing to him, as though for the
first time, the faces of those who had worked his father free, beating
at the black swarm moving up their arms and legs, then wrapped him in
burlap and carried him home; those for whom his father's death had
been meant as a warning. Those, so like his father, after all, who did
not listen. Who did not know how.

It would come back to him in a rush: the woodshed the day after his
father's funeral, filled to the roof with cedar, oak, even apple wood,
aged, split, and stacked. And how every Sunday at dawn, there would be
something hung out back, out of reach of the dogs: a pair of ducks
tied at the neck, a pheasant, a whole leg of venison. And the old coin
sack filled with toys: miniature pinecone owls with button eyes, twig
feet, and wings of leaves; hazelnut mice with hair whiskers and tiny
rope tails ... and sitting there, watching his huge hands doing their
work, old Machar could almost hear his father's voice: remember them.

And he would remember now too the hand lost in his like an egg in a
nest, the one he had dropped that night as he lunged for their
throats, the softness under his thumbs coming up against the bone, the
clear crackling as of branches when he brought the strength of his
shoulders to bear through his forearms, his wrists ...

And that is where I leave him, years before my life would cross his,
in a bare room thin with wind, outside the small pocked window shoved
off-plumb into the thick plaster wall, small, curled leaves gathering
against the clutter of fences and catching in the tangled gardens, he
not hearing the bang and bang and bang of an unpainted shutter calling
the river to frost, not seeing the small aromatic drifts of shavings
gathering, spilling off the gullied lap of his blue canvas pants to
his shoes (set far apart and sad like the facing cornerstones of some
vast, unspared mansion), from them to the cracked and broken floor,
knowing only that emerging from the palmed wood was not the same
familiar shape, the monotonous affirmation of his guilt, but (see the
head bent low to the chest like a resting child, the bending back, the
aching, cross-hatched ribs, those huge and haunted hands, palms
outward, supplicant) his brave and broken self.

Mark Slouka is the author of War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the
High-tech Assault on Reality, to be published by Basic Books in
August.

=============================================================

Source: Publishers Weekly, Jan 11, 1999 v246 i2 p65(1).
Title: THE PYROTECHNIC INSANITARIUM: American Culture on the
Brink.(Review)_(book reviews)
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Dery, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Cahners Publishing Company

Mark Dery Grove/Atlantic, $25 (240p) ISBN 0-8021-1640-X

Centering his critique of the contemporary pop cultural landscape
around the title image, borrowed from a sobriquet once applied to
Coney Island, Dery sees "a giddy whirl of euphoric horror where
cartoon and nightmare melt into one." He can be an astute observer of
trends, adept at connecting seemingly disparate phenomena. The best
essays here focus on our obsessions with conspiracy and paranoia, the
new grotesque aesthetic in the arts and the changing dynamics of
technophilia and technophobia in the new computer age Unfortunately,
the book is padded with writing on minor topics. Dery shifts focus
rather too quickly--one has the sense that he is throwing ideas at a
wall ostensibly to see what sticks, but really hoping to distract
attention from the results through the speed of his performance. And,
too often, he filters his subject matter through suppositions plucked
from high theory without examining the ideas he's borrowing, perhaps
least successfully in his deployment of Georges Bataille to unravel
the cul tural import of Jim Carrey. Some inconsistencies stick out at
one point, he characterizes deconstruction as a "vogue," barely above
the level of a conspiracy theory, at another, he concludes his
analysis of freaks as culturally "other" with one of the hoariest of
deconstructionist chestnuts, the condemnation of binary oppositions.
Such jargon limits his writing, and makes the book feel dated, as his
reliance on interpretive strategies left over from the '70s
(particularly from French thought Kristeva's abject, Baudrillard's
postmodern, Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenic) is stale even by the
standards of academe (Feb).

===========================================================

Source: Booklist, Jan 1, 1999 v95 i9-10 p804(1).
Title: The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the
Brink.(Review)_(book reviews)
Author: Joe Collins
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Dery, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 American Library Association

Dery, Mark. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the
Brink. Feb. 1999. 224p. illus. Grove; dist. by Publishers Group West,
$25 (0-8021-1640-X). DDC: 306.

Like many essays on pop culture of contemporary America, Dery's
collection is an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink view of the end
of the millenium (including comparisons of the Warren Report to
Finnegan's Wake, and the author's fascination with the Edvard Munch
painting The Scream). Occasionally, Dery's ruminations on our
Nike-obsessed, Jim Carrey-imitating, X-Files-paranoid culture are
hilarious; at other times, they definitely are not. But his point is
well taken, that as we approach the next century, the U.S. is more of
a culturally aware, and thus more culturally consuming, country than
ever before. The author's previous take on cyberspace, Escape
Velocity, seeps in here as well: the information age pushes the bits
and pieces of pop culture further in our faces every day. The title is
an old term used to promote New York's Coney Island amusement park,
and a more appropriate monicker for 1990s culture can't be found. With
no war to distract us as in previous decades, the culture itself has
become a focal point for societal anxiety, and Dery's insights into
the whys of this upheaval are most illuminating.

=============================================================

Source: Library Journal, Jan 1999 v124 i1 p134(1).
Title: The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the
Brink of the Millennium.(Review)_(book reviews)
Author: William P. Collins
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Mark, Dery

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Reed Publishing USA

Dery Mark. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink
of the Millennium. Grove/Atlantic. 1998. c.240p. ISBN 0-8021-1640-.
$25. SOC SCI

Social critic Dery (Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the
Century, LJ 2/15/96), whose writings on fringe culture and new media
have appeared in Wired and other pop culture organs, searches America
for clues to its millennial angst. His title is a metaphor for America
as amusement park, commingling technology and pathology. Dery explores
the fringes of American life, from conspiracy theories to killer
clowns, blaming globalization and the spread of information technology
for America's sharper cultural fault lines. Elites retreat into gated
enclaves, and global capitalism becomes de facto world government. The
essays are entertaining, insightful, and thoughtful examinations of
phenomena including the Heaven's Gate cult and Disney's corporate town
of Celebration, Florida. Dery is expert in 20th-century social
criticism, which he cites deftly. But once we understand his analysis,
will it matter? Dery's answer is that endings are never final. For
some, apocalypse is always coming, already past, or happening now.
Highly recommended for academic and large public libraries, especially
those dealing extensively with popular culture.
--William P. Collins, Lib. of Congress, Alexandria, VA

=================================================================

Source: MIT's Technology Review, April 1997 v100 n3 p65(2).
Title: Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.
_(book reviews)
Author: Ellen Spertus
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Dery, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alumni
Association

Most books about cyberculture are either rants or raves, heralding the
new utopia or dismissing it as utterly dystopian. What they have in
common is that they focus on computer technology itself, assuming that
it is unlike anything human beings have ever faced. But in Escape
Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, Mark Dery takes a
different approach. While he acknowledges that the technology is
amazing and new, he shows that people's reactions to it actually have
less to do with its amazing newness than with basic human drives that
have been present for millennia.

Dery begins with a discussion of how the counterculture went from
rejecting technology in the sixties to embracing it in the nineties.
He cites Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand's 1972 assertion
that hackers had the same worldview as hippies but better technology,
and goes on to talk about how altered states are now sought not
through drugs but through computerized virtual reality. In the sixties
Timothy Leary said, "Turn on, tune in, and drop out"; in the nineties,
"Turn on, boot up, and jack in."

From there the author launches into an exploration of the fundamental
motives behind such pursuits. He notes, for example, that when
cyberians rhapsodize about transferring the mind from the body into an
immortal machine, they are arguably describing
"technotranscendentalism's version of born-again Christianity's
'rapture,' in which true believers are lifted out of the mundane, into
the parting clouds." In an age when religion has taken a back seat to
reason, people's fear of death and their unmet spiritual needs,
combined with a simple failure to comprehend new technology, can yield
technopaganism. Freud's observation that primitives "believe they can
alter the external world by mere thinking" is pertinent here, too:
since thought, in the form of computer programs, can profoundly affect
reality, it is no wonder that mysticism is on the rise. Even the
technological elite are not immune. In The Soul of New Machine, Tracy
Kidder quotes a programmer on the thrill of assembly language: "I
could . . . talk right to the machine . . . . I could talk to God."

Using Technology to Protest Technology

One of Dery's deepest concerns is the enormous power of technology. He
has no sympathy for starry-eyed cyberians such as Wired editor Kevin
Kelly, who claims that "technology is absolutely 100 percent
positive"; the author's attitude is similar to that of cartoonist Tom
Tomorrow, who has made this quotation a caption for an atomic bomb
explosion in which one victim explains to the other that any distress
experienced "is simply the result of your outmoded 'second wave'
thinking." And Dery fears not only the misuse of technology but the
potential of technoutopian fantasies to distract us "from the
devastation of nature, the unraveling of the social fabric, and the
widening chasm between the technocratic elite and the minimum-wage
masses." He notes, too, that much of the freedom technology grants us
may be illusory. He invokes theorist Arthur Kroker of Concordia
University in Montreal, who writes, "Technology allows the few to
dominate the many . . . . Technologies are enabling people but at the
same time government and industry want to control the technologies
that enable the masses."

This outlook has drawn Dery to the cyberpunk movement, which is driven
largely by the fear of such government and industry control. With
dozens of photographs of cyberpunk art and extensive interpretations
and descriptions of written and multimedia works, Escape Velocity is
an invaluable resource for anyone who wishes to gain some
understanding of that seemingly impenetrable world. Perhaps the most
meaningful insight is that cyberpunks consistently use technology
itself to protest technology.

For example, consider cyberpunk music - "electro-industrial rock with
a grungy, sci-fi edge." Characterized by "pile-driver rhythms" that
are "rammed home by drum machines or clanged out with the . . . sounds
of heavy industry," the songs feature lyrics "hoarsely barked or
recited in a future-shocked monotone." Those vocals are also
"electronically processed to give them a fuzzy, metallic quality that
makes them sound as if they've been synthesized by a computer." And in
fact the lyrics are often explicitly about "body loathing, social
control, and the fear of being superseded by machines."

The effect of all this can be overwhelming, which, as it turns out, is
the intent in many cases. "Hemmed in on all sides by machines, the
claustrophobic vocals embody the human condition in technoculture,"
Defy tells us. To put the matter in a larger context, he calls on
musician Genesis P-Orridge, who observes that such developments mark a
real change in the nature of popular music. Until recently, P-Orridge
explains, the genre was predominantly based on blues and slavery, part
of America's agrarian past; now the historical reference point for a
significant strain of pop music is the Industrial Revolution.

[jum...@my-deja.com]

Dery is not optimistic about the chances that the cyberpunk movement
will effect a change in political consciousness, however.
Counterculture activities are almost invariably coopted by the
mainstream, he says, and for evidence he offers the commodification of
rock music, "once too wild for television" and now "a necessary
adjunct of TV's all-pervasive ad." The author also believes that
cyberpunks frequently undermine themselves by defining art so loosely
as to obscure any distinction between it and real-life events. For
instance, he criticizes author Douglas Rushkoff for writing that "a
homeless man dragging a cardboard box isn't foraging for shelter, he's
engaged in 'social hacking.'" Dery's view is that Rushkoff, in
treating the man's struggle as if it were some kind of performance
art, trivializes and even condones human suffering.

Bookstores are already filled with polemical works, and Dery is to be
thanked for not adding to that pile but instead providing a way of
sorting through the situation we find ourselves in. To be sure, he
does not provide solutions to the problems he sees. But his plea for
society to address them is compelling, and that is a firm step in the
right direction. If nothing else, the reader is, at least temporarily,
jolted out of the irresponsible and ineffective escapism that makes
solutions impossible.

ELLEN SPERTUS is a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering and
computer science at MIT and a visiting scholar at the University of
Washington.

=============================================================

Source: National Review, Oct 14, 1996 v48 n19 p81(3).
Title: Escape Velocity._(book reviews)
Author: James Gardner

Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Dery, Mark

===========================================================

Source: The Nation, June 3, 1996 v262 n22 p36(3).

Title: Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.
_(book reviews)

Author: Andrew Leonard

Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Dery, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1996 The Nation Company Inc.

"Do you believein math?" a caller asked Mark Dery during Jerry Brown's
Pacifica talk show, We the People. Talk about your tough questions.
Say yes, and half the audience pegs you as an anti-Gaia
techno-fascist. Say no, and the rest dismiss you as yet another
brain-fried "cyberdelic" wannabe. It was a no-win situation, and Dery
stammered a vague, no-win response--an unexpectedly wimpish "I don't
understand what you mean." Kind of a surprise from someone whose
writing is anything but timid, but Dery's excuse--that "Jer-Jer's
constant interruptions" had thrown him of fhis stride--is eminently
acceptable. Still, the irony is sweet. Had Dery been on his game, he
might have realized that the seemingly idiotic question cut straight
to the heart of Escape Velocity, his invaluable contribution to the
ever-burgeoning cybercrit canon.

The question should be: Do you believe in technology? Are you one of
us-that cabal of smart-machines-will-save-us-all,
insert-computer-into-orifice-of-your-choice Wired digerati? Or are you
one of them--the monitor-smashing,
if-it-hasa-circuitboard-it-must-be-the-enemy, technology-is-doom
neo-Luddite dissenters? Or do you, as Dery does, understand that such
dichotomies are flawed from the get-go--that the first thing one must
grasp about computers is that they are not, in fact, binary?
Cyberculture is not black and white, one or zero, this or that. What
it is, actually, is a mess.

Escape Velocity is a packet-switched plummet through punctured flesh,
digital brain-jack dreaming and muddled politics, a fiber-optic foray
through crowds of teeming cyberpunk poseurs and Terminator 2
morph-junkies. And if the messiness confuses, one nonetheless feels
safe in Dery's hands--you have to trust someone who eschews
"cyberdrool" from the outset and then later coins the word "cyberbole"
to describe what everyone else is doing).

So forget for the moment the constant clash between the pros and cons.
Kevin Kelly (executive editor of Wired) versus Kirkpatrick Sale gets
old fast, anyway. Dery's tour of the cybercultists--the Extropian
posthumanists and digi-sex teledildonistas, "body art" mutilators and
Mondo 2000 boobies, robot monster mad scientists and "submolecular
shamans"--is a journey through regions where technology is neither
placed on a pedestal nor staked through the heart: "Most of them,"
writes Dery, "regard the computer--a metonym, at this point, for all
technology--as a Janus machine, an engine of liberation and an
instrument of repression." Of course Janus was only a two-faced
god-perilously close to a binary superbeing. Dery's a believer in
"polyvalent" phenomena--there are almost always more than just two
sides to his explorations.

Fear not, though. He may have read all the post-structuralists, but he
rarely lapses into pomo relativist fence-sitting blather. He has an
argument to make. He repeatedly expresses a subdued admiration for
those who reftise, in the words of socialist feminist cultural critic
Donna Haraway, the "demonology of technology"--those who, like master
robot maker Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories, recycle or
appropriate outright the products of industrial and military culture."
He saves his strongest language for the
"techno-transcendentalists"--those whose "visions of a cyber-rapture
are a fatal seduction, distracting us from the devastation of nature,

the unraveling of the social fabric, and the widening chasm between
the technocratic elite and the minimum-wage masses."

Belief in the cyber-Rapture constitutes, for Dery, evangelism of "a
theology of the ejector seat." For the believers in the
techno-millennium, technological acceleration has proceeded to such a
point that humanity is about to be launched into a great unknown. The
attitude of Australian performance artist Stelarc (who has a passion
for piercing his body with hooks and suspending himself in precarious
positions) is typical: "It is time to question whether a bipedal,
breathing body with binocular vision and a 1,400-cc. brain is an
adequate biological form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity
and quality of information it has accumulated."

Poppycock. Or as Dery more eloquently puts it: "The misguided hope
that we will be born again as `bionic angels,' to quote Mondo 2000, is
a deadly misreading of the myth of learus. It pins our future to wings
of wax and feathers."

"We live in overstimulated times," writes Dery, quoting Nicki Brand,
the smoldering talk-show host from David Cronenberg's s.f./horror
fantasy masterpiece, Videodrome. And you thought television was
obsessed with sex and violence. Try cyberculture. Ponder the latest
thing in tattoo-fashion: "biomechanicals" that reveal robot innards
pulsating just beneath the skin. Contemplate the "reasons that many of
us worship at the stations of the Nautilus" to make our bodies harder,
more like a machine, more inhuman. Click on down through the CD-ROM
game Virtual Valerie, a strip-tease masturbation exercise that Dery
dubs "a sort of pervert's progress."

It is not as if any of this is really new, of course. Body mutilation?
Been there, pierced that. Dery quotes artist D.A. Therrien on torture
machines in the Spanish Inquisition "designed to slowly inflict pain,
using screws and pulleys and tremendous force, enabling the victim to
find the purity within his own religion. During that period, some of
the best engineers in the world were developing devices to help people
renounce the demons within-the barbaric thoughts, the primitive
urges." Nor is cybersex a newborn techno-babe. "Freudian readings of
the psychosexual symbolism of overheated machinery are hardly a recent
development; the sight of camshafts thrusting ceaselessly, of
hydraulic fluids squealing through small orifices under high pressure,
quickened pulses early in this century."

But it is difficult to deny that techno-escapism has come into its own
in these finde-siecle days. The camshafts thrust ever faster. The
microprocessors are multiplying like mad. The "digital revolution" has
stormed the Ministry of Propaganda. Down with the old flesh. Long live
the silicon soul. "If religion," concludes Dery, "is the opiate of the
masses and Marxism the opiate of the intellectual, then cyberspace is
the opiate of twenty-first-century schizoid man, polarized between
mind and body."

And as with all opiates, the pipe dreams are spectacular. Even Dery,
who specializes in taking all things seriously, can't resist some
balloon-puncturing-as when he ruminates on Douglas Rushkoff's thesis,
in Cyberia, that humanity is poised for global consciousness:
"Precisely how the fiber-optic interconnection of the number of humans
equivalent to the number of neurons in the human brain will give birth
to a planetary consciousness is left to the reader's imagination." In
other words, hog-wash. And Dery reserves special scorn for the true
believers in cyber-salvation: "Thus, we are drawn to the inescapable
conclusion that much of what passes for post-humanism is in fact
egoism leavened with a dash of technocratic elitism, whether it is
Mondo 2000's dictatorship of the neurotariat---the `shrapies, mutants
and superbrights in whom we must place our 'faith' and 'power' or the
Extropian triumph of the overman."

Nicely said, but Dery is perhaps too kind to the Mondoids and
Extropians. Are they worth the attention? As with malfunctioning
computer programs, one wonders if they even merit debugging.
Certainly, the creators of Mondo 2000 magazine rarely took themselves
quite as seriously as their critics. Dery's rationale for tackling the
court jesters of cyberspace is best summed up by his quotation from
the science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard, who declaims: "Science and
technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate
the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those
languages, or we remain mute."

But who is really doing the dictating? Not Mondo 2000, currently in
publishing limbo due to a consistent failure to attract advertising
dollars. The posthumanists are a weak straw person to counterpoint
Dery's frequent allusions to the greater societal problems being
submerged by the digital deluge. Dery would have done better to load
more fully into his sights the real target--Wired-style
techno-positivity. It isn't as sexy, and it long ago lost its
subcultural cachet, but as far as social reality is concerned, Wired's
aestheticizing of techno-politics is the real "Mechagodzilla."

==========================================================

Source: New Statesman & Society, April 12, 1996 v9 n398 p36(1).

Title: Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.
_(book reviews)

Author: Peter Jukes

Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Dery, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT Statesman and Nation Publishing Company Ltd. 1996

There's a nasty bug doing the rounds. Like a computer virus, it
occupies apparently innocuous space. Then it starts replicating itself
at amazing speed, spawning logical contradictions that eventually
bring the system shuddering to a half. Fortunately, the symptoms are
easy to spot. If words like "seduction", "simulation", "decentred
individual" and "posthumanism" randomly flash across the page, you
know you've found the bug of postmodernism.

Neither Mark Dery's Escape Velocity nor Sherry Turkle's Life on the
Screen are free from this virulent force. Both claim to explore the
cultural impact of the "digital revolution", and yet rely on the
prescriptions of Baudrillard, Jameson and Lacan--theorists whose main
contributions were relevant to the mass media of ten or 20 years ago,
rather than the multimedia industry of today.

Escape Velocity is the most rampantly affected, even though it claims
to be on the radical cutting-edge. One of the most startling effects
of digital technology is how it pervades so much of our everyday
activities of work, play, communication and learning. But, shunning
the ordinary, Dery takes the "alternative" route in search of
extraordinary "subcultures" and "countercultures".

His book unfolds as a freak show, a parade of cyberpunk novelists,
cybersex enthusiasts, technopagans, cyber rockers and underground
roboticists. It adheres to the old and questionable postmodern
assumption that the more outlandish, marginal, bizarre a phenomenon,
the more socially significant it is.

As a result, Escape Velocity has a tendency to fall into the formal
style of a telephone directory. Since every manifestation is
potentially important, nothing can be left out. From nanotechnology to
neural networks, safe sex to smart drugs, Dery connects the most
diverse and spurious developments. There is, despite all this, a
unifying element. His argument is that new technologies are changing
the way we configure our consciousness to our bodies, and to all the
other objects around them.

Though he swings from the utopian to the apocalyptic, Dery is really
only repeating something Marshall McLuhan observed 40 years ago.
Technology extends the range of our physical control and mental
awareness. But, in doing so, we make a psychic exchange with inorganic
matter. We become less animated as the objects we make become more and
more alive.

The only problem with the formulation is that it is hardly new
(Humphrey Jennings applied it to the Industrial Revolution in his
anthology Pandemonium) and this undermines Dery's decision to select
his subjects for their sensational news value. He often cites Hans
Moravec's belief that one day we will be able to "download" our minds
entirely on to some trillion terabyte computer hard disk. But this is
just another manifestion of the ancient desire to turn ourselves into
monuments, epitaphs or statues, a "sundering of body from the
consciousness" that Walter Benjamin once saw as inherent in the act of
writing itself.

For all the new technology of its subject matter, Escape Velocity is
still working in the old technology of text. It is in the verbal
texture of the book that the biggest problem really lies. Every
sentence is spiked with "cyberdelic" buzz words and neologisms.
Technical systems swiftly transform into metaphor and back again (like
the title of the book), preventing clear or sustained argument.

Postmodernists may claim that Dery is just making clear the innate
"opacity" of the language. But surely even opacity can have its shades
and contrasts? Too often, Dery's insights get hijacked by his style.
At one point, Escape Velocity shows the similarity between the
technological vision of McLuhan and the theology of Teilhard de
Chardin: a fusion of mysticism and machinery that Dery calls
"techno-paganism". But whereas he might have connected this to wider
social trends (for example, the growth of sci-fi religions like
Scientology), Dery ends up watching a performance artist practise some
new kind of body piercing. It's cool. It's shocking. And it's largely
irrelevant--like a bad day at the ICA.

At least Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen is not just devoted to the
folly of the few. It attempts to explore how the growing presence of
personal computers has affected the follies of the many. The best
passages in Turkle's work are drawn from her own researches. Over the
past decade, she has interviewed hundreds of men, women and children
who use digital technology as everyday practitioners rather than
performance artists.

Life on the Screen explores many of the same premises of Escape
Velocity--especially how the development of smart machines has
affected our idea of what it is to be a human being. But Turkle
pursues these premises through a very different route. Asking children
of different ages (and in different cultures) whether an interactive
computer program is "alive" or not, she reveals how quickly children
learn the difference between simulation and reality.

The fact that computer programs are becoming increasingly
sophisticated and apparently "intelligent" does not seem to instil
these children with any fear that computers will one day think for
themselves and take over the world (like the malevolent "Net" in the
Terminator movies). Significantly, they have revised their ideas of
what it is to be alive and human beyond the mere ability to process
logical commands. They help to define their humanity by seeing what a
computer cannot do: breathe, feel or imagine.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It is the normality of Turkle's approach that makes it the more
profound piece of cultural criticism. There are elements of the freak
show, especially with her emphasis on the fantasy role-playing and
gender-bending of online interactive games in Multi-User Dungeons.
Yet, even here, Turkle avoids the sensationalism of virtual murder and
rape. She compares the stories of two inhibited lonely men who played
obsessively for several hours a day, adopting different roles in their
online charades. For one, it became an unhealthy addiction, a way of
acting out his fantasies of power and revenge. For the other, it
became a way of working them out.

Unfortunately, despite long sections in which Turkle makes the digital
domain both understandable and real, there are also chapters cluttered
with apologies for the intellectual mentors of her student days. Hours
of valuable processing time are wasted on Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari and
all the circularities of postmodern theory.

Without this virus on her hard disk, Turkle's distinction between a
culture of calculation and culture of simulation--a distinction that
largely covers the change from the centralised, inaccessible
mainframes of the 1970s to the colourful user-friendly PCs of the
1990s--would be perfectly acceptable. But by adding the key word
"simulation", the dormant bug is triggered. What was initially just a
suggestive observation mutates into ideological position, then into a
sprawling series of self-justifications.

===============================================================

Source: Whole Earth Review, Spring 1996 n89 p20(2).

Title: Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.
_(book reviews)

Author: Howard Rheingold

Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Dery, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT POINT 1996

Are we leaving our bodies behind in our rush into cyberspace? It's a
question worth asking. It's too bad that so many of those who question
the wisdom of technophilia don't know a cyborg from a hole in the
ground.

Cyberculture has long needed a savvy critique by someone who
understands what it is all about who participates in and directly
observes the object of his critique. Mark Dery goes beyond letting the
air out of the tires of techno-utopia. His report from the hairy
fringes of cyberculture forces us to examine the possibility that
literal Just for technology* is not just, seducing us, but converting
us into something other than human.

All the trendiest technologies, Dery points out, are either
disembodied or have to do with altering our bodies. indeed, Whole
Earth Review's 1989 "Is The Body Obsolete?" issue (#63) is cited by
Dery, and is clearly one of the inspirations for this book. I don't
agree with everything Dery has to say: he's often a bit too
smug-French-intellectual-postmodern neo-Marxist for my taste but I
have to admire the way he gets up out of the armchair and goes head to
head with Mark Pauline (Survival Research Laboratory), R.U. Sirius
(Mondo 2000), Hans Moravec (the guy who thinks we are going to
download our brains into computers), and others at the forefront of
the movement he chronicles.

If you are a cyberpunk a virtual communitarian, or a Wired or Mondo
2000 subscriber, you need this dose of antidote, if you are inclined
to the neo-Luddite persuasion, here is something intelligent by a
commentator who isn't afraid to use email or put on a VR helmet
himself to experience and perhaps understand that which he is
critiquing.

* Yes, literal, in a significant number of cases.

* As the millennium draws near, we are witnessing "the convergence of
what Leo Marx has called the rhetoric of the technological sublime" -
hymns to progress that rise "like froth on a tide of exuberant
self-regard, sweeping over all misgivings, problems, and
contradictions" - and the eschatology that has structured Western
thought throughout history, in one form or another: the
Judeo-Christian Second Coming, the capitalist myth of never-ending
progress, Marxism's predestined triumph of the proletariat over the
bourgeoisie. America, to which this book confines its scope, is the
fountainhead, of this techno-eschatology. Since its beginnings, the
United States has been Utopia's home - the "city upon a hill"
envisioned by John Winthrop, where Christian teleology, free-market
visions of boundless expansion, and an abiding faith in technology
have intertwined in a secular theology. The machine-age artist Charles
Sheeler, famous for his meticulously realistic paintings of American
industry, once observed, "Our factories are our substitutes for
religious expression."

* Coming to grips with Mondo 2000 is like wrestling the shape-shifting
liquid metal android in Terminator 2. By turns illuminating and
infuriating, the magazine is an in-crowd status symbol, a career
vehicle for would-be Warhols, a beacon of utopian hope, and a source
of dystopian anxiety. Epitomizing the contradictions of the
cyber-hippie phenomenon, Mondo ("M2k" to its fans) has one foot in the
Aquarian age and the other in a Brave New World. It is pessimistic
about political solutions but Panglossian about technological ones;
hardened by cyberpunk cynicism but softened by New Age credulity;
eager to jettison the body but determined to retain its humanity;
obsessed with upgrading brainpower (through smart drugs, mind
machines, neural implants, and nanotechnological tinkering) but
impatient for the fleshly pleasures of the "Dionysian revival"
prophesied by Mondo's publisher, Queen Mu.

* Nowhere do body politics, the avant-garde's imperative to shock, and
the pathologies of a culture drowning in images and obsessed with
appearances come together more arrestingly, or disturbingly, than in
Orlan's operating theater. Since 1990, she has undergone cosmetic
surgery seven times as part of The Ultimate Masterpiece: The
Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, a "carnal art" work-in-progress designed
to transform her face into a collage of famous features. Her surgeons'
hands are guided by a "facial template" assembled from digitized
details of famous paintings. The composite face has Mona Lisa's
forehead; the eyes of Gerome's Psyche; the nose of a Diana attributed
to the School of Fountainebleau; the mouth of Boucher's Europa; and
the chin of Botticelli's Venus.

* Acknowledging that a "person is not just brain cells," Ross
speculates that "nanomachines invading [our subject]'s body will
replace all sensory neurons as well, and then replace all the parts of
his body that influence the neurons with programs [that] do the same
thing." The infomorph inhabits a cyberspace whose fidelity to reality
is so impeccable that the muffled thump of his heart, the wind
tickling his sweaty back, the rusty sweetness of red wine, and a
universe of other sensations, no less subtle or complex, is virtually
indistinguishable from embodied experience.

Assume, then, that the mind could be distilled from the body, that we
could follow to its ultimate conclusion the process of bodily
extension and "auto-amputation" which, according to McLuhan,
constitutes the history of technology, "downloading" our selves after
having delegated, one by one, all of our mental and physical functions
to our machines. Still, a shadow of a doubt remains, nagging at the
edge of awareness the doubt that once our bodies have been
"deanimated," our gray matter nibbled away by infinitesimal
nanomachines and encoded in computer memory, we might awake to
discover that an ineffable something had gotten lost in translation.
In that moment, we might find ourselves thinking of Gabe, in Synners,
who unexpectedly finds himself face-to-face with his worst fear while
roaming disembodied through cyberspace:

I can't remember what it feels like to have a body.... He wanted to
scream in frustration, but he had nothing to scream with.

================================================================

Source: The Nation, Feb 5, 1996 v262 n5 p28(4).
Title: Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture._(book reviews)
Author: Edwin Diamond and Stephen Bates

Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Dery, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1996

Mark Dery, ed. Duke. 349 pp. Paper $13.95.

Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, meet Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Libby Hubbard--Dr.
Hubbard, that is; she has a doctorate in futurism from the University
of Massachusetts--has blended Christianity, socialism, feminism,
vegetarianism, hedonism and New Age thought into a melange she calls
Neutopianism, a new faith for a new era.

An on-line era, as it happens. Under the name Doctress Neutopia,
Hubbard madly proselytizes on the Internet through her Usenet
newsgroup alt.society.neutopia. She has already posted her Neutopian
doctoral dissertation, plus a steady stream of philosophical musings
and details of her daily routine in Amherst. "I don't like spending a
lot of time in the kitchen," she revealed just last month. It's all
Out There in cyberspace being archived for future historians and
theologians.

For a time the Doctress posted her love letters, too. A South African
named Geertjan sent her a fan note about Neutopianism; soon they were
exchanging romantic manifestoes and engaging in on-line, real-time
cybersex. Finally she flew to South Africa to meet him. Alas. "I had
tried to be honest with Geertjan, this soul whom I had never seen
before," she told us via e-mail. "I thought that we had grown to love
each other's essences. But it turned out that Geertjan was really not
interested in me. After having sex with me while I was in South
Africa, he decided that he was no longer in love with me." Her
assessment: "He had been too brainwashed in patriarchal mythology to
possibly know anything about the creative nature of love."

Reality is something of a bummer for the growing millions who live
on-line. "RL is just one more window, and it's not usually my best
one," a computernik tells Sherry Turkle in Life on the Screen. He's a
pale, male college kid--the dominant on-line demographic. As for
Turkle, she's a licensed clinical psychologist as well as a professor
at M.I.T.; computer people confide in her. One of her subjects plays
the interactive, text-based computer game known as TrekMUSE.
Offscreen, this TrekMUSER turns out to be a man playing a woman who is
pretending to be a man. The game "is more real than my real life,"
s/he tells Turkle. A second Turkle informant, an 11 -year-old girl,
spends her time on-line playing LambdaMOO, one of the freakier
multi-user games. The kid has created a "condo" on her screen and
invites her cyberfriends to join her there. "She chats, orders a
virtual pizza, and flirts," according to Turkle, who remains
maddeningly non-judgmental about the idea of prepubescence making the
cyberscene. (LambdaMOO is more likely to involve S&Ms than M&Ms.)

TrekMUSE and LambdaMOO are MUDS, for Multi-User Domains, or as some
prefer, Multi-User Dungeons (in homage to the Dungeons and Dragons
craze of the Reagan years). MUDhuts, condos and electronic cottages
float in and out of this hot shelf of new books bursting with
technophiliac wet dreams. Here the recurring images of virtual space
provide a key to the dream makers' real intentions. Out There, a whole
new industry is prepared to sell us electronic shelter, and in the
process sell out our cities, office jobs and other RL (real life)
activities.

Turkle's M.I.T. colleague William Mitchell, for instance, also sees
the future, and it works right there on screen. Thanks to his laptop,
he can telecommute to his job as Dean of the School of Architecture
and Planning. For this dizzy dean, his personal Walkman foreshadows
the day when he can bag club, concert hall and theater as well.
Goodbye Broadway, Mitchell trills in City of Bits: Space, Place, and
the Infobahn [see Andrew Leonard, "Blueprint for 'Cyberkhooey,'"
October 23, 1995!. Why go to a show when new "sophisticated network
navigation software" will beam low-budget entertainment directly into
your brainpan? And, as long as you're up, send his last regards to
Wall Street, too. "New and inexpensive" information-processing
equipment has begun to weaken the adhesive power of that old standby,
the office tower.

Bill Gates, for another, hardly pauses to mourn the salespeople and
clerical staff who are the highway kill in his wet dream The Road
Ahead. Like Mitchell, 7 million Americans now telecommute; millions
more will soon join them and, says Gates ("the world's richest man"),
"lots of companies will eventually be far smaller." Those workers who
escape downsizing will be transformed into silicon-smart,
telemanipulating nomads working in the brave new Gatesworld of
disembodied communications--speech without actual speakers,
performances severed from stages, meetings taken in the ether.

As the twenty-first-century office-in-alaptop displaces present-day
cubicles of commerce, the mental work done in traditional city-center
locations will be shifted to networked, computer-equipped, suburban or
rural homes. The technophiliacs can't wait; they don't like cities or
city people. There are too many of us in the streets, of far too many
colors and shapes, jostling, making eye contact, maybe even speaking
to one another. Telecommuting is Gates's solution to "many of today's
major social problems [that] have arisen because the population has
been crowded into urban areas." Just decrease the number of New
Yorkers by 10 percent, Gates figures, and property values will rise
for those who stay.

Ah, yes, power to the suburbs. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, the onetime
Greenwich Village Marxists who've become the First Couple of
Futurology, first got off on work among the rhododendrons in The Third
Wave and Creating a New Civilization. In the cyburbs, husbands and
wives and perhaps their children will work together churning out
information-age products, not unlike families in First Wave
agricuttural societies, before the dark satanic mills of the Second
industrial Wave. The Tofflers are the darling gurus of Newt Gingrich,
whose down To Renew America is also a paean to the transformative
powers of technology. Like the Tofflers (and Marx) Gingrich sees
history as a succession of stages shaped by the way people produce
goods and services.

But the cozy, colorized vision of loom and living room, piecework and
rec space, bed above the store, Ozzie, Harriet, Ricky and Dave at
their processing-play stations, is only the beginning. The onanists
are full of millennial plans for our leisure, too. When we're not
pushing out info product at home--@home--in our gated cyburg
communities, we can take off. . .to the planets. A recent issue of
American Civilization, a publication of Gingrich's allies at the
Progress and Freedom Foundation, front-pages news that earthlings
could be levitating about on "A New Martian Frontier" within a decade.
No one has to be left behind. After Gingrich proposed that poor people
be given tax credits so they could buy laptop computers, the headlines
made him back away-but only a little. "Maybe I'm a bit nutty in my
populism," he conceded.

Also a bit slutty. While Gingrich was talking up a mouse in every
house, the Progress and Freedom Foundation produced a grandiose
document titled Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age. The Magna Carta
seeks "liberation in cyberspace," a goal that, as it happens, requires
"repealing Second Wave laws and retiring Second Wave attitudes."
Because "regulation. . . can be tantamount to confiscation," Third
Wave government must be cut to half the size of the present
liberal-leftist welfare state. The new Ging state will adjust federal
tax rules to permit quicker depreciation of Knowledge Age technology.
It won't interfere with collaborations between phone companies and
cable companies; doing so would be "socially elitist." It promises, in
short, bumper sticker libertarianism (the Magna Carta actually quotes
Ayn Rand). Not so incidentally, among the major contributors to the
foundation are drug manufacturers and telecommunications
companies--precisely the corporations that stand to gain when
liberated once and for all from the already droopy gaze of the F.D.A.,
F.C.C. and other "watchdog" agencies.

The Tofflers, Gingrich, the P.F.F. et al. natter on about a world
where, to borrow from Nabokov, "reality" is always embedded in
quotation marks. Shrewdly, the Third Wavers have appropriated all the
good words: freedom, future, frontier, opportunity, individualism,
democracy, prosperity. According to the P.F.F. Magna Carta, "the
central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. . . .
The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of
things."

[jum...@my-deja.com]

What the cyberhypesters have overthrown is the idea of durable goods.
The electronic cottage is not just chockablock with enough cool new
gear to stock the display windows of The Wiz; the stuff must
constantly be replaced--upgraded. Talk about nostalgia: Third Wavers
are bringing back the planned obsolescence foisted on consumers by the
avatar of smokestack America--the Detroit car-makers and their 1950s
gas-guzzlers. For all the bloviating about caring, craftlike cottage
work, the new information ecosystem is more ferocious Darwin than
pastoral Ruskin or Morris.

In the fast-forward future of Gatesworld, we'll all be expected to do
our duty to commerce by stocking up on new appliances. The nineteenth
century embraced those twin peculiar institutions, slavery and
indentured servitude; in the millennium, according to Nicholas
Negroponte's Being Digital, they'll make something of a reappearance
as software-intelligent agents and hardware robots. In twenty years
we'll be talking to eight-inch-high holographic assistants; one of our
electronic secretaries will prepare a personalized
newspaper--Negroponte calls it the Daily Me--consisting solely of
articles about subjects the master has previously specified. Moreover,
"my VCR of the future will say to me when I come home, 'Nicholas, I
looked at five thousand hours of television while you were out and
recorded six segments for you which total forty minutes. Your high
school classmate was on the 'Today' show, there was a documentary on
the Dodecanese Islands. . . .'" Later he adds, "It would really be
quite simple to brand your toast in the morning with the closing price
of your favorite stock."

Negroponte is a likable guy: a grown-up--he's the director of M.I.T.'s
Media Lab--with an undergraduate hacker's love of the technology. When
he travels abroad, "a full 25 percent of my luggage volume is likely
to be a combination of phone jacks and power plugs" so he can stay in
e-mail contact with colleagues. From where he sits, perhaps the new
technologies are indeed "creating a totally new, global social
fabric." Perhaps the computer "can be a natural force drawing people
into greater world harmony." Still, his Hallmark wisdom reminds us of
Charles Briggs and Augustus Maverick's 1858 prediction about the new
telegraph system: "It is impossible that old prejudices and
hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been
created for an exchange of thought between all the nations of the
earth."

Reporters covering Nelson Rockefeller's bid for the presidency learned
to know when the candidate's rote stump speech was coming to an end so
they could race for the press buses. "Under the brotherhood of man and
the fatherhood of God.
. . " Rocky's peroration began. This quickly became known as the BOMFOG
signal
(I'm outta here, fella). In fact, beneath all the current bomfoggery
about the new word order, there's a core of valuable RL services,
utilitarian stuff like e-mail and file transfers that we'll all be
using long after Negroponte's fantasies of newsy toast--toasty
news?--are forgotten. Some of the more intriguing are elaborated by
Richard Lanham in his witty, informed analysis The Electronic Word.
Lanham is professor of English at U.C.L.A. and a scholar with an
antic, humanistic imagination. The Pastists, Lanham says, think the
computer means the end of the book and therefore the end of the world.
Not so, he says; digital texts offer new ways to read and write.

What's wrong, he asks, with Paradise Lost on a CD-ROM? Wouldn't you
play with it a bit? "Hey, man, how about some music with this stuff?.
. . Add some
graphics and graffiti. Print it out in San Francisco [typeface] for
Lucifer and Gothic for God." Blasphemy perhaps, but also fun. And then
what about some alternative plots and endings? As Lanham writes,
experimental composers, serious musicians, have written pieces with
alternative endings and branching sequences in so-called "aleatory
compositions." So have rock musicians. Similarly, digitized films can
be released on videocassette with both the outtakes and alternative
endings. Renters could play director, assembling their own films,
which means no "final cut." That would really be a blast from
Blockbuster. Gates also endorses this idea, although he writes that he
wouldn't fool with movie classics like La Dolce Vita or The Great
Gatsby.

Gates and his ghostwriters must really live in another world if they
think the Robert Redford-Mia Farrow turkey is right up there on the
charts with Fellini. So exactly what is going on inside the minds of
all those white boys on-line? To find out, check out the work of
Lanham's cross-campus colleague, U.C.L.A. film scholar Vivian
Sobchack. Professor Sobchack is one of the contributors to Flame Wars:
The Discourse of Cyberculture, a lively, lit-crit look at the
prevailing weirdness of the new electronic culture. Sobchack analyzes
the on-line heroes portrayed in the cybercult magazine. She finds a
beau ideal who is "powerful, heroic, committed, and yet safe within
his (computer) shell." In Sobchack's mordant phrase, the model
on-liner lives a life of "interactive autism."

Her verdict is not too different from that of Martin Marty, the smart,
sharp University of Chicago religion historian. The cult of
media-on-demand, Marty argues, is intended to put the on-liner "in a
solipsistic, narcissistic universe where you are God." Or, we would
add, at least a film director or a Doctress.

Edwin Diamond teaches at N. Y U. and is the author of White House to
Your House: Media and Politics in Virtual America (M.I.T.). Stephen
Bates, a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program, is the
author of Battleground: One Mother's Crusade, the Religious Right, and
the Struggle for Our Schools (Holt).

================================================================

Source: Booklist, Feb 1, 1996 v92 n11 p901(1).

Title: Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.
_(book reviews)

Author: George Needham

Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Dery, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT American Library Association 1996

Dery, Mark. Feb. 1996. 384p. Grove; dist. by publishers Group West,
$21 (0-8021-1580-2). DDC: 306.

"Escape velocity" refers to the speed a body must achieve to escape
the gravitational pull of Earth. Dery contends that cyberculture--an
underground world of high-tech performance artists and philosophers,
cyberpunk authors and musicians, and technosex aficionados--is
reaching its own escape velocity and will eventually free itself of
the gravitational pull of history, tradition, and perhaps even
evolution. Drawing his raw material from a wide variety of sources,
Dery has produced an exhaustive and exhilarating book. Cyberculture,
he demonstrates, threatens to forge a whole new meaning not only for
technology but for what it means to be human: he discusses the kinds
of music, art, and literature created through computer programs, and
he relates experiments in life extension as well as plans to store
human consciousness on CD-ROM. Some of this material is not for the
squeamish, especially the treatment of "cybernetic body art," which
includes putatively artistic self-mutilation, body piercing, and
tattooing. Still, for librarians struggling to understand how the
internet will affect their reference departments, this book will be a
mind-expanding voyage. For the initiated, it will be a handy travel
guide.

=============================================================

Source: Reason, Dec 1995 v27 n7 p44(7).

Title: War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault
on Reality._(book reviews)

Author: Nick Gillespie
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Slouka, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT Reason Foundation 1995

Subj: Computers and community Date: 95-10-25 From: NGill...@aol.com
To: ske...@ubu.edu

Yes, by all means, let's keep talking about how technology in general
and computers in particular affect our world today - and will
influence our word tomorrow. But first, a pop quiz: Of the four
following quotations, can you tell which one is written by the
Unabomber?

1. "Few of society's major losses happen during sudden hurricanes or
earthquakes....[T]he big time disasters creep up on us; by the time we
notice something missing, it's already been wasted. Our cities weren't
destroyed by atomic bombs or bubonic plague....The telephone eroded
the art of writing letters. Television cut into neighborhood cinemas.
MTV and superstars weakened amateur musicians and hometown bands. The
car destroyed urban trolley systems; interstate highways devastated
passenger rail service; and airliners wiped out passenger ships."

2. "The primary human relations - to space, time, nature, and to other
people - have been subjected to a warping pressure that is something
new under the sun. Those who argue that the very nature of history is
change - that change is constant - are missing the point. Our era has
seen an escalation of the rate of change so drastic that all
possibilities of evolutionary accommodation have been
short-circuited....[W]e have stepped...out of an ancient and familiar
solitude and into an enormous web of imponderable linkages. We have
created the technology that not only enables us to change our basic
nature, but that is making such change all but inevitable....None of
this, I'm afraid, will seem very obvious to the citizen of the late
twentieth century. If it did, there would be more outcry."

3. "Before 1900, daily life for the majority of individuals was
agrarian, static, local - in other words, not that different from what
it had been for centuries. The twentieth century, however, altered the
pace and pattern of daily life forever....What started us on the road
to unreality? Though the catalog reads like a shopping list of many of
the century's most dramatic trends - urbanization, consumerism,
increasing mobility, loss of regionality, growing alienation from the
landscape and so on - technology...was the real force behind our
journey toward abstraction....Let me state my case as directly as
possible: [I]t is possible to see, in a number of technologies spawned

by recent developments in the computer world, an attack on reality as
human beings have always known it."

4. "There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from
less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of
life than modern man is....Among the abnormal conditions present in
modern industrial society are excessive density of population,
isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and
the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended
family, the village or the tribe....In the modern world it is human
society that dominates nature rather than the other way around, and
modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change
[T]here is no stable framework."

Time's up. It's number four, but it isn't obvious, is it? The other
passages are from, respectively, Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil:
Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, Sven Birkerts's The
Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, and Mark
Slouka's War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on
Reality. All three books, in slightly different ways and with slightly
different emphases, take on computers and related issues. But as you
can tell from the lines quoted above, their contempt for computers is
part of a larger critique of Technology writ large. Like the
Unabomber, Stoll, Birkerts, and Slouka characterize technology - a
term that refers to everything from stone axes to particle
accelerators - as disruptive and discombobulating, never enabling or
enriching.

For them, it's as if technology is flinging humanity through time and
space at such a step that the g-force is making our skin pull away
from our eyes and our lips flap away from our gums; we're being
crushed by such dizzying speed. Rub your eyes and poof! Horses are
out, autos are in. Blink again: Books are extinct, hypertext is cock
of the spacewalk. As the Unabomber would put it, there is no "stable
framework," no way to make sense of what man hath wrought, no way to
evaluate change before it's too late.

Such sentiments appeal to a very basic conservative part of human
nature: Stick with what you know, a bird in the hand is worth two in
the bush, anything new is worth waiting for. Who can't relate to
Miniver Cheevy who "loved the days of old," or the Wild West outlaw
who, after 30 years in jail, is released into a strange new
20th-century world of moving pictures and flying machines?

But such notions grossly misrepresent both the pace and nature of
technological change. Things change over time and unevenly: I know
plenty of people who only write letters longhand, others who only type
on typewriters, others who only use e-mail, and still others who use a
combination of all three media. Technology is not a self-starting
perpetual motion machine that runs on human bodies. The inventions
that stick - specially in a market order based on voluntary exchange
and association - are the ones that serve people's needs and allow
them to realize their desires.

Slouka, a lecturer in literature and culture at the University of

California at San Diego, is correct to suggest that, for many people
throughout most of history, life was static and predictable. That is
to say, they could expect a life of disease, discomfort, and
deprivation. (At least it was short.) No doubt about it, a bird in the
hand is indeed worth two in the bush - but what do you do when you
need five birds, 10 birds, 15 birds to feed your family?

That was, no doubt, the question all four of my grandparents pondered
as they crossed the Atlantic on steamships during the 1910s. All were
born before the Wright Brothers got off the ground at Kitty Hawk and
three of four watched a man land on the moon because their lives had
been "artificially" extended by surgery, drugs, and medical devices -
not to mention the fertilizers, farming techniques, and transportation
technology that helped put food on the table.

After watching Roots, I remember asking my Irish grandmother why she
left the old sod, a place from which people have been fleeing en masse
ever since they could tie logs together to make rafts, and why she had
never gone back. She answered both questions with the same
matter-of-fact reply: "Because there was nothing there for me." In the
late '70s, after more than 50 years of self-induced exile, my Italian
grandparents finally made it back to their hometown, a tiny village a
few hours outside Naples. They knew better than anyone that the world
had changed 1,000 times over in the interim. "We left on a boat to
find work," my grandfather told me. "We went back on a plane for
vacation." The steps in between seemed to make sense to him.

Subj: Computer complaints Date: 95-10-27 From: NGill...@aol.com To:
ske...@ubu.edu

In a message dated 95-10-26 16:13 EDT, you write:

<<Okay, so Stoll, Birkerts, and Slouka spin out a larger critique of
technology. But what about computers specifically?>>

Fair enough. Stoll, Birkerts, and Slouka confess at various points to
Luddite tendencies even as they all go out of their way to say that
they aren't calling for a return to caveman days. One thing that
clearly gets under their skin is the exuberance of telecomputer
boosters such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Perry
Barlow, who is fond of saying the move into cyberspace is "the most

transforming technological event since the capture of fire."

In a Harper's forum featuring Birkerts, Slouka, Barlow, and Wired
magazine's Kevin Kelly, Slouka and Birkerts - who has compared Wired
to a porno mag - bristle at "the theme of inevitability," the idea
that the computer revolution is a totally done deal, even as they
accept the fact that the train of technological development has left
the station. "Computers themselves don't bother me, it's the culture
in which they're enshrined," writes Stoll in Silicon Snake Oil. "The
medium is being oversold, our expectations have become bloated."

There's more than a grain of truth to such discontent. While computers
are here for good - or at least the foreseeable future - it's unclear
what exactly that means. And Stoll is right that going online is
oversold - although he, Birkerts, and Slouka should recognize that as
a good thing. While being on the Internet has added some things to my
life and subtracted little or nothing, it sure as hell hasn't been a
revolution.

Not surprisingly, Stoll is more willing than Birkerts and Slouka to
grant the general usefulness of computer technology, if only as an
introduction to his larger condemnation of the burgeoning Republic of
Cyberspace. Stoll is, after all, an astronomer, a longtime devoted
computer and Internet user, and the author of the delightful The
Cuckoo's Egg, which details his role in catching a gang of hackers who
broke into a computer system at the University of California at
Berkeley. (Silicon Snake Oil is not only more engaged with its subject
matter; because it's written with wit and self-conscious irony and
packed with cold data and interesting anecdotes, it engages the reader
more than either The Gutenberg Elegies or War of the Worlds.)

But all three authors contend that computers (and, as important,
computer networks) attack the "real" world by luring us away from such
time-honored activities as reading, writing (in longhand or on
typewriters), spending time with friends and family, hiking, and
puddle-jumping. Instead, we while away our days at an electronic
coffeehouse, answering gratuitous e-mail messages, engaging in gossipy
chit-chat about Star Trek and The X-Files, and sampling various
pornographic cyberthrills.

Computer networks, says Stoll, "isolate us from one another and
cheapen the meaning of actual experience. They work against literacy
and creativity. They will undercut our schools and libraries."
Birkerts sings the same dirge with slightly different lyrics. He
certainly agrees with Stoll that computers - all things electronic,
really - undermine the solitude and quiet necessary for deep readings
of books and mankind alike.

But computers don't so much isolate us as destroy us, says Birkerts.
For him, going online means nothing less than dissolving your
subjectivity - your sense of self - into electrical impulses scattered
out into space. "[B]eing on-line and having the subjective experience
of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive
situations," he writes. We have destroyed "duration...deep time, time
experienced without the awareness of time passing." His "core fear" is
that we are becoming as shallow and flattened out as the TV and
computer screens we use to communicate. "We are experiencing the
gradual but steady erosion of human presence, both of the authority of
the individual and, in ways impossible to prove, of the species
itself," frets Birkerts.

Slouka, too, worries about the individual. "For just as surely as [the
interstate highway system! had helped homogenize the American
landscape," he writes, "replacing the distinctive color and lingo of
regional culture with the ubiquitous ugliness of the corporate strip,
[the information superhighway! would make us blander still,
sacrificing a different kind of regionality - the 'regionality' of
race and gender and age and opinion - to the needs of the
all-blurring, eternally inoffensive Netsoul."

The damage is all the greater, says Slouka, because the Internet
allows us to escape our physical surroundings. Reacting to a positive
assessment of cyberspace, Slouka writes, "The problem...was not that
Cyberspace would usurp reality as we know it, or that we would all
disappear into some virtual world. The problem, simply put, was that
Cyberspace would distract us from the job at hand; ...we'd forget that
most of the human race was more immediately interested in survival
than transcendence."

As can be gleaned from the quotes above, Stoll, Birkerts, and Slouka
invent and then inhabit a stuffing-or-potatoes universe: Here's the
blue-plate special and absolutely no substitutions are allowed. Given
their anti-computer stances, it's ironic that they adopt such a binary
logical system. They essentially banish the connector and from their
vocabularies; they refuse to entertain the notion that computers can
supplement - as opposed to supplant - existing technologies,
relationships, and communities.

At times they pursue their logic to ridiculous extremes, as when Stoll
writes, "A computer network is, indeed, a community. But what an
impoverished community! One without a church, cafe, art gallery,
theater, or tavern. Plenty of human contact, but no humanity.
Cybersex, cybersluts, and cybersleaze, but no genuine, lusty,
roll-in-the-hay sex. And no birds sing."

Slouka beats a similar cyberdrum: "Instead of exploring a local farm
pond (or catching praying mantises in the park), today's
eight-year-old can explore on her computer....Instead of visiting real
animals at a zoo (itself already a kind of simulation), she can visit
the dodo and the passenger pigeon (and others sure to follow in their
path without our very real intervention) on the computer." Well, there
it is: You can either roll in literal hay or scroll over your onscreen
lover's body, you can either go to the City Zoo or go to your room.

Birkerts explicitly sees "the situation in Faustian terms, as an
either/or." You can, he says, either read "deep" the way he suggests
or else you "move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one site
to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly. The
inscription is light but it covers vast territories: quantity is
elevated over quality." He thinks in terms of a "face-off, a struggle,
a war."

The either/or is so central to such formulations that it is
meaningless to engage them on their own terms. How exactly do computer
networks erode community? Essentially by letting us make or stay in
touch with distant friends so that our attention is trained away from
our immediate surroundings. As Stoll accurately observes, e-mail is
far from perfect, but the medium's relative ease and convenience
allows me to write more letters in the same amount of time. This
doesn't mean I spend less time living in the "real" world. And why
would someone suppose, as does Slouka, that the curiosity of a kid who
views animals on screen would be fully satisfied by the experience?
There is no sense here that appetites can grow and expand. After PBS
ran Ken Burns's Civil War series, for instance, attendance at
battlefields boomed because people wanted to see the places for
"real." History books became hot, too, as people sought out more
information.

Indeed, rather than Birkerts's "face-off," his Phillips curve of
technology and "soul," it makes more sense to think of computers as
adding to our ability to interact with one another, to locate
ourselves in time and place, to fashion ourselves as both deep readers
and "skimmers." I've had a computer of some sort for about 10 years
now - starting with a Commodore tape-drive behemoth that took five
minutes to save files - and I've been online for five; neither of
these facts has taken away from my ability or my willingness to become
absorbed in the sort of literature Birkerts champions. Computers have,
however, made it easier for me to discuss such books by making it
easier to contact and stay in touch with people who have similar
interests.

In the Harper's forum, Wired's Kelly suggests that on-line reality
will "be an auxiliary space," one that adds to existing possibilities
rather than obliterating them. Yes, old ways will be modified, but the
process will happen over time and moderately, and there will be
various ways to opt out or modify its impact if you so choose.

This dynamic, of course, has nothing to do with computers
specifically, but it's important to understand that it generally
leaves us with more options, not fewer. Consider the federal
interstate system, which is a controlling metaphor for cyberspace
enthusiasts and detractors alike. "Thanks to the interstate highway
system, it's possible to travel across the country without seeing
anything," Stoll quotes retired CBS News correspondent Charles Kuralt.
"I wonder if the information superhighway will offer a corollary - a
dulling impact on our cerebral cortex."

So speaketh Charles Kuralt, sage of the nation's blue highways, who
made a name for himself by going "on the road" 20 years ago in an RV
that no doubt carded all the pleasures of home and hearth. But Kuralt
misses the point: Thanks to the interstate system, it's possible to
drive across the country in a few days and take a more circuitous
route.

No doubt, the trip was more scenic from the buckboard of a Conestoga
wagon when folks had to worry about Indians, bandits, and bad weather.
But the Donner Party, we can assume, would have appreciated a six-lane
divided highway with rest stops and picnic areas (or, at the very
least, Kuralt's pleasure cruiser). A few years ago, my wife and I
drove across the country on our honeymoon. We took highways and byways
and saw a hell of a lot of the country, some of it just off
interstates, some of it just off unpaved roads.

Far from dulling our cerebral cortices, if the information
superhighway is at all like the interstate system, it will stimulate
them all the more.

Subj: On-line overstimulation Date: 95-10-29 From: NGill...@aol.com
To: ske...@ubu.edu

In a message dated 95-10-28 20:12:10 EDT, you write:

<<Isn't too much stimulation precisely one of the problems with an
on-line society? Doesn't the constant hum, whirr, and buzz of
electronically processed information drive us insane?>>

Some of us, maybe. In any case, the fear of too much information
undergirds the cybercritiques of Stoll, Birkerts, and Slouka. In fact,
even their disdain for technology and computers is, at rock bottom, a
dislike of unfettered, decontextualized information. Where many of us
welcome an increase in information as a (potential) increase in
knowledge, possibilities, and self-fulfillment, they employ a Tower of
Babel model in which static unity transmogrifies into dynamic chaos.
Consider:

"Anyone can post messages to the net. Practically everyone does. The
resulting cacophony drowns out serious discussion....[T]he valuable
gets lost in the dross. There are no pointers to the good stuff - you
don't know which messages are worth reading," writes Stoll.

"One of the advantages of the net is that everybody can publish: it's
a free medium....You can cut out the middleman - the publisher and

agent and everybody else. But when you open the floodgates entirely,
you don't get egalitarianism. You get babble. My shopping list becomes

as valuable as Cormac McCarthy's latest book," Slouka told Harper's.

"The explosion of data - along with general societal secularization of
what the theorists call the 'master narratives' (Christian, Marxist,
Freudian, humanist...) - has all but destroyed the premise of
understandability. Inundated by perspectives, by lateral vistas of
information that stretch endlessly in every direction; we no longer
accept the possibility of assembling a complete picture," says
Birkerts.

There is no question, of course, that our society, both online and
off, is awash in information, good, bad, and ugly. We are up to our
necks in the stuff and the tide's still coming in: TV and radio
broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, databases, web sites,
conversations. But the currents are surprisingly easy to navigate.
Contrary to Stoll and Slouka, there are all sorts of pointers and
middlemen who nudge you in one direction or another, who sift through
material and send it your way. Some of these are formal services -
Nexis, say; others are informal - friends who flag something for you.
And no one, it is safe to say, will mistake Slouka's shopping list for
a novel. But to the degree they do, that's their choice.

Birkerts rightly characterizes the dilemma as an epistemological one:
Without a master narrative to make us slaves, how do we pick among
competing choices? Given the funereal air of The Gutenberg Elegies, it
is hardly surprising that he can only lament a proliferation of
options: "Our postmodern culture is a vast fabric of competing isms;
we are leaderless and subject to the terrors, masked as the freedoms,
of an absolute relativism."

But do you know anyone who is an absolute relativist, or even a
relative relativist? Yes, ideas of the good life, of the proper life,
of the righteous life compete with one another - at least when they
are allowed to. Where is the terror in that, unless you have lost your
own faith?

There is a sense, implicit in Birkerts and explicit in Slouka, that
individuals ultimately can't be trusted to their own devices. We are
too easily duped, too gullible, too dumb: "We live," writes Slouka,
"in an increasingly visual age, consumers, not of life, but of
representations of life; of movies, videos, and commercials; of media
events and reenactments....[T]his, to put it bluntly, makes us
vulnerable. With nearly 50 percent of us functionally illiterate, and
90 percent of us listing television as our primary source of news,
we're ripe for the picking. Or the manipulating, as the case may be."

So what's the alternative, especially in a semi-free society? Stoll,
Birkerts, and Slouka don't travel the road to its end, but the
signposts clearly indicate less choice, less information, less
individualism. Reading through Silicon Snake Oil, The Gutenberg
Elegies, and War of the Worlds, I was reminded of an Eastern European
friend of mine from grad school. He came over to study shortly before
the Berlin Wall fell and he knew firsthand the terror of living with a
master narrative.

Still, it was easier for him to leave central Europe behind than it
was to give up certain elements of communist thought. We would go out
drinking and he would joke with me about the "so-called" free market
and how the problem with America was that there was too much of
everything: news, books, clothing, schools of thought. "I spend half
an hour picking out a brand of toothpaste. How does anyone decide
anything?" he would ask me, "How do you know what's important and
what's not?" It depends on the individual, I would tell him, what they
value and what they want. Where's the harm?

"That's just incredibly inefficient, that's no way to run a society,"
he would say, launching into a discussion of his model community: the
medieval Roman Catholic Church. "Everybody had a definite place - the
clergy, the lay people, the peasants," he would explain. "The world
had a certain certainty about it." Information was distributed on a
strict need-to-know basis.

What about people who wanted to know more than they were told, or who
didn't agree with the church, I would query. What about people who
didn't want to "run" with the plan? What about heretics and apostates
- was it good to get rid of them?

"No, probably not," my friend would grant. "But at least everyone knew
what they stood for. They knew what they lived for and what they died
for."

Such a "stable framework" is, at best, arguable theology. And the
predictable horror it inspires far outstrips the pain of deciding
among disparate choices.

Nick Gillespie (ngill...@aol.com) is assistant editor of REASON.

================================================================

Source: Publishers Weekly, Jan 1, 1996 v243 n1 p67(1).

Title: Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.
_(book reviews)

Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Dery, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1996 Reed Publishing USA

Mark Dery. Grove, $21 (384p) ISBN 0-8021-1580-2

Freelance cultural critic Dery takes readers on a strange, unsettling,
often provocative tour through fringe computer subcultures. We meet
cyber-hippies and "technopagans" who use the personal computer in New
Age mystical rituals via echomail, a technology that links discussion
groups into a communal conference. California roboticist Mark Pauline
stages spectacles in which robots and humans are menaced by heavy
machinery or remote-controlled weaponry, while Chico MacMurtrie's
puppet-like robot musicians, acrobats and warriors enact ecotopian
dramas. Australian cybernetic body artist Stelarc, plastered with
electrodes and trailing wires, embodies the human/machine hybrid all
of us are metaphorically becoming. Dery also profiles online swingers
hooked on virtual sex, cyberpunk rockers, cyberpunk novelist William
Gibson and D.A. Therrien's performance ensemble Comfort/Control, which
dramatizes popular anxieties over the autonomy of intelligent machines
and the nightmare of humanity's obsolescence. Dery closes this
adventurous inquiry with an appraisal of the "posthumanist" visions of
novelist William Burroughs, techno-mystical SF author Vernor Vinge and
Carnegie-Mellon roboticist Hans Moravec. Illustrated. (Feb.)

============================================================

Source: Whole Earth Review, Spring 1994 n82 p99(1).
Title: Flame Wars._(book reviews)
Author: Caius van Nouhuys

Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Dery, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT POINT 1994

If you've been watching the news and reading the paper lately, you may
have noticed a wave of quick and superficial stories on the emerging
culture surrounding new electronic media, the Internet, and virtual
reality. To their credit, editor Mark Defy and the South Atlantic
Quarterly bucked the trend, and have done what few others have in
putting together a tough, serious, academic look at this emerging
culture. The authors of this collection of essays are mainly academics
and science fiction writers. Their opinions are often theoretical,
carefully thought out, and worth the effort it can take to push
through the sometimes scholarly language.

Why are there relatively few black science fiction writers? Why are
feminism and the Internet so infrequently mentioned in the same
sentence? How exactly does one go about having e-sex? The essays in
Flame Wars, with titles like "Techgnosis, Magic, Memory, and the
Angels of Infomation" or "Virtual Surreality: Our New Romance with
Plot Devices," try to answer all of these questions. More importantly,
though, Flame Wars tries to address the social and cultural
implications of these answers. Like it or not we are becoming a
culture more and more entwined in new electronic media. To be a
well-informed and culturally aware person means you need to start
thinking about how our society relates to these media. Flame Wars is a
great place to start

* Since, as some philosophies assert, our reality may itself be an
illusion created by the senses and compounded by ignorance, then VR is
a particularly fitting metaphor for an exploration of reality. The
possibility of confusing virtual and actual modes satisfyingly mirrors
the manner in which our minds are duped into believing that they have
an objective existence. If reality is a cosmic illusion, then its
details need be no more fine-tuned than the best of our sensors to
fool us into believing it. Our senses may be very coarse filters, but
the mind itself -- building up models from a combination of all
available information -- seems more sensitive, and ultimately it is
the mind that must distinguish between reality and fabrication. When
the mind has only sensory data to work with, its conclusions are no
better than the signals it receives; but when it can merge completely
with the forces that generate reality -- whether virtual or actual --
then it becomes part of the creative process, an active interpreter of
nature.

* Every computer information service, large or small, has lurking
within its bits and bytes an active subculture of users engaged in
text-based sexual exchanges. These encounters rarely carry over into
face-to-face meetings. Rather, the participants are content to return
night after night to explore this odd brand of interactive and
sexually explicit storytelling. Compu-sex enthusiasts say it's the
ultimate safe sex for the 1990s, with no exchange of bodily fluids, no
loud smoke-filled clubs, and no morning after. Of course, there's no
physical contact, either. Compu-sex brings new meaning to the phrase
"mental masturbation."

Flame Wars

Mark Defy, Editor. 1993; 301 pp.

ISBN 0-8223-6400-X

$12 postpaid from Duke University Press/

Journals Fulfillment, 90660 College Station,

Durham, NC 27708-0660; 919/687-3617

==============================================================

Source: Guitar Player, Jan 1993 v27 n1 p17(1).
Title: Blind Idiot God: dropping smart bombs. (instrumental trio)
Author: Mark Dery
Abstract: The New York, NY-based trio features guitarist
Andy Hawkins, Drummer Ted Epstein and bassist Gabe Katz. Their
two recordings since 1988 include adaptations of avant-garde
classical composers Gyorgy Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki.
Subjects: Guitar music - Innovations

Full Text COPYRIGHT Miller Freeman Publications 1993

LISTENING TO Blind Idiot God you half expect your head to swell,
knotted with veins, and explode in bone and grey goo.

Yet the New York instrumental power trio manages to be brainy and
bludgeoning at the same time. Guitarist Andy Hawkins' penchant for
dissonance, chromaticism, and "beating" effects, hitched to the
elemental force of drummer Ted Epstein and bassist Gabe Katz, yields
an inspired oxymoron: artcore. "Drowning," from 1988's Undertow
[Enemy, 11-36 31st Ave., Long Island City, NY 11106], begins with
supersonic strumming flogged along by tom rolls and ends with a
scraping, clanging guitar solo that sounds like a well-tempered fender
bender--just what one would expect from a guitarist whose influences
include "soundcolor" composers Gyorgy Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki.
"Stravinsky/Blasting Off," the opening salvo on the group's eponymous
1987 SST debut, reconstitutes the jarring dissonances and shifting
meters of Stravinsky's modernist masterwork in grinding guitar,
thudding bass, and thumping hardcore drums.

"What classical music has over rock is orchestration," says Hawkins.
"Listening to hardcore or metal, I would think, 'Great
intensity--boring chords!' 'The Firebird Suite' offered a point of
departure. By throwing root-fifth-octave guitar chords on top of that
bass figure, we wound up with something that sounds like Slayer but is
much more interesting, harmonically and texturally."

On the band's new Cyclotron [Avant, available as a Japanese import],
the 27-year-old guitarist relies on two custom-made ESPs and an
avalanche of gear to realize his orchestral approach to layered
timbres. He overdubbed multiple parts with his stage setup, which
includes an Eventide H-3000, two Lexicon LXP-15s, and "a DBX fake bass
thing that creates artificial rumble."

"I want clarity and density," insists Hawkins, "the full force of the
guitar, together with an orchestral ringing, where all the harmonics
are clear." Some would call the results pandemonium--the poet Milton's
name, coincidentally, for the capital of Hell.

Hawkins chuckles: "We do our best to live up to the farranging
implications of cosmic evil."

==============================================================

Source: Guitar Player, June 1992 v26 n6 p14(1).
Title: Steel Toe._(sound recording reviews)
Author: Mark Dery
Subjects: Sound recordings - Reviews
People: Anderson, Ron
Millner, Chris
Scandura, Thomas

Full Text COPYRIGHT Miller Freeman Publications 1992

Scrubbing frantically at his '78 Gibson Paul, Ron Anderson churns out
a dissonant grinding that sounds like a car starting on a cold
morning. On the latest by the Molecules, Steel Toe (Tragic Mule, 4001
San Leandro St., Ste. #7, Oakland, CA 94601), Anderson and bassist
Chris Millner pounce on angular, Captain Beefheartian phrases and tear
them note from note, while drummer Thomas Scandura parenthesizes the
song's jolting rhythms with rambunctious fills reminiscent of Magic
Band drummer John "Drumbo" French.

Anderson, 33, was raised in New Jersey and spent eight years in New
York City. In the early '80s, he played in Rat-At-Rat-R, a seminal New
York noise band. These days, he lives in Oakland, California, with two
pit bulls. Anderson can sympathize with Tom Waits' characterization of
Manhattan as "a ship full of rats, and the water's on fire," but he
also knows that California's reputation as the Moonbeam State is well
deserved.

"New York is a love/hate thing," says Anderson. "I move to San
Francisco, and all I hear is, `Oh, if we only had a Knitting
Factory-style scene.' But in the Bay Area, you can still find a hole
in the wall to play in, whereas in New York there's only the Knitting
Factory."

Even so, Anderson continues to make buzzing, humming New York music,
all short circuits and bad connections. Steel Toe is skateprog: Most
of the CD's 22 short, nerve-jangling tracks are characterized by
ensemble playing, close-interval harmonies, and stop-start grooves
that take sudden, gut-wrenching detours into new tempos and time
signatures.

Running his guitar through a Pro Co Big Rat and a Crybaby Wah into an
"old, beat-up Carvin head" and a Peavey cabinet, Anderson unleashes
bone-scraping shrieks and off-the-Richter-scale rumbles. The guitarist
scrabbles above the bridge, plinkety-plinks behind the nut, and gouges
out cluster chords. In mid-solo, he gives a tuning peg a vicious
twist, turning a bluesy bend into a slowed-down lion's roar. "I've
been influenced by No New York," says Anderson. "That, together with
Pere Ubu, is a punk sound I've always liked. It was interesting
musically, but at the same time abrasive and intense."

Happy New Year (Sound of Pig, Box 150022, Van Brunt Station, Brooklyn,
NY 11215), by contrast, is neither. The cassette includes "Ululation,"
a hypnagogic instrumental with a Frippish guitar figure. Fever Dream
(LP, Tragic Mule), with its twinkling guitar and tinsel-bright
synthesizer, is airy, almost Eno-esque.

Notes Anderson, "The Molecules love '70s-style prog rock - Yes, King
Crimson, Gong, Soft Machine. I wanted the Molecules' sound to have
elements of prog rock and Fred Frith in it, but be really raw. I
wanted to make something awful, something my heroes would hate."

===============================================================

Source: Whole Earth Review, Spring 1994 n82 p100(1).
Title: Culture Jamming._(book reviews)

Author: Howard Rheingold
Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Dery, Mark

Full Text COPYRIGHT POINT 1994

This broadside, polemic how-to manual and call to arms is the
manifesto of a worldwide uprising of cultural guerrillas who go beyond
media criticism to direct action. Billboards are altered, journalists
are spoofed, zines proliferate, joke religions are founded.
Intellectually grounded in political and social media criticism from
Bagdikian to Baudrillard, culture jamming takes its action or/entation
from the Yippies and samizdat culture. Do a few self-proclaimed
revolutionaries with paintbrushes, pirate radios, and media pranks
stand a chance against the forces of the global media? Maybe. Culture
jammers are injecting some powerful roerues into the worldmind;
thoro's no telling what will evolve from their pranks. Most hopefully,
these revolutionaries seem to be having fun with what they are doing
-- a sign that they are onto something of great value.

* Meanwhile, the question remains: How to box with shadows? In other
words, what shape does an engaged politics assume in an empire of
signs?

The answer lies, perhaps, in the "semiological guerrilla warfare"
imagined by Umberto Eco. "[T]he receiver of the message seems to have
a residual freedom: the freedom to read it in a different way... I am
proposing an action to urge the audience to control the message and
its multiple possibilities of interpretation," he writes. "[O]ne
medium can be employed to communicate a series of opinions on another
medium... The universe of Technological Communication would then be
patrolled by groups of communication guerrillas, who would restore a
critical dimension to passive reception." Eco assumes, a priori, the
radical politics of visual literacy, an idea eloquently argued by
Stuart Ewen, a critic of consumer culture. "We live at a time when the
image has become the predominant mode of public address, eclipsing all
other forms in the structuring of meaning," asserts Ewen. "Yet little
in our education prepares us to make sense of the rhetoric. historical
development or social implications of the images within our lives." In
a society of heat, light and electronic poltergeists -- an eerie
otherworld of "illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss
and smoothness of material things" -- the desperate project of
reconstructing meaning, or at least reclaiming that notion from
marketing departments and P.R. firms, requires visually-literate
ghostbusters. Culture jammers answer to that name. "Jamming" is CB
slang for the illegal practice of interrupting radio broadcasts or
conversations between fellow hams with lip farts, obscenities, and
other equally jejune hijinx. Culture jamming, by contrast, is directed
against an ever more intrusive, instrumental technoculture whose
operant mode is the manufacture of consent through the manipulation of
symbols.

The term "cultural jamming" was first used by the collage band
Negativland to describe billboard alteration and other forms of media
sabotage. On Jamcon '84 (SST), a mock-serious bandmember observes, "As
awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs
our inner life grows, some resist... The skillfully reworked
billboard... directs the public viewer to a consideration of the
original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammet is the
world at large." Part artistic terrorists, part vernacular critics,
culture jammers, like Eco's "communications guerrillas," introduce
noise into the signal as it passes from transmitter to receiver,
encouraging idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations. Intruding on
the intruders, they invest ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts
with subversive meanings; simultaneously, they decrypt them, rendering
their seductions impotent. Jammers offer irrefutable evidence that
Rightwingers have no copyright on war waged with incantations and
simulations, And, like Ewen's cultural cryptographers, they refuse the
role of passive shoppers, renewing the notion of a public discourse.

Finally, and just as importantly, culture jammers are Groucho
Marxists, ever mindful of the fun to be had in the joyful demolition
of oppressive ideologies. As the inveterate prankster and former Dead
Kennedy singer Jello Biafra once observed, "There's a big difference
between 'simple crime' like holding up a 7- II, and 'creative crime'
as a form of expression... Creative crime is... uplifting to the
soul... What better way to survive our anthill society than by abusing
the very mass media that sedates the public?... A prank a day keeps
the dog leash away!"

Jamming is part of a historical continuum that includes Russian
samizdat (underground publishing in defiance of official censorship);
the anti-fascist photomontages of John Heartfield; Situationist
detournement (defined by Greil Marcus, in Lipstick Troces, as "the
theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts and their diversion
into contexts of one's own devise"); the underground journalism of
'60s radicals such as Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman;
Yippie street theater such as the celebrated attempt to levitate the
Pentagon; parody religions such as the Dallas-based Church of the
Subgenius; workplace sabotage of the sort documented by Processed
World, a magazine for disaffected data entry drones; the ecopolitical
monkeywrenching of Earth First!; the random acts of Artaudian cruelty
that radical theorist Hakim Bey calls "poetic terrorism" ("weird
dancing in all-night computer banking lobbies... bizarre alien
artifacts strewn in State Parks"); the insurgent use of the "cut-up"
collage technique proposed by William Burroughs in "Electronic
Revolution" ("The control of the mass media depends on laying down
lines of association... Cut/up techniques could swamp the mass media
with total illusion"); and subcultural bricolage (the refunctioning,
by societal "outsiders," of symbols associated with the dominant
culture, as in the appropriation of corporate attire and Vogue model
poses by poor, gay, and largely non-white drag queens).

Culture Jamming

Mark Dery.

$4 postpaid from Open Magazine Pamphlet

Series, PO Box 2726, Westfield, NJ 07091;

908/789-9608

[jum...@my-deja.com]

bye
Author: Ross Getman <rge...@twcny.rr.com>
Date: 1999/06/27
Forum: alt.fan.unabomber

I hope the folks interested in learning more about the Unabomber feel
free to e-mail me with their ideas and new information, because I've
greatly enjoyed the exchange, and wish you well in your various
endeavours. I think, for starters, we should all read Shadow's novel.
The next few months should be interesting, beginning with Kaczynski's
Refutation. With folks like Beau participating, we had unequalled
access to Kaczynski. With folks like Scott, we had the very best in
analysis of all things UNABOM. And with the founder of artificial
intelligence, Professor McCarthy, we had the benefit of his patient
insights into the pro-technology point of view.

But I see that folks are responding to our resident troll and
propagandist Dan Pyro on his usual off-topic right-wing issues -- and
my entreaties to him by email to stay on topic and to grow up were
unsuccessful. And so the group becomes the sort of internet
experience that lowers you to a common denominator, rather than lifts
you.

The group will never attract new members with someone as immature as
Pyro posting on his usual litany of right-wing propaganda topics, and
so I'll leave while the corpse is still fresh. The fact that he is so
well-spoken makes the waste of his life that much more tragic.

If you folks want to spend your time responding to (or reading) Pyro's
posts, that's your choice. But with freedom of the press comes the
right to vote with one's feet.

[jum...@my-deja.com]

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,34436,00.html?tw=wn20000218
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Beyond the Genome
by Kristen Philipkoski
3:00 a.m. 18.Feb.2000 PST

NEW YORK -- We've got a big mess of genetic information. Now what?
That was the question posed to a panel of genomic researchers at the
Bio CEO and Investor conference on Wednesday. And since sorting out
messes of gene sequences is the panelists’ business, they had plenty
of ideas -- and concerns.

"We're 10 percent into the genomic revolution, if you will. Getting
the information is not the end, it's absolutely the beginning," said
Edward Maggio, CEO of Structural Bioinformatics in San Diego.

The company is one of several poised to pick up where the Human
Genome Project leaves off. After all the genes are sequenced later
this year, much work will remain to translate the genome map into
something useful.

Genomics companies such as Incyte and Celera try to make sense out
of the massive amounts of genetic information being produced by the
HGP. They hope to generate revenue with technology platforms that
will crunch gene sequence data and find meaningful genetic markers
that could lead to new drug therapies.

Each company hopes to carve out its own niche by offering
pharmaceutical companies information about which organs express
which genes, and how the expression of certain genes changes as a
result of disease.

"The direction we're trying to move in is addressing the next
bottleneck. The bottlenecks are in how you use that sequence and
drive forward to function and therapeutic algorithm," said Bill
Matthews, CEO of Deltagen, in Menlo Park, California, which
specializes in providing information on the role of newly discovered
genes in animals.

The audience expressed concerns about the accuracy and reliability
of information being fed to genomics companies by genome sequencers.
Although the main players say they'll have the human genome mapped
this year, it could be several years before an accurate and reliable
map comes to fruition.

"It's going to be an incredible hodgepodge of information," said
Michael Brennan, CEO of Gene Logic in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Sangamo, a company that focuses on cardiovascular disease
information and specializes in DNA transcription factors, also
announced collaborations with 16 biotech companies at the meeting,
including Pfizer, SmithKline Beecham, Bayer, and Merck.

Copyright © 2000 Wired Digital Inc., a Lycos Network site.
All rights reserved.

========================================================

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,34440,00.html?tw=wn20000218
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

MS Denies Offer to Open Code
Reuters
10:55 a.m. 18.Feb.2000 PST

SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft strongly denied Thursday that Bill Gates
said he would be willing to open the Windows operating system source
code to competitors to settle the antitrust suit with the Justice
Department.

"Bill did not make any of the comments attributed to him [in an
interview with Bloomberg News] about the settlement," Microsoft
spokesman Jim Cullinan said. "The comments they said Bill made are
just not true."

The suit by the Justice Department and 19 states is in a mediation
phase and both sides have been instructed by the mediating judge,
Richard Posner, not to talk to the media about details of the case.
Just hours after Gates unveiled Windows 2000, the latest version of
its operating system, Bloomberg quoted Gates as saying, "Microsoft
Corp. would be willing to open the source code for Windows software
to competitors to settle the antitrust case filed by the U.S.
Department of Justice."

Bloomberg later issued a correction saying that the release should
have read, "Bill Gates agreed with the statement" that Microsoft
would be willing to open the Windows source code in order to settle.

Cullinan emphasised that Gates had made no comments about opening
the Windows source code. Windows accounts for about 40 percent of
the company's revenues.

"He just said that we would be doing our best to settle the case,"
Cullinan said, adding that such statements were the company's
routine way of answering questions about the antitrust suit.
Microsoft planned to make a transcript of the interview available on
its Web site later on Thursday, Cullinan said.

The Justice Department has argued that Microsoft abused its monopoly
power in computer operating systems to crush rivals and stifle
innovation, charges that the court has largely agreed with.
There has been speculation that the Justice Department could seek a
break-up of Microsoft, a move the company vigorously opposes.
Another solution would be to open the Windows source code, which
would let other software developers, including Microsoft
competitors, create and sell their own versions of Windows, analysts
have said.

Copyright © 1999-2000 Reuters Limited.

Copyright © 2000 Wired Digital Inc., a Lycos Network site.
All rights reserved.

[jum...@my-deja.com]

http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring96/031425.htm
---------------------------------------------------

The Mismeasure of Man
Stephen Jay Gould
Revised and Expanded
The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve.

When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed
as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify
people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and
limits.

Yet the idea of biology as destiny dies hard, as witness the attention
devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively
anticipated and thoroughly undermined. In this edition, Stephen Jay
Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why
he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the
controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve. Further, he
has added five essays on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and
on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These
additions strengthen the book's claim to be, as Leo J. Kamin of
Princeton University has said, "a major contribution toward deflating
pseudo-biological 'explanations' of our present social woes."

"A rare book-at once of great importance and wonderful to
read."-Saturday Review Stephen Jay Gould is the author of thirteen
other books, including such international bestsellers as Ever Since
Darwin, The Panda's Thumb, Bully for Brontosaurus, Wonderful Life, and
Eight Little Piggies. Winner of the American Book Award for Science,
and of the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Mismeasure of
Man, he teaches geology, biology, and the history of science at
Harvard University.

400 pages / Recently Published

[jum...@my-deja.com]

CHAPTER ONE

Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals
By STEVEN M.WISE
Perseus Books

The Problem with Being a Thing

"It is difficult, to handle simply as property, a creature
possessing human passions and human feelings ... while on the
other hand, the absolute necessity of dealing with property as a
thing, greatly embarrasses a man in any attempt to treat it as a
person."

-- Frederick Law Olmsted, traveling in the American South before
the Civil War

Jerom's Story

Jerom died on February 13, 1996, ten days shy of his fourteenth
birthday. The teenager was dull, bloated, depressed, sapped, anemic,
and plagued by diarrhea. He had not played in fresh air for eleven
years. As a thirty-month-old infant, he had been intentionally
infected with HIV virus SF2. At the age of four, he had been infected
with another HIV strain, LAV-1. A month short of five, he was infected
with yet a third strain, NDK. Throughout the Iran-Contra hearings,
almost to the brink of the Gulf War, he sat in the small, windowless,
cinder-block Infectious Disease Building. Then he was moved a short
distance to a large, windowless, gray concrete box, one of eleven
bleak steel-and-concrete cells 9 feet by 11 feet by 8.5 feet.
Throughout the war and into Bill Clinton's campaign for a second term
as president, he languished in his cell. This was the Chimpanzee
Infectious Disease Building. It stood in the Yerkes Regional Primate
Research Center near grassy tree-lined Emory University, minutes from
the bustle of downtown Atlanta, Georgia.

* * * * * * Entrance to the chimpanzee cell room was through a tiny,
cramped, and dirty anteroom bursting with supplies from ceiling to
floor. Inside, five cells lined the left wall of the cell room, six
lined the right. The front and ceiling of each cell were a
checkerboard of steel bars, criss-crossed in three-inch squares. The
rear wall was the same gray concrete. A sliding door was set into the
eight-inch-thick concrete side walls. Each door was punctured by a
one-half-inch hole, through which a chimpanzee could catch glimpses
of his neighbors. Each cell was flushed by a red rubber fire hose
twice a day and was regularly scrubbed with deck brushes and
disinfected with chemicals. Incandescent bulbs hanging from the
dropped ceiling provided the only light. Sometimes the cold
overstrained the box's inadequate heating units, and the temperature
would sink below 50°F.

* * * * * * Although Jerom lived alone in his cell for the last four
months of his life, others were nearby. Twelve other
chimpanzees—Buster, Manuel, Arctica, Betsie, Joye, Sara, Nathan,
Marc, Jonah, Roberta, Hallie, and Tika—filled the bleak cells, living
in twos and threes, each with access to two of the cells. But none of
them had any regular sense of changes in weather or the turn of the
seasons. None of them knew whether it was day or night. Each slowly
rotted in that humid and sunless gray concrete box. Nearly all had
been intentionally infected with HIV. Just five months before Jerom
died of AIDS born of an amalgam of two of the three HIV strains
injected into his blood, Nathan was injected with 40 ml of Jerom's
HIV-infested blood. Nathan's level of CD4 cells, the white blood
cells that HIV destroys, has plummeted. He will probably sicken and
die.

Sales Tax for Loulis

The biologist Vincent Sarich has pointed out that from the standpoint
of immunology, humans and chimpanzees are as similar as "two
subspecies of gophers living on opposite sides of the Colorado River."
Rachel Weiss, a young Yerkes "care-tech" who watched Nathan being
injected with Jerom's dirty blood and saw Jerom himself waste away and
die, wrote about what she had seen. During the time she cared for the
chimpanzees of the Yerkes Chimpanzee Infectious Disease Building,
Rachel learned firsthand that chimpanzees possess "passions" and
"feelings" that, if not human, are certainly humanlike. It made them
no less "difficult to handle simply as property." She stopped thinking
of them as "property" and resigned from Yerkes shortly after Jerom's
death.

* * * * * * Seventeen years before Jerom's death, the primatologist
Roger Fouts encountered Loulis staring at him through the bars of
another Yerkes cage. Loulis's mother was huddled in a corner. Four
metal bolts jutted from her head. Fouts doubted that the brain
research she had endured allowed her even to know that Loulis was her
son. He plucked up the ten-month-old, signed the necessary loan
papers, then drove Loulis halfway across the United States to his
adopted mother.

* * * * * * Washoe was a signing chimpanzee who lived on an island in
a pond at the Institute for Primate Studies in Norman, Oklahoma.
Loulis did not want to sleep in Washoe's arms that first night and
curled up instead on a metal bench. At four o'clock in the morning,
Washoe suddenly awakened and loudly signed "Come, baby." The sound
jerked Loulis awake, and he jumped into Washoe's arms. Within eight
days, he had learned his first sign. Eight weeks later, he was
signing to humans and to the other chimpanzees in Washoe's family. In
five months, Loulis, by now an accepted family member, was using
combinations of signs. At the end of five years, he was regularly
using fifty-one signs; he had initiated thousands of chimpanzee
conversations and had participated in thousands more. He had learned
everything he knew from the other chimpanzees, for no human ever
signed to him.

* * * * * * As years passed, Fouts realized that Yerkes could call in
its loan and put Loulis to the knife, as his mother had been. When
Loulis was seventeen years old, Fouts sought to buy him outright.
Yerkes agreed to sell for $10,000, which Fouts didn't have. After
strenuous efforts, he raised that amount. But at the last second, a
hitch developed. Ten thousand dollars was Loulis's purchase price. As
if Yerkes were selling Fouts a desk or chair, Fouts was charged
another 7.5 percent in Georgia sales tax.

* * * * * * The scientists who injected Jerom and Nathan kept the
baker's dozen chimps imprisoned in a dungeon, and invaded the brain
of Loulis's mother and the administrators who collected sales tax for
Loulis believed that chimpanzees are things. But they didn't know
why. Rachel Weiss and Roger Fouts show that we can come to believe—as
they do—that chimpanzees are persons and not just things.

Demolishing a Wall

For four thousand years, a thick and impenetrable legal wall has
separated all human from all nonhuman animals. On one side, even the
most trivial interests of a single species—ours—are jealously guarded.
We have assigned ourselves, alone among the million animal species,
the status of "legal persons." On the other side of that wall lies the
legal refuse of an entire kingdom, not just chimpanzees and bonobos
but also gorillas, orangutans, and monkeys, dogs, elephants, and
dolphins. They are "legal things." Their most basic and fundamental
interests—their pains, their lives, their freedoms—are intentionally
ignored, often maliciously trampled, and routinely abused. Ancient
philosophers claimed that all nonhuman animals had been designed and
placed on this earth just for human beings. Ancient jurists declared
that law had been created just for human beings. Although philosophy
and science have long since recanted, the law has not.

* * * * * * This book demands legal personhood for chimpanzees and
bonobos. Legal personhood establishes one's legal right to be
"recognized as a potential bearer of legal rights." That is why the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights, and the American Convention on Human
Rights nearly identically state that "[e]veryone has the right to
recognition everywhere as a person before the law." Intended to
prevent a recurrence of one of the worst excesses of Nazi law, this
guarantee is "often deemed to be rather trivial and self-evident"
because no state today denies legal personhood to human beings. But
its importance cannot be overemphasized. Without legal personhood,
one is invisible to civil law. One has no civil rights. One might as
well be dead.

* * * * * * Throngs of Romans scoot past the gaping Coliseum every
day without giving it a glance. Athenians rarely squint up at their
Parthenon perched high on its Acropolis. In the same way, when we
encounter this legal wall, it is so tall, its stones are so thick,
and it has been standing for so long that we do not see it. Even
after litigating for many years on behalf of nonhuman animals, I did
not see it. I saved a handful from death or misery, but for most,
there was nothing I could do. I was powerless to represent them
directly. They were things, not persons, ignored by judges. But I was
butting into something. Finally I saw that wall.

* * * * * * In Chapters 2 through 4, we will see how it was built by
the Babylonians four thousand years ago, then strengthened by the
Israelites, Greeks, and Romans, and buttressed again by early
Christians and medieval Europeans. As one might expect, its mortar is
now cracked and stones are missing. It may appear firm and sturdy,
but its intellectual foundations are so unprincipled and arbitrary,
so unfair and unjust, that it is crumbling. It has some years left,
but it is so weak that one good book could topple it. This is meant
to be that book.

* * * * * * In Chapters 5, 6, and 7, I hope to convince you that
equality and liberty, the two most powerful legal principles and
values of which Western law can boast, demand the destruction of that
wall. But there are about 1 million species of animals. Many of them,
say, beetles and ants, should never have these rights. So the wall
must be rebuilt. But how? In Chapter 8, I will show you that the
hallmark of the common law, which is the judge-made law of
English-speaking peoples, is flexibility. It abhors thick high legal
walls, except when they bulwark such fundamental interests as bodily
integrity and bodily liberty, and prefers sturdy dividers that can be
dismantled and re-erected as new discoveries, morality, and public
policy dictate.

Why Chimpanzees and Bonobos?

Chimpanzees and bonobos (sometimes referred to as "pygmy chimpanzees")
are kidnapped for use as biomedical research subjects or as pets or in
entertainment. They are massacred for their meat to feed "the growing
fad for `bush meat' on the tables of the elite in Cameroon, Gabon, the
Congo, the Central African Republic, and other countries," so that
their hands, feet, and skulls can be displayed as trophies, and for
their babies. Thousands are jailed around the world in biomedical
research institutions like Yerkes or are imprisoned in decrepit
roadside zoos or chained alone and lonely in private dwellings. When
the last century turned, there were 5 million wild chimpanzees in
Africa. We don't know the number of bonobos because they weren't then
considered a species separate from chimpanzees. But it was probably
about half a million. By 1998, only 200,000 chimpanzees remained,
perhaps as few as 120,000, and maybe 20,000 bonobos. One of the
world's most prominent bonobo experts, Takayoshi Kano, believes that
less than 10,000 bonobos may have survived. Thousands of chimpanzees
and bonobos are slaughtered every year. They are nearing annihilation.

* * * * * * In Chapters 9 and 10, you will get a close look at the
kinds of creatures these apes are and how similar their genes and
brain structures are to ours. You will learn about the scientific
revolt that has broken out as an increasing number of scientists
demand they be tucked into the genus Homo with us. We will peel back
the layers of their minds and try to understand what is known about
how they feel and what they think; why they are conscious and
self-conscious; how they understand cause and effect, relationships
among objects, and even relationships among relationships; how they
use and make tools; how they can live in societies so complex and
fluid that they have been dubbed "Machiavellian"; how they deceive
and empathize, count simple numbers and add fractions, treat their
illnesses with medicinal plants, communicate with symbols, understand
English and use sign or lexigram languages, and how they might know
what others think. We will compare what we think we know about their
minds with what we think we know about ours.

* * * * * * I didn't choose to describe the plights of Jerom and
Nathan and the rest of the Yerkes chimpanzees because they are not
the worst known examples of legal chimpanzee abuse. That dubious
prize probably goes to the notorious SEMA, Inc., renamed Diagnon,
located in Rockville, Maryland. Sometime in 1986, a nauseated
employee tipped off the True Friends, a band of animal-rights
activists, who broke into the lab and videotaped what was happening
inside. AIDS-infected baby chimpanzees were housed alone in what SEMA
called "isolettes," metal cubes 40 inches high, 31 inches deep, and
26 inches wide, each of which contained a small window. Inside, the
babies rocked and rocked as would the emotionally starved or the
mentally ill.

* * * * * * I hope you will conclude, as I do in Chapter 11, that
justice entitles chimpanzees and bonobos to legal personhood and to
the fundamental legal rights of bodily integrity and bodily
liberty—now. Kidnapping them, selling them, imprisoning them, and
vivisecting them must stop—now. Their abuse and their murder must be
forbidden for what they are: genocide.

(C) 2000 Steven M. Wise All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-7382-0065-4

Copyright
2000 The New York Times Company

[jum...@my-deja.com]

CHAPTER ONE
Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans
By ERIC A. JOHNSON
Basic Books

Locating Nazi Terror: Setting, Interpretations, Evidence

The Gestapo in Cologne was exceptionally weak. The calm, elderly
officers let things come to them and did not undertake any of their
own initiatives," testified Dr. Emanuel Schäfer on Tuesday, July 6,
1954, the first day of his trial before a Cologne jury court for
assisting in the deportation of the Cologne Jews to the death
factories in the east in 1941 and 1942. Tried along with Schäfer were
two other former leaders of the Cologne Gestapo, Franz Sprinz and Kurt
Matschke. In the course of the previous several years, the state
prosecuting attorney's office had investigated more than one hundred
former Cologne Gestapo officers for their part in the mass murder. But
in the end only these three men were put on trial, and their sentences
would be light. The scenario would prove to be similar in the rest of
Germany.

* * * * * * The courtroom was quiet. Only seven people sat in the
audience as the trial began. The most prominent of these people was
Moritz Goldschmidt, the presiding head of the Cologne Jewish
community as well as the representative of the Central Committee of
Jews in Germany and its delegate to the Jewish World Congress. After
the first day's session was over, Goldschmidt told the court
reporters that of the 13,500 deported Cologne Jews, only 600
survived. Despite the appalling proportions of this mass murder, few
Germans appeared to have been particularly interested. Maybe they
were afraid or ashamed to show interest. The newspaper headlines on
the following day seemed almost tired and apologetic for having to
report on such commonplace events. "Again a Gestapo-Case in Cologne,"
read the headline in the Cologne newspaper Kölnische Rundschau. In
the beginning of its coverage of the case, the paper noted
matter-of-factly, but with a touch of sarcasm as well, that there had
been none of the emotional atmosphere and popular appeal of a trial
held in the same courtroom only a week before. That case, which had
filled the courtroom to overflowing, involved a twenty-three-year-old
mother from the neighboring town of Brühl who had been charged with
hanging her illegitimate two-year-old daughter on a window-fastener.

* * * * * * The trial was over in four days. Schäfer, the
fifty-three-year-old former head of the Cologne Gestapo from October
1940 to January 1942, during which time the Jewish "evacuation" to
the east was organized and set in motion, maintained that he had only
adhered to the existing laws, that the Jews had been well treated,
and that he had no personal responsibility because he was only
following orders from higher party and SS officials. In his words:

The Nuremberg Laws were well known at that time to all judges and
attorneys. Today they are thought of as criminal. The Jews were
placed outside of the German community because of the laws. This
was indeed wrong, as I now know, but at the time it was the law of
the land. In an official discussion with the Gauleiter Grohé after
a bombing attack, I learned that the Jews were to move out of
their homes to make space for people who had been bombed out of
theirs. The Jews were then given lodgings in the fortress in
Müngersdorf. After this time, an order came from Heydrich that
they were to be evacuated.

* * * * * * Although Schäfer had presided over the planned and
well-orchestrated murder of thousands of Cologne Jews, the wrongful
arrest and incarceration of thousands of other Cologne citizens, and
many other misdeeds of the rankest order both in Germany and abroad
during his prolific career, the court was partially persuaded by his
defense. Many other countries, like Yugoslavia, Poland, and the
Soviet Union, demanded that he be deported to stand trial for his
leadership role in the deaths of thousands of their citizens during
the Third Reich. But he was not deported. Instead, the Cologne court
convicted him of schwere Freiheitsberaubung (aggravated deprivation
of liberty), a crime of much less gravity than abetting mass murder,
the prosecution's original charge against him in the official
indictment. For his crimes he was to serve six years and nine months
in prison, minus the time he had already spent in jail awaiting
trial. In addition, he would have to forgo his civilian rights for an
extra three years after he was let out of prison.

* * * * * * The fifty-year-old Sprinz and the forty-six-year-old
Matschke got off even easier. Their defense was similar to Schäfer's.
After Schäfer had been sent to Belgrade in the winter of 1942 to
preside over the elimination of the Serbian Jews, Sprinz replaced
him. Sprinz then oversaw the remaining "evacuations" of the Cologne
Jews and stayed in his post in Cologne until February 1944. In trying
to justify his actions, he asserted that he had never been
anti-Semitic and that "the `Jewish parasitism' was only one of the
problems to be solved." He had "never thought that a `biological
solution' [which he called the annihilation of the deported Jews in
gas chambers] would be used." Furthermore, he testified, he was
"personally of the opinion" that he "had really nothing at all to do
with the Jewish transports." As he put it, "I did not wish to
intercede in the already well organized process. Once I did observe
the preparations for a transport of 800 Jews, which took place in the
Cologne trade center. Nurses were on hand and a doctor. Of course I
did not notice any enthusiasm." As Schäfer had done, therefore, he
defended himself by claiming that he was not involved in the physical
aspects of the deportations themselves, that the Jews were well
treated as long as they were in Cologne, and that he did not and
could not have known what was to become of them after they had been
deported. And most important, he had only passed along orders from
those above him to those below him in the chain of command. Convicted
of the same minor offense that Schäfer was convicted of, Sprinz was
given a three-year prison sentence minus the time he had already
served awaiting trial.

* * * * * * Matschke was also convicted of the same offense but
received only a two-year sentence. Although he admitted to having
been the head of the section of the Cologne Gestapo dealing with
Jewish affairs from 1943 on, he had only been involved, he said, in
the transport of the small number of Jews who were still residing in
Cologne after the main deportations had been completed in late summer
1942. From all that he had heard about the transports, everything had
proceeded smoothly, he explained, and he had acted in an official
capacity only and thus bore no personal responsibility. "There had
been no protests or complaints and everything had taken place without
a hitch. In my department, everything proceeded along purely official
lines."

* * * * * * In the typewritten summary of the final judgment in the
case, the court made it clear that it did not believe that these men
held more than marginal responsibility for what finally happened to
the Cologne Jews. Compared with the guilt of the people who were
truly responsible—who remained unnamed but whom the court referred to
as the "leading perpetrators"—the responsibility of these men was
deemed only modest. The "leading perpetrators," on the other hand,
bore such "unending guilt that their deeds could not be punished
adequately by any earthly court." The court pointed to several
factors that served to reduce even further the share in the guilt
attributable to Schäfer, Sprinz, and Matschke. All of these men had
led supposedly "unobjectionable lives," and each of them had made
some effort to ease the hardships faced by the unfortunate Jews.
Their guilt lay mainly in their foolish, but understandable,
adherence to an ideology and a leadership that had led them astray.
It is left for the reader of this document to assume that the court
believed these men's alibis that they had not known that the Jews
were to be murdered after they were deported. (It is important to
point out here that this document has never been made public and that
this particular reader is one of the first to gain access to it.) The
court ruled that these men were not the truly guilty culprits because
each had merely followed orders from his superiors; Schäfer and
Sprinz had served at such a high level of command that they had
little to nothing to do with the actual deportations; and Matschke
came so late to the Cologne Gestapo as to have been involved in only
a limited number of deportations. The identities of the truly guilty
culprits remained unspecified.

* * * * * * This verdict settled the case at the time. It also set a
precedent for the trials and investigations in other German
localities that came several years later. It made clear that the new
German state was not about to exact heavy penalties from a large
number of past wrongdoers. The cases against former Gestapo and SS
men and Nazi Party officials would, with few exceptions, be confined
to handing out mild sentences in individual cases of wrongdoing in
relatively minor but highly specific matters, as opposed to heavy
sentences for the many people involved in more momentous, though less
well defined, acts of inhumanity. The verdict in this Cologne case
and those that followed it elsewhere may have helped the new German
nation get on with the pressing business of its present and future by
covering over some gaping sores from its past. But such verdicts did
not resolve many important questions about the nature of the Nazi
terror and the murder of the Jews of Cologne and the rest of Germany.
Many of these questions continue to burn painfully today. To what
degree were rank-and-file Gestapo officers below the leadership level
culpable for the murder of the German Jews? How were the deportations
organized locally, and who specifically carried out the deportation
orders? To what extent were local party officials and average
citizens aware of and involved in the deportations and mass murder?
And more broadly, how pervasive was the Nazi terror for average
citizens, and how much freedom of action did they have? How did the
terror work on an everyday basis?

* * * * * * The Cologne prosecutor's office chose to put only three
top Gestapo leaders, all comfortable targets, on trial. This decision
came after an extensive investigation of all identifiable Cologne
Gestapo officers, an investigation that took the Cologne prosecutor's
office and the police several years to conclude. One does not have to
have read the long documentary trial evidence generated by this
investigation to wonder why only these three officers were chosen.
These documents do reveal, however, ample grounds to incriminate many
more people than were finally put on trial. One cannot avoid coming
to the cynical conclusion that these three people were chosen as
particularly malevolent fall guys with whom the Cologne population
and the Federal Republic could easily dispense, thereby putting the
matter to rest. In so doing, many other Gestapo officers, party
officials, and individual citizens who also took part in,
facilitated, or profited from the deportation and murder of the
Cologne Jews would not have to atone for their actions. In Cologne as
elsewhere in Germany, "normal" Gestapo officers and other former
Nazis and Nazi sympathizers would never have to face justice for
putting the most stupendous crime of the century into motion.

* * * * * * For example, Karl Löffler, the head of the "Jewish desk"
of the Cologne Gestapo during the deportations of 1941 and 1942, and
his counterparts in other German cities, such as Richard Schulenburg
of the Krefeld Gestapo, were spared by this precedent. Whereas local
Gestapo chiefs like Schäfer and Sprinz were sometimes punished, local
Eichmanns like Löffler and Schulenburg almost never were. Löffler's
activities were examined in the investigation preceding the trial,
but he served only as a witness in the trial itself. It will be
illuminating to explore why Moritz Goldschmidt, one of the seven
people in the audience for the Schäfer trial and a man who served as
the first and probably most important witness in the entire
investigation and trial itself, chose to deflect the finger of blame
away from Löffler. In his testimony he asserted that Löffler had been
reassigned to the Gestapo in Brussels in the fall of 1941, before the
deportations took place. In reality, Löffler first went to Brussels
in the fall of 1942, after the main waves of deported Cologne Jews
had ridden off to their deaths in train cars.

* * * * * * The precedent set by the Cologne case may have allowed
Löffler and other responsible people to get off scot-free, but the
careers, actions, and mentalities of individuals like Löffler and
other Gestapo officers and policemen bear closer examination if we
are to understand how the crime of the century was perpetrated in the
Nazi years and how it was dealt with in the first decades of the
Federal Republic. In seeking an understanding of this crime in
particular, and of Nazi terror in general, it will be necessary to
compare it with the myriad crimes of the Gestapo officers, German
justice and lay officials, and common citizens who helped ensure the
success of dictatorial terror and pave the way for mass murder in the
Third Reich.

* * * * * * This book focuses therefore on both the role of
individuals, such as Gestapo officers and ordinary citizens, and the
role of the society in making terror work. While stressing the
centrality of Jewish persecution in the Nazi example of terror, it
also examines more than one thousand individual cases of persecution,
and sometimes protest, pertaining to the entire spectrum of people
who suffered from Nazi terror or acted to make it possible. It deals
in flesh-and-blood narratives—sometimes quite graphically, to convey
a true sense of how the terror operated—as well as in facts and
statistics to tell the story and to provide an explanation of the
terror that was perhaps the defining characteristic of the Nazi
dictatorship.

* * * * * * Many of the central questions this book confronts have
already been mentioned or alluded to in the discussion above. A
fuller list includes the following: How did the terror affect the
everyday lives of German citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, in
average German communities? What was the progression of the terror
over time? Who suffered the most from it, and who suffered the least?

* * * * * * How did the central instrument of the terror, the
Gestapo, function? How powerful and how pervasive was it? How did
other "justice" organs work, such as the prosecutors' offices and the
"Special Courts" (Sondergerichte) set up to try political offenses in
the Third Reich? What biases did they display?

* * * * * * Who carried out the terror, and how responsible and
culpable were they individually? What kinds of backgrounds did
Gestapo officers, for example, come from? What was their mentality?
Were they, as they claimed after the war, simply "normal" police
officers who only followed orders and did their duty with regard to
the existing laws and without any particular malice on their part?

* * * * * * How did individual German citizens respond to the Nazi
terror? What differentiates the people who protested against it from
those who acted to support it? How involved were common German
citizens in the policing and control of their fellow citizens? What
motivated citizens to denounce their neighbors, work colleagues, and
relatives? How often did such denunciations occur?

* * * * * * How did the degradation, expropriation, and mass murder
of the Jews play out in individual German communities? How much were
common citizens involved? What did they and the local Nazi officials
know about the fate of the Jews?

* * * * * * What happened to the perpetrators in the Federal Republic
after the war? How did they seek to avoid prosecution, resume their
careers, and reclaim their pensions? Who helped them achieve these
goals?

THE EVOLVING INTERPRETATION OF THE TERROR

The last half-century has witnessed an enormous outpouring of books
and articles on nearly all aspects of Nazi society, and many people
have made excellent contributions to the understanding of the terror
that reigned in Germany for the twelve and a half years of that
society's existence. As German society has shown an ever greater
willingness to open its archives and to confront squarely the most
painful chapter in its recent history, German scholars have joined
forces with scholars from several other countries in what is now an
international and cooperative effort that has exploded many of the old
myths about Nazi terror. The following discussion acquaints the reader
with some of the exemplary work done on the topic and concludes with a
statement about the overarching interpretation that this book
provides.

* * * * * * The scholarship on Nazi terror has progressed through at
least three distinct stages. The first two stages each lasted for
about two decades, and the third stage has gained momentum throughout
the 1990s. Several variables distinguish these stages and their
differing versions of what the terror was, how it operated, and who
bears responsibility for it: the centrality or marginality of the
Holocaust; the centrality or marginality of Hitler personally; the
power and pervasiveness of the Gestapo; the focus of the
investigation of the terror (on the highest echelons of German
society, where the terror was centrally ordered and organized by the
Berlin leadership, or on individual localities, where it was carried
out); the nature of the Nazi state's ruling apparatus; the nature and
extent of protest and dissidence; the role played by common citizens
in their own policing; and the people who have conducted the most
influential research on the subject.

* * * * * * The first stage began at the end of the Second World War
and lasted until the late 1960s. At the beginning of this period the
world was reeling from revelations about the concentration camps and
the Holocaust. Enriched by the many eyewitness accounts that soon
appeared—published by former concentration camp inmates and some of
Hitler's former henchmen—formal scholarship on the terror focused on
the role of Hitler and the central organs of the terror apparatus in
Berlin and on the disastrous fate of the Jews. German scholars were
largely discredited at this time for having either supported or gone
along with Hitler, so the bulk of the significant work on the subject
came from the pens of foreigners and German emigré scholars living
abroad. The archival sources for much of this work were limited. Even
though Raul Hilberg and some others did make solid use of the
voluminous Nuremberg trial records, most researchers believed that
nearly all useful local archival sources were either lost during the
bombings or destroyed by the Gestapo and other Nazi Party officials
at the end of the war.

* * * * * * The guiding assumptions of this primarily top-down
history were that a maniacal Hitler was firmly in command of a
smoothly functioning, monolithic state and party apparatus that
controlled the German population by means of unrestricted terror. At
the center of this terror stood a supposedly all-powerful,
all-knowing, and omnipresent secret police empire spearheaded by the
Gestapo. First appearing in Berlin in April 1933, when Hitler had
been in power for only three months, the Gestapo shortly thereafter
established large central posts in Germany's major cities and smaller
outposts in the rest of Germany's communities. Allegedly endowed with
a huge army of specially trained agents and spies and employing
advanced technical means of surveillance, the Gestapo, like the
"thought police" of George Orwell's terrifying postwar novel 1984,
had more than sufficient means to keep close tabs at all times on all
citizens—from Jews, Communists, and other "enemies" of the regime to
the most insignificant members of German society.

* * * * * * Emphasizing the historic roots of anti-Semitism and
racism in her famous study of the origins of totalitarianism
published six years after the end of the war, Hannah Arendt was one
of the first to examine the nature and implementation of the terror
in Nazi (and to a lesser extent Soviet) society. Totalitarianism, she
argued, threatens nearly all citizens. Totalitarian societies like
Nazi Germany employ "a system of ubiquitous spying, where everybody
may be a police agent and each individual feels himself under
constant surveillance." Secrecy and the secret police prevail to such
an extent that victims disappear without leaving a trace. "The secret
police ... sees to it that the victim never existed at all."

* * * * * * Many scholars soon elaborated on Arendt's Orwellian
argument. The French author of one of the earliest books on the
Gestapo explained in a chapter he entitled "The Gestapo Is
Everywhere" that

the Gestapo acted on its own account by secretly installing
microphones and tape recorders in the homes of suspects. In the
absence of the victim, or on the pretext of making repairs or of
checking the telephone or the electric installations, a few
microphones were discreetly installed, allowing the individual to
be spied upon even in the bosom of his family. No one was safe
from this type of practice.... Spying became so universal that
nobody could feel safe.

* * * * * * The second stage in the evolving interpretation of the
Nazi terror began in the mid-1960s and lasted until the end of the
1980s. During this stage German scholars started to come to grips
with their own recent history. This effort would cause considerable
pain and controversy. So much so, that by the mid-1980s nearly the
entire German intellectual establishment had become embroiled in an
acrimonious debate (Historikerstreit) played out in leading
newspapers and national media about the uniqueness of the Holocaust
and how it and Germany's Nazi past should be properly studied and
understood. Its early phases, however, started out more tamely. It
was heralded in the mid to late 1960s by the appearance of seminal
works by, among others, the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf on the
endemic weakness of democracy in German society, the historian Martin
Broszat on the nature and structure of the German dictatorship, and
the former Nazi architect and armament minister Albert Speer on
Hitler's character and daily routine. The initial effect of these
works was to recast the view of the German dictatorship and the
German people in a more nuanced and also somewhat more favorable
light.

* * * * * * Guilt continued to be heaped onto the person of Adolf
Hitler, but his hold, and that of his regime, over the society was
now seen as having been more tenuous than previously believed.
Instead of running a tight ship of state over a willing and united
population, Hitler's top brass were now portrayed as having been rent
by internal divisions, overlapping jurisdictions, and conflicting
goals. The population was also seen as having been more diverse. If
not always on the brink of full-scale resistance and outright
revolution, the German citizenry had been made up of a wide variety
of individuals, many of whom were seething with discontent and
searching for ways to express their disagreements with the leadership
through minor but nonetheless significant expressions of their
unhappiness.

* * * * * * In this new wave of more German-dominated scholarship,
the persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust moved from the center
to the periphery of the debate. Perhaps unintentionally, but
nonetheless noticeably, the pioneering works of Broszat and
Dahrendorf and the revelations of the former Nazi Speer hardly
touched on the Jews and the Holocaust. In the second wave of
scholarship in this stage, in the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s,
following the lead of Broszat and company, a new consensus began to
emerge that the German population was less anti-Semitic, and the
plight of the Jews less important to their support for the Nazi
dictatorship, than was previously thought. Many Germans, it was
shown, had been appalled by the barbarous Kristallnacht pogroms of
November 9 and 10, 1938; that reaction forced the Nazi leadership to
put pressure on and later murder the Jews in greater secrecy. Only a
few dyed-in-the-wool Nazis, it was now believed, had been animated by
the Jews' misfortunes. Most Germans seemed to have cared little about
the issue. As the British historian Ian Kershaw explained in one of
his two influential books published in the early 1980s treating the
mood and morale of the German citizenry, "the road to Auschwitz was
built by hate, but paved with indifference."

* * * * * * Although Kershaw's evaluation of the extent of the German
population's anti-Semitism is important in itself, his careful study
of local opinion formation in the Third Reich focuses even more on
the issues of day-to-day compliance and noncompliance by average
German citizens. Kershaw was involved in a large project on this
theme, entitled "Bavaria in the NS Period," that was led by Broszat
and published in six influential volumes between 1977 and 1983. He
and others working on this and on other projects of the time helped
move the focus of the study of the Nazi terror away from the top
leadership in Berlin to the plight of the average German citizen
living in the provinces of the Third Reich. This new emphasis on the
history of everyday life, though adding needed texture and lifeblood
to Broszat's and the other pioneers' scholarship of the period,
basically confirmed the arguments originally laid out in a more macro
fashion by their senior colleagues. The analysis carried on in this
period of Gestapo and Social Democratic Party in exile (SOPADE) mood
and morale reports and of local court documents and other local
records buttressed the arguments of Broszat and others that there was
considerable disharmony and disunity at all levels in Nazi society.

* * * * * * These new studies also helped to illustrate Broszat's
argument that Hitler was crucial to the Nazi movement. Without his
guiding hand, Broszat argued, the Third Reich would simply have
crumbled into disarray and discord. A veritable cottage industry of
studies on the subjects of resistance and persecution developed at
this time, suggesting at least implicitly that the Third Reich could
not possibly have survived Hitler's death. As Edelweiss Pirates,
swing youth, and other youngsters refused to conform to Nazi dictates
and struggled with increasing vehemence against Hitler Youth and
local Nazi Party leaders, their parents grumbled constantly about
lower wages, harsher conditions, and the Nazi leadership.
Additionally, a barrage of studies pointed to the sufferings and
discontent of Communists, clergymen, religious sects, women, and
others who may not always have expressed their dissatisfaction in
openly rebellious ways but were nevertheless longing for a way out of
the Nazi straitjacket. According to Kershaw, Broszat, and several
others, only Hitler continued to be held in esteem; only Hitler could
have kept this turbulent society intact.

* * * * * * The high degree of discord these studies uncovered and
their new focus on the daily lives and aspirations of common Germans
prepared the way for the third and currently reigning perspective on
the Nazi terror. Impressed by the demonstration that many Germans
found ways of disobeying Nazi dictates in their everyday lives, a new
wave of scholars began questioning how this could have been possible
if the Gestapo and the other organs of the terror were as powerful
and pervasive as previously thought. A wholesale reevaluation of the
Nazi terror apparatus and of the role of ordinary Germans in the
terror and the Holocaust has resulted.

* * * * * * The second stage of the scholarly research on and
interpretation of the Nazi terror often highlighted the resistance to
the terror and the victims of the terror, while at the same time
continuing to assume that the terror was total even if the organs of
the Nazi power structure were structurally polycratic instead of
monolithic. In contrast, the newest perspective on the terror rejects
outright the notion that the terror was total and has a far more
negative view of the role played by common German citizens. Beginning
as the Historikerstreit began to cool down in the late 1980s and
gaining momentum throughout the 1990s, a number of important studies
have scrutinized the powers and activities of local police and
judicial organizations, stressing the role that common citizens
played in the execution of Nazi justice and social control. Using
records either believed to have been destroyed or not previously
accessible to scholarly investigation, like local Gestapo and Special
Court case files, these studies have produced some provocative
findings. They have shown that the Gestapo often had less manpower,
fewer spies, and less means at its disposal to control the population
than had been assumed by nearly everyone since the Nazi period came
to an end. With its limited resources, the Gestapo had to rely
heavily on the civilian population as a source of information. This
information seldom came from paid informants; rather it was usually
supplied by plain citizens acting out of a wide variety of
motivations. Angry neighbors, bitter in-laws, and disgruntled work
colleagues frequently used the state's secret police apparatus to
settle their personal and often petty scores. By means of political
denunciations, common citizens frequently served as the eyes and ears
of the Gestapo. As former head of the Cologne Gestapo Dr. Schäfer had
testified in his trial, the "officers let things come to them."

* * * * * * According to the new argument, then, the population
largely controlled itself. Collaboration and collusion characterize
the activities of the German people much more than meaningful
resistance and true dissent. In the words of the German scholars
Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul, who in 1991 published an
exemplary study of the everyday activities of the terror apparatus in
the Saarland:

Our study shows over and over again that what in other places
has been celebrated as resistance, was merely a mixture of
unintentional polycratic conflicts, normal social conflict
behavior and pious wishes of exiles.... Neither the propaganda
nor the terror were totally effective. There were many niches
left over in which the people could conduct themselves quite
normally. Their behavior inside of these not completely
"coordinated" spaces or inside of the polycratic power structure
had nothing to do with resistance and opposition.

* * * * * * The opening up of previously inaccessible records and the
intense interest in local resistance activity and deviant behavior in
the Third Reich that was generated in the 1970s and 1980s have also
led to a reappraisal of the functioning of German courts and other
justice organs in Nazi society. Several works have appeared in recent
years that investigate the role played by judges, prosecuting
attorneys, and the courts in helping to keep the population in line.
The effect of these studies is to demonstrate that the more "normal"
legal officials of the Third Reich certainly did not impart
"positivistic" impartial justice, as many justice personnel claimed
after the war. Prosecuting attorneys and judges, just like Gestapo
officers, acting at both the local and national level, dispensed
arbitrary and biased justice. Whereas some used their authority
almost benignly, others eagerly pushed for maximum penalties for
minor misbehavior. On the one hand, a mild political offense like
listening to BBC during the war years could have resulted in a
dismissal before going to trial at a local court, an acquittal, or a
minor sentence, all depending on the recommendation and judgment of
the police, prosecutors, and judges. On the other hand, it could have
led in extreme cases to a referral to Roland Freisler's feared
People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) in Berlin, where the death sentence
was the expected outcome.

* * * * * * The reevaluation of the Gestapo and the justice system,
and of the people's role in helping them operate, has done much to
demystify the Nazi terror apparatus. Detailed archival evidence
laying bare the actual workings of the Nazi terror at the grassroots
level has been amassed and analyzed by resourceful scholars. No
longer can we believe that the Gestapo itself was everywhere and that
the power of the state over the individual was total. Nor can we
continue to sort the German people into one of two polar opposite
camps, with one camp consisting of blind followers of the Führer and
the other camp of guiltless victims and resistance fighters. Although
the sufferings of large numbers of Germans and many Germans'
discontent with various aspects of the Nazi dictatorship have been
well documented, the evidence suggests that a great majority of the
German population found ways to accommodate the Nazi regime, despite
whatever inner reservations they might have had. It also suggests
that considerable numbers of ordinary citizens used the repressive
political means afforded them by the Nazi dictatorship, especially
through the vehicle of political denunciations, to their own
advantage.

* * * * * * Echoing these disturbing revelations about the
participation of ordinary German citizens in Nazi terror, landmark
books published in the early and mid-1990s by the American scholars
Christopher R. Browning and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen have demonstrated
chillingly that ordinary Germans were also more active than
previously believed in the perpetration of the Holocaust. A fierce
scholarly debate, reminiscent of the German Historikerstreit of the
1980s, has ensued, but this time the controversy began in the United
States before it spread to Germany and then around the world. There
are many layers to the debate, but its epicenter is clearly
Goldhagen's best-seller Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust, and especially his contention that common
German citizens willingly killed Jews during the Holocaust because
they were motivated by what he claims was a historic and uniquely
German "eliminationist anti-Semitism." One of Goldhagen's foremost
critics is Christopher Browning, who argues in Ordinary Men: Reserve
Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland that Germans
acted no differently than people from any country might have acted in
their extreme situation. Nevertheless, though he comes to different
conclusions, much of the empirical evidence he employs in his equally
graphic portrait of the murderous activities of reserve German
policemen during the Holocaust differs in only minor ways from the
evidence Goldhagen presents. Thus, both Browning and Goldhagen relate
essentially the same scenario: sizable numbers of ordinary, often
middle-aged German civilians, with little to no ideological
indoctrination or training, were called up for brief periods during
the war as reserve policemen all over eastern Europe to shoot
thousands of defenseless Jews at point-blank range and then allowed
to return to their normal civilian lives and families in Germany.

* * * * * * Further casting a pall on the ordinary German
population's involvement in Nazi crimes has been a haunting
exhibition attended by large audiences in many of Germany's leading
cities in the last few years. Organized by the Hamburger Institute
for Social Research and entitled "Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der
Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944" (War of Annihilation: The Crimes of the
German Army, 1941 to 1944), this exhibition displays scores of
photographs and other visual materials to document the regular German
army's direct involvement in the criminal atrocities perpetrated
against Jewish and other eastern European civilians during the Second
World War. Combining these materials with the evidence provided by
Browning and Goldhagen, it is no longer possible to maintain that the
Holocaust was perpetrated exclusively, or even especially it seems,
by elite Nazi special-forces units, for average German citizens
formed the core of both the reserve police battalions and the German
army.

* * * * * * As Daniel Goldhagen's best-seller and the well-attended
exhibition on the crimes of the German army demonstrate, the subject
of Nazi terror and Nazi crimes has riveted popular audiences and
fueled scholarly controversies around the world in ways that would
have seemed unimaginable not long after the Second World War ended
over a half-century ago. In the immediate postwar decades people
everywhere wanted to lay to rest the trauma of the war and the
Holocaust so that they could move forward to rebuild their societies
and their lives, but today the world's thirst for new knowledge about
the leading example of terror and inhumanity in the twentieth century
seems unquenchable. Given that there remains much to be discovered
and understood about how the Nazi terror operated, whom it affected
most, and who was most culpable for perpetrating its crimes against
humanity, and given that terror, mass murder, and crimes against
humanity continue to threaten citizens in many countries long after
Hitler's death, it is likely that the study of Nazi terror will
continue to flourish well into the twenty-first century.

* * * * * * To help ensure that the future study of the Nazi terror
rests on a secure foundation, this book aims to provide an assessment
that both places the burgeoning literature on the terror in a proper
and clear perspective and casts new light on how it operated. Over
the past fifty years, as already mentioned, knowledge about the
terror has expanded enormously and the dominant interpretation of the
terror today rests on far better and more plentiful evidence than the
interpretations of several decades ago. There are signs, however,
that in the scholarly zeal to uncover more and more new information
about the terror and to unmask ever wider groups of people who were
involved in perpetrating it, the interpretation of the terror is
starting to get out of balance.

* * * * * * Fifty years ago, when the first stage in the scholarship
on the terror began, it was assumed that the leading organ of the
terror, the Gestapo, was all-powerful and all-knowing. Today scholars
argue that the Gestapo was relatively weak. With few officers and few
spies, the Gestapo, they argue, was almost completely dependent on
civilian denunciations as its source of information. Fifty years ago
scholars assumed that nearly the entire German population was
terrorized by the Gestapo and the other organs of Nazi repression.
Today the ordinary German population is under indictment for having
played a leading role in the terror itself, charged with voluntarily
providing the Gestapo with information about fellow citizens and
willingly participating in the mass murder of the Jews. At the
Nuremberg Trials more than fifty years ago, the Gestapo was branded a
criminal organization. Today books and articles portray Gestapo
officers as more or less "normal" police officers, if overly
career-minded and eager.

* * * * * * Many ordinary Germans certainly did participate in the
Nazi terror and the Holocaust. The Gestapo clearly had limited
manpower and resources. Indeed, the Nazi terror never became fully
total, and ordinary Germans enjoyed considerable space to vent their
everyday frustrations with Nazi policies and leaders without
inordinate fear of arrest and prosecution. These are by now
uncontestable facts for which this book will provide much fresh
evidence. But the newest perspective on the terror, although it is to
be credited for helping to bring these facts to light, needs to be
revised, for several important reasons.

* * * * * * The newest perspective on the Nazi terror has begun to
stress the importance of the role played by the ordinary German
population to such an extent that it is beginning to lose sight of
the fact that the terror would not have existed at all had it not
been put into motion by the Nazi leadership and led by the Gestapo.
This shift in focus has also begun to underestimate the ruthless
effectiveness of the Gestapo; indeed, the newest perspective is
nearly at the point of excusing Gestapo officers for their
overwhelming culpability. Finally, the newest perspective on the
terror needs revision because, in its determination to debunk what
some of its leaders refer to as "the myth of `popular opposition' and
`Resistenz,'" it undervalues the resistance activity that did take
place. It is undoubtedly true that, as Mallmann and Paul note, "the
greatest amount of dissent did not develop into opposition and
resistance activity ... that the basic support of the Third Reich
functioned until the bitter end." But it is also true that many
people—among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses,
clergymen, and others—acted consciously and bravely at various times
during the Third Reich to try to undermine the Nazi regime. Even
though they were unsuccessful, they, their efforts, and their
suffering should not be forgotten.

* * * * * * As this book demonstrates, the key to understanding the
sometimes brutal, sometimes quasi-legalistic, but always effective
Nazi terror lies in its selective nature. Never implemented in a
blanket or indiscriminate fashion, it specifically targeted and
ruthlessly moved against the Nazi regime's racial, political, and
social enemies; at the same time it often ignored or dismissed
expressions of nonconformity and mild disobedience on the part of
other German citizens. This dualistic treatment of different sectors
of the German population helped the Nazi regime garner legitimacy and
support among the populace. Indeed, many Germans perceived the terror
not as a personal threat to them but as something that served their
interests by removing threats to their material well-being and to
their sense of community and propriety. This acceptance helped
guarantee that the leading organs of the terror, like the Gestapo,
would not be hampered by limitations to their manpower and means.

* * * * * * Jews were ultimately the foremost targets of the terror.
But in the early years of Nazi rule the terror was applied with
equal, and sometimes even greater, force against Communist and other
leftist functionaries and activists. Once the threat from the
political left was eliminated (by the mid-1930s), the terror began to
concentrate on silencing potential sources of opposition in religious
circles and on removing from society what the Nazi regime deemed
social outsiders, such as homosexuals, career criminals, and the
physically and mentally disabled. During the war the terror reached
its most drastic phase, with the mass murder of the Jews serving as
the most ominous example of its fury.

* * * * * * Although many German citizens belonged to one or more of
the targeted groups, most did not, and consequently most Germans
suffered not at all from the terror. There was no need to target them
because most Germans remained loyal to the Nazi leadership and
supported it voluntarily from the beginning to the end of the Third
Reich, if to varying degrees. Although some Germans strongly agreed
with the regime's anti-Semitic and antihumanitarian policies, many
did not. In the same vein, some Germans voluntarily spied on and
denounced their neighbors and coworkers to the Nazi authorities, but
the overwhelming majority of German citizens did not. Furthermore,
civilian denunciations were typically made for personal and petty
reasons against normally law-abiding citizens whom the Gestapo seldom
chose to punish severely, if at all. It remains true, however, that
the civilian German population figured heavily in its own control,
and its collusion and accommodation with the Nazi regime made the
Nazis' crimes against humanity possible.

* * * * * * It is necessary not to overlook the ordinary German
population's complicity in Nazi crimes. It is also necessary to
realize that most Germans were motivated not by a willful intent to
harm others but by a mixture of cowardice, apathy, and a slavish
obedience to authority. After the war Gestapo officers and other Nazi
authorities tried to justify their participation in Nazi crimes by
arguing that they had been similarly motivated. Although these
excuses are not to be dismissed out of hand, especially since they
were frequently accepted by prosecuting bodies as well as by
influential members of the local communities of these officers, the
analysis in this book of the backgrounds, motivations, and actions of
Gestapo officers who cruelly, efficiently, and willfully implemented
the Nazi terror uncovers the hollowness of their alibis. These not so
"normal" men, though enjoying considerable support from many in the
German population both during the Nazi years and afterward in the
Federal Republic of Germany, need to be seen as the arch perpetrators
they most certainly were. If they are not to be held accountable in
historical memory, then almost nobody can be.

(C) 1999 Eric A. Johnson All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-465-04906-0

[jum...@my-deja.com]

Vol. 105 - April 1998 - No. 4

Saving the
Environment from the Environmentalists
Peter W. Huber

AS A political movement, environmentalism was invented by a
conservative Republican. He loved wild animals. He particularly
loved to shoot them.

In the spring of 1908, with time running out on his second term,
President Theodore Roosevelt held a hugely successful conference
on conservation. The report that emerged, T.R. would declare,
was "one of the most fundamentally important documents ever laid
before the American people." He promptly called a hemispheric
conference on the same theme, and was working on a global one
when he left office in March 1909. He had learned his
conservation the hard way. After Grover Cleveland defeated the
Republicans in 1884, T.R. returned to his Chimney Butte ranch in
the Dakota Territory with plans to increase his cattle herd
fivefold. Armed neighbors came by to complain. As H.W Brands
recounts in his recent T.R.: The Last Romantic, "the potential
for overstocking the range weighed constantly on the minds of
the ranchers of the plains." Although Roosevelt faced down his
angry neighbors, he also set about finding a political solution
to the problem that concerned them, forming and becoming
president of the Little Missouri Stockmen's Association. He
would only regret not starting earlier. The Dakota pastures were
badly overgrazed in the summer of 1886, and many herds, T.R.'s
among them, were destroyed in the dreadfully harsh winter that
followed.

Occupying the White House two decades later, T.R. and his chief
forester, Gifford Pinchot, would be the first to apply the word
"conservation" to describe environmental policy. By then,
Roosevelt had come to view the misuse of natural resources as
"the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other
problem of our national life." THE ADMINISTRATION of Theodore
Roosevelt was certainly not the first to show such concern.
Congress had proclaimed Yellowstone a national park in 1872.
Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant national parks were
established in 1890. The first U.S. forest reserve, forerunner
of the national forests, was proclaimed in the area around
Yellowstone National Park in 1891. Presidents Harrison,
Cleveland, and McKinley transferred some 50 million acres of
timberland into the reserve system.

T.R.'s distinction was to give conservation its name and, more
importantly, to transform it into an enduringly popular
political movement. On the way to adding 150 million more acres
to the country's forest reserves, he would persuade the great
mass of ordinary Americans that conservation was in their own
best interests. What with two world wars and a depression
intervening, it would take another six decades to complete a
federal legal framework for conservation. In the meantime, much
occurred to affect conventional notions of the environment. The
radioactive aftermath of Hiroshima taught a first, ghastly
lesson about insidious environmental poison. There followed
popularized accounts of industrial equivalents of Hiroshima --
fallout without the bomb. Rachel Carson defined the new genre in
1962, with the publication of The Silent Spring, about the
dangers of pesticides.

All this became reflected in law. The Clean Air, Clean Water,
and Resource Conservation and Recovery Acts of the 1960's, like
the Endangered Species Act passed unanimously by the Senate in
1973, seemed to be cut from the same old conservationist cloth
woven by T.R. (though they concerned smoke, sewage, and
landfills rather than parks and mountains). But even as they
completed and somewhat extended the framework for traditional
conservation, these laws also quietly launched a new era -- the
era of environmentalism.

Regulating multifarious forms of pollution -- the purpose of the
clean-air, clean-water, and landfill acts -- required a more
elaborate regulatory structure than regulating parks and
reserves. President Nixon had to establish a new cabinet-level
body, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to take charge.
More significantly, each of the laws also included something
quite new: an open-ended "toxics" provision, a general
invitation to monitor the micro-environment for poisons and
regulate them as needed. Even the Endangered Species Act, though
written mainly with the likes of cougars in mind, was drafted
broadly enough to protect unpleasant rodents like the kangaroo
rat, and would soon be amended to prevent not only hunting but
also "harming," which a federal court then construed to

cover "habitat modification." A mere statutory afterthought in
the 1960's, the micro-environment was getting entire acts of its
own a decade later. The Toxic Substances Control Act was
promulgated in 1976. Then, in 1980, came Superfund. And thus,
somewhere between Vietnam and the discovery of alarming
concentrations of chemicals in the soil and groundwater at a
town in upstate New York called Love Canal, a legal
infrastructure for the new environmentalism slipped into place.
Conservation was not abandoned. But politically it was
overtaken, subsumed into something bigger. Bigger precisely
because it concerned the very small.

OVER TIME, the distinctions between conservation and
environmentalism have been obscured. But they really are two
different schools. Conservation happens in places we can see,
and draw on a map. Yellowstone starts here and ends there.
Bison, eagles, and rivers are only somewhat harder to track.

T.R. had no trouble seeing the things that made him a
conservationist. Forests were being leveled, ranges overgrazed,
and game depleted. Hunters and hikers, cattlemen, farmers, and
bird-watchers could easily grasp all this, too. The political
choices T.R. was urging were based on these considerations.
Americans would want to preserve Yellowstone for the same reason
they might some day wish to climb Everest: because it was there,
because they knew it was there, and because they desired to keep
it there. If conservation happens in places we can see,
micro-environmentalism happens everywhere. The microcosm is so
populous, the forces of dispersion so inexorable, that in every
breath we take we inhale many of the very molecules once
breathed by Moses and Caesar. At that level of things,
everything gets polluted, even though no one can see it, and it
is all too easy to suggest causes and effects. Fish die, frogs
are deformed, breast cancers proliferate, immune systems
collapse, sperm counts plummet, learning disabilities multiply:
every time, invisible toxics are assumed to be the culprit.

To believe wholeheartedly in micro-environmentalism one must
either be a savant or put a great deal of trust in savants. In
particular, one must put one's trust in computer models. The
model is everything. Only the model can say just where the
dioxin came from, or how it may affect our cellular protein.
Only the model will tell us whether our backyard barbecues
(collectively, of course) are going to alter rainfall in Rwanda.
OnIy the model can explain why a relentless pursuit of the
invisible -- halogenated hydrocarbons, heavy metals, or
pesticides -- will save birds or cut cancer rates. The cry of
the loon gives way to the hum of the computer. T.R. trades in
his double-barreled shotgun for a spectrometer. But precisely
because it involves things so very small, the microcosm requires
management that is very large. Old-style conservationists
maintained reasonably clean lines between private and public
space. They may have debated how many Winnebagos to accommodate
in Yellowstone, how much logging, hunting, fishing, or drilling
for oil to tolerate on federal reserves, but the debates were
confined by well-demarcated boundaries. Everyone knew where
public authority began and ended. Yellowstone required
management of a place, not a populace. Municipal sewer pipes and
factory smokestacks may have required more management, but still
of a conventional kind. The new models are completely different,
so different that they are tended by a new oligarchy, a
priesthood of scientists, regulators, and lawyers.

With detectors and computers that claim to count everything
everywhere, micro-environmentalism never has to stop. With the
right models in hand, it is easy to conclude that your light
bulb, flush toilet, and hair spray, your washing machine and
refrigerator and compost heap, are all of legitimate interest to
the authorities. Nothing is too small, too personal, too close
to home to drop beneath the new environmental radar. It is not
Yellowstone that has to be fenced, but humanity itself That
requires a missionary spirit, a zealous willingness to work door
to door. It requires propagandists at the EPA, lesson plans in
public schools, and sermons from the modern pulpit. Children are
taught to enlighten -- perhaps even to denounce their
backsliding parents.

AT THIS point, environmental discourse often degenerates into a
fractious quarrel about underlying facts. One side insists that
tetraethyl lead, pseudo-estrogen, and low-frequency
electromagnetic radiation seriously harm human health. The other
side says they do not. One side says these things will hurt
birds, frogs, and forests, and have already done so. The other
side says they have not and will not.

One might suppose that science would settle such disputes. But
it cannot. In a classic essay from 1972, the nuclear physicist
Alvin Weinberg explained why. He coined a term, "trans-science,"
to describe the study of problems too large, diffuse, rare, or
long-term to be resolved by scientific means. It would, for
instance, take eight billion mice to perform a statistically
significant test of the health effects of radiation at exposure
levels the EPA deems to be "safe." The model used to set that
threshold may be right, or it may be way off; the only certainty
is that no eight-billion-mouse experiment is going to happen.

The same goes for any model of very-low-probability accidents --
an earthquake precipitating the collapse of the Hoover dam, say,
leading to the inundation of the Imperial Valley of California.
Statistical models can be built, and have been, but their
critical, constituent parts cannot be tested. And similarly with
all the most far-reaching models of micro-environmentalism, a
realm of huge populations (molecules, particles) paired with
very weak, or slow effects. Whether we are talking about global
warming, ozone depletion, species extinction, radiation,
halogens, or heavy metals, whether the concern is for humans or
frogs, redwoods or sandworts, the time frames are too long, the
effects too diffuse, the confounding variables too numerous.

You may doubt this if you get your environmental trans-science
the way most people do, for the mass media always convey a
greater sense of certitude. There is no news in reporting "Dog
May or May Not Bite Man; Scientists Waffle." Instead, Newsweek
gives us: "Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of
the cooling trend. But they are almost unanimous in the view
that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the
rest of the century." That was in 1975. They were still almost
unanimous in 1992, according to Vice President Al Gore; but
about what? "Scientists have concluded -- almost unanimously --
that global warming is real and the time to act is now." (I owe
this juxtaposition to the Economist, December 20, 1997.) If the
papers give you the various sides of the trans-scientific debate
at all, they give it in different editions; sometimes, the
editions are published twenty years apart.

It is a fair bet that now and again a model will predict things
exactly right. It is a fairer bet that much of the time it will
not. Indeed, if overall statistics confirm anything, it is that
environmental toxins of human origin are not the main cause of
anything much. The more industrialized we become, the longer we
live and the healthier we grow. There is a model -- quite a
credible one, in fact -- that purports to prove that a steady
dose of low-level radiation, like the one you get living in a
high-altitude locale like Denver, or at some suitable distance
from Chernobyl, actually improves your health.

Nor are these the only problems. Suspect toxins vastly outnumber
modelers. The list of things we might reasonably worry about
grows faster than new rules can be published in the Federal
Register. But the axiology of science, its priorities of
investigation and research, the criteria for what to study and
what not to, are matters of taste, budget, values -- everything
but science itself. Scientific priorities, Weinberg notes, are
themselves trans-scientific. So are all the engineering issues,
the practical fixes that regulators prescribe. Science will
never tell us just how much scrubber or converter to stick on a
tailpipe or smokestack, how much sand and gravel at the end of a
sewer pipe, how much plastic and clay around the sides of a
dump. So, in the end, the micro-environmentalist just names his
favorite poison, and gets on with making sure that nobody drinks
it. The process is arrayed in the sumptuary of science, but the
key calls are political. Micro-environmentalism ends up as a
pursuit of politics by other means. THERE IS nothing wrong with
politics, of course -- T.R. reveled in them. But here too there
is an essential difference between the old conservationism and
the new environmentalism.

All the choices old-style conservationists make are
conventionally political. The Clinton administration recently
designated as a national monument a vast stretch of land in
Utah, from Bryce Canyon to the Colorado River, and from Boulder
to the Arizona state line. It was a controversial call: the area
includes the Kaiparowits plateau, where a Dutch-owned concern
was slated to begin mining massive coal formations. T.R. would
certainly have understood the controversy over the Kaiparowits
plateau, and would likely have approved the decision to
conserve.

In the new environmentalism, by contrast, conventional political
process decides little. The clauses about toxics that were
inserted as an afterthought in the clean-air and clean-water
acts, and as the central thought in Superfund, are just a stew
of words. They articulate no standard, set no budget, establish
no limits. In T.R.'s day they would not even have passed
constitutional muster. The Supreme Court would have cited the
"nondelegation doctrine," which, then at least, forbade Congress
to delegate responsibilities wholesale to the executive branch.

Today the delegation goes a lot further. Though nominally in the
hands of the President and overseen by Congress, political
authority for micro-environmental matters is now centered in the
new trans-scientific oligarchy. The key calls are still
stroke-of-the-pen politicaI, at bottom, but no ordinary observer
can see to the bottom. The only thing ordinary Americans may
dimly realize is that somewhere deep in the EPA it has been
deemed wise to spend more money digging up an industrial park in
New Jersey than ever was spent conserving a forest in the
Adirondacks.

Politicians know how to reward friends and punish enemies, but
democratic politics tends, as a whole, to be pretty even-handed.
When the old conservationists took your land, they paid you for
it, and the money came from taxes and user fees. That was about
as fair as the income tax -- not very, but fair enough. In the
new environmentalism, most of the taxing occurs off the public
books. There is a great deal of creeping, uncompensated
expropriation, and a freakish rain of ruin on those unlucky
enough to discover the wrong rodent, marsh, or buried chemical
on their land. Any amount of public environmental good, however
small, can entail any private financial burden, however large.

We have likewise lost all pragmatic sense of when enough is
enough. Conservation, driven as it must be through normal
political channels, can be pushed only so far. The Clinton
administration had to trade political chips for the Kaiparowits
plateau; nobody feared it would soon seize the rest of Utah.
Conservation works, politically, because the boundaries are
reasonably well defined and because it targets real estate, not
molecules. By contrast, most of the Northeast could be placed
in regulatory receivership for its countless micro-environmental
derelictions. Whereas hikers and hunters occupy a seat or two at
the political table, synthetic estrogens and carbon dioxide have
somehow escaped from the coils of politics, and the priesthood
can pursue them without restraint.

The "remedial" efforts that emerge from this pursuit end up
repelling even the intended beneficiaries. Contact with
Superfund has become socially poisonous. The very arrival of the
EPA in a community shatters property values, repels new
industrial investment, and throws a region's entire future into
doubt. Environmental regulation has in effect become a mirror
image of the problems it is supposed to solve, leaking into
society cancerous plumes of lawyers, administrators, and
consultants, the brokers of ignorance, speculation, and
uncertainty.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT was no Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau, or John Muir. These "preservationists" revered
wilderness for its own sake. Muir, founder of the Sierra Club,
adamantly opposed building the Tuolumne River dam in Yosemite to
supply water to San Francisco. T.R. supported it, consistent
with his "wise-use" philosophy of conservation. For T.R., the
whole of conserving nature was to continue using it -- forests
for lumber, ranges for grazing, rivers for electrical power.
Hunters, cattlemen, ranchers were to be involved in conservation
because it was in their own self-interest. "Despite occasional
moments of doubt," writes H.W. Brands, T.R. "passionately
believed in the capacity of the ordinary people of America to
act in the public welfare, once they were alerted to the true
nature of that welfare."

That was the faith that defined the first century of
conservationism. Congress had established Yellowstone National
Park as a "pleasuring ground" for people. The national parks
would include forests, seashores, lakeshores, and scenic trails
but also monuments, historical sites, and battlefields- -- man's
creation alongside nature's. T.R.'s distant cousin Franklin,
too, was an ardent conservationist, and during his presidency he
established his own share of national parks and forests; but he
also built roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, and skyscrapers.
Like T.R., he believed there was room enough in nature for man.

Today, the preservationist vision is back on top. The
quasi-pagan nature worship of the late 19th century has been
reworked as the trans-scientific demonology of the late 20th.
Those who believe in the new methods and models do not even
credit the distinction between conservation and preservation.
The computer models can link any human activity, however small,
to any environmental consequence, however large -- it is just a
matter of tracing out small effects through space and time, down
the rivers, up the food chains, and into the roots, the egg
shells, or the fatty tissue of the breast. This is what chaos
theorists call the "butterfly effect," traced out by computer.
If you believe in the computer, you must believe that the only
way really to "conserve" is not to touch at all.

IS IT possible to change course, and if so, how? The answer
comes in two parts, the philosophical and the
practical-political.

There was never much high-church philosophy to T.R.'s
conservationism. It was inspired by an abiding appreciation for
the beauty of nature- -- that is, by aesthetics. And it was
disciplined by a real sense (this may seem a curious thing to
say of a man like T.R.) of humility. Not much philosophy there,
but enough.

A sense of aesthetics would get us a long way in reforming
environmental discourse. It would, to begin with, help us cut
through the scientism, the fussy bureaucratic detail. It would
let us ignore the priesthood and dispense with its soaring
intellectual cathedrals. It would save us the enormous expense
and inconvenience of digging up New Jersey and conserving our
own trash. It would allow us to spend our energy and dollars on
places that are simply beautiful, and oppose things for no
fancier reason than that they are ugly.

The aesthetic approach does not mean ignoring the
micro-environment completely, still less rejecting every
commandment ever prescribed by the priesthood. Priests and
propagandists have every right to help shape our aesthetic
preferences, for better or worse; they just should not be
allowed to palm off their art as science. Purity is beautiful,
and industrial byproducts in our drinking water are ugly, even
if invisible and harmless. (Fluoride and chlorine in the water
are sort of ugly, too, even if they give us healthier teeth and
guts.)

There is also an aesthetic case to be made for frugality: we are
not going to run out of space for dumps, but garbage is not
beautiful, and making do with less often is. By the same token,
however, profligate excess in the digging up of dumps is as ugly
as profligate excess in the original dumping. T.R.-style
conservationists would devote far more energy to parks and
forests, to sewage treatment and cleaner smokestacks, and far
less to part-per-billion traces of dioxin. Whatever impact
pesticides may have, setting aside 100 million acres of forest
will likely protect more birds than vying to bankrupt the DuPont
corporation through the Superfund. The most beautiful way to
purify water is probably the most effective way, too: maintain
unspoiled watersheds. While an "almost unanimous" priesthood
forecast cooling in 1975, and warming in 1992, the
conservationist just went on planting trees, the most pleasant
and practical way to suck carbon out of the air, however it may
(or may not) affect global climate.

As for a sense of humility, it might usefully take the form of a
wariness of grand public works. T.R. endorsed his share of them;
FDR endorsed many more. In retrospect, it seems clear that more
of the megalithic government projects of those days should have
been opposed. They certainly should be as we go forward.
Yesterday the federal dollar erected huge dams and drained
swamps; today federal money is used to unleash those same
rivers, and convert sugar plantations back into swamp.(The swamp
programs are doubly expensive because the government also props
up the price of sugar.) A consistent conservationism might have
blocked more of the before, and thus saved us from having to do
much of the after.

A consistent philosophy of moderation and caution could also do
much to blunt the vindictive, punitive impulses of the modern
environmentalist -- and thereby help make things greener. In the
aftermath of the Exxon Valdez spill, the multi-billion dollar
steam-cleaning of rocks in Prince William Sound did far more
harm than good, stripping away the organic seeds of rebirth
along with the oil. In places where the cleanup was left to the
wind and the waves, "nature," Scientific American would
conclude, "fared better on its own." But the frenzied demands
that Exxon be made to pay and pay overwhelmed every other
impulse, to the point where increasing the damage to the oil
company became much more important than abating damage to the
Sound.

SO MUCH for philosophy. Politically, the most important
principle is that whereas the environmentalist mission is
exclusionary, the conservationist mission is populist and
inclusionary, welcoming humankind as in integral and legitimate
part of nature's landscape. Conservationism does not see man as
a tapeworm in the bowel of nature. Symbiosis is possible. And
when a choice has to be made, as it sometimes must, people come
first.

The old conservationists were reluctant collectivists; the new
environmentalists, eager ones. Having successfully conflated
eagles with snail darters, halogenated hydrocarbons with the
mountain peaks of Yosemite, the new environmentalists claim to
speak for them all. This is an agenda that fits easily into a
left-wing shoe. Running the whole environment -- literally,
"that which surrounds" -- is an opportunity the Left gladly
welcomes. The micro-environment is the best part of all,
requiring as it does a pervasive, manipulative, and intrusive
bureaucracy -- for the Left, political ambrosia.

In reply, the Right has nothing better to offer than a long
tradition of creating parks, husbanding wildlife, and venerating
natural heritages of every kind. Politically speaking, however,
that should be enough. It is the old conservation, not the new,
that welcomes the family in the camper. It is the old that
dispenses with oligarchy and caters to the common tastes of the
common man. It is the old that is the legacy of T.R., a man who
so loved to shoot wild animals that he resolved to conserve the
vast open spaces in which they live.

Besides, too-eager collectivists never end up conserving
anything; only the reluctant ones do. (Behold the land once
called East Germany: Love Canal, border to border, perfected by
Communists.) The old conservationism, of parks and forests and
Winnebagos, advances the green cause because of the Winnebago.
The man in the Winnebago is enlisted in the cause precisely by
an appeal to his own private sense of what is beautiful, and
therefore to what he wants for himself and his family. What is
wrong with that?

===============================================================

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,34446,00.html?tw=wn20000219
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Greening of the Red Planet
Reuters
10:25 a.m. 18.Feb.2000 PST

WASHINGTON -- Trees that can grow their own protective
greenhouses and computers smart enough to figure out
things for themselves are some of the tools that will help
future space explorers settle Mars, scientists predicted
on Friday.

They said it was becoming clear that understanding and
using biology will be as important to space exploration as
the "harder" sciences of physics and engineering.

And, they told a meeting of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, using the imagination is a
vital first step to solving the problems barring space
travel.

Freeman Dyson, a professor emeritus of physics and
astrophysics at Princeton University, thinks space
travelers will turn to nature when it comes to building
shelters on new planets -- but nature tweaked by modern
science.

"The way to get to it clearly is to grow the habitat
rather than building it," Dyson told a news conference.

"People are used to living in forests," he added, saying
he believed forests could make very nice shelters for,
say, Mars colonists.

"You need to have habitats that are cheap and comfortable
and user-friendly."

Genetic engineering could help scientists produce trees
that could grow a protective greenhouse for themselves to
survive the freezing temperatures and thin atmosphere on
Mars.

Then the trees could go about their natural job of
producing oxygen and creating a comfortable environment
like the one plants created on Earth hundreds of millions
of years ago.

Dyson said that the water needed to do that is readily
available on Mars, and genes could be used that resemble
those that animals use to protect themselves from the
elements.

"I think of a turtle growing its shell, or a polar bear
growing its fur. It is something plants are not very good
at but maybe we could teach them," Dyson said.

Yoji Kondo, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard space flight
center in Maryland, said such imaginings were key to
figuring out ways to settle and explore space.

"When someone like Professor Dyson dreams, our minds
become stimulated," Kondo told the news conference.

Kathie Olsen, NASA's chief scientist, said this was not a
completely far-fetched idea. "I see the picture," she
said.

Olsen described how NASA had already started growing sweet
potatoes that would stay in small trays and yet produce
nutritious roots. Olsen, herself a biologist specializing
in neurology, said NASA turned to nature in other ways.

She described experiments on building computers that would
use neural nets -- structures more resembling a brain than
a present-day computer that does calculations one at a
time.

They were able to solve problems on their own, at least in
computer simulations. "We had a spacecraft we sent all
kinds of bizarre instructions," Olsen said. "It was able
to decipher them and do what it was supposed to do and not
what we told it."

She said they also ran a successful computer simulation in
which an aircraft had its wing chopped off and yet managed
to successfully land itself.

All the scientists agreed that private sector funds were
key to getting people into space, and one big industry
would probably drive this -- tourism.

Dyson predicted hotels would go up almost as quickly as
laboratories on any space settlement.

"People do love to go to weird places for reasons we can't
imagine -- mostly because they have too much money."

Copyright © 1999-2000 Reuters Limited.

Copyright © 2000 Wired Digital Inc., a Lycos Network site.
All rights reserved.

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The Third Culture - Chapter 13

STEVEN PINKER "Language Is a Human Instinct"

George C. Williams: I'm very favorably impressed with Steven
Pinker. He's going to be a superstar well into the twenty-first
century. What's particularly notable is his work on the
evolution of our language capability, and being able to talk
about this in specific terms. There are features there that have
been evolving, and that we can interpret with respect to why
they evolved. I remember speculating in my 1966 book about what
it is that makes the human species special. There have been all
sorts of suggestions: bipedalism, tool use, that sort of thing,
but it struck me at the time that the one defining capability is
language.

STEVEN PINKER is an experimental psychologist; professor in the
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT; director of
the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT;
author of Language Learnability and Language Development (1984),
Learnability and Cognition (1989), The Language Instinct (1994),
and How the Mind Works, forthcoming, 1997.

Steven Pinker: I call language an "instinct," an admittedly
quaint term for what other cognitive scientists have called a
mental organ, a faculty, or a module. Language is a complex,
specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously
without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed
without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the
same in every individual, and is distinct from more general
abilities to process information or behave intelligently. (One
corollary is that most of the complexity in language comes from
the mind of a child, not from the schools or from grammar
books.) All this suggests that language is caused by dedicated
circuitry that has evolved in the human brain. It then raises
the question of what other aspects of the human intellect are
instincts coming from specialized neural circuitry.

I'm interested in all aspects of human language. I'm an
experimental psychologist who studies language for a living: how
children learn language, how people put sentences together in
their minds and understand sentences in conversation, where
language is situated in the brain, and how it changes over
history.

My work concentrates on what science has discovered about
language since 1950. In answering those questions, other
questions repeatedly come up. Why is the hockey team in Toronto
called the Maple Leafs instead of the Maple Leaves? Why do we
say, "He flied out to center field" in baseball — why has no
mere mortal ever "flown out" to center field? Why do immigrants
labor with lessons and tapes and homework and English classes,
while their four-year-old kids learn the language so quickly
that they can make fun of their parents' grammatical errors?
What language would a child speak if he was raised by wolves? I
also look at what we know about how language works, how children
acquire it, how people use it, and how it breaks down after
injury or disease of the brain.

I unify this knowledge with three key ideas. One responds to the
fact that what people do know about language is often wrong. The
view of language that suffuses public discourse — that people
assume both in the sciences and in the humanities — is that
language is a cultural artifact that was invented at a certain
point in history and that gets transmitted to children by the
example of role models or by explicit instruction in schools.
The corollary is that now that the schools are going to pot and
people get their language from rock stars and athletes, language
will steadily deteriorate, and if current trends continue we're
all going to be grunting like Tarzan. I argue instead that
language is a human instinct.

The second idea comes from the following: If language is a
mental organ, where did it come from? I believe it came from the
same source as physical organs. It's an adaptation, a product of
natural selection in the evolution of the human species.
Depending on how you look at it, this is either an incredibly
boring conclusion or a wildly controversial conclusion. On the
one hand, most people, after hearing evidence that language is
an innate faculty of humans, would not be surprised to learn
that it comes from the same source that every other complex
innate aspect of the human brain and body comes from — namely,
natural selection. But two very prominent people deny this
conclusion, and they aren't just any old prominent people, but
Stephen Jay Gould, probably the most famous person who has
written on evolution, and Noam Chomsky, the most famous person
who has written on language. They've suggested that language
appeared as a by-product of the laws of growth and form of the
human brain, or perhaps as an accidental by-product of selection
for something else, and they deny that language is an
adaptation. I disagree with both of them.

The third idea comes from the question, "Why should we be so
interested in the details of language in the first place?"
Language is interesting because, of course, it's distinctly
human, and because we all depend on it. For centuries, language
has been the centerpiece of discussions of the human mind and
human nature, because it's considered the most accessible part
of the human mind. The reason people are likely to get exercised
by technical disagreements over the proper syntax of relative
clauses in Choctaw, say, is that everyone has an opinion on
human nature, and lurking beneath such discussions of language
is the belief that language is the aspect of science where human
nature is going to be understood first. If language is an
instinct, what does it say about the rest of the mind? I think
the rest of the mind is a set of instincts as well. There's no
such thing as intelligence, a capacity for learning, or a
general ability to imitate role models. The mind is more like a
Swiss Army knife: a large set of gadgets, language being one of
them, shaped by natural selection to accomplish the kinds of
tasks that our ancestors faced in the Pleistocene.

Why do I call language an instinct? Why not a manifestation of
an ability to acquire culture, or to use symbols? There are four
kinds of evidence that have been gathered over the last century.
One of them is universality. Universality, by itself, doesn't
indicate that the ability in question is innate. For all I know,
VCRs and fax machines are now close to universal across human
societies. But universality is a first step to establishing
innateness, and it was a remarkable and unexpected discovery —
early in the century, when anthropologists first started
exploring societies in far-flung parts of the globe — that
without exception, every human society has complex grammar.

There's no such thing as a Stone Age language. Often you'll find
that the most materially primitive culture has a fantastically
sophisticated, complex language. Likewise, within a society,
complex grammar is universal. To appreciate this, you first have
to put aside "prescriptive grammar" — the grammar of schoolmarms
and copyeditors (don't split infinitives, watch how you use
"hopefully," don't let your participles dangle, don't say "them
books"). That has nothing to do with what I'm talking about;
it's in large part conformity to a set of conventions for a
standard written dialect — something that all literate people
have to master, but separate from ordinary conversation. The
grammar of the vernacular, in the sense of the unconscious rules
that string the words together into phrases and sentences when
we converse, is far more sophisticated. If you simply try to
determine what kind of mental software it would take to generate
the speech of a typical person in the street, or a typical four-
year-old, you'll find that it's always extremely complex and has
the same overall design within a society and across societies.
All languages use things like nouns and verbs, subjects and
objects, cases and agreement and auxiliaries, and a vocabulary
in the thousands or tens of thousands.

Those are the first two bits of evidence, the universality of
language and the universality of the design of language — that
is, the kinds of mental algorithms that underlie people's
ability to talk. The third bit of evidence is from my own
professional specialty, language development in children. We see
language development proceed the same way in all the world's
cultures. It's remarkably rapid, as any parent can attest.
Children begin to babble in their first year of life. First
words appear at about one year of age. First word combinations,
things like "more milk" and "all gone doggy," happen at about
eighteen months. Then around the age of two, there's a burst of
about six months — even less for some children — in which one
sees a flowering of virtually the entire grammar of English:
relative clauses, passives, questions with "WH" words, and
constructions so complex that the researchers in artificial
intelligence haven't been able to duplicate them in computer
systems that would allow us to converse with a computer in
English. Nonetheless, children have mastered these constructions
before the age of three, and you have the impression at a
certain point that you're having conversations with your child,
whereas the child a short time before could produce no more than
one or two words of baby talk.

And what the child has done is solve a remarkably difficult
computational problem. The problem can be stated as an
engineering task: design an algorithm that will take a sample of
sentences and their contexts from any of the five thousand
languages on the planet, and after crunching through a number of
these sentences — say, a couple of hundred thousand — come out
with a grammar for the language, regardless of what the language
is. That is, Japanese sentences in, Japanese grammar out;
Swahili sentences in, Swahili grammar out. This problem is way
beyond the capability of any current artificial-intelligence
system. Current natural-language processing systems can't even
use a single language, let alone learn to use any language.
Nonetheless that's what the child does in those six months,
despite the lack of grammar lessons or even feedback from
parents. Moreover, if you crank up the microscope on baby talk,
you often find that it conforms to universal constraints that
characterize language across the planet. In the kind of
experiments I do in my day-to- day work, in which you get a
child in a situation where he has to use some construction he
hasn't been challenged with before, the child often gets it
perfect on the first shot, as if he had all the pieces and just
had to let them fall together.

Children also have a remarkable ability to avoid errors. Our
ears do perk up when we hear things like "breaked" and "comed"
and "goed." But if we were to look at the much larger set of
errors that a computer would make, because the errors would be
natural conclusions to jump to about the logic of the language,
in most cases it never occurs to children to make that error,
even though it's the first thing a logician or a cryptographer
or a computer program would guess.

Language development isn't driven by general communicative
utility. The child doesn't talk better and better just to get
more cookies, or to get more TV, or to be allowed to play
outside more often. A lot of the changes you see in children's
development simply make their speech conform better to the
grammar of the language they're acquiring. Here's an example.
Take a verb like "to cut," "to hit," or "to put." Children go
through a stage in which they make errors like "cutted,"
"hitted," and "putted." A child at that stage is simply making
distinctions that we adults don't. If I say "On Wednesday I cut
the grass," it could mean that I cut the grass every Wednesday
or that I cut the grass last Wednesday, because in English the
past tense and present tense of "cut" are identical. A child who
says "cutted" can distinguish the two, even though in some sense
he is making a grammatical error. Children outgrow that "error,"
and in doing so they make their language worse in terms of the
ability to communicate thoughts. What's going on in the mind of
the child isn't like a hill-climbing procedure, where the better
you're communicating the more you stick with what you have, but
an unconscious program that synchronizes the child's language
with the language of the community.

There are exotic circumstances where one can show that children
are injecting complexity into the language. They're not simply
repeating or reproducing imperfectly what they hear, but making
the language more complex. These situations are referred to as
creolization. They were first documented in cases where children
in plantation or slave colonies were exposed to a mishmash or
"pidgin" of choppy, ungrammatical strings of words that served
as a lingua franca among the adults, who had come from different
language communities. The first generation of children who were
exposed to a pidgin did not reproduce that pidgin but converted
it into a language with a systematic grammar called a creole.
There are several cases where creolization can be seen happening
today. These are cases in which deaf children are either exposed
to a defective version of sign language, because their parents
didn't learn it properly, or, in the case of Nicaraguan sign
language, because no sign language exists and the children were
recently put together in schools for the first time and are
inventing, in front of our eyes, a language with a systematic
grammar. The final bit of evidence is that language seems to
have neurological and perhaps even genetic specificity. That is,
the brain is not a meatloaf, such that the less brain you have
the worse you talk and the stupider you are, but seems to be
organized into subsystems. Using brain damage and genetic
deficits as tools, we can see how the brain fractionates into
subcomponents.

First, there are cases in which language is impaired but
intelligence is intact. For example, there are forms of aphasia,
caused by strokes, in which people lose the ability to speak or
understand but retain the rest of their intelligence. A slightly
less extreme condition is called "specific language impairment,"
or SLI, in which children don't develop language on schedule or
in a normal way: the language appears late and the children have
to struggle with it. Pronunciation improves in adulthood, with
the help of lots of therapy and practice, but the victims speak
slowly, hesitantly, and with many grammatical errors. They have
trouble doing certain language tasks that any five year-old can
do. For example, a tester shows a picture of a man doing
something for which there doesn't exist a word, like swinging a
rope over his head, and says, "Here's a man who likes to `wug.'
He did the same thing yesterday. Yesterday he..." A
five-year-old will say "wugged," even though he's never heard
"wugged" before. Presumably he creates it by applying the mental
equivalent of the rule of grammar: "Add `ed' to form the past
tense." If you give this task to a language-impaired victim,
very often he'll say, "Well, how should I know? I've never heard
the word before." Or he'll sit and think, and reason it out as
if you'd given him a calculus problem to solve; the answer
doesn't come naturally.

This is despite the fact that victims of SLI are, by diagnostic
definition, normal in intelligence — that is, if they weren't
normal in intelligence they wouldn't have been classified as
"specifically language-impaired." They aren't deaf, and they
aren't autistic or socially abnormal. Often, in fact, they can
be superior in intelligence. There are some children with SLI
who are excellent in math but who find speaking a pain. Specific
language impairment seems to run in families — something that
language therapists have known for years, because they'll treat
Johnny and then a few years later they'll treat Johnny's sister
and Johnny's cousin. In the last few years, large-scale familial
and twin studies have shown that SLI is highly heritable. The
crucial study — identical twins reared apart — has not been
done, because only about seventy of these pairs in the whole
world have been studied, and none of them happens to have SLI.

In cases where you find a bad gene or an injured brain, and
language suffers but the rest of the brain is all right, there's
always the objection that perhaps language is the most mentally
demanding thing we do. If there is any compromise in processing
power, language will suffer the most, but that doesn't indicate
that language is somehow separate from the rest of cognition; it
may be just quantitatively different. The clincher is what
people in my field call a double dissociation, where one sees
the opposite kind of impairment; these are syndromes in which
language is intact but the rest of intelligence suffers — a
linguistic idiot savant, who can speak, and speak well, but is
retarded. There are a number of syndromes in which that can
happen, including spina bifida and Williams syndrome. In those
cases, you have what therapists call chatterboxes or blatherers;
a child goes on and on in beautifully formed sentences that
often have no connection to reality. This can happen in children
with an IQ of 50, who cannot tie their shoes or handle money.
That's evidence for the claim that language is a separate mental
system, an instinct.

Why do I call language an adaptation? What is the alternative?
Gould and Chomsky suggest that language is a by- product.
Perhaps, as we developed a big brain in our evolutionary
history, language came automatically, the same way that when we
adopted upright posture our backs took on an S-shaped curve.
Perhaps we have language for the same reason we have white
bones. No one would look for an adaptive explanation for why
bones are white as opposed to green. They're white as a side
consequence of the fact that bones were selected for rigidity;
calcium is one way to make bones rigid, and calcium is white.
The whiteness is simply an epiphenomenon, an accident.

The argument from Chomsky and Gould is that maybe language was
an unavoidable physical consequence of selection for something
else, perhaps analytical processing, hemispheric specialization,
or an enlarged brain. No one who was around when language
evolved is here to tell us about it, and words don't fossilize,
so the arguments have to be indirect. However, there's a
standard set of criteria in biology for when to attribute
something to natural selection — that is, when it may be called
an adaptation — and when to look at it as a by-product, or what
Gould and Lewontin call a "spandrel." Ironically, what Gould and
Chomsky have not done is apply these standard criteria to the
case of language. They've noted the logical possibility that
language doesn't have to be an adaptation, but they haven't
said, "Let us now pull out the test kit, apply it to language
the way we apply it to any other biological system, and see what
the answer is."

The test is articulated very well by George Williams and Richard
Dawkins, and that test is complex adaptive design. The
fundamental problem in biology is to explain biological
organization: why animals are complex arrangements of matter
that do unlikely but interesting things. Dawkins and Williams
noted that before Darwin, complex design was recognized as the
fundamental puzzle of life, even by theologians. In fact, for
them, it was an argument for the existence of God. The Reverend
William Paley put it best: Imagine that you're walking across a
field and you come across a rock, and you ask someone, "How did
the rock get there?" and they say, "Well, the rock's always been
there." You'd probably accept that as about as good an
explanation as you had any right to expect. But now let's say
you're walking across a field and you come across a watch, and
you ask, "How did the watch get there?" and someone says, "Well,
it's always been there." You wouldn't accept that explanation,
because a watch is an inherently improbable arrangement of
matter. You can rule out the possibility that some pattern of
wind and earthquakes just happened to throw together a bunch of
matter that fell into the exact configuration of springs and
gears and hands and dials that you find in a watch. The watch
shows uncanny signs of having been designed for the purpose of
telling time, which implies some intelligent creator.

Paley's argument in the nineteenth century was that any
biological organ, like the eye, is much more complex than a
watch. The eye has a retina, and a lens, and muscles that move
it in precise convergence, an iris that closes in response to
light, and many other delicate parts. Just as a watch implies a
watchmaker by virtue of its complex design, an eye implies an
eyemaker — namely, God. What Darwin did was not to deny that
complex design was a serious problem that needed a solution but
to change the solution. The brilliance of Darwin's idea, natural
selection, is that it's the only physical process ever proposed
that can explain the emergence of complex design. The reason you
have eyes that are uncannily designed for vision is that they're
at the end of a long series of replicators, such that the better
the eyes worked, the more likely the design would have made it
into the next generation.

One can distinguish between the eye, which all biologists agree
is the product of natural selection, and features like the
whiteness of bones or the S-shape of our spine, which aren't
complex gadgets or seemingly engineered systems or low-
probability arrangements of matter. We don't have to invent some
scenario in which animals were selected by the whiteness of
their bones. There, a by product explanation rather than
adaptation is perfectly plausible.

That's the test. Apply it now to language. What we've discovered
in recent studies of language is that it, too, is an improbably
complex biological system. It's improbable in the sense that
it's found only in one species, and improbable also in the sense
that most of the things you do to a brain will disrupt the
ability to use language. Moreover, like a watch or an eye, it
has many finely meshing parts. There is the mental dictionary,
which in a typical high-school graduate contains about sixty
thousand words. There are the unconscious rules of syntax, which
allow us to put words together into sentences. There are the
rules of morphology, which allow us to combine bits of words,
like prefixes and suffixes and stems, into words. There are the
rules and processes of phonology, which massage sequences of
words into a pronounceable sound pattern — what we informally
call an accent. There are the mechanisms of speech production,
including the shape and placement of the tongue and the larynx,
which seem to have been built for speech production at the
expense of another biological function, like being able to
breathe while you're swallowing — which other mammals can do.
There's speech perception, in which the ear can decode speech at
the rate of between 15 and 45 sound units per second, faster
than it can decode any other kind of signal. This is almost a
miracle, because at a frequency of about 20 units per second
sound merges into a low pitched buzz, so the mouth and the ear
are doing a kind of multiplexing, or information compressing and
unpacking. And there is the ability of a child to learn all this
in a very short period of time. These facts suggest that the
anatomy of language is complex, like the anatomy of the eye.
Moreover, language is quite clearly adaptive, in the sense of
inherently serving the goals of reproduction. All societies use
language for patently useful things like sharing technology and
inventions. Language is a major means by which people share what
they have learned about the local environment. Also, social
relations in the human species are largely mediated by language.
We rise to power, manipulate people, find mates, keep mates, win
friends and influence people by language. Moreover we, and every
human society, value people who are articulate and persuasive,
which certainly sets up pressures for better language.

Those two lines of evidence suggest that language meets the
criteria for an adaptation and a product of natural selection.
We can also test the alternative — that there's some way in
which language could have arisen through another route, just as
whiteness comes from making bones out of calcium. Chomsky, and
many anthropologists, have speculated that a big brain was
sufficient to give us language. We can test that idea, because
there are people with small brains. There are dwarfs, and there
is normal variation within the human species, and it's certainly
not the case that people with smaller brains have more trouble
with language. There are some syndromes of dwarfism where the
brain is not much bigger than that of a chimpanzee. Those people
are retarded, but nonetheless they have language.

Brain shape is another possibility that we can rule out as the
ultimate source of language. Could it be that a generally
spherical brain with a certain kind of neuron packing, through
complex laws of physics we don't understand, somehow gives rise
to language? Again, over the range of normal variation and of
pathology, there are reports of grotesquely distorted brains,
usually from hydrocephalus, sometimes cases in which the brain
lines the inside of the skull like the flesh of a coconut. It's
possible for a person to have that condition and nonetheless
develop language on schedule. One reported case was an
undergraduate student at Oxford.

If we applied those criteria to any organ we weren't as fond of
— and hence likely to have strong preconceptions about — as
language, we'd come to the same conclusion that we do for the
eye: namely, that it's a product of natural selection.

What about the rest of the mind? In this century, starting in
the 1920s, there has been a pervasive, enormous intellectual
movement that treated the human mind as a general-purpose
learning device and attributed its complexity to the surrounding
culture. There's an obvious political motivation for this idea,
in that it was a reaction to some of the racist doctrines of the
nineteenth century; it seems consonant with ideals of human
equality and perfectibility. One can take any infant and make
him or her into anything, given the right society. People who
take issue with this view have often been tarred with the
epithet "biological determinist" — someone who, according to the
stereotype, believes that women are biologically designed for
child rearing, say, or that the poor are biologically inferior.
This is a specter that hovers in the background of these
discussions; both in the academy and in polite intellectual
discourse, the politically correct position is that the mind is
a lump of wax or a blank slate.

Carl Degler, in his book on the history of Darwinism in the
social sciences, traces this credo back to two sources in the
academy. One is anthropology, which contributed the idea that
human cultures can vary freely and without limit and that one
can therefore say nothing definitive about the human species,
because somewhere there will be a tribe that demonstrates the
opposite. The other is psychology, which contributed the idea of
the general all-purpose learning mechanism. But both ideas have
now been discredited.

The impression from anthropology that humanity is a carnival
where anything is possible came in part from a tourist
mentality: when you come back from a trip, you remember what was
different about where you went, otherwise you might as well have
stayed at home. That is, many anthropologists exaggerated the
degree to which the tribes they studied were exotic and strange,
both to justify their profession and to raise people's
consciousness about human potential. But many of their claims
have turned out either to be canards, like Margaret Mead's
claims about Samoa, or to miss the forest for the trees: the
anthropologists spent so much time looking for differences that
they didn't notice basic categories of human experience that are
found in every culture, like humor, love, jealousy, and a sense
of responsibility. Language is simply the most famous example of
a human universal. Donald Brown, an anthropologist at UC Santa
Barbara, wrote a book called Human Universals, in which he
scoured the archives of ethnography for well substantiated human
universals. He came up with a list of about a hundred and fifty,
covering every sphere of human experience. That's my
interpretation of the main lessons of anthropology. The
interesting discoveries aren't about this kinship system or that
form of shamanry. Underneath it all — just as, in the case of
language, there's a universal design Chomsky called universal
grammar — there is in the rest of culture what Donald Brown
calls the universal people. He characterized the human species
much the way a biologist would characterize any other species.

There has also been disillusionment with the idea that came from
psychology and the study of learning — including the attempt to
engineer artificial intelligence — that there's a magical
learning mechanism that can acquire anything. It's an idea that
sounds plausible, until you start to build one.

The main discovery of cognitive science and artificial
intelligence is that ordinary people are apt to be blasé about
abilities that are, upon closer examination, remarkable
engineering feats, like seeing in color, picking up a pencil,
walking, talking, recognizing a face, and reasoning in ordinary
conversation. These are fantastically complex tasks that require
their own special kinds of software. When one builds a learning
system, one doesn't build a system that can learn anything; one
has to build a system that can learn something very special,
like a system that learns large territories, a system that
learns grammar, a system that learns plant and animal species,
or a system that learns particular kinds of social interactions.
The only way a brain could possibly work is to have this large
set of learning mechanisms, tailored to specific aspects of
knowledge and experience. A general-purpose learning device is
like a general-purpose tool: rather than a box full of hammers,
screw drivers, and saws, one would have a single tool that does
everything. That possibility is inconceivable in hardware
engineering and equally inconceivable in the mental software
engineering we call psychology. If language is innate, then how
much else is? Is carburetor repair innate? Is innateness a
slippery slope? Of course not! The idea of a general-purpose
learning device in an otherwise blank mind is so deeply
entrenched that for many people it is inconceivable that there
could be anything other than the two extremes: at one end,
nothing is innate; on the other end, even the ability to repair
carburetors is innate.

But research in psychology, linguistics, and AI have shown that
there can be an interesting intermediate position. All the
wonderful complex things that people do — repairing carburetors,
following soap-opera plots, finding cures for diseases — might
come out of the interactions among a smaller number of basic
modules. The mind might have, among other things, the following:
a system for intuitive mechanics — that is, our understanding of
how physical objects behave, how things fall, and so forth; an
intuitive biology — that is, expectations about how plants and
animals work; a sense of number, the basis of mathematics and
arithmetic; mental maps, the knowledge of large territories; a
habitat-selection module, recognizing the kinds of environments
we feel comfortable in; a sense of danger, including the emotion
of fear and a set of phobias all humans have, like fear of
heights and of venomous and predatory animals; intuitions about
food, about contamination, about disease and spoilage and what
is icky and disgusting. Monitoring of current well being: is my
life going right? Is it all O.K., or should I change something?
An intuitive psychology — that is, an ability to predict
people's behavior from knowledge about their beliefs and desires
(which, incidentally, seems to be the module that is defective
in autism). A mental Rolodex, in which we store knowledge of
other people and their talents and abilities. The self concept:
our knowledge of ourselves and how to package our identity for
others. A sense of justice, rights, obligations. A sense of
kinship, including the tendency towards nepotism. A system
concerned with mating, including sexual attraction, love, and
feelings of fidelity and desertion.

So, with regard to the question "Why should we care so much
about language?," one answer might be that language is a human
intellectual instinct, and there might be many more.

George C. Williams: I'm very favorably impressed with Steven
Pinker. He's going to be a superstar well into the twenty-first
century. What's particularly notable is his work on the
evolution of our language capability, and being able to talk
about this in specific terms. There are features there that have
been evolving, and that we can interpret with respect to why
they evolved. I remember speculating in my 1966 book about what
it is that makes the human species special. There have been all
sorts of suggestions: bipedalism, tool use, that sort of thing,
but it struck me at the time that the one defining capability is
language. But nobody has ever been able to think of a reason why
advanced language capability would be favored by selection. I
presume that Shakespeare and Milton and Goethe did not produce
an extraordinarily large number of grandchildren compared to
their contemporaries of low IQ and verbal capabilities, so I
speculated that maybe what evolution has tried to do is provide
children with a minimal verbal capability as early as possible,
so that they can have the advantage of that, and just as an
incidental consequence the process develops a momentum as the
individual grows, so that you end up with adults with enormously
greater than required verbal capability. Pinker may be implying
something of the sort. I've read some of his earlier work on the
evolution of language, although not yet his book The Language
Instinct. I will certainly do so soon.

Daniel C. Dennett: What I find particularly interesting about
Steve Pinker is the clarity and resoluteness with which he
turned his back on the ethos of MIT, where he was raised. This
is somebody who was certainly educated in a very narrowly
pinched and mandarin view about the nature of language and of
cognitive science, and it involved giving no ground at all to
evolutionary considerations. When I first met Steve, he seemed
to me to be the perfect avatar of that attitude, the ultimate
MIT cognitive- science product. But he's so smart; he saw the
light, and shifted ground quite decisively and with great
effect. That was wonderful to see.

The light he saw was evolution. What's particularly nice is that
he overthrew the shackles of his education without rancor,
without going overboard in the other direction. He simply saw
that there was another way of looking at things, and he pursued
it. I've particularly benefited from the position he developed
with one of his graduate students, Paul Bloom, in a 1990 paper
entitled "Natural Language and Natural Selection." They start
with the standard MIT position that the language organ, as
Chomsky has called it, is innate. Of course, it's no longer
really in dispute that there are aspects of linguistic
competence that are innate and specific to human beings. But
then they went on to say, in a most un-Chomskyan way: Look at
how much of this innate competence can be accounted for in
adaptationist terms. Look at how much of this can be explained
by natural selection.

One of the motivations for resistance to the Chomskyan view was
that it seemed to be invoking magic at a crucial point. At
least, the behaviorists — who viewed language as something
learned by a general-purpose learning mechanism — were clear
that they wanted a no-nonsense, no-miracle theory of how each
human being comes to have language. It's not a gift from God,
it's something that has to develop, has to be designed, has to
emerge from an elaborate process of R &amp; D, as you might say.
Chomsky seemed to be saying, No, it isn't learned, it's innate
in the individual, just a God-given language organ. That, if you
stop there, is just anathema to anybody of scientific
temperament. It can't be that way. Pinker has driven that point
home to people.

W. Daniel Hillis: Growing up in the Minsky School, I was always
taught to be wary of linguists, because Minsky had a very strong
reaction against the Chomsky School. I would characterize that
school as studying language without studying the fact that
people are talking about anything. That's always made me very
wary of anybody who talked about hardwiring. Steven Pinker is
perhaps the first to make me realize that linguists have
something to offer, because he can talk about his linguistic
ideas from a computational viewpoint and link them to
psychological phenomena in a sensible and understandable way.
It's amazing that you put a human on earth and three years later
that human is speaking natural language. It's a phenomenon that
requires a lot of explanation.

Stephen Jay Gould: I don't know Steve Pinker very well. I
certainly appreciate his expositions of the Chomskyan worldview,
but I sure wish I could persuade him that adaptation is not the
way to go in understanding brain function. He seems quite
implacable, though.

Excerpted from The
Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution by John Brockman
(Simon &amp; Schuster, 1995) . Copyright © 1995 by John Brockman.