Bugs

I got this message from Soren last week:  "I seem to have caught a little bit of a stomach bug [that my kid] had. I'm feeling better, and I'm still up for meeting today, but wanted to let you know. Also, will probably be having something other than suds to drink! Anyway, I don't think I'm contagious at all, but like I said, wanted to let you know. It's what we do here in the 'burbs.'"  Alas, later on, he wrote to cancel, his public-energy spent in Geography 1100, the summer version of Regions and Nations of the World 1 (someday, we should chat about that class...).

But this meant that my weekly moment of intellectual engagement had crashed. Teaching doesn't count, not only because we're slumping into the Victorian realm, leaving behind Keats and Romantic fellow travelers--but because there in class, I have to guide the discussion, and not say outrageous things, or at least make sure students don't write them down.  Monday, though, in that early-morning-window of early-caffeine-jacking-into my deprived (no, not depraved) biochemistry, I instantly knew Soren had given me something to investigate.

First, there are the remedies that automatically come to mind. True, beer doesn't seem the ideal treatment for a virus, nor, I think wine. For sore throat or congestion, go with a Prairie Fire, a process which you can visualize this way:

Here's someone's not-for-the-cure response:

  
(and I felt the need to generate my own authentic images, so I ordered one at D&D explicitly to take a picture...

 

But sadly, in the excitement, I forgot to photo the first one, and had to order a second, which appears happily above.  The price of research...).

Or for just ordinary out of sorts, low energy, lethargy, probably this combo which Matt imported from Denver for us, the tequila shot with powered cinnamon and orange:

And there're remedies like 4 weeks of beer and yogurt, which I found successful in those days without health insurance, after swimming in the Amazon, and getting some never-known bacteria or parasite.  Quite effective.  

Beyond remedies, though, Soren offered that virus/micro-critter-sharing is "what we do here in the 'burbs.'"  I have had one student out a couple weeks ago with something that sounded like that stomach affliction, so I looked in the official media for local epidemics.  Found a report of "early flu," from December 16, 2014, a report on fatal deer illness from this March, and a February report, "Shigella Outbreak in Columbia/Boone County, Missouri," in which we're informed that this is caused by a feces-related bacteria.  Cool.

Yet all of these, and the absence of more reports, given how often something "goes around," tells me that we miss out on a whole layer of reality, that realm of bacteria, viruses, and invisible parasites.  Sure, we hear plenty about recent pandemics and their apocalyptic threat, but this misses the hourly lives of our little buddies, how they jump from one human to another, their colloquiums on strategic mutation, their treaties with human cells, their declarations of war.  For any of this to reach the official media, one consistent strain would have to expand to bloated proportions, sort of like the human population, which continues to blossom like algae in an increasing fetid pond. Most of our encounters with the invisible world are tiny events, local or micro-local, ever-shifting, perhaps county-wide, perhaps networked through day-care, or an event in the 'burbs.

To really see these, we'd need to crowdsource, to gather reports, symptoms, anecdotes, draw lines of contact...  Oh, crowdsourcing-- visualize it like this-- 

For Columbia, population about 100k, maybe 100 'spotters'?  200? For Boone County, about 170k--maybe 400, spread out in all the little human pockets?

A goal?  Maybe to see a different reality.  Try Googling "ontology of bacteria."  That's not what I'm going for.  More a sense of different states of being, of a very different agency--of lifeforms that, after all, numerically dominate this planet.

The whole planet, though, well, we've never been good at thinking in those terms.  Wouldn't it be fun to begin to see, to map, just some of what lives right here in Boone County?  What kind of map could do justice to the types, the numbers, the absurdly fast leaps, the temporal shifts?  Even the idea of what a map is would collapse.

later, bob

Storm-porn and the Technology of Emotion

There were so many places to start this post.  Seems like any one, and none, would quite work. Thought about doing the lawn-mower tease:  think about all the times you've mowed the lawn, push or riding. Whether for pride or allowance or sheer habit. The hot sun, the sometimes breeze, the smell of the cut grass, the smell of the dirty-engine exhaust, the daydreaming, that oops! when you run over the new tulips, those pictures in your head of what the swath of green is 'sposed to look like, maybe the police order that keeps your lawn under 4" tall, maybe the neighbors' dandelions which parachute in like the communists in Red Dawn...all that.  File all those images away, and--but nah, didn't want to start with that tease.  Forget the lawn.

Instead, look at this photo I just took, a ways down my road, walking the dogs about midnight, the moon already up and down and long gone.  What's wrong with this picture?

Oh, another trick.  Probably nothing wrong exactly.  Just that with my cell phone camera, I can't take a picture of that host of fireflies swirling like an elfin city through the elder oaks and cottonwoods there by the creek.  Not even a mini-flash recorded, of the hundreds of dis-junct, patterned flashes every instance.  So no still photo. And I can't give you that in a poem (I've done the poetry, but nobody read poetry).  And I haven't, for years, been able to interest my film friends into capturing scenes like this, creating our own film bank. (I'm determined to get our film group, Dark City, back into production this summer.  I started on a Busch Light-induced script last night.)  And without any of those mediations, those technologies, I can't even begin to give you the simple wonder of walking through this every night.

The mediations are what we need to figure out.  At AAG this spring in Chicago, at this session, "Alien Phenomenology--Sounding the Thermal,"

the main presenter, I think Kevin McHugh (his son the one in NY, he said), gave us demonstrations of altered media, using [sound], and thermal imaging.  The effect and purpose were mostly to offer us a dislocation of our "normal" (that is, habitual, conditioned) sense of  being.  A lot of the images looked a bit like these bits from Predator (I linked this because I know some film-challenged folks, the film-equivalent of me and music--scary!):

or on this aslant look at sports .

More interesting, McHugh was the first I heard at this conference to talk, at least in passing, about OOO (and here's a nice piece on 'how to explain OOO to your non-OOO friends').  But not so strangely, Wikipedia is always the best at the basic run-down.  (Soren and I have spent a good deal of time this spring working through Graham Harman 

                                    

     

                  "Graham Harman: Objects and the Arts"

and Tim Morton, both worth looking into.)  A side note--if I can find the thermal camera technology, I'm ready to start writing a few scripts that use this as a basic plot/identity device, but so far, I just get strange looks...   Maybe Mark will know.

Through all these ramblings, a key thread--what we can know, experience, feel, express, all these are limited, prevented, mediated or threaded through by various technologies.  So, is this just an alienation, as we were coached to think, back when, in lots of pop and too-serious books? [ok, I should generate a cool and critical list of these, and maybe someday, but I've had too much coffee to be that patient right now.]  Or are we working on some mind-shift?  some evolution? (cyborg, etc.) an 80-degree twist on poetry? a new ontology?

At some point, being stuck and not writing this post (which defeats the whole point, of quick and easy and not-anxious communication), I realized that I'm probably not using the term 'technology' the same way people usually do, so some more cheap beer, and I scribbled out these categories, during loud Saturday-night karaoke at the country bar ('Cos I ain't askin' nobody for nothin', / If I can't get it on my own. / If you don't like the way I'm livin', / You just leave this long-haired country boy alone"):

1.  Technology of extension.  Cars, planes, microwaves.  Laptops, light bulbs, nuclear bombs, super-villain lasers, flying saucers, gasoline, aspirin, polyester.  Hammers, broken or otherwise.  The regular stuff that shapes and is our physical presence.

2.  Technology of compulsion. Parking tickets, eminent domain, Supreme Court decisions, prisons (Foucault stuff).  Animal control. Drug laws. Dinner etiquette. Those slippery 5, 8, 3 yellow lines down the center of the road on Saturday nights.

3.  Technology of evolution.  Monocultures.  Farming.  Dolly.  All of Monsanto.  Dog-breeding.  Biological warfare.  The gods.  (N.b., not all gods are benign.)

4.  Technology of emotion.  Writing, poetry, novels. TV.  Movies. Social media.  Songs--which I think become a basis for identity in some times and places, especially country western songs in rural margins, where the songs seem to codify ethics/persona/behavior. (I'll write about that someday, when I'll have some commentary on tunes like 

  "Country Boys Can Survive," Hank Williams, Jr.

or by Little Big Town, or one of Lee Greenwood's songs.  Anyway, these technologies, which are the type I'm most interested in here.

The Saturday all this coalesced, there I was, home on a stormy night, after an afternoon of coffee, prepping for Brit Lit 2, a romp through Horace Walpole (which inspires me to go visit Strawberry Hill next May, when I'll be stuck in London), and excerpts from The Monk and bits from Ann Radcliffe, reading Aikin and Aikin's "On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror, and Sir Bertrand, a Fragment," (1773): 

A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of "forms unseen, and mightier far than we," our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy cooperating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement.

Hence the more wild, fanciful, and extraordinary are the circumstance of a scene of horror, the more pleasure we receive from it...

And I wind up captured by Svengoolie's presentation of The Bride of Frankenstein, back in those happy days before movie ratings, the Depression-bliss of 1935: 

There, terror was shown inside the movie, the villagers frenzied in alternate fear and outrage, though whether the original audience felt terror or our campy delight, not sure.

But what stood out that night was more the TV weather.  Oh, there was "real" weather outside:

Yes, I'd driven home through downpour.  And later, Darrell, at D&D, told me about being on a bus in town, when the call came through to "take shelter," and the buses stopped, and his bus shuffled people into a church (wind-threat, not War of the Worlds), and the power went down in places in town.  But TV weather, an incessant drone, voices that just say the same thing, live, on a hysteric loop, with no new info, only shifting, dramatic, vivid, violent graphics: 

Yes, there are real dangers, like Joplin disintegrating a few years ago... Here's the long version: 

 

And Oklahoma, frequently, is shredded by tornadoes. 

But what we get on local TV is not measured, and not, finally useful, not truthful.  It has taken on cheap sensation of pornography.  And pornography isn't harmless; per Ann Tolly, in "10 toxic side effects of pornography use," which I'll shamelessly select from, to shore up this analogy with weather coverage:

"When someone views [excessive weather-hysteria], they end up creating an intimate bond with an artificial, fake world and can actually lose the ability to bond with [the real world outside]."

Users/viewers "end up feeling emotionally empty and disconnected...," and "while pornography use [weather viewing] may result in a short term high, it eventually results in feelings of emptiness...and deep loneliness.  It ultimately creates emotional distance."

"Over time, [users'/viewers'] brain chemistry is altered and a full-fledged addiction occurs."  Further, "Sex [relation to the world] is no longer a wonderful source of connection between our deepest selves and a beloved partner; it becomes a commodity..."

And, as "an addictive substance, it creates an appetite for itself," which requires an escalation of the original thrill.  Overall, such encounters "will magnify each emotional wound from the past and cripple your ability to meet your essential emotional needs."

Here's another porn-critique that you might have fun reading in terms of weather-sensationalism:  "He's Just Not that Into Anyone."

Of course, the trouble with analogies is they only work so far, and then they miss the whole point.  I don't want to completely reject our tech-interfaces, these new faces of being.  Technology does matter in our new emotional constitutions, but weather hysteria simply alarms and misses the big picture, the many many things we should worry about, like, say, all the chemicals rushing through us, or dubious good news, such as guns finally being more deadly to us than cars.  Or the real threat, which is climate collapse, which weather-hysteria and bad media policy prevent us from seeing.  

Quick corrections?  Watch Bill McKibben's Do the Math, which is free on topdocumentaryfilms.com, or see the amazing documentary, Chasing Ice (it's on Netflix).

later, bob

The Response from Illinois

Mike

Apparently, those folks over there have bio-pirated some of our day lilies...

and from Lee, outside Chicago...

bob

The Season of Flash Flood

Seasons.  Let's think about that.  It seems appropriate, here on June 20, formally the last full day of Spring, the Summer Solstice to begin in about 20 hours.  But earth-tilt and seasons aren't quite the same thing, at least not in our imagination.  Consider:

"April showers bring May flowers."  Our friends at Wikipedia tell us of April Showers that "In one day the weather can change from springtime sunshine to winter sleet and snow. The track of these depressions can often be across Ireland and Scotland bringing bands of rain followed by heavy showers (often of hail or snow) and strong blustery winds."  They go on to say "The proverb "March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers", first recorded in 1886, or the shorter, trochaic version "April showers bring May flowers" (originally "Sweet April showers/Do spring May flowers", part of a poem recorded in 1610) are common expressions in English speaking countries." Cool.

I didn't know about the 1610 poem, so tried out that rhyme.  Didn't find 1610.  Instead, I wound up with Thomas Tusser, a poet I'd never heard of, despite his life, 1524-80, being squarely in the Elizabethan era, some of his clever sayings, like “A fool and his money are soon parted,” and his A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (available on Amazon!), being, according to the Poetry Foundation, "thought to have been one of the most popular books of poetry during the time of Elizabeth I."

  

(Notice that this cover is 500 Points of Good Husbandry--apparently so successful, he expanded 5-fold.  I, strangely, never get requests to write more...).

     Or, we can go back a bit to this poetry:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote   

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote, 

And bathed every veyne in swich licour, 

Of which vertu engendred is the flour; 

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth        

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth 

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne 

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,   

And smale fowles maken melodye, 

That slepen al the night with open ye,       

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages: 

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, 

And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,   

To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes; 

And specially, from every shires ende        

Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, 

The holy blisful martir for to seke, 

That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

Translate this?  Really?  If you're reading this, you've been to college.  

It's Chaucer. 

It's Middle English.  Get over it. 

And there's this seasonal artifact, already doubtful, even back when: 

  

Well, yes.  We're headed, not for 4-part harmony, but to question that 4-part symmetry in the way we think about seasons, even when the evidence is long against it.  We certainly don't share the weather patterns of the British Isles, even if those are buried in our language habits.  But even making a few corrections in longitude and latitude, we won't find a match.  Growing up in the Bootheel, I might have been able to imagine that quartet--blazing summers, a suffocating fall, a couple months of chill and ice storms, with occasional snow, then rain and tornadoes.  Close.

But these days?  We're accelerating out of even that mismatch.  A temporary pattern of late summer drought (more west of us, true, and that part not changing for the better in the next few decades), which overlaps with the reign of tornadoes, an unstable season of hay fever and baseball and football, a cold snap to end the year, a false spring too early, which tricks trees into bud, a resurgent winter blast in February, March storms, two beautiful days in April, then months of mold, mosquitoes and more storms, drenching us before the cycle repeats.

Just now, we're at the tailing edge of being drenched, a time we could label 'a season of flash floods.'

There's Texas...  

This already foreshadowed in that scene in All the Pretty Horses, the movie version, not the book (which is one of Cormac McCarthy's more cheerful works), 

in which the goofy kid, Jimmy Blevins, is stripped down to his underwear, hiding from lightning in a ravine, which not long after, has a real flash flood.

John Grady Cole: What the hell are you doing?
Jimmy: Just sittin' here.
John Grady Cole: If this rain hits hard, there's gonna be a river come down through here like a train. You thought about that?
Jimmy: You ain't never been struck by lightning. You don't know what it's like.
John Grady Cole: You're gonna get drowned sittin' there.
Jimmy: Why that's all right, I ain't never been drowned before.
John Grady Cole: Well...I say no more.   (imdb quotes)

(He does better nowadays on NCIS.)

Joe and Soren recently strolled around Rock Bridge Memorial State Park , taking refuge from yet another Missouri monsoon in Devil's Icebox, and found the water gushing in.  There were survivors.

And then there's my yard, newly converted to swampland:

 

We keep getting the news reports, the governor declaring a rain-state-of-emergency,

much because crops just can't endure what this spring has to offer:

And more storms on the way:

One state ag official said that only 42% of Missouri's soybean crop has been planted yet, while a farmer let the TV crews film his soggy fields and empty barn, to show that the early haying season has pretty much collapsed.  We read about that same sort of thing in Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Flight Behavior, a book that looked at Monarch butterflies radically changing their winter survival strategies, because of global warming.  (Here's one book review; I like this novel better than a lot of the reviewers to.  Even without things blowing up.)  
   

A problem here is that what matters about flash flood just now is strictly shown in human terms--what happens to our roads, our crops, the hay in the field, occasionally the cattle, which figure only in relation to our fast food mania.  Does flash flood mean the same to the grasses on their own?  To the dragonflies?  To my dogs?

Long-term, of course, none of how we think about the seasons matters at all.  It's more the patterns and changes that we need to be aware of, and just refuse to pay attention to.  For instance, NASA's 

GRACE program has been identifying what's going on with aquifers around the world, and what happens to those will make quite a bit of difference.  That, and the way rain and drought play off against each other.  And they aren't playing that game the same way agriculture needs them to play.  The grass will grow, but might not get harvested.  The soy and corn and wheat might not make it at all, at least not on the predictable mass scale we depend on.

What I guess I could have said right off, and saved you all this time:  There are no seasons anymore, not even the false imports.  No seasons except maybe TV and sports.  There are only episodes of weather-time-event now, and despite our old habits or campy nostalgia, this won't change for quite a while.  We've entered two centuries  of human-caused chaos.

later, bob

John Grady Cole: I thought you might want your old horse back.
Lacey: Damn, bud.

Ditch Lilies

Among things flourishing in our current month of deluge are those half-hidden, out of the way, orange day lilies.  Do you notice them at all?  Or are they just part of the background, like puddles and clouds, political blah-blah-blah, and green weeds sprouting everywhere?

Occasionally, there are big clumps of them, like here on the Business Loop:

Hard to know if those are nurtured, or simply not yet "improved."

More often, these lilies are scattered along the road, in ditches, in odd little clumps.  Along North Brown Station...

  

 Here, around a country mailbox...

 Or just in the ditch...

Or in big clumps in the field, where no one is building yet...

Here, for instance, a new and unfortunate little development has a sidewalk that just goes nowhere--nowhere being a field of flowers.

In town, along Rangeline, between Bus. Loop and Wilkes (where I not only drive back and forth, but got to walk several times today, my Jeep having decided to plunge into the 260 degree + red zone)...

Odd clumps of flowers...

 

Lilies sort of forgotten or not noticed, back by the AC unit, or a garage...

  

Or in that margin between the incessantly upgraded asphalt and the tilted, cracked sidewalks, beside an electric pole.  On the strip of Vandiver I drive, the only day lilies were around an electric pole in front of an older house.  None of course around any of the car dealers or state buildings.

On South 9th, those old apartments that J-school students have long inhabited, which almost, and maybe still soon, are slated for the endless destroy-and-replace-craze Columbia is in:

 

Where these lilies are, and where they aren't might have a lot to say to us.  They aren't anywhere that hires people to keep "the grounds."  They aren't anywhere that wealthy people live.  Nor, in my quick survey, any place there are new homes.  Almost a formula:  the more groomed the lawn, the less likely day lilies will be left to bloom.

Our friend, The Missouri Department of Conservation, tells us that the Orange Day Lily is "found along roads, disturbed stream banks, railroads, fields, pastures, old cemeteries, abandoned homes, and waste places. Native of Eurasia. Old-fashioned ornamentals, day lilies were widely planted by early settlers. This plant is sterile and has escaped from cultivation coast to coast by root divisions. Today there are thousands of garden hybrids but, strangely, none of those have been reported as escaped into the wild."  That explains a bit.  The MDOC continues:  "The flowers are rich in protein and are eaten in China; they can be fried or broiled much like squash blossoms or used as a flavoring in soups. The roots can be eaten raw or cooked and are said to taste like salsify. Neither insects nor diseases bother the plant."

Now that has possibilities!  I stopped yesterday at the edge of that sidewalk to nowhere and picked a few blossoms.  Haven't tried them yet.  In salad?  Quick-fried in olive oil?  Hmm...  (Ah, the possibilities...)

But to the point--day lilies seem to have quite a bit to say about how we live right now.  Once prized by 'early settlers'--you can imagine life without the luxury of bits of color, and here, some plants that just have to be stuck in the ground and left alone, little spots of joy just at the corner of the house or beside the barn.  Today, they survive when they aren't easily in the path of mowers--in wet ditches, around mailboxes, which county road crews sometimes try to miss, in forgotten spots at the edges. Interesting is how often, at least in Columbia, they are paired with catalpha trees, a few elder trees towering, and lots of seedlings sprouting up, tolerated as weeds or shrubs, till they interfere with one of our civil projects.  (Both day lilies and catalapha trees tend to be scorned in the designer lands of Bradford pears...)

 

Wouldn't it be fun, given enough leg-power, to just inventory a few neighborhoods around here, create one of those Denis Wood maps, like in Everything Sings?  To test out what space we left, what space isn't yet deliberate.

later, bob