Lining the birdcage

If words matter, and I think that they do, why are so many newspaper and other media people, as well as writers, limiting themselves to 140 characters, thinking that Twitter is the solution to their problems? This isn't about being concise, it's about being suicidal.

Hence, David Sirota's Salon column comes along, and reminds me that all these hip, oh so ironic media bloggers are part of the problem, instead of being part of the solution. It doesn't hurt that he drops a David Simon reference, either.

Sirota laments,

Beltway scribes didn't have to miss the Iraq war lies or the predictive signs of the Wall Street meltdown. Election correspondents weren't compelled to devote four times the coverage to the tactical insignifica of campaigns than to candidates' positions and records, as the Project for Excellence in Journalism found. Business reporters didn't need to give corporate spokespeople twice the space in articles as they did workers and unions, as a Center for American Progress report documents. National editors weren't obligated to focus on "elevat(ing) the most banal doings" in the White House to "breaking news," as the New York Times recently noted.

No, they certainly did not, but they did.

That's why this morning, when I thought about driving two miles to our town's one variety store, for the Maine Sunday Telegram, I poured a second cup of coffee and picked up the memoir I'm reading, instead.

A beautiful thing

Once upon a time, I wanted to save the world. I know, pretty idyllic, and not grounded in any sense of reality, either.

By the time I hit thirty, life had kicked the idealism out of me. Yeah, I still sought the perfect solution, but falling short of that, which was nearly always, cynicism became my daily bread. Family responsibilities, a string of soul-deadening jobs, and the only time I was able to escape was my weekly stint on the mound for a variety of beer league ball teams, which only reminded me of what might have been if I hadn’t blown out my shoulder in college.

Five years ago, I reinvented myself. The transition from bitter, ex-believer, failed baseball hopeful, and consummate asshole, to someone doing what he was meant to do with his life didn’t happen overnight. These things are only immediate on television, and in the movies.

This morning, I sat in a room at the Cross Building in Augusta, and was part of a group of collaborators that have accomplished something pretty amazing over the past three years—we’ve taken a grassroots project and parlayed it into a program that is having a positive effect and making a difference across the state.

As I glanced around the room of educators, members of various non-profits, and others committed to making their little corner of the state a better place, I realized how foolish I was to have at one time had the world as my focus. By “brightening the corner” where we all are, we are all having an effect on something larger.

No one in the room was there to promote their own personal agenda. In fact, many of the participants purposefully put their own pet projects, and priorities aside, for the good of the group. The irony of being in Augusta wasn’t lost on me, and I’m sure many of the others. What occurred in our three hour meeting was a model of how these kinds of things should work, and possibly, how government could function, when people don’t grind ideological, or personal axes, and put the group before individual wants. I think what I experienced was an example of community organizing in the purest sense of the word, and in its most functional form.

[Weekly musical non-sequitur:

The Tragically Hip: Up To Here-

Released in 1989, nearly a decade after I graduated from Lisbon High School, listening to Gord Downie in the boys in their early days always makes me hearken back to those halcyon high school years.

The vibe is “classic rock,” albeit with a literary bent on the lyrics, courtesy of the poetic Downie’s songwriting prowess.
I scored Up To Here on a trip to Montreal, and a consumer excursion to Eaton’s Department Store, on St. Catherine Street. Apparently Eaton’s is no more, going out of business in 1999, a victim of Wal-Mart and other big-box monstrosities, just like similar retailers in the U.S.

We were visiting our hospitable neighbors to the north, soaking up the European vibe that is a visit to Montreal.

I had heard “New Orleans Is Sinking” on WTOS, still a freeform FM mainstay. The song was like nothing else being played on the radio at the time. While The Hip were virtual unknowns in the U.S., except on the few stations like ‘TOS that prided themselves on real variety, in Canada, they were rock and roll royalty.

I picked up both Up To Here, their third release, and Road Apples, their 2nd record. Actually, back in 1992, I actually bought both on cassette, subsequently replacing them both with CDs over the past few years.

It’s been awhile since I’ve listened to The Hip, even though they’ve spent considerable time in both cassette decks, and now, CD players of mine. Pulling the disc down off the shelf Saturday, I’ve been playing it regularly the past several days, including today’s trip north, to Augusta.

One hot August day, in 1998, my wife and I had gotten away for an afternoon at Old Orchard Beach. As was common, single prop planes flew overhead, with the usual advertisements for Lisa’s Pizza, local drink specials, and other assorted tourist trap enticements trailing behind. On this day, however, the trailer read, “Tragically Hip: Tonight at the State Theater.” I said to Mary, “We’re going!”

Apparently, the show was poorly promoted, as about 500 people showed up to see Canada’s Rock Gods put on the kind of high energy show that has won them legions of fans for the past 25 years. This chance encounter was one of the top five rock shows I’ve ever been to.

Long live (Canadian) rock!]

Barry Schwartz makes a case for wisdom

History Maker Mondays-10

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
--Karl Marx


Franz Kafka (1883-1924)


If today’s chosen mode of communication is limited to 140 words (ala Twitter), what does that say about the future of literature, and the works of writers like Franz Kafka.

I first read Kafka during my sophomore year in high school. The world literature class, taught by an imposing and erudite woman, rumored to be a lesbian, was a combination of hot and cold with me. Some of the works we read were intriguing and continue to linger with me today, some 30 years later. Ursula Le Guin, Dostoevsky, Herman Hesse, and Kafka fit the latter category.

For the 15 or so students that made up World Lit class at Lisbon High School, our first exposure to Kafka was via The Trial, one of three Kafka novels published posthumously. For many of us, a work like this one was unfamiliar. A mysterious, vague storyline, and an atmosphere that at times felt equally claustrophobic and hallucinatory, with Kafka mining the dark regions of his ego. The descriptive phrase, “Kafkaesque” emanates from the storyline of The Trial, as well as Kafka’s other works, like The Metamorphosis, and The Castle.

For those familiar with the 60s television series The Prisoner, an understanding, and a corollary between No. 6 and Josef K. (Kafka’s protagonist in The Trial) would seem apparent. The Trial addresses the facelessness, and the obvious impersonal nature of government bureaucracy, in its various forms.

Kafka was born in 1883, to a middle-class Jewish family, in Prague. At that time, Prague was part of the empire of Austria-Hungary.

The Jewish Europe that Kafka was born into would be radically transformed over the next 50 years. WWI would see the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapse at the end of the war, which led to a reworking of the map of central Europe.

Kafka’s Prague disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, where his work was initially banned. The Nazi Holocaust claimed the lives of his three sisters and many of his friends. While Kafka didn’t live to see all this, the tensions and communal anxieties fuelling that destruction had shaped both him and his writing.

While Marxist literary critics are at odds about Kafka, some, like Theodor Adorno, described Kafka’s writing as “a reaction to unlimited power.” That would be obvious in the case of Joseph K., buffeted by unseen, and faceless forces, much the way that Stalin’s subjects in the Soviet Union saw their lives ruined by a baseless accusation, coming from an anonymous tip—off to Siberia you went, relegated to a life of hard labor, and a premature death.

Kafka was raised as both a German, and a Jew. His early years saw him devoted to reading and writing. He had a proclivity towards the philosophical, and the scientific, leaning towards works by Spinoza, Darwin, and Nietzsche.

Raised in a Jewish family, the Kafka’s family was not overly religious in practice, with his Jewishness remaining as a backdrop.

He attended the German University in Prague, where he studied law. After completing his doctorate in 1906, Kafka landed a job at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute in 1908, where he’d work for the next 14 years. His short work day, as well as the lack of strenuousness associated with the job allowed him freedom for writing and thinking.

During his off hours, he was writing fiction, and between 1909 and 1910, he published a dozen short stories. He also became friends with fellow writer, Max Brod, who would become Kafka’s lifelong friend, and advocate of his writing.

It was Brod that we have to thank for having any knowledge of Kafka today. Kafka had instructed Brod to burn all his writings after his death, which Brod refused to do.

Kafka began work on The Trial in 1914. In 1915, he got his first recognition for his writing when he was awarded the Theodor Fontane Prize, which included a monetary prize of 800 marks.

Kafka found romantic attachments difficult, who wrote that he found the act of having sex repulsive. Nevertheless, he managed to have numerous brief “relationships” with women, but found the romantic entanglements that accompanied them, difficult.

In 1917, after finishing The Hunter Gracchus, and The Great Wall, Kafka’s health began to deteriorate. He began coughing up blood, and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. This necessitated a leave of absence from his work, and also, his writing. He spent part of the next several years on periodic sick leaves, including time spent in 1921, in the Tatra Mountains, at a sanatorium.

Even while being afflicted by poor health, he wrote three of his most important works in 1922: his novel, The Castle, and two shorter works of fiction; A Hunger Artist, and Investigations of a Dog.

Kafka died a citizen of Czechoslovakia on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria, in 1924. He was 39 at the time.

Limbaugh: Apologist for AIG

Corporate water carrier, Rush Limbaugh, was once again back at it, chosing to promote profiteers, over the working people of America. Of course, he's been doing it for years, and this should come as no surprise, other than to the duped millions that listen to him, daily.

Per usual, these fools are merely acting out that which Thomas Frank eloquently laid out in his book, What's The Matter With Congress? How Conservatives Won The Heart of America.