Shaw Island

We are in some new time zone, in a place with very different light patterns because of the thick tall trees surrounding the house, a house with different internal rhythms than ours, too, slow and sweet rhythms, quieter, all of us gathered around the wood stove. I have no idea what time it is, which is a fine fine fine fine fine thing.

This morning, we woke slowly and stayed in bed to think and drift until we heard the others rouse. While Buni made scones, we all talked for a long time about family stuff, me going step-by-step through where all my brothers and sisters are now which also means talking about the nieces and nephews and crossing the continent back and forth and going back a few decades sometimes to fill in backstory, surprising that we need to do that given how far back we go together. Brian and Buni didn't know about Andrew's death, for example, which ties into why my father wants to move to San Diego now, and so I slipped back into the memories I have from being three and surrounded by very odd and intense events involving crying adults, a turquoise-and-white Chevy, and one of the most striking cemeteries on the planet.

We walked out later in the morning to Broken Point, through cedars, moss, and damp and past several new-to-us kinds of ducks out on the various views of the sound. There was a sea otter hanging out among what might have been buffleheads, and the ferry passed.

We drove into the little store at the ferry dock to get bread, wine, and the last bits of presents.

We wrapped the gifts, and Brian has made cherry pies. Buni is reading, with spotted Bindi all wrapped up around her.

Before that, though, Buni showed me her workroom. I don't know what Buni calls what she does, really. She goes to elementary schools and helps children perform stories. She adapts stories from books, makes costumes, and prepares relaxed scripts that get the children dancing and moving and singing and adding words and making guesses about what happens next, and that is how they tell the story to themselves. Any seven-year-old would want to wake up forever in Buni's workroom. It is full of sly-looking and jolly marionettes of all sized and kinds, and billowy dragon costumes and tails and snouts. There are too many capes too count, made of shiny fabrics and ribbons, and floating thunderstorm costumes and scepters, velvety hats. There are pinks and greens, silky and shiny, everything ordered and yet floating into everything else, and lots of tinkly and throaty musical instruments. I wanted to fall asleep in the soft colors and glints. I wanted to roll up in it all and listen to Buni tell her stories.

these foolish things

The phone rang at 10:30 last night -- Christmas night -- and Dennis answered. He sucked in his breath and said, "You'd better talk to Anne." It was a woman from the airport, almost in tears, telling us that our morning flight had been canceled. She said that the morning flight had been delayed or canceled three days in a row, and that she pretty much hadn't left the airport in five days.

She spent many minutes trying to reroute us, explaining how they had tried to get a bus to take everyone to the Green Bay airport in the morning but that the bus driver had bailed. She looked to see if any flights were available out of Green Bay. No. Marquette? No. Rhinelander? Yes! And it is a flight out at a human hour, 10:45am, which is Central Time, too, so 11:45am our time (psychologically), meaning that we didn't have to leave for the drive until almost 8am, to give us three hours of safe time to get there. Plus... because this is now the third flight we've been promised, we got sweetly upgraded to first class for both of the longer flights coming and going. Well, okay. When I got off the phone, I sent a thank you note to Melinda, the woman who had helped us. Now if only she could ensure our bus-to-ferry connection once we get there.

The drive down this morning was beautiful. Picture every Christmas card or child's book you've ever held that had a "Winter Wonderland" scene in it, and that was us. The roads were clear, there were bits and pieces of light snow falling here and there around Painesdale and Watersmeet, but all the trees were thickly dusted and the long views of the Ontonagon River Valley were gentled with the edgings of white and the low grey sky. Eventually as dawn came on the crows appeared, doing lookout from the white pines or digging in the banks on the roadsides.

I hope Dennis didn't mind that I needed to sing, the mix CDs keeping me going. (Thank heavens for Cole Porter.)

Now we sit in the Rhinelander airport, an hour to go, a blue-tiled waterfall-fountain making us doze against the other background noise of the TSA folk checking people's luggage. I think of Allan Heaps and Karla Kitalong, with whom I drove back from a Computers & Writing Conference in Columbia, Missouri many years ago now. Allan wanted to save money by not staying another night in a hotel, so we -- he -- drove all night, fueled by bridge mix he bought just north of the Wisconsin/Illinois border. By the time we got to Rhinelander it was close to 4am. Allan and Karla were in the front seat, shouting "Rhinelander" over and over in different accents, making each other crack up. They settled finally on a sort of Germanic accent, thick and authoritative in spite of their giggles. This morning I started the chant of it as soon as we saw the first road sign. Dennis didn't remember the story, and certainly didn't remember the emotional resonance and comfort of such chanting in the dark.

But we are here and, if we are lucky, we will be sitting by the fire at Shaw in about 14 hours. (And being grateful that all this didn't happen while we were trying to get to the MLA.)

where does chumlig come from?

Persisting to page 130 paid off; the last 200 pages of _Rainbows End_ went quickly. It helped, also, to have a large chunk of unexpected and unclaimed time today so that the difficulty of holding on to who is who in the book wasn't intensified by the gaps between my previous reads.

Arrogant judgment: If Vinge had written characters that were more than sketches with one or two traits -- sometimes visual, sometimes personality (Miri is heavy, Alice is withdrawn, Carlos flutters periodically into Mandarin and wears Bermuda shorts and T-shirts, Robert is an arrogant asshole) -- the book would compel as well as give fun. I might have also gotten engaged in the plot, which although was supposed to be tied to the-end-of-life-as-we-know-it had neither suspense nor weight. The pleasure for me was in his imaginings of technological implications, which are suggestive -- but schematic.

The descriptions of the protest at the library that weaves through most of those last pages -- pitting the belief circle of the Scoochis against that of the Hacekeans -- did bubble for me because it's Seuss meets Society for Creative Anachronism. Both come with already-established visualization and high silliness, and Vinge plays it out at night, under the eucalyptus. Vinge asks us to imagine this event drawing the attentions of hundreds of thousands of people, many participating in its distributed sustenance and movement. Within the book the event is supposed to be a big deal because it's the first time that belief circles have clashed with each other, rather than internally. They clash because the SCA contingent wants the library's books to be digitized, no matter if the books are destroyed; the Scoochis want to hold on somehow to the 'real' books while the digitization happens.

In spite of that, there's no real defense put up for books as unique objects. In the last pages, following the prevention of the dangerous mice being shipped out, the library is rebuilt as a place of haptics: feel the book, turn the pages: it's all digitized and being spread everywhere. Where the ‘real' books are stored or who has access isn't discussed. I must have missed something about the Scoochi position and how it differed from the Hacekean because it doesn't seem that there are two widely separate positions there: one is tied to a dream of chain mail fantasy and the other to plush furries, and it's okay that the British Museum can be made to fit on a sort-of floppy because there's haptics, and at the end Vinge tells us that this is the result of the two positions working in parallel.

At best, then, there is an argument for belief circles not being exclusive, without reasons being given and with an unspoken ambivalence about the materiality of words and books circulating throughout. But I want to stop complaining.

I do enjoy the descriptions of the wearables that allow the wear-ees different kinds of primarily visual overlays: a cop car on the freeway becomes a woman on a pterodactyl, the scrub of San Diego County reveals its water system or allows mutual game playing in the hills (where we lived when I was very little, before those hills were suburban). Vinge does allow me to imagine the results of thousands of people playing together as individuals, without planning or hierarchical oversight, to result in complex entertainments -- and he plays that off interspersed descriptions of hundreds of people in various security organizations looking, individually, within the playing for patterns that denote imposed plans and plots. It is distributed computing carried out through certain logics of social organization, where most people, it seems, are meant to be distracted and the rest are meant to keep them safely distracted by keeping anyone else from giving the distribution enough shape to bend it in any particular direction.

But what's of focused interest to me in all this, given what I do, are the occasional descriptions of the Composition class in which several of the principles take part. By having old people need to be educated into wearable and other technologies just as the young people do, Vinge sets up being able to explain stuff without having to have pages of overt let-me-explain-how-this-all-works exposition. And so the poet who has come back from Alzheimer's has to take a sort-of remedial Composition class at the local high school along with the kids who aren't the stars; the same teacher also teaches a "Search and Analysis" class. The Composition class consists of people making things, and being graded -- it sounds like -- on both process and product. The process, in part, is learning how to partake in distributed systems, in learning how to hook up with others and collaborate and consider how one contributes (the poet collaborates with a boy, teaching him to be comfortable with words in exchange for technical lessons); the products include water purifiers, musical compositions played by school orchestras thousands of miles apart, and a virtual bridge that circle the Earth.

I circle back then to the book's ambivalence towards words: these compositions are fully multimodal and collaborative, requiring lots of discussion -- which we never see -- and apparently no writing. Vinge is certainly doing things with words as a writer, and he must know his limitations because he doesn't give us any of the great poet's poetry -- which the great poet can no longer create, anyway, as a result of the medical procedures that have brought him back from Alzheimer's. The boy with whom the poet collaborates is drawn to the poet after after being transfixed by the poet's performance of a poem, and at the end the boy creates the words that accompany the musical composition I mentioned above. One of the minor -- and made-to-be mediocre -- characters comments that those words are beautiful, and the poet agrees, while thinking that in his past life, as the poet, he would have found them second-rate. Words are here, then, but uncomfortable, necessary but causing considerable tension in their print manifestations, allowed to be the past beautiful results of a single great (but asshole) man's efforts but fading now as biological patterning and collaborative creations become the dangerous or engaging ways of being with others.

Is distributed aesthetics about the fading of singular creative types and the glistening of those who know how to collaborate and spread and insert delight in many different and often small places?

It's time to sleep, and I have devoted more time to this than I should, but now I know even more the directions some of my reading has to take: sensation, aesthetics, distributed cognition, ethics, yee-hah. What would a distributed ethics be -- if it's different from how we already live? (What is morality in distributed cognition?)

the joys of traveling -- and not

Here is where we are supposed to be at this moment:

Here is where we are:

We woke at 5, showered, watered the plants, remarked the bright massy stars in the chilly darkness as we climbed up to the car, stopped at the Post Office to drop off the bills in the chilly outside mailbox, and at the airport were smug at not having to wait in the unusually long line because we'd already printed our boarding passes and had no luggage to check.

Until our friend Diane walked over out of the line to ask, "And where were you imagining you were going this morning?" She told us the plane was delayed three hours. Later, on the Northwest website, we read that the reason was that the plane crew needed required rest time -- usually you can count on that first flight out in the mornings as the most reliable flight, because it goes on the plane that came in the night before, but all we can figure is that the plane got in late last night and so the crew weren't allowed to leave on time. We hope they slept well. But at the airport the airline people were all too busy up to tell any of us.

From those past days of hanging around with Cindy Selfe I know that when there is a long line and a flight change you go to the phones, so we pretty quickly learned that there was no way we were going to make it to Seattle today, unless we wanted to risk stand-by.

So our plans have changes and we fly out on Tuesday, instead, fingers crossed. B&B won't be able to meet us at the airport, as they would have today (they spent the night in Seattle last night so they could meet us) -- so we're trying to figure out whether to take the bus from the Seattle airport to the ferry or the little plane to the island. There are less happy things to spend an afternoon considering.

We came home from the airport, still in the dark, slept a little, cleaned out the basement a little (amused at ourselves that this is what we do with a gift of a little time), shopped for food for the next day and a half -- and bought ourselves a bottle of champagne and some local smoked fish for tomorrow morning: this is our Christmas plan if we are here, a delicious one that has provided many good memories from the past -- like the Christmas morning a few years back where we came up with the five disk set of the best women's music of all time, in an operatic narrative of love sustained.

I had forgotten...

that momentary start of seeing the world change, of waking toward the window and having it all be the dim white of an early morning snow that has lined all the trees and erased all other detail. One morning at Vassar, when I lived in the townhouses with Rachel and Hilary, I woke to this and went out for a three hour walk along the edge of the farm and through neighborhoods I hadn't walked before, in the quiet and no one else was there until I came home and they were bustling about breakfast, Rachel having made something warm as she usually did. One morning some years later -- the first of Thanksgiving break after we had driven up late at night into the Sierras from the previous day of classes at Berkeley, a day that had been frustrating for some one of the reasons grad school can be frustrating -- we woke to several inches of snow and I headed out into it with our friend's dog, out and down toward the Stanislaus River through the big trees, several hours of sloughing off pissed-off-ness into the delight and beauty of it and the effort of it, too, the snow in some places knee-high. When we got back to the cabin, the dog passed out in front of the wood stove and I was back in the world of living with others.

I won't go out into this morning's snow, yet. Instead, I have printed our boarding passes for flying away tomorrow, off to Seattle to visit with Dennis's brother and Buni for two weeks. (Is there a way to type so that the letters sparkle with the gladdening they bring?) In the meantime, though, I am looking out into this snow for some consolation for the frustrations and bad-decisions-of-others of this past week.

Not counted in that list, however, is that my father put our Christmas package that we'd sent them on the stove. I heard this happening while on the phone with my mother, checking that the package had arrived. In the middle of talking about what is happening Christmas Day there, she said, an aside, her hand over the receiver, "Walter, that's probably not a good place to put that," but I could picture him standing in the kitchen with the package and no other place to put it because my mother is in cooking mode (hence, all the counter space is full). She and I talked a few minutes more, plotting various niece-and-nephew fun, and we finished and hung up. Several minutes later the phone rang, and Dennis picked it up and what I heard was, "But it's okay? Only the bottom was singed?"

meanwhile

I am trying to read Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge as my "find a few moments in the evening to read something fun and distracting" book, and this man has won four Hugos? This is the first book of his I have read, and it's like chewing cardboard.

Vinge can develop edge-of-intriguing ramifications of current technological potential but he cannot write a person whose name I remember (or care to remember) or whose behaviors make sense or involve decision, thought, or concern. Vinge's place descriptions are flat and there is no rhythm or variety to the sentences. I'm staying with it now because it puts me to sleep.

His other books must be better somehow? How?

it is raining

It is raining? A year ago, it was not raining.

A year ago, I also did not have a General Education Distribution Lists meeting in the afternoon on the last day of the semester.

But the night ended with decorating Marilyn's Christmas tree, which is beautiful.

Maybe it will snow by morning. The tree will still be beautiful.