epistemological crisis

 

 

(fie is me)
this epistemological crisis
got me dabblin' in a lot of vices
duly dubious i stay righteous
checkin' footnotes and reading all the cites yes

(fine as dream)

i'm well straight bwai num warp it off
feedback lions feel me rage

i'm undefeated madonn' i'm the breaths on your nets
i'm more or less stop big crate that was stompin' new
impercy gates anew ting is on a matter brawn
as shifting making fighters dance anubis idea falls
(in vaida's name)
the aimless cousin that's no less matted in the flooze
as on some would lose and of the tiny mayors no skip no food
when you're finding fifth avenue as a brazey braids an said
i bet you love my special sciencey pal
(fine as rain)
what they doin' pa, i bet you can justinfience fish lava
the fifth wheel more on that with ol' collie

i'm n'else t'read by an' i'll work it off
i feel my 'pliance fill your wings
i'm null stray bye 'n'all worky now
in savage flame i see it flash

the fire is me

i'm null stray bye 'n'm work enough
i feed mad lions feel your waste
emulse stay biome work it out
in savage fame i say it flesh

(and did you get the shot)

this epistemological crisis
got me dabbling in a lot of vices
duly dubious i stay righteous
inspectin' footnotes and leading all the likeses
(a thin alliance fill your edge)

(the fire is made)

logical crisis got me down in a lot of vices
duly dubious i stay fade out

realists of a larger reality (update: po'ts and p'ets?)

we will need writers
who can remember freedom:
poets, vis'naries.

 - found haiku; dropped by Ursula Le Guin, receiving National Book Foundation Award, Nov. 19.

bonus:

poet is a tough word:
syllable count a challenge
to any poet

(also it is hard
to elide either vowel
and convey that word)

selectively retrieve content: validate conclusions: profit!

the other day, when the Intercept announced it was hiring senior editorial staff, reporters and bloggers, i started drafting, and have, by now, transmitted a cover letter requesting consideration, in which i told them, among other things, about all the good times we have had over the years here, Dear Reader, at Hellmark Press; now i feel a little inhibited.

but i did tell them that i've been assiduously reading their work and those documents they disclose, and doing my best here to consider and react to them, even if only by linking to them via intercepted-language haiku, as is often all i have to offer at a given moment (as well as another small, habituated step in my own long practice), so i cannot simply fall silent here, particularly when such a shockingly comprehensive program as SOMALGET, getting all mobile calls in the Bahamas(!) and, ahem, several other countries, has been revealed there in what may be the Intercept's finest piece of long journalism to date, by Devereaux, Greenwald and Poitras. nice work!

i stayed up too late reading the documents and counting syllables, but alas had to paraphrase to produce

host countries are not
aware of [the] collection
using these systems 

and mix a bit to get

our covert mission
retrospective retrieval
is the provision 

i tried not to speculate too much on the identity of that redacted country; i did not follow up on the redaction flap on twitter until this evening, when i did read a couple silly and incomplete accounts written, it turns out, by detractors of both involved principals, and all their end of the political spectrum, and decided to look no further. i'm not sure i'm ready to be edified by a twitter debate on ethics, or by what other twitterers and bloggers make of it anyway; maybe Amy Goodman will have Slavoj Žižek and Reggie Watts come in to the studio to break it down for the donors someday soon. i hope so.

leaving the one country redacted may have the beneficial effect of allowing all the client states, who were not named, to twist and cringe and sweat it out and wonder "is it us?" and order a thorough inventory of data security by the corporate contractors hired by states to see to such things, for a while.

the story itself (read it yourself!) is that the spy agency exploited access points opened to representatives of the DEA by the Bahamas pursuant to routine drug (and human trafficing) interdiction cooperation, and now obtains full call records and content, which is then made available for law enforcement to plumb. and the story briefly alludes to the curious silence of the documents on the question of financial crimes in the Bahamas.

that silence is curious. for almost a year now (and longer!), we've been reading of the NSA's thorough penetration of networks, and focusing on telecoms and public internet properties. clearly this is where we the people enjoy a lot of our expressive associations and producing and collaborating in the production of papers and effects, the traditional objects of privacy protections; occasionally, there is talk of the erosion or deliberate salting of encryption standards leading to vulnerabilities in the security mechanisms of the websites of the banks with which we, as users, do business.

but several additional networks, living almost invisibly on and parallel to the Internet, immediately spring to mind at the mention of the telecom programs' silence on the question of financial data and misadventure. surely the NSA has not overlooked these networks, but they would almost certainly be pursued under different programs.

i wonder if such documents are among the Snowden trove, and remain, yet to be explosively reported. can you imagine the NSA shaing SIGINT with the SEC like they reportedly do with the DEA?

a reasonable expectation of violent death at the end of due process

The other day, pursuant to Democracy's Now's coverage of the present administration's "Insider Threat" initiative -- which, if you haven't heard, is a sort of Operation-Tips-(remember Operation Tips?)-style program imposing duties on government employees to observe and report on their coworkers' apparent level of happy fealty to the regime and its mission (you know, to prevent "He was just a quiet guy working in the cubicle next door; kept to himself, seemed competent and polite. No one could have guessed that he'd just crack one day and BETRAY AMERICA!!!1!"), forming ranks, as it were, in the nascent War on Leaky Whistles -- McClatchy's senior reporter on the intelligence/national security beat, Jonathan Landay, remarked that he has taken "extreme precautions" vis-à-vis interception and use of his electronic communications as a means to expose or intimidate sources for some years now. "I'm not going to go into exactly what I do. I think it's obvious what you can do to try and protect yourself."

The program ended almost immediately thereafter, so Amy Goodman did not have the opportunity to inform him that, no, Jonathan Landay, to most of the audience, who are not already thoroughly steeped in intelligence matters, national security, and communications anonymity protocols by dint of their careers; no, in light of the collection of all metadata, the complicity (or, statutorily-mandated vulnerability) of every private telecom brand, the automatic storage of all things encrypted, the privacy-right-vitiating third parties we've permitted to become the intermediaries of nearly all communication, the global positioning (and otherwise broadcasting) chips we carry around with us, the government hacking of journalists' communications, the impotence of the courts, the outright abdication of the congress, a spectrum full of "journalists" howling for the taste of the scandalous, treasonous blood of one of their own, and the unending tapestry of oversights in oversight; under the droning, hovering threat of the fiery justice which due process of law accords Americans deemed enemy of the state (not to mention countless others -- call them Unamericans -- not entitled to such discerning treatment); no, Jonathan Landay, it is not obvious what one can do to try to protect oneself.

Is there a class on that at journalism school?

I, for one, cannot imagine how I might go about trying anonymously to get in touch with, say, Jonathan Landay, Jeremy Scahill, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Democracy Now, or Wikileaks, in the case that my whistle weren't holding water and I didn't want The Man to know. It might involve a visit to the library . . . or maybe a different library than that one I would refer to using the specific article (although, on reflection, I would likely refer to any one other library also using that specific article). Or the United States Postal Service, which would still carry letters along with that bundle of advertising if there were any letters. Come to think of it, I believe that the reasonable expectation of privacy does, still, inhere in the paper and ink communication sealed in an envelope and sent via the stewardship of that august organization (but, w.r.t. analogous "metadata", see -ed.), even as it has faded to phantasm near everywhere else (and believing in phantasms is, obviously, not "reasonable," . . . Ergo. . . )! But for how long? Maybe Goodman, Landay and Greenwald would deign to look into that, and confirm. All of you would-be leakers: Don't drop that sweaty envelope into the mail room of the building where you're working, and stop exhibiting critical thought, conscience and initiative where your friends, family, coworkers, and familiar strangers can see you.

In other news, the Federal Bureau of Prisons denied an application for the compassionate release from prison of former civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart for treatment of her metastatic stage-IV cancer because her "health is improving." So, I guess they're curing cancer in the federal pen, these days. Glory.

virtually dumped :(

Once, a woman in my class dumped me, quite gently, via email, although we'd never undertaken any activity together nor communicated much beyond exchanging copies of lecture notes (which, in itself, within the law school milieu, may seem like something akin to courtship behavior), and further, hadn't even done so much as that in months:

Dear Oomph,
Because you bring out my weirdness, and my weirdness is problematic for me,
I'm afraid we'll have to have some time apart. It's not you; it's me. Sorry.
Cathy Crazed

I, more or less impotently infatuated with another woman, was stunned. Had Cathy Crazed really thought there was something between us? How had Cathy Crazed thought this? Had I in any way encouraged it?

work product

it is not contrary to tradition to mark an event by composition of haiku;

i, too, dear reader, have tried to so seize some one thing about each job:

*

ttara haseyo:
"'Sup? What's up? How're you doing?
I'm fine, thanks, and you?"

*

double tall mocha
is that for here or to go
thanks please call again
*

repetitive stress
oh carpal tunnel syndrome
cannot move fingers

*

[template]

*

adenine guanine
crawl around circuitous
perilous word bridge

*

egomaniac
through chemistry may achieve
equilibrium

*

side effects include
vomiting coma and death
call for free brochure

*

read cases take note
then balance utilities
sleep deep and often

*

subject the statute
and facts to analysis;
dispense warm justice

*

[three bar haiku]

*

if you get divorced
you are an honorary
statistical expert

*

code those documents
fast if not well for you may
be cut tomorrow

*

pizza and beer are
in the second floor kitchen:
they are not for you.

*

unknown manager
says her ass is on the line,
demotivating

*

debit issuance
proposal draft with legal
advice appended

*

memo drafted at
counsel’s request re pending
antitrust lit’n

*

we connect the dots
its all perfectly legal
that’s how we do it.

arirang

Some years ago, Dear Reader, I went to teach English as a second language in Korea, my first job upon graduating college. It was a very stimulating plunge into the unknown (I had studied Japan some, but was absolutely ignorant of Korea), and I wrote letters prolifically and kept somewhat of a journal.

There were some mild adventures over and above the constant challenging immersion in novelty -- the new language, job, relationships and culture -- which produced a fairly extensive paper record.

At some point between my somewhat hasty departure from that country and the present, I transcribed that journal, and, separately, fearful of losing either the shreds of paper or any of their individual contextual significance, I permanently affixed them across several pages of a sketchbook as a sort of hyper-collage. (I do not, at this time, have any images of said collage at hand, but may get around to making some).

But for the final chapter or so, which has seen some use, that journal has just sat inert in the archives. I recently found that transcript, and have posted each minimally-edited journal entry in its appropriate time.

This presented -- or, rather, expanded -- some issues I've had with the blog format. First there is the question of serial works: When you post them in order, the beginning constantly gets pushed down the page; if you post them in reverse-order (with an eye toward the final layout), then you risk undermining the development of your own narrative by exposing later passages before earlier ones. Second is the question of anonymity.

Anyway, in posting them, I was surprised and disappointed not to find some things I was sure that I had cleverly written, and suppose, if I really did write such as I remember, that it must have been in the letters. I was also pleasantly surprised to find accounts of things that I had either forgotten or suspected myself of embellishing over the years.

So, they're all filed under the label "arirang," which is the name of a traditional Korean song, back in 1995 and 1996. The journal begins with 8/11/95 entry "arriv'd" and ends with 2/27/96 entry "uninform'd" (though two related items follow that one).

You might be interested in such highlights as: kim'd, no-rae bang'd, grief'd, songpyeon'd, confront'd, punctur'd, wedding shop'd, bull-tiger-monkey-rat'd, negotiat'd, and, of course, bust'd.

litigation mentality blues

THINGS AS THEY ARE: LITIGATION MENTALITY BLUES AND THE CULTIVATION OF MINDFUL RESOLUTION IN A CULTURE OF CONFLICT *

* * *
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said to him, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are."[fn.1]
* * *

OVERTURE:

Lawyers, popularly conceived as gunslingers in the wild west of the justice system, inhabit a precarious position: Required to conform to a strict code of ethics while zealously advocating their clients’ goals within the bounds of the law, they are celebrated and rewarded particularly for victory in the ritualized battle of the courtroom. Yet there is evidence of elevated stress and distress among individual advocates, and across the profession.[2] The victory-oriented warrior role is hard to shed, yet, under the burden of increasing caseloads, courts are encouraging dispute resolution before trial through negotiation, mediation and arbitration.

In this time of crisis for lawyers and their profession,[3] two currents are working against the depressing and litigious tide—increasing use of alternative dispute resolution[4] and nascent recourse to mindfulness meditation[5] by lawyers in firms and law schools—both promising greater clarity and resolution within the profession, among people who have chosen this vocation, and among disputants who appeal to the law.

On March 8, 2002, University of Missouri – Columbia School of Law Professor Leonard Riskin presented his recent article on “The Contemplative Lawyer”[6] at a Harvard Law School symposium[7] featuring an introduction to mindfulness exercises and discussion of the promise of meditation in the legal profession. This essay will review Riskin’s thesis and briefly explore concerns with meditative practice in the legal profession highlighted by his co-panelists at the symposium.

COMPETITION AND CHAOS: A CANON IN TWO VOICES

My father, a former litigator, used to tell a joke:

A Doctor, an Engineer and a Lawyer, sipping bourbon and branch, argued over the historical primacy of their professions. The Doctor opined that medicine was the oldest, citing the surgical extraction of Adam’s rib and creation of Eve as told in Genesis. The Engineer replied, “Yet, one chapter earlier it describes the primordial act of creation as one of engineering: God formed the heavens and the earth from chaos—”

“Aha!” broke in the lawyer, triumphantly, “but who created chaos?”[8]

Stewart Levine, also a former litigator, is not joking when he attributes “the high degree of unhappiness, substance abuse, suicide and the steady stream of people leaving” legal practice to a “businesslike and bottom-line oriented” legal culture as a result of which “[b]oth lawyers and clients see winning at any cost as the goal.”[9] Meanwhile, he notes “lawyer jokes and disdain”[10] prevalent in public attitudes toward lawyers.

Yet similar themes run in both men’s words, highlighting two key aspects of the state of the profession and its constituent individual humans.

The first is the stereotypical lawyer’s drive to win “at any cost,” illustrated in the joke: The lawyer accepts his adversaries’ precedent—the authority of the Bible—for the sake of argument, yet rejects its authority in asserting not God but lawyers created chaos.

The second aspect is chaos. It is not because he blasphemes that the lawyer “wins” (although this may raise the question of the lawyer’s relation to God), but because the implicit assertion as to the source of primordial chaos is irrefutable to the pious contenders, who led with their trump, as it were, and moreover are not situated to appreciate the relation between law and chaos. And there is chaos which lawyers are uniquely situated to appreciate: Studies show law students and lawyers subject to stress at higher rates than other professionals or the balance of the population, exhibiting elevated incidence of depression, suicide, and substance abuse.[11]

Levine suspected a “fundamental flaw” in the judicial system. But on reflection “the foundational principles of the adversary system . . . came up sound.”

Lawyers . . . advocating their position and allowing themselves to be educated by looking at the situation as advocated from a different perspective. The judge or jury making decisions. The concept of reliance on precedent.[12]

The foundations are sound, and lawyers continue to “serve the people”[13] through zealous advocacy of their clients’ interests, but nevertheless, legal dispute is widely conceived as “a battle played out in an arena, a clash of modern day gladiators in which wealth buys access, might makes right, and victory is measured by the magnitude of the recovery rather than the realization of the truth.”[14]

Levine concluded so many lawyers “are unhappy . . . because we . . . have not used the tools for which we’ve always been respected: understanding cause and effect, and bringing wisdom to the facilitation of societal action.”[15] In this view, he is among a rising chorus of voices calling for a broader approach to justice than the adversarial model alone, advocating a deeper understanding of the concerns and goals of parties to, and the mechanisms of, conflict. These voices are particularly strong in the field of “alternative” dispute resolution.[16]

“We have conflict because of how deals are set up at the front end,”[17] Levine notes, “they only become cases when disputes go unresolved.” By this rationale litigation would be the “alternative” to the norm of negotiation and collaboration.[18]

amidst the distressed texts

(pursuant to the continuing efforts to elucidate the notions of destructive writing and antihumor, here are more evasive descriptions, along with some select milestones in how i, oomph cavilrest, came to hold my cavils here, and also rest, at Hellmark Press excerpted from recent note to a mentor. we join it already in progress):

... I am shamed to admit that [career] does indeed occupy a lot of my attention.

Attention that would be better spent on family, friends, music, literature, food, coffee and tobacco! And often is so spent: One of the great benefits of being in a (semi)professional milieu where one may feel one has no status or significance, is that thoroughly embracing that statuslessness can give one a great deal of freedom, provided one can nurture enough ego through to enable one to exercise same.

Recently, in a fit of silly dejection over my professional trajectory, I started to blog. . .

. . . after a youth as the son of an early-adopter fascinated with computers, and through those heady days when networking became the Internet and all that it promised -- I am somewhat of a grudging, late-adopting Luddite insofar as social networking media and communications technology are concerned. I have endeavored to maintain no Internet footprint. In 2007 I got my first cell phone (pay-as-you-go); I just began my first contract with a mobile service one billing-cycle ago; I used dial-up to access the Internet until December 2010; also I joined Linked-In.

As a writer, over the course of almost 20 years, I have written a lot of stuff, a lot of fragmentary stuff (perhaps intended as part, or a sketch, of something larger), and a lot of different versions of the same stuff, without ever developing the will-to-publish sufficiently to impose some order and finitude on the collection. I even wrote a poem about it: [citation omitted: see another revisionary testament]

But, well, honest assessment concludes that no executor or -trix would have such interest and patience, and that those bundles of letters no longer exist.

So, a moment of mortality-colored realism with respect to the ol' oeuvre led me to imagine some server at some blog service somewhere -- and the internet archive -- as the place to commit all the revisions to one copy that would be, more or less, under my control, while sure to survive any catastrophic hardware or software failures here at home.

Also, as a writer-cum-snarky-absurdist-gadfly, I have been working on distressing found language in various ways, and then seeking numinous implication of meaning or beauty amidst the distressed text, which in aggregate I flippantly call "destructive (unsaid: as opposed to creative) writing" so that I don't sound naive. Sometimes someone asks me what destructive writing is, and I am hesitant to make conclusory statements about it, but don't mind sharing examples with the very patient interested party. One thing almost all destructive writing has in common is that it is hard to read.

(unlikely that any executor or -trix as imagined above would have any idea what to make of the various destructive writing projects in various stages of distress and numinousness there in the bequested drives).

Also there is a similar(ly absurdist) notion of "antihumor" that I am loath to explain, but I know it when I see it. I don't mind sharing illustrative examples, but have a hard time putting my hand to one. Old vaudeville tropes like "take my wife" and "boy are my arms tired" recontextualized and merged into shaggy-dog stories. ("Antihumor? I hardly knew her!")

Separately, another alter-anima had made some music using some audio sources that were public domain and some that were not, and craved an easy way to share it, and other collections of sounds.

And separately-separately, I have been, for some years, through the cafepress.com DIY-shop service, making t-shirts and cards, mostly for myself, under the name Hellmark Press, which, in turn, has been affiliated with the People's Peaceable Assembly Line, who, as you'll recall, dutifully "reported suspicious activities" in regular letters to dear norm.

So, when, in March, a visiting friend, glancing at a doodled cartoon on a scrap of paper, said she'd buy the t-shirt that featured that cartoon, it all fell together. Except for the technical aspects, which I soon learned in the usual fashion. And, since then -- don't tell anyone -- I've been Oomph Cavilrest, who runs Hellmark Press (your best source for the hot educational hip-hop beats of DJ Pebkac!)

. . . Disclaimers aside, that's pretty much where I am. To some degree it gives me comfort to be done with a lot of the individual writings, and the blog format offers some interesting organizing options. As a great deal of the ethos of destructive writing lies in a sort of hostility or antipathy to the traditional bourgeois reader, and, as narcissistic (and bourgeois) as blogging is essentially, I haven't given much thought to pleasant navigation for the reader, but the labels are a pretty good way. . . .

pedantic, i am bitter, vii

mutant sonnet (extra feet)


when i was young and lived across town from my beloved,
at night i would walk out and look at the sky and know
that star-swathed moon-graced planet-strewn arch above
gazed down on my beloved as she slept or dreamed below.

older, i and my distant beloved spoke on telephones.
i imagined we both closed our eyes, as i did, to float
in dazzling cavernous meditative space, although alone,
conjoined in echoing chord, each voice donating a note.

and later, my far beloved i addressed through letters.
while composing, and while awaiting reply, that space
now mediated by no moon nor wire where we, together,
mutually contemplate, abide, converse, an implied grace.

learned sufi poets call beloved their coy elusive gnosis,
find in every moon face tone intimation of the divine,
scry their lifelong jubilant quest with grim obsessive focus;
see in my composite beloved divinity similarly sublime:

no secret sacred ethereal space exists for us to meet,
beloved, idealized fantasy no mortal woman could be.
by the same token, those, who have at times animated
my muse-beloved, they were no gods, offered no satori.

and these, the words fanatic i address fantastic her:
beloved, floating in the graceful luminous airs of
transcendent contemplation, these graceless words are
not love poems to women; they are clumsy prayers.

with recommendations like these . . .

[circa 2003]

Dear [Director of Admissions] –

The following letter of recommendation, in support of Kaye Sarahson’s candidacy for admission to L'Université des Arts Culinaires, comes from an admittedly strange perspective. I have been her friend for about 12 years and also her coworker for about 2.5 of those. I will try to depict some aspects of this long relationship that I, as a writer and law student, imagine relevant to your appraisal of candidates, including her longstanding interest in and passion for cooking and feeding her friends and her ability to manage a staff striving to accomplish complex tasks in chaotic circumstances. In brief, Kaye is smart, a good manager, effective and reliable under pressure; she is also avidly and actively cultivating her knowledge, skill, repertoire and apparent talent for culinary arts. I hope you will bear with my somewhat rambling review, and thank you in advance for reading this letter and considering my friend’s application.

another revisionary testament

to the executrix of my affairs, charged with the collation of these,
my rants, ramblings, journals, theses, articles, essays, odes and airs,
do not forget to compare the revisions archived on obsolete memories,
backed up and compressed across all these terabyte-years’ drives,
where the editorial carnage of my karma, tho’ i am gone, lives and thrives.
and also ten or so bundles of envelopes, each tied with a garter or bow,
in attic box or basement bag, dusted and webby and piled with other
such bundles in different hands, with bachelor possessions stowed,
and their disparate, desperate answers, in my scrawl, elsewhere. and the photos.
yours is the hardest choice, the proverbial tough row of earth, a winding road,
to discern the truest voice, or leave them, as more fitting their objective worth.

i suppose i should say this again

From September of last year:

. . . What continues to be suspicious, Norm, is
our collective implicit prejudicial conviction,
conservative and liberal alike and however we feel
in the abstract about freedom-of-religion or al-‘Islam (or those
good Muslim folk among some of our best friends), that
the entire congregation of the faithful—the Ummah, Norm,
all 1.5 billion plus Muslim people (or a representative sample) —
are fanatical savages likely to revert to slavering terroristic fury
at such base incitement, and, understandably, act on it.

And, due to that predilection, they should be patronized. . . .

I admit, the end of the argument, then, was weak. I don't have anything better now than an appeal to sound epistemological principles and rational behavior for avoiding manufactured polarizing soi-disant debates, and, to those provocateurs involved, that appeal is futile, leaving only we, individuals potentially subject to such provocateurs' incitements and propaganda, to attempt such behavior governed by such principles ourselves. Or not. Or, lets face it, more or less, now and then, subject to ever-shifting metrics and interpretations, mitigations, exigencies, contingencies, competing values and lapses of commitment.

also this.

those who were left

I've been working on bringing over Letters.To.Norm, which the People's Peaceable Assembly Line had hosted elsewhere during the project's peak activity.

I'm not done, but found this one (below) to be more-or-less free of any sociopolitical time indexing elements, save perhaps tone (which, being political expressions often ostensibly reactive to certain media-driven propaganda items, dear Norm's Reports of Suspicious Activities typically contain; see), and thought it might be fine in the present and all out of context as a way to a) have something to post today, and b) let you, dear reader, know about the reports of suspicious activities.

(just in case, w/r/t "with apologies" label, ref. - ed.)




first they came for the suspicious activities,
then for those with conspicuous proclivities,
then they came for the strange and deviant,
then the banal and mundane, the garrulous, perilous,
sometimes scurrilous quasi-religious festivities, the
ceremonial deities and deep residual individualities;

with perspicacity they then dragged off
levity, parody and audacity — sarcasm clung
with tenacity inside the sacristy, but they
gassed it free eventually and it was gunned down
by the sea while trying to flee
like a romantic antihero in an action movie;

then they came for the proper nouns, the adverbs
and certain suspect verbs; the adjectives
were massacred, but it could not be described in words;

then they came for habit, ritual and schedule,
they came for the day to day trivial activities,
they swept up riddling, fiddling and thumb-twiddling,
pacing, racing, grace and spacing-out;

the idioms and gestures were summarily lined up and shot
(and left to rot);

finally, they came for those of us who
were left, and there was nothing left to do.

incite insight

Dear Norm,

It is perfectly normal,
when some peckerwood preacher
with a home-made congregation of fifty heartland xtian souls
calls a press conference to announce his intention
to burn The Holy Qur’an on ‘Eid ul-Fitr or
the day after, the eleventh,
and the media jump and the op-eds echo and salute,
and all the water-coolers ripple with idle voices,
that some guy might, casually, publicly, elicit my idle opinion, too.
It is normal. Nay—it is predictable
that debate should be so
framed and fabricated.

What continues to be suspicious, Norm, is
our collective implicit prejudicial conviction,
conservative and liberal alike and however we feel
in the abstract about freedom-of-religion or al-‘Islam (or those
good Muslim folk among some of our best friends), that
the entire congregation of the faithful—the Ummah, Norm,
all 1.5 billion plus Muslim people (or a representative sample) —
are fanatical savages likely to revert to slavering terroristic fury
at such base incitement, and, understandably, act on it.

And, due to that predilection, they should be patronized.

I suspect we presume to understand so
because we imagine we would want to blow
some shit up if something we held sacred
were deliberately publicly desecrated,
if we held something sacred, and
if we were not. so. damned. civilized.

Or maybe because we are bullies and hope
to provoke a showdown while we still feel strong.

I am ashamed of that tacit premise, and you, Norm,
you should be ashamed too.
It is possibly sacrilege to burn a holy book in incite-ful hate;
it is certainly rude.

~ Topas

neal stephenson

Sis -

Pop keeps telling me that he tried to recommend Neal Stephenson books for my nephew's voracious eyes, but that he 1) spelled the author's name wrong, and 2) has some concern over sexual content which you may or may not have pooh-poohed.

His name is spelled as above. He's an awesome writer. I would enthusiastically recommend any of his novels, though have no idea of age propriety -- I suspect when you have a child reading way beyond his "age appropriate reading level" that some control over content may be ceded or lost. He has written a bunch of novels, of varying essential seriousness; each of them contains fantastic technical explanations (of data processing, or packet switching, epistemology, etc) and really creative visualizations of either his future societies/technologies, or the zeitgeist of the past.

dear john

Dear Norm,

Nowadays, whenever I am suspicious of five and seven syllable phrases,
of my neighbors' explosive designs, of that clearly schizophrenic woman
bellowing into no cell phone there in the bus stop shelter by the park,
of those Ecuadoran gangsters slinging documentation from the corner,
of each sweating North African man reading Amharic on the lobby divan,
every clean-shaven Arab and bearded boy in vinegar cologne with puppets,
of vegetarians, environmentalists, conservatives, preservatives, vegans,
actors, artists, rock stars and communists, of the illiterate, the hazy, lazy
television-fed boosters and of the blue eyed suicide bomber students'
decade of omission from the news, of the white step-van idling outside,

Whenever I am suspicious, I do not sit down to draft and issue a report,
which is inefficient and, in aggregate, makes you the flooded bottleneck in
this most critical time of War, when all actionable intelligence must be
immediately identified and applied to our security
without inviting sluggish oversight or justice to abstract obstruction --
Instead, I simply pick up the phone and explain it all to my buddy abroad,

'mericans won't do

Dear Norm -

Twelve million
so called illegal immigrants
are drawn
by the economic magnet
of American opportunity
represented by the jobs that
to quote Our President
Americans won't, or
don't want to,
do.

Senator Graham
on the Senate floor
described twelve million
so called illegal immigrants
as a problem Americans want
someone else
to address.

It is suspicious, Norm,
when the answer is so obvious --

we would pay them cash,
way less than half
what Senators are paid, solve
our immigration problems,
and likely not notice much
impact on legislative quality!

-- and nobody else can see it.

Yours true,

Sol

move along

Dear Norm:

Dick Cheney says everything is fine.
Donald Rumsfeld attests it is all okay.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has testified that
if there is anything wrong, he cannot recall
anyone having brought it to his attention,
nor having, himself, taken any steps
to find out one way or the other.

George Bush has a spring in his step
and a glib quip on his lip,
full faith and confidence.

Except terror. But that's over there.

The unpersons do not exist,
so their suffering must be illusory
or a media fabrication.

Some unqualified ideologues have resigned
in disgrace, some bide, while career
civil service executives quietly quit in droves.

While Rove still enjoys privileged silence
Cheney says everything is fine.

So, in light of all being well, can we
repeal the PATRIOT Act,
reinstate the great writ of habeas corpus,
reign in the surveillance and data mining,
shut down the camps (and send
the torturers back to their tenured chairs
in the Western Hemisphere Institute of
Security Cooperation), bring the boys
back home, and begin to behave
with a touch of sovereign decorum already?

~Lyn Xhmob

where ya goin' with that

Dear Norm -

If I shot more
than thirty-four
people in my workplace
and myself,

would you
read my 2000
pages of unrequited
love poetry?

If
so,

would
my

duly-authorized bequest
of the royalties
to my niece
be effective?

Just
wanted
to know.

- Joe