If you know who Jaron Lanier is you will understand why he, and probably only he, can get away with such a title for a commercially published book, a title that most people today, and that would include writers with books to promote, would consider hoot-out-loud humbug.
But perhaps they would not if they more fully understood the perverse and toxic nature of the machine Lanier terms BUMMER.
BUMMER = Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made Into an Empire for Rent
Writes Lanier:
“BUMMER is a machine, a statistical machine that lives in the computing clouds. To review, phenomena that are statistical and fuzzy are nevertheless real.”
And more:
“The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Here I have put forward a hypothesis that our problem is not the Internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms. Instead, the problem that has made the world so dark and crazy lately is the BUMMER machine, and the core of the BUMMER machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people.”
BUMMER sounds like science fiction. But alas, as
Lanier explains, the business plan behind social media, and the use of proprietary
algorithms to hook users into addiction and subtly distort and shape
interactions among users, is both real and seriously icky. You’ve probably read
or heard something about FaceBook’s shenanigans, but in Lanier’s Ten
Arguments you’re getting a far broader, more detailed analysis and
argument, in a wierdly charming package, and not from some random TED pundit,
but from one of the fathers of the industrial-cultural complex now known as
Silicon Valley.
Call me a pessimist: I doubt that Lanier’s book will have any more influence on the general public’s social media habits than did Mander’s on television watching, which came out in the late 1970s. But perhaps such works may assist you in marshaling your attentional power for your creative endeavors, as they did for me, and for this reason I enthusiastically recommend them to you, dear writerly readers.
Carpe diem.
BUT BY THE WAY…
I have not deleted my social media accounts. What I have done is deactivate FaceBook (back in 2015), abandon Twitter (totally, 2021) and now only very rarely participate on LinkedIn and academia.edu, mainly to announce a publication. While I agree with Lanier’s argument that social media is perverse and and toxic, and I sincerely wish that I had never signed up for FB and Twitter in the first place, the fact is, I did, and because of that existing online record and username, I am not ready to hit the delete button. Moreover, I am still digesting some parts of his argument (in particular, I do not accept his hypothesis that the problem is merely what he terms BUMMER).
And, yes, I know, this blog, on the Google platform, blogger, belongs to BUMMER. A better and paid platform is on my to-do list. [UPDATE January 2019: Here at last this blog is on self-hosted WordPress at www.madam-mayo.com]
As for using Google search– definitively
BUMMER– I switched to Duckduckgo as
my go-to search engine a good while ago.
What’s the specific strategy that would be right
for you? I would not presume to say.
But what is clear— and we don’t need Mr Lanier to inform us on this simple point— is that if you want to write anything substantive, and you don’t have the abracadabradocity to summon up more than 24 hours in each day, social media can be a lethal time-suck. The years will scroll by, as it were… and funny how that is, though you Tweet #amwriting often enough, you never wrote what you planned to write…
What’s more, the visibility you can achieve with social media, and the sense of “community,” albeit intermediated by proprietary algorithms of a corportation, are Faustian bargains: you will pay in the end, and on many levels.
P.S. For those who have the inclination and/or sufficient cootie-proofing to handle esoterica, I can also recommend philosopher Jeremy Naydler’s splendidly researched and elegantly argued In the Shadow of the Machine: The Prehistory of the Computer and the Evolution of Consciousness— also just published. You might find it worthwhile to keep in mind, if you read In the Shadow of the Machine, that in his Ten Arguments Jaron Lanier mentions (oh so briefly, blink and you’ll miss it) Waldorf schools. (More about that connection here.)
As I mosey along with my book about borderlands Far West Texas I have become increasingly fascinated by the interweavings of the imaginal realm and the real, that is, how novels, television shows and movies are inspired by and in turn shape our ideas about this place, its people, and its history. (See my previous post, “Thirteen Trailers for Movies with Extra-Astral Texiness.”) I have also been pondering the ways in which the digital revolution has transformed the experience of travel itself, conflating, multilayering, and pretzeling time and space. (See my post on “Literary Travel Writing: Notes on Process and the Digital Revolution.”) And I’ve been noodling on technology (see “Notes on Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey.”)
So no surprise, I have ended up, willy by nilly,
crunching through the ouevre of Marshall McLuhan.
For anything to do with media, Marshall McLuhan is your superstar go-to guy. He’s wild, brilliant, cryptic until you realize just how very brilliantly inside-out brilliant, and spookily prophetic. His famous saying was, “the medium is the message.” His arguably most famous book, however, is titled The Medium is the Massage.
An excellent introduction to his work is this video on the Marshall McLuhan Speaks website. It opens with his cameo in the Woody Allen film, “Annie Hall,” then goes to an approximately 20 minute introduction by Tom Wolf.
This year I’ve been posting a Q & A with a
fellow writer on the fourth Monday of the month, and while I have every
intention of continuing to do so, this Monday instead herewith some notes on
the epic novel by the artist who, back in 2001, passed over to the Great
Beyond: Tom Lea.
“It is part and parcel of your culture and I
think you should cherish it,” says Italian art historian
Luciano Cheles of the surprisingly little-known works of El Paso, Texas painter
and writer Tom Lea. And encouraging that is precisely what Adair Margo has been
doing with great verve for the past many years with the website and educational
programs of the Tom Lea
Institute. I had the immense privilege of attending Margo’s talk
about Tom Lea at the Bullock Museum in Austin back on October 15, 2015. (And by
felicitous happenstance, I sat next to Luciano Cheles.) More about that anon.
Here is the must-see 5 minute video with what
Cheles has to say about Lea’s artwork:
For more on Lea’s and The
Wonderful Country’s place in the canon, see Marcia Hatfield Daudistel’s
majestic anthology, Literary El Paso
(TCU Press, 2009).
WILDEST WEST EL PASO
This post is prompted by my work-in-progress about Far West Texas (…stay tuned for more podcasts…) At long, belated last I have tackled Tom Lea’s epic historical novel of El Paso.
I am happy to report that The Wonderful Country is wonderful indeed, a masterpiece not only of works set in El Paso, but in the genre of the Western, and indeed in all of American fiction.
These days most literary readers, and especially those out on the coasts, tend to turn their noses up at Westerns. Dear curious and adventurous reader, if that describes you, be assured that to overlook reading The Wonderful Country is to miss out on something very fine in U.S. literary heritage. The Wonderful Country was popular in its day, back in the 1950s, but it is not a typical commercial novel; it has a high order of literary quality; morever, its treatment of Mexicans and Mexico is unusually knowing and sensitive. (What would I know about that? Start here and here; my books are all here).
Set in post-Civil War El Paso, that is, the
latter part of the nineteenth century, the first days of the railroad and the
last of the free-roaming Apache, and published in the pre-Civil Rights era,
Lea’s The Wonderful Country forthrightly portrays many of the still
painful tensions in the border region. While he writes with an unusually open
heart and mind, Lea is scrupulous in rendering accurate period detail. The
“N” word appears! (In the mouth of a character.) There is no lack of
roastin’ ‘n stabbin’ n’ shootin’ n’ scalpin’ and our hero is the son of a
Confederate from Missouri. Vegetarians and those with flea-trigger hot-buttons,
be forewarned.
From the catalog copy, TCU Press, 2002:
“Tom Lea’s The Wonderful Country opens as mejicano pistolero Martín Bredi is returning to El Puerto [El Paso] after a fourteen-year absence. Bredi carries a gun for the Chihuahuan war lord Cipriano Castro and is on Castro’s business in Texas. Bredi fears he will be arrested for murder once he is back across the Rio Grande. Fourteen years earlier– shortly after the end of the Civil War–when he was the boy Martin Brady, he killed the man who murdered his father and fled to Mexico where he became Martín Bredi.
“Back in Texas, other misfortunes occur to Brady. First he breaks a leg; then he falls in love with a married woman while recuperating; and, finally, to right another wrong, he kills a man.
“When Brady / Bredi returns to Mexico, the Castros distrust him as an American, and Martin is in the intolerable position of being not a man of two countries but a man without a country.
“The Wonderful Country is marvelous in its depiction of life along the Texas/Mexico border of a century-and-a-half ago. Lea brings to life a time that was wild, a time when Texas and Mexico were being settled and tamed. Lea knows the desert region of his birth as well as anyone who has ever written about El Paso and the great nation that borders it to the south.”
NOTES ON THE TCU PRESS EDITION WITH AN AFTERWORD
BY JOHN O. WEST
You should be able to scare up a first edition
over on www.abebooks.com,
and power to you if you want to shell out the clams for a fine first with
intact dustjacket and an autograph. The copy I read is the paperback
reprint of 2002 available from TCU Press (and most online
booksellers) which includes afterword by John O. West, a noted US-Mexico border
scholar. For West’s afterword I would recommend the TCU Press paperback as your
best buy (unless your main goal, buck for buck, is to beat the stock market).
As far as I know, all editions include the
elegant and evocative drawings Lea made to head each chapter.
John O. West argues, and I concur:
“The story of Martin Brady is that of Thomas Wolf’s You Can’t Go Home Again, of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; the setting in the desert Southwest gives it particular realism, but the theme makes it speak beyond the region where it grew.”
West also provides some illuminating background
on the inspirations for the novel. My additional notes below.
NOTES ON THE PLACE, THE PEOPLE, AND THE EVENTS
THAT INSPIRED THE NOVEL, PLUS SOME RELATED RECENT WORKS & WEBSITES
Tom Lea’s “El Puerto” is based on El Paso; Fort Jefflin, clearly inspired by Fort Bliss.
El Paso pioneer W.W. Mill’s memoir Forty Years at El Paso, 1858-1898 was Tom Lea’s major inspiration. A first edition is pricey! But it is out-of-copyright now so you can read a digitalized edition for free online.
W. H. Timmons’ El Paso: A
Borderlands History (Texas Western Press, 1990). Back in the
1960s, Timmons served as Chairman of the History Department at the University
of Texas El Paso.
Fort Bliss actually moved around the El Paso region
quite a bit in the 19th century, but you can visit the current Fort Bliss,
which has an adobe museum and a modern museum– the latter perhaps of most
interest for WWII aficionados. The historic parade grounds, surrounded by
stately houses for senior officers, are well worth a visit.
Some of the characters in The Wonderful
Country are inspired by (or mighty similar to) some real people, among
them:
Both the U.S. Army and the Mexican Army went after the Apaches, and in some instances, U.S. forces chased Apaches into Mexico. In general such US Army forays seem to have been welcomed by the Mexicans, but communications in these remote areas were dicey and resentments still very raw after the US-Mexican War. Many historians writing in English about border history have not had the wherewithall to research Spanish language sources, and vice versa, so there is some low-hanging fruit here for those historians with cross-border cultural and language skills. The Apaches also have something to say about it. One recent biography of note is Kathleen P. Chamberlain’s Victorio: Apache Warrior and Chief (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).
The hero of The Wonderful Country becomes
a Texas Ranger. A crucial source for Lea, writing back in the 1950s, was James
B. Gillett’s 1921 memoir, Six Years with
the Texas Rangers: 1875-1881, from which Lea takes the epigraph and
his title:
“Oh, how I wish I had the power to describe
the wonderful country as I saw it then.”
> Check out Gilett’s page at
the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco, Texas. Gillett
ranched south of Alpine and upon moving to Marfa helped found the West Texas
Historical Association. He died in 1937 and is buried in Marfa.
(The Texas Rangers made up a more heterogeneous
group than some too easily conclude. See also the 2014 book by historian
Cynthia Leal Massey, Death of a Texas
Ranger. An interview with Massey is here.)
TENTH UNITED STATES CAVALRY
Marcos Kinevan’s superb (of partial) biography of Lt. John Bigelow, Jr. of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry in Texas
The Wonderful Country has
a number of characters who serve in the Tenth U.S.
Cavalry. The Tenth was famed for its African American
“Buffalo” soldiers, and its exploits in fighting Indians, especially in
Texas and then Arizona.
Less famous, but undeservedly so, is Lt. John Bigelow, Jr., who is the subject of a forthcoming paper I presented at last year’s Center for Big Bend Studies Conference. His younger brother, Poultney Bigelow, who published his series of articles on trailing the Apaches, was a great friend of artist Frederic Remington who illustrated many of the articles. Their father, John Bigelow, was an accomplished editor (at one point editing the New York Times), he served as President Lincoln’s ambassador to France, and had much to do with the founding of the Republican Party, the New York Public Library, the Panama Canal, and promoting Swedenborgianism. Bigelow, Sr also entertained literary celebrities including Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. My paper explores some of the family’s rich and varied social and political connections, John Bigelow Jr’s reports for Poultney’s magazine, his role as a nexus between the Eastern establishment and the West, and his importance as a military intellectual who anticipated the profound changes to come in 20th century warfare.
NOTES ON THE 1959 MOVIE “THE WONDERFUL
COUNTRY” BASED ON THE NOVEL
… Reminds me of that old
joke about the goats out browsing on a hill in Hollywood. They find the can
with the reel of film, they kick it open, and they start munching… The one
goat says to other, well, whaddya think? The other goat chews some more.
“Eh,” the goat says, “I liked the novel better.”
One of the African American “Buffalo
soldiers” is played by baseball star Satchel Paige. Tom Lea himself has a
cameo as the barber, Peebles.
“Writing is a kind of burden to me, which painting is not. I sweat and stew and fight painting, but I am not overwhelmed… by problems like I was with writing. I taught myself to write and never had any kind of a mentor or formal course… I taught myself to write by reading, reading good stuff.”
On The Wonderful Country:
“…I wanted to do something that ad been on my mind since I was a kid: Write about this borderland and the people on both sides of the river.”
“When traveling down in Mexico I never carried anything more than a little notebook because I was trying to train myself to hear rather than to see. I was trying so hard to be a good writer, you know… The hardest chapter in that book was where Martin goes with Joe Wakefield across the river in the springtime. I was trying to tell how much this fellow felt about both sides of the river. I remember I struggled and struggled for some way to express springtime and I settled it by saying, ‘A mockingbird sang on a budded cottonwood’ or something like that. I had to watch myself about using the big word. I always chose the shortest way if it could say exactly what I wanted.”
“A gust of wind sished sand against the one small windowpane.” (p.16)
“They ate in the light of tallow dips, a dozen men in soggy leather, laughing and chewing, with the rain sounding on the roof, and cold drops leaking through.” (p.250)
“Slowly, under the winking high stars, they came to where they saw beyond the paleness of the sand the darkness of the brush that lined the river, and they rode toward it. They worked across a dry flat of alkali white in the starlight, with the hooves scuffling the crust in the windless silence. ” (p.306)
FURTHER MISC NOTES
From Tom Lea Month 2012, Nick Houser on Lea’s Cabeza de Vaca picture:
In my opinion, Lea’s masterwork is his 1938 mural
“The Pass
of the North” which is in El Paso Historic Federal Courthouse
Building.
NOTES ON HIS FAMILY
Lea’s father was Tom Lea
(1877-1945), who served as mayor of El Paso during the Mexican
Revolution. (Alas, many Mexicans and Mexican Americans do not remember Mayor
Lea fondly; this is
one reason why.)
Of late American readers have been well served by a veritable cottage industry of works about the Roman Republic and Empire, and their respective falls, and various aspects thereof, and what lessons we, with our republic (or empire, as some would have it), purportedly at the precipice of analogous fiscal, ecological, military, social and/or political Seneca Cliffs, might learn from them. History may not repeat itself any more than we can wade into the same river twice, but, of course, we can step into rivers that look more than a sight familiar. Sometimes a nicely behaved river—let’s dub it the Goth Swan—turns of a sudden into a drowning horror. Indeed, a close reading of Roman history does suggest, in blurriest outlines, some analogies with contemporary trends and conundrums. But there are perhaps more valuable insights to be parsed from our own little-known and, relatively speaking, recent history.
In West of the Revolution, Claudio Saunt, a noted scholar of early American and Native American history, spotlights nine places and formative events of 1776 that rarely raise a blip on the radar of even the most well-educated Americans. As Saunt writes in his introduction, “The American Revolution so dominates our understanding of the continent’s early history that only four digits—1776—are enough to evoke images of periwigs, quill pens, and yellowing copies of the Declaration of Independence.”
As of this year, the second Monday of the month is dedicated to my workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.
While I increasingly rely on the Internet for reference—I’ll more likely type a word into my on-line dictionary or thesaurus than pull a wrist-breaker of an old tome off its shelf—there is still no substitute for a writer’s reference library: real books on a real shelf, at-hand. And among the most useful works in my own reference library is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style.
From the catalog copy:
“… Tufte presents—and comments on—more than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sentences come from an extensive search to identify some of the ways professional writers use the generous resources of the English language. “The book displays the sentences in fourteen chapters, each one organized around a syntactic concept—short sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, appositives, parallelism, for example. It thus provides a systematic, comprehensive range of models for aspiring writers.”
But Artful Sentences is not only for aspiring writers. Having written more books than I’ll bother to count, I still find that an occasional review consistently yields inspirations.
Where, and for what effect, can I limber up my writing? Perhaps I need to work in shorter sentences. (p. 9) Bright little ones!
Or perhaps, I could play a bit with what Tufte terms “Catalogs of modifiers” (p.100)– basically, a bunch, a spew, an avalanche of adjectives.
Or perhaps, I might try “an adjective as an opener.” (p.160) Open doors, don’t they seem more inviting?
Artful Sentences elucidiates the immense range of possibilities we have in the English language to arrange our sentences, and within them, the sounds and rhythms of words, the better to sharpen and strengthen what we mean to say. And that, my dear writerly reader, is power.
“Systems analysis must become cultural
analysis, and in this historians may be helpful.”– Lynn White, Jr.
Drive into Far West Texas and before you can say
“pass the Snickers” you’ll spy the railroad tracks, which more often
than not run, seemingly infinite sinuous ribbons, parallel to the highway.
Travel for a spell and you’ll pass or, if at a crossing, be passed by a freight
train, always an impressive experience. All of which is to say, railroads are
an inescapable part of Far West Texas scenery and history, and so, for my book
in-progress on that region, I have been doing my homework.
Of late: The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a German historian and scholar of cultural studies. Originally published as Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, the English translation came out in 1979; I read the 2014 edition with a new preface, “World Machines: The Steam Engine, the Railway, and the Computer,” in which Schivelbusch asks,
“Could it be that the railway, the
accelerator of the Industrial Revolution, and the computer occupy different
points along / on the same trajectory of machine evolution?”
In recent weeks, this question of machine
evolution, to my surprise, has begun to interest me intensely.
At first I had thought of this book I am writing about Far West Texas as a doppelgänger to my 2002 memoir of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, Miraculous Air, for the ecosystems and early exploration and mission histories of these two regions have many parallels. There are indeed many parallels, however, to start with, the literature on Far West Texas is exponentially greater and– more to the point– since the time I was traveling in Baja California, the experience of traveling itself has been radically transformed by the Digital Revolution. My sense of this is a compression of time and a curious elasticity of space; of oftentimes disquieting and othertimes most welcome transparency; and that constant pull to the little screens that, so it would seem, we all feel these days, whenever, wherever.
In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch opens
with a detailed discussion of the history of the steam engine.
“Next to wood, water and wind power were the main energy sources of pre-industrial economic life. The Industrial Revolution, generally seem as having begun in the the last third of the eighteenth century, was a complex process of denaturalization… Iron became the new industrial building material, coal the new combustible. In the steam engine, the prime mover of industry, these two combined to produce energy in theoretically unlimited amounts.”
The “decisive step” for the development
of the steam engine– and ultimately the railroads– was the introduction of
rotary motion, “a kind of mechanization of the mill race.” In other
words, transforming the up-and-down movement of the steam-driven piston
to the driving wheel.
In his new 2014 preface, however, Schivelbusch
writes: “It took me forty years and the Digital Revolution to realize that
I had missed the more important point of the invention preceding it.” In
other words, the technological Crossing of the Rubicon, as it were, was
“placing a piston in a cylinder and applying the pressure of steam… [I]t
did not transfer an existing form but forced a new form of power out of
combustible matter.” Moreover, “the piston’s up-and-down movement
was no longer the analogue of any form of movement found in nature but
possessed a binary-digital logic all its own.”
Watch a demonstration of a piston (in this
example, powered by an electric motor):
Most histories of the computer’s binary-digital
logic that I am familiar with focus on English mathematician George Boole’s An
Investigation into the Laws of Thought (1854)– the concept of binary
logic. Schivelbusch’s is a wondrously powerful insight.
THE MACHINE ENSEMBLE
In his second chapter, “The Machine
Ensemble,” Schivelbusch explores the ways the development of the railways
was experienced as “denaturalization and densensualization.” With
cuttings, embankments, and tunnels”the railroad was constructed straight
across the terrain, as if drawn with a ruler.” Now “the traveler
perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the machine ensemble.”
And what is the machine ensemble? “[W]heel
and rail, railroad and carriage, expanded into a unified railway system… one
great machine covering the land.”
RAILROAD SPACE
With the railroad, argues Schivelbusch,
“space was both diminished and expanded.” Things moved across space
faster, and simultaneously, more space could be accessed. “What was
experienced as being annihilated was the traditional space-time coninuum which
characterized the old transport technology.”
Schivelbusch quotes the German poet Heinrich
Heine, writing in 1843:
Heinrich Heine, protosurrealist
“What changes must now occur, in our way of looking at things, in our notions! Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time lone… Now you can travel to Orléans in four and a half hours, and it takes no longer to get to Rouen. Just imagine what will happen when the lines to Belgium and Germany are completed and connected up with their railways! I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.”
Sniffed Victorian-era English art critic John
Ruskin:
“Modern traveling is not traveling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from being a parcel.”
(I quail to imagine what might have been Ruskin’s
reaction to a TSA line. We airline travelers have been demoted from parcel to
cattle…)
PANORAMIC TRAVEL
For me, having spent so many hours driving
through the vast spaces of Far West Texas, the fourth chapter, “Panoramic
Travel,” was the most engaging. The opening epigraph is from Emerson’s Journals:
“Dreamlike traveling on the railroad.” In a car, as in a railway
compartment, we are enclosed from the weather behind windows, and by a roof and
a floor. We rest our bodies in an upholstered seat. Beyond the window, things
sail by silently, inexorably, scentlessly: hills, fences, a gas station– it
becomes a blur.
Travel by railroad induced “panoramic
perception.” Schivelbusch:
“Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects: the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus which moved him through the world. That machine and the motion it created became integrated into his viual perception: thus he could only see things in motion. That mobility of vision– for a traditionally oriented sensorium, such as Ruskin’s– became a prerequisite for the ‘normality’ of panoramic vision. This vision no longe experiences evanescence: evanescent reality had become the new reality.” (p.64)
Because this can be deadly boring, and
necesitated being in close quarters with fellow travelers of, shall we say,
possibly inconvenient social connections, bougeois train travelers took up
reading. Schivelbusch:
“Reading while traveling became almost obligatory.The dissolution of reality and its resurrection as panorama thus became agents for the total emancipation from the traversed landscape: the traveler’s gaze could then move into an imaginary surrogate landscape, that of his book.” (p. 64)*
But back to computers. I am beginning, with
fraying patience, to think of ours as the Age of Phubbing Smombies. To walk the
aisle of a railway passenger car or an airplane is to catch the soundless
glow of dozens of little screens… the overwhelming majority not of text but
of flashing images of murders, faces, scantily clad women, roaring dinosaurs,
cars and other objects hurling off cliffs (what is it with all the cliffs?)..
and cartoons of the same… In sum, a mesmerizing mishmash of imagery.
AMERICAN VS EUROPEAN RAILROADS
In the 19th century the “great machine”
of the railway ensemble spread across the land in both Europe and the
North American continent, but, as Schivelbusch details, there were fundamental
differences in the pattern and nature of that machine. Europe was already
densely populated and richly networked by highways and roads; “in America,
the railroad served to open up, for the first time, vast regions of previously
unsettled winderness.”* In other words, to quote Schivelbusch quoting von
Weber, “In Europe, the railroad facilitates traffic; in
America, it creates it.”
*Quibble: Important regions of America’s interior were not in fact a wholly “unsettled wilderness” until after the cascading demographic collapses, and later Indian removals, and the Indian Wars. There were well-established trails and trade routes throughout the continent, many going back many hundreds of years. But yes, compared to Europe, the road networks in Amreica were thin and poor and the vast desert expanses and the Great Plains were terrible to traverse by horse-drawn vehicles, as many memoirs attest.
And while Europe’s industrial revolution focused
on manufacturing, primarily textiles, in America it was about agriculture
(cotton, tobacco) and transport. In the early 19th century, what American
industry had in the way of machines was, writes Schivelbusch, “river
steamboats, railroad trains, sawmills, harvesting combines.”
By the 19th century the string of older cities of
the North Atlantic coast– Boston down to Washington DC– were linked by
well-established highways, however, the rest of the continent had more
primitive roads, oftentimes what amounted to footpaths and, above all,
waterways: The Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio, the Hudson, various canals,
and the Great Lakes. “Thus passenger travel used these waterways in the
absence of highways… One traveled by water whenever possible.”
Unsurprisingly, the American railway compartment
took on the distinctive character of the American riverboat cabin. These tended
to be broad open rooms, more comfortable for traveling long distances. European
railroad compartments took their template from the stagecoach, a cozier space.
Schivelbuch argues that in American culture the
railroad was closely linked with the steamer both because it was these were the
first and second mechanized means of transportation and because so much of the
interior landcape– the Great Plains–was described by travelers as kind of
vast ocean. (Indeed it was, in an eon past, the bottom of an ocean.)
The path of the railroad tracks differed as well:
American tracks tended to curve where European tracks would be straight. As
Schivelbusch points out, this reflected differences in labor and land costs. In
America, land was cheap and labor expensive. In Europe then “it paid to
construct tunnels, embankments and cuttings in order to make the rails proceed
in a straight line, at a minimum of land cost.”
Ah, so that explains the sinuosity of those Far
West Texas rails.
INDUSTRIALIZED CONSCIOUSNESS
“new consciousness of time and space based on train schedules and the novel activity of reading while traveling” (p.160)
Re: The reconsideration of the concept of shock
in the 19th century. Schivelbusch:
“The railroad related to the coach and horses as the modern mass army relates to the medieval army of knights (and as manufacture and industry do to craftmanship.)” (p.159)
Re: A “sinister aspect”.
Schivelbusch:
“…it had become possible to travel in something that seemed like an enormous grenade.” (p.160)
“The train passenger of the later nineteenth century who sat reading his book thus had a thicker layer of that skin than the earlier traveler, who coud not even think about reading because the journey still was, for him, a space-time adventure that engaged his entire sensorium.” (p.165)
(Thicker layer of skin!! Just turn on TV news!!
The commercials!! In our day, we’ve all grown callouses on top of rhino hide.)
HAUSSMANN’S REDO OF PARIS AND A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS FOR A NEW CITYSCAPE
Schivelbusch covers Haussmann’s remodeling of
Paris in detail in chapter 12, “Tracks in the City.”
“The streets Haussmann created served only traffic, a fact that distinguished them from the medieval streets an lanes that they destroyed, whose function was not so much to serve traffic as to be a forum for neighborhood life; it also distinguihsed them from the boulevards and avenues of the Baroque, who linearity and width was designed more for pomp and ceremony han for mere traffic.” (p. 183)
“The broad, tree-lined streets were seen as providers of light and air, creating sanitary conditions in both a physiological and a political sense– the latter favorable to the rule of Napoleon III.” (p. 186)
MORE ABOUT PANORAMIC PERCEPTION
The final chapter, “Circulation,” looks
at the consequences of the changes in transportation for retail, specifically,
the development of department stores.
“As Haussmann’s traffic arteries were connected to the rail network by means of the railway stations,and thus to all traffic in its entirety, the new department stores, in turn, were connected to the new intra-urban arteries and their traffic. The Grands Magasins that arose during the second half of the nineteenth century were concentrated on the boulevards that supplied them with goods and customers.” (p.188)
While traveling on the train put an end to
conversation, so the department store put an end to haggling, for now there
were price tags.
Department stores encouraged panoramic
perception.
“There had to be noise, commotion, life everywhere… The customer was kept in motion; he traveled through the department store as a train passenger traveled through the landscape. In their totality, the goods impressed him as an ensemble of objects and price tags fused into a pointillistic overall view…”(p. 191)
The sources of parnoramic perception were at once
speed and “the commodity character of objects.”(p. 193)
THE CIRCULATION CONCEPT IN THE 19th CENTURY
“… whatever was part of circulation was regarded as healthy, progressive, constructive; all that was detached from circulation, on the other hand, appeared diseased, medieval, subversive, threatening.” (p. 195)
CIAO, GRAND TOUR
Re: The Grand Tour, “an essential part of
… education before the industrialization of travel.” The world was
experienced in its original spatio-temporality… His education consisted of
his assimilation of the spatial individuality of the places visited, by means
of an effort that was both physical and intellectual” (p. 197)
(At this thought, of the industrialization of
travel, I had an evil little chuckle recalling Mrs Pofrock in Henry James’ The
Ambassadors.)
So:
“The railroad, the destroyer of experiential space and time, thus also destroyed the educational experience of the Grand Tour… the places visited by the traveler became increasingly similar to the commodities that were part of the same circulation system. For the twentieth-century tourist, the world has become one huge department store of countrysides and cities” (p. 197)
I would venture that a more apt analogy would now
be “menu of venues for digitally realized self-presentation” —
translation from the Noodathipious Flooflemoofle: “selfies.” I hear
most everyone shops online these days.
#
FURTHER TIDBITTY THOUGHTOID
A curious analogy occured to me, that just as the
automobile allowed for more agency for a traveler vis-a-vis the railroad, so
the tablets and smartphones allow more agency than the television for the
consumer of entertainment.
Without exception Taber’s works are superb, wondrous, must-reads for anyone who would explore the world from an armchair– and for anyone who would write their own. There is so much to relish and to learn from Taber’s daring, her mastery of the craft, her ability to see the most telling particulars, and the exquisite, sensuous beauty of her prose.
Based just outside Washington DC, Taber is also a long-time writing teacher, currently leading workshops both privately and at the Writer’s Center (Bethesda MD) and elsewhere. And now, for both her workshop students and for those at a distance, who cannot take her workshop, just out from Johns Hopkins University Press, and with lovely illustrations by Maud Taber-Thomas, we have Sara Mansfield Taber’s Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook.
I was honored to have been asked to contribute a blurb:
“Sara Mansfield Taber’s Chance Particulars is at once a delicious read and the distilled wisdom of a long-time teacher and virtuoso of the literary memoir. Her powerful lessons will give you rare and vital skills: to be able to read the world around you, and to read other writers, as a writer, that is, with your beadiest conjurer’s eye and mammoth heart. This is a book to savor, to engage with, and to reread, again and again.” – C.M. Mayo
The following Q & A is reprinted from her publisher’s website (Johns Hopkins University Press):
Q: Why did you decide to write this book?
SARA MANSFIELD TABER: So that writers of any stripe—from travelers, to bloggers, to journal-keepers, to memoirists, essayists, and journalists—will know just what to note down so as to paint rich and vivid pictures of people and places, and create a lively record of their experiences in and responses to the world.
Q: What were some of the most surprising things you learned while writing/researching the book?
SARA MANSFIELD TABER: The writing of the book allowed me to put on all my hats—literary journalist, anthropologist, memoirist, essayist, journal-keeper, and traveler—and draw together in one place all that I have learned, from those various fields, about keeping a lively field notebook. Writing the book let me re-live the pleasure of field-notebook keeping and also offer the prodigious pleasure of the habit to others. It is a way to get to live your life twice.
Q: What do you hope people will take away from reading your book?
SARA MANSFIELD TABER: A sense of exhilaration—to stride out into the world, to experience it fully and observe it closely, and then to write about that world with all the richness and color they can muster.
Check out the trailer for Sara Mansfield Taber’s Chance Particulars:
There are some books, masterpieces as they may be, that one simply is not ready to read. For me, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby comes to mind. Trudging through it as assigned reading for my highschool English class, I could not fathom why anyone would celebrate this blather about the antics of a bunch of silly people! Zoom ahead a decade and a half, and then rereading it, however, I was in awe– at once, continually, and sledding into that elegy of a last line– of its majesty, its poetry, its utterly American genius (although indeed, it is about a bunch of silly people). I say the same about Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
Are you ready to read Four Arguments? Or
have you already? It’s an old book, originally published in the late 1970s. For
me to read Mander’s masterpiece in this Age of the Smombies has been one of the
most astonishing reads in my life. Yet I do not believe that I could have read
it any earlier. Or, perhaps, I should say: would that I had read it earlier.
Nancy Peacock comments:
“I read this book many, many years ago, first as a series of excerpts published in the Mother Earth News, and later, I purchased it and read it again. It is profound. I have told so many people about this book, and yet my recommendation always falls on deaf ears. The fact that is was published in the ’70s does not make it any less profound today. In fact in my opinion, given the technologies its author likely did not imagine and how they have taken over so many lives, it is even more profound. Thank you for posting this.” — Nancy Peacock www.nancypeacockbooks.com
Dense yet elegantly lucid, Stephen L. Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst was published by O’Reilly Associates in 1995, on the eve of the explosion of email, well before that of social media. Astonishingly, it delineates the nature of our now King Kong-sized challenges with technology, when those challenges were, so it now seems, but embryonic. And Talbott writes with unusual authority, grounded in both philosophy and his many years of writing and editing for O’Reilly Media, a prime mover in the economic / cultural juggernaut of a complex, increasingly dispersed from its origin in California’s Santa Clara Valley, that has become known as “Silicon Valley.”
> Talbott offers the entire text of The
Future Does Not Compute for free on his website at this link, along with an annotated table of contents. You
can also find a paperback edition from your go-to online bookseller.
From the catalog copy:
“Many pundits tell you that the computer is ushering us toward a new Golden Age of Information. A few tell you that the computer is destroying everything worthwhile in our culture. But almost no one tells you what Stephen L. Talbott shows in this surprising book: the intelligent machine gathers its menacing powers from hidden places within you and me. It does so, that is, as long as we gaze into our screens and tap on our keyboards while less than fully conscious of the subtle influences passing through the interface…
“The Net is the most powerful invitation to remain asleep we have ever faced. Contrary to the usual view, it dwarfs television in its power to induce passivity, to scatter our minds, to destroy our imaginations, and to make us forget our humanity. And yet — for these very reasons — the Net may also be an opportunity to enter into our fullest humanity with a self-awareness never yet achieved. But few even seem aware of the challenge, and without awareness we will certainly fail.”
For me Talbott’s work was a wondrous but belated
find, given my focus on the conundrums of technology in my book-in-progress on
Far West Texas (which also, on few occasions, ranges as far west as Silicon
Valley, for reasons which will be clear in the book itself).
NOTES ON TALBOTT’S THE FUTURE DOES NOT COMPUTE –BUT FIRST, OWEN BARFIELD
Owen Barfield: “Our destiny is to become conscious and free”
In his acknowledgements Talbott
writes that he is “indebted above all to a man I have met only though his
published writings: Owen Barfield.” Barfield (1898-1987) was an English philosopher,
author of Worlds Apart and Saving the Appearances, among many
other works, and part of the Oxford literary circle that included C.S.
Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkein. Writes Talbott:
“The core insights underlying all [Barfield’s] work remain among the most original scholarly achievements of this century. So original, in fact, that these insights are impossible to accept– even impossible to think.”
An important influence on Owen Barfield was the work of Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), most notably his book The Philosophy of Freedom. When he found Steiner’s works, Barfield had already independently come to many similar conclusions. In the documentary on Barfield cited above, “it was a case of like finding like.”
See the page on Rudolf Steiner here and an archive of his works here.
Caveat: Reading Steiner can get very strange very fast; not everyone has the stomach for reading about angelic channelings, epic battles in the supercelestial realms, etc. Steiner’s Anthroposophy is an offshoot of Theosophy, and as such, heavily influenced by many of the ideas of Russian mystic Madame Blavatsky. (Read a brief note about Madame Blavatsky, the monumental figure of modern esotercism, in the excerpt from my book about Francisco I. Madero here.)
But: keep your shoes on your feet and your helmet
buckled onto your coconut! Steiner was, among many other things, the founder of
the Waldorf Schools. Read about that influence in Silicon Valley here (New
York Times) and here (Business
Insider). There is also a video posted
in 2013 by the Waldorf School of the Peninsula which explains the
educational philosophy in some detail.
(I’m focusing on computers here, so I won’t get
into Steiner and Biodynamic Agriculture; do Google or Duckduckgo should you
feel so moved. P.S. Wikipedia, aka wiki-whenever-whomever-whatever, is likely
not your best source of information on this subject.)
“[This is] the most radical book that Steiner wrote, it is the foundation of all his thought… I think it is the only book that would have convinced me he had something important… to say… he is removing the blinkers from the Western mindset. He clarifies the act of knowing… he brings it down to the simplest possible elements and he shows you where, in your thinking, it’s possible that you might be free. He shows you, there’s a self-contained place in your thinking where it’s absolutely clear that you could be free…. If you build from that place, you can be sure that what you are thinking and feeling and willing is coming from a place that is not being determined by anybody or anything else… we can begin to know ourselves in the world, and that would be the true basis of freedom.”
BACK TO NOTES ON TALBOTT’S THE FUTURE DOES NOT
COMPUTE
Talbott:
“During most of [the] seventeen years I was working with computers, and it slowly became clear to me that the central issues bedeviling all of us who try to understand the relation between the human being and the computer are issues upon which Barfield began throwing light some seven decades ago. The Future Does Not Compute is my attempt to reflect a little of that light toward the reader.”
Talbott on awareness of self and awareness of the nature of machines:
“Machines become a threat when they embody our limitations without our being fully aware of those limitations. All reason shouts at us to approach every aspect of the computer with the greatest caution and reserve. But what incentive has our culture provided for the exercise of such caution and reserve? It’s more in our nature to let technology lead where it will, and to celebrate that leading as progress.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“On the one hand: the machine as an expression of the human being. On the other hand: the machine as an independent force that acts or reacts upon us. Which is it? I am convinced there is no hope for understanding the role of technology in today’s world without our first learning to hold both sides of the truth in our minds, flexibly and simultaneously. The relationship between human being and machine has become something like a complex symbiosis.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“If it is only through self-awareness and inner adjustment that I can restrict the hammer in my hands to its proper role, I must multiply the effort a millionfold when dealing with a vasty more complex technology– one expression in a much more insistent manner its own urgencies.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“understanding is the basis of freedom.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“the computer, one might almost say, was invented as an inevitable refinement of the corporation” Ch. 3 “The Future Does Not Compute”
“what we have embodied in technology are our own habits of thought… The need is to raise these habits to full consciousness, and then take responsability for them.” Ch. 5 “On Being Responsible for Earth”
“another word for responsability is ‘dominion’– not the dominion of raw power, but of effective wisdom.” Ch. 5 “On Being Responsible for Earth”
“We can no longer stop or even redirect the engine of technological change by brute, external force. Such force is the principle of the engine itself, and only strengthens it. We must tame technology by rising above it and reclaiming what it not mechanical in ourselves.” Ch. 5 “On Being Responsible for Earth”
“But Mander does neglect one critical fact: what we have embodied in technology are our own habits of thought. Yes, our artifacts gain a life of their own, but it is, in a very real sense, our life. We too easily ignore the ways in which we infuse these artifacts with the finespun web of our own, largely subconscious habits of thought. The need is to raise these habits to full consciousness, and then take responsibility for them.
[Much of chapter 6 includes a scathing attack on
George Gilder’s ideas.]
“…the more complex and indirect the mechanisms through which human action come into expression, the more you and I must be masters of ourselves.” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“…one way or another, you are creating your future. Wake up before you find that the devils within you have done the creating.” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“…the view that a technology can be ‘democratizing and leveling’ testifies to a radical alienation from everything that constitutes both the inner life and culture” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“…the telephone, automobile, radio, and television have all contributed to social fragmentation, personal isolation, and alienation from both self and other” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“What hope is there for peace and human rights when I conceive the barriers separating me from my fellows to be mere obstructions on a network technology diagram rather than the powers of darkness shadowing my own heart?” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
On freedom and power:
“The need is to recognize ourselves in our machines, and our machines in ourselves, and begin to raise ourselves above our machines.” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
“Freedom, you might say, is not a state, but a tension” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
“The doing required of us is a refusal to continue seeing all problems as the result of a doing rather than a being, as technical rather than spiritual.” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
“…if we persist in the cultivation of a purely technical stance toward our work and our technology, we will find that, like the corporation, it takes on a life of its own, which is at the same time, our life–but out of control and less than fully conscious… this autonomous life may exercise a totalitarian suppression of the human spirit that will be all the more powerful for its diffuseness and invisibility” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
On the so-called “global village”:
“…could it be that what we so eagerly embrace, unawares, are the powers of dissolution themselves?” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
“…what concerns me is the likelihood of our expressing within a new social and technological landscape the same spiritual vacuity that gave rise to the old tyrannies” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
“The global village is… a technological creation. Many would-be village architects are inspired by te endless potentials they discern in a satellite dish planted among thatched roof houses. This techno-romantic image calls up visions of information sharing and cooperation, grassroots power, and utopian social change. What it ignores is the monolithic and violently assimilative character of the resulting cultural bridges.” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
On awareness and loss:
“The light of mathematics may have descended into our minds from the circling stars, but how many students of mathematics still look to the night sky with wonder?” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
On “helping” developing countries by bringing modern technology:
“the logic and assumptions of our technology can prove bitterly corrosive. Worse, the kind of community from which Western technical systems commonly arise is, for the most art, noncommunity–typified by the purely technical, one-dimenional, commercially motivated, and wholly rationalized environments of corporate research and development organizations.”
More:
“…human life can be sustained only within a sea of meaning, not a network of information” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
Heavvvvy….
“…our rush to wire the world will some day be seen to have spawned a suffering as great as that caused by this century’s most ruthless dictators”
On the corporation (corporation as machine):
“Is the corporation a human activity in the service of human needs, or not? It is remarkble how easily and subtly the human-centered view slips from our grasp. Indeed, just so far as the corporation is viewed as an enterprise designed to score a profit, rather than to serve worthwhile ends under the discipline of economic controls, to that extent the entire organization has already been cut loose from its human justification and reduced to something like a computational machine” Ch. 10 “Thoughts on a Group Support System”
Nugget o’ wisdom:
“… every problem is a gift… [it] invites the production of new, human “capital.’ This is far different from seeing a problem merely as something to be gotten rid of by the most efficient means possible.” Ch. 10 “Thoughts on a Group Support System”
Essence:
“It’s not the Net we’re talking about here; it’s you and me. And surely that’s the only place to begin. Neither liberation nor oppression can become living powers in any soil except that of the human heart” Ch 11
Yep:
“If we experience our machines as increasingly humanlike, then we are experiencing ourselves as increasingly machinelike.” Ch 11
“…we are strongly tempted to use our freedom in order to deny freedom, pursuing instead the mechanization of life and thought” Ch 11
“… what is directly at risk now–what the computer asks us to abdicate– are our independent powers of awareness. Yet these powers are the only means by which we can raise ourselves above the machine” Ch 11
“What if the human being to whom we so beautifully adapt the computer is the wrong sort of human being? What if our efforts really amount to a more effective adaptation of the human being to the machine, rather than the other way around?” Ch 11
“…we have learned to regard ourselves as ghosts in the machine… we have more and more become mere ghosts in the machine” Ch 11
Quotable:
“an electronic New Jerusalem, its streets paved with silicon” Ch. 24 “Electronic Mysticism”
More to ponder:
“ancient man, much more than we, experienced himself rather like an like an embryo within a surrounding, nourishing cosmos… a plenum of wisdom and potency”
“the mythic surround was engaged in weaving the ancient mind, as in a dream”
“From Tolkein’s storyteller– who originates and remains one with his own mind– they have descended to mechanican tinkerer… just so far as we forget our ancient descent from a cosmos of wisdom above us– we lose the basis of creative mastery, an offer ourselves to be remade by the mechanisms below us”
“we are pursuing an experiment every bit as momentous as the discovery of mind at the dawning of western civilization– what manner of god will we be?”
Essential quote from Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute:
“…what we have today is in some respects a seriously disabled consciousness, and… our own infatuation with machines is both a symptom of our disability and a further contributor to it.”
This has been a year of extra-intensive reading, the bulk of it for my book in-progress on Far West Texas. Specifically, I’ve had some catching up to do on the oil industry and New Mexico history (impossible to grok Far West Texas without those subjects). I say this every year but truly, this may have been my richest year of reading yet. I feel so lucky to have encountered these works; each and every one of these authors has my sincere admiration and immense gratitude.
1. The Professor’s House by Willa Cather A deeply weird and profoundly American novel. I had been meaning to read The Professor’s House for years, and I finally did– and by uncannily felicitous happenstance, just after visiting Acoma, Chaco Canyon, and Mesa Verde. (P.S. Whoever calls this book flawed I call a puddinghead.)
2. The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek by Barry Cunliffe A brilliant book that evokes the ghost of a lost book and the world it came out of so unfathomably long ago. This is one I look forward to savoring again.
For the past several years I have been reading intensively about Texas, and that includes its fraught ethnic relations, and with these two books about slavery– both recent and major scholarly contributions– by golly, the whole thang just gelled. For U.S. readers I recommend reading first Torget; then, without delay, Resendiz.
The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1610 by Genaro M. Padilla It astonishes me that so few Americans or Mexicans have ever heard of the epic poem Historia de la Nueva Mexico– and that would include Yours Truly, until I found The Daring Flight of My Pen. Padilla’s book about Pérez de Villagrá’s book rearranged all the furniture in the way I think about the U.S., about the Southwest, and about Mexico– and waxed the floor and put in new curtains, too.
7. Shrinking the Technosphere by Dmitri Orlov This book has an important and urgent message, but it also comes with a gamelan orchestra of super-freaky esoteric undertones. In other words, to appreciate the clanging in there, you have to be ready to appreciate it. Not for the pleasantly numbed of Smombiedom.
8. Resist Much, Obey Little: Remembering Edward Abbey Edited by James R. Hepworth and Gregory McNamee Its impossible to go far into reading about the American West without encountering Edward Abbey and his works, and in particular his iconic Desert Solitaire. Resist Much, Obey Little, an eclectic collection of essays and interviews, is at once a festschrift and an adventure in the funhouse of Abbey’s mind.
9. Big Batch re: The Oil Patch Having crunched through a library’s worth of reading on the oil industry, herewith a selection of some of the more worthy tomes:
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin This one won the Pulitzer Prize when it came out more than two decades ago, and most deservedly. It rewired my thinking about World War II, among many other episodes in the last century.
The Blood of the Earth: As Essay on Magic and Peak Oil John Michael Greer Reading Greer is akin to spooning up Swiss chocolate pudding: page after page of smoothly yumsie schoggi. Yes, even if it’s got crunchy stuff about oil and– keep your crash helmets on!– magic.
