A Kind of Hurry

I’m in a kind of hurry

To just slow down a bit.

Since all through life I  worried

That things might fail to fit -

All the living and the loving,

The wondering ‘bout each bit,

Of life’s pictures, and it’s poems,

Of where they’d be arranged,

Since every day, and every way

They’ve kept my mind engaged,

With who and why and wherefore,

With the hopes and goals to meet,

With the myriad potentials of

The paths before my feet.

They’ve kept the brain cells churning,

Neglecting needed sleep.

So now I am a'hurryin' -

To just slow down a tad.

To gently put behind me

The paces of the lad.

To pause and shift my glances

From the towering  tops of trees

To studying small treasures

Lurking down below my knees.

Secret nests of little songbirds,

‘Neath small flowers, tiny eggs,

Will soon be mouths demanding

Bugs, and worms, and crawly things,

That fuel the bright clear music

Of the birds that sing in Spring.

So don’t worry, rush on by me.

Pray, do scurry past my bower.

For I’ll be here to rest and watch,

For nigh onto an hour.

The passing minutes move me not,

They leave me free from worry.

Though again it seems I must confess,

That I’m really in a hurry -

To just slow down a bit.

SchragWall: PPP - Azaleas on Azaleas

As a postscript to my last wall post about the Internet it has taken me about an hour and a half to reconcile snafus with my Apple ID, iCloud ID and various USB readers to be able to send you this. But moving on . . .

The image was originally a photo I took in the azalea garden at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, NC. Neat venue, weddings, graduations, etc. I pulled a strip out of that photo. Pulled it into Photoshop and sort of "abstracted" it and stretched it to 12x36 inches. Then, in that larger format, I "whited out" the portions into which I wanted to draw designs. I then printed out the version with the blanks. I then drew the designs in the blank spaces and added color with a variety of pens, markers, etc.

With an image this size I would advise pulling it and enlarging it so you can see the small details.

Cheers,

Robert

 

The Internet is Breaking

For most of my forty-odd years as a university professor, I spent my time thinking about, teaching about, reading about, and writing about the media. It was a fascinating world in that it was always changing, always evolving into something new. I used to wonder how my colleagues in say, English, for example, avoided going crazy teaching courses like The English Language Novel in the 19th Century. I mean, aside from exploring evidence of the influence of novels from the 19th century on contemporary prose, it seemed a lot like doing the same thing over and over. Which would, I suppose, leave you a lot of time to work on your own novel which many of my colleagues in that department had stashed on their hard drive somewhere.

Anyhow “the media” had a far different problem, at least in the last couple of decades since the internet went public in the mid-1990s. It changes all the time. I used to start my lectures by saying, “OK, let’s talk about what changes we have seen in the media over the last couple of days.” And I always had something to talk about.  During the last couple of years of my teaching career I had been struggling with trying to find a model that would allow my students to understand just why and how those changes came about. And so in about 2018 my colleague Ed Funkhouser (who is out there on The Wall with you - Hi Ed!) wrote a textbook - digital access only, naturally - called The Process: Understanding Technology and the Media.  In that work we propose a model of eight steps of media evolution, steps charting the course of the development of all communication media, from the first evidence of proto-writing to the Internet. Cool huh? We think so - blush, blush.

Anyhow the 8 steps, in order go like this:

1. Need. Some  entity, individual person, group or organization feels compelled to communicate with another entity.
2. The Creators. The folks in the "back room," carvers, painters, bicycle builders, engineers, programmers, examine what is available in their time and place and cobble the available pieces together into what becomes
3. The medium. Print, film, radio, TV, etc.
4. The gatekeepers. Every medium moves through the hands of gatekeepers, the pharaoh, pontiff, church, lawyers, what have you, who decide what media are "allowed" in the culture and who gets to use them. Those decisions get codified into
5. The law. Which is what it sounds like.
6. The entrepreneurs.  After learning what the restrictions and laws surrounding the new medium are, the entrepreneurs figure out how to package the new medium in to a profitable product and bring it to
7. The marketplace where sales people of various stripes try to convince us that we really must have it.
8. We open our pocketbooks to purchase the new gizmo and begin to use it, which invariably leads us back to #1. e.g. "Hey this radio thing is cool - I wish it had pictures." And bing bang we work through the following 7 steps to television.

If we apply this model to understand how the Internet came about we learn how it might be fracturing along some important lines. First this huge entity came into being, like all other media from step 1 Need. But this wasn't a huge societal, organizational, governmental need. It was the need of one guy: Tim Berners-Lee, or Sir Tim as those of us close to him call him. [Lying here, Sir Tim doesn't know me from Adam, but a fellow can dream right?] Berners-Lee has had so much written about him it is hard to separate fact from fiction - it is truly worth a google search. But what is fairly well agreed upon is that what we call the internet first came to light in 1989 when he was working for CERN. His job required him to create hundreds and hundreds of files pertaining to his work. He, like all of us, became frustrated with the repeating questions of "What did I call that file" and "Where did I put it?" 

Unlike us, who just stomp out and get coffee or something stronger, Bernes-Lee solved the problem by devising a system of giving the files unique names so he could search for them on his computer more easily. The system had two major parts; Hypertext Mark-up Language - which gave each file a unique name, and a Universal Resource Location which let his computer know where he had put the file.

One day, or so the legend goes, he typed the name of a file into his computer and the file popped up. But he soon realized the file wasn't on his computer, it was on the computer of a colleague in another location to whom he had sent a copy of the file. A truly unique moment, for which among his other accomplishments, he was knighted in 2004 and in 2013 received the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, sort of the Nobel prize for Engineering. Because, if you haven't guessed by now, Hypertext Markup Language became more widely known as HTML and the Universal Resource Location as URL; two tags that, although we rarely actually type them out these days, are tools that we use dozens, if not hundreds, of times every day to  work our way around the internet.

So things sailed along through the model pretty smoothly with the creators of proto-internet remaining the professional geeks in universities and government labs refining these cool tools that allowed them to communicate easily with each other. But then in 1994 the government, aka gatekeepers, decided that the medium, aka the internet, was now robust enough to open the doors to all of us, and the world-wide-web was born.  And things got a little crazy.

The media, despite lovely slogans like "freedom of the press!" and "the pen is mightier than the sword!" has always been primarily about money and advertising, and the Internet provided opportunities for both in previously unimaginable degree. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s I used to do a lecture about the "cartel" - BND-TV which was an acronym for Bertlemann, Newscorp, Disney, TimeWarner and Viacom; five companies that, at the time, controlled somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of all the news and information outlets in the country. They fought viciously with each other to provide products that would allow them to steal each other's audiences, advertisers, and profits.  They are all mostly around in some form or another, often as pieces within their former competitors. [Do a search for Columbia Journalism Review/ Who Owns What for some eye-opening data. https://beta.cjr.org/resources] 

But they are all dwarfed by the new kids on the block - companies birthed by the 1994 opening of the Internet, the new cartel - Apple, Amazon and Google, with Microsoft sliding in and out. How big are the new kids on the block? Probably shifts day to day, but I read yesterday that Tim Cook was before Congress trying to explain why the App Store's weekly take of 1 billion dollars was not excessive. But that is not really why I think the Internet is breaking. The COVID pandemic drove millions of us to our keyboards to shop, to go to the doctors, etc. and the Big Three little 4 - AAGm - did that pretty well. But they often demanded that we use their unique system of hardware and software, and we were supposed to figure out how to work each of their systems. In short, the big three little 4 forgot they were supposed to be communication companies. Companies that allow each of us to communicate with each other easily - that was the original need that drove MaBell and her competitors forward.

The geeks in the backroom often forget that they are supposed to be communication specialists, not computer engineers. I lived through that bias during the early years of my 4 decade stay at NC State. When computers began to shoulder some of the communication tasks at the university. The system was designed by, and seemingly only for, engineers. You had to work on a computer running the UNIX operating system to access the university system. You may remember the scene from Jurassic Park when the young girl, attempting to corral the raging dinos, sat down in front of a computer and exclaimed, "I know how to work this! This a UNIX box!" And she busily typed away. At State it took years of conflict before PCs running the Windows operating system were allowed on the system, even longer until the "arty" Mac system cleared the isolationist hurdles.

AAGm is currently raising similar exclusionary barriers but more subtly than was the case in the old software wars. But the negative impact on "we the people" is no less frustrating. You see, rather than becoming different kinds of companies, each honed for a different task, AAGm all became slightly different companies designed to do the all the same tasks. That is a bit of an exaggeration. The companies do look a bit different "under the hood" but we, as ordinary people, rarely experience the those differences. For us, each company appears to be trying to do the same thing - communicate with people and places.

And they do that, but unfortunately in doing so they have reverted to the old software wars. Just answer one question: How many passwords do you have? Now break the question out a bit. How many Apple IDs do you have? I, unfortunately, have two. My current one attached to my Goggle gmail account and another still existing one attached to my old University email address. I was chagrined to learn that I could have even more. Makes it difficult to answer the prompt: "What is your Apple ID?" What is the password to your Goggle account? May be different from your gmail account. Or you may have to access your Goggle account to get to your gmail ID. What is your Amazon password? And if you are an Amazon Prime member what is your five digit Amazon Prime pin number? And once you have jumped all these hurdles to get to say, your doctor, what is your MyChart user name and password? And no your "password saver" software is not the answer because AAGm, and the various entities you reach through them, are prone to requiring you to change your "easy to hack password."

"Please enter the last password you can remember for this site. Now enter a new password that you have not used on any site in the past decade. It should be 37 characters long, using special characters, both upper and lower case, and should not contain the names of anyone in your immediate family, pet names or birthdays, or proper nouns in this or any other recognizable language except Klingon."

Now do you understand why I drink? My particular issue is getting this blog to you. I wrote in a previous post that I feel really lucky to have just about everyone I care about on the SchragWall list. But having you on the list is not really a guarantee that you actually get the post. I use Blogger and gmail, both Google products, so I try to keep it as simple as I can on my end. But the blog is really is a sort of "broadcasting model." I create a post and "broadcast" it out to y'all. However, you may have changed your email address, or your provider may have implemented a "new and improved version which does not talk to "Blogger/gmail." You may have been busy and sent it to your "read later" mailbox that you last accessed sometime before New Years." I do not use any kind of tracking software that would tell me if you received the post and opened it. If I wanted to work for the CIA I would have applied long ago. Nor do I frequent some other international tracking organization. Because the Wall is actually international. To date it goes to, in alpha order:

Argentina

China

Canada

Italy

Kazakhstan

USA

And I really have no idea if any of those ex-pats or internationals are receiving the post with any regularity - unless they respond on the page or send me an email directly to robert.schrag@gmail.com.  Some are on Facebook, some use a Facebook App, WhatsApp, some use Signal, some may use something else. Oh, and by the way, if you use Internet Explorer [AKA Internet Exploder during the software wars] you need to change since Microsoft has announced it will terminate the app next summer. I have no idea how they plan to transition current users.

I remember and old commercial by Lee Iacocca when he was CEO of Chrysler Automotive. In essence he said, "If your commuter stops working they tell you to turn it off and turn it back on again. We don't do things that way at Chrysler!" 

I am afraid we are approaching those Bad Old Days on the Internet. The never-ending search to be the biggest kid, the newest kid, the richest CEO appears to be creating an Internet Tower of Babble held together by greed, conspiracy mongers, hysteria, and fake news. I know that is true because I read it on Qanon.

But seriously, I am concerned that unbridled competition amongst some very selfish, very greedy, totally unregulated companies and individuals will endanger my ability to reach you. That saddens me.

Wandering Around in the Memory Palace

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Since my last post on synesthesia, and messages from a couple of you reporting your own experiences with that fascinating condition, I have been thinking a lot about the mysterious realm that follows us everywhere, hanging out above our shoulders and between our ears.  Mostly I've been reflecting on that intriguing possible mental relationship between synesthesia and memory. Specifically the ability of certain stimuli to call up little memory vignettes; smells, sounds, sights, whatever, that transport you back to another place and time. For me lilacs, dill pickles, newly cut grass, burning leaves, and wood burning fireplaces are particularly powerful aromas that trigger memory floods. I close my eyes, focus on the smell and wait to see where it takes me.  Which, of course, raises the question of where do those aromas take me, and how, and maybe why? Here’s an idea.

The idea of a memory palace is an ancient one. Google tells us that Cicero (106 - 43 BCE) described the Memory Palace technique in his writings on rhetoric, called De Oratore.  However, my earliest recollection of the notion is far more prosaic; Jerry Lucas on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which Google also informs me took place on May 14, 1971. [Which, of course raises the question of why, with Google, do we really need a memory palace?, but let's let that go for now.] For those of you who have not yet attained "a certain age," Jerry Lucas was a basketball star at Ohio State, the NBA and the Olympics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who later gained renown for his remarkable memory. Lucas attributed his feats of memory to the memory palace technique.

Briefly the technique is said to work like this: you call to mind a structure with which you are intimately familiar. You know every crook and cranny. No problem there, I often amuse myself when settling down to sleep by mentally “walking around” in the house and neighborhood in which I was raised. Next, when you want to remember something you stash it somewhere in that structure - AKA your memory palace. OK. Now it is getting a little “iffy.” So if I want to remember when my daughters were born I take those dates and stash them in the bottom drawer of the big built-in drawers in my sister’s bedroom where the cat had kittens. All right, maybe. But now when I need to remember those dates I need to bop over to the memory palace and haul those dates out of that drawer - top or bottom or wherever I put them. I may have that somewhat distorted, which may be why it has never worked for me. It always seemed to me that with the memory palace, instead of just remembering one thing - the dates - I now needed to remember where in the memory palace I had put the dates, so now instead of just remembering one thing - daughter dates - I now need to remember two things - drawer and dates. Something rotten in that particular state of Denmark, not?

But like many interesting concepts, the memory palace notion provides some delightful points for reflection.  First and foremost I love the metaphor of a palace as the place in which our memories reside. It is a narrative device that resonates strongly with me. My acquaintance with scripture is sketchy at best, but for some reason the phrase “My father’s house has many mansions.” (John 14:2 - thanks again Google) has always spoken strongly to me, both for its inclusive theme, and for my visual imagining of a structure with a plethora of hallways and doorways, windows and mirrors -  exciting and still a bit frightening. The house in Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is a delicious example.

So if you combine the idea of this slightly spooky memory palace with my assertion in the previous post about the time-traveling synesthetic potential of music you end up - potentially anyhow - with a synesthetic memory palace in which a song, a dream, an image, color or flavor can catapult you into one of the many rooms of your own unique memory palace, landing you in the lap of a long-ignored, yet still present, memory.

This somewhat fanciful construction has the added benefit of bringing comfort to those of us on the far side of a “certain age” about the accessibility of our memory palace. The memories are there. Oh, I’m not saying that the particular noun for the round bread product that is kneaded, then shaped, baked and boiled, the, the, the, bagel! dammit! won’t occasionally escape you. But the larger more important memory of breakfasts shared where, when and with whom, are still there in the palace, just waiting for the right synesthetic key to turn the lock, swing the door open, revealing the rest of the memory and the absolutely wonderful opportunity to wander around in that time and place one more time.

All of which brings me to both the greatest frustration and the most tantalizing possibility of this whole memory palace notion. The greatest frustration is that I can't choose when to enter my synesthetic memory palace, it just sort of happens when I happen to encounter the key. Nicely serendipitous, but potentially awkward; "Pardon me, miss, but could I sniff your neck?" I'm thinking that some combination of guided meditation/relaxation/reike might provide a path and I play around with those elements sometimes during my night time sleep ritual, however without success to date.

The tantalizing piece comes when I have been fortunate enough to stumble into the palace and walk into one of those lovely, but long forgotten, memories and discover that that particular space leads to other spaces - sort of like a memory maze. The people and places in that first memory lead to other people, places and spaces, and I can wander through that delightful cascade of memories until I am disturbed by some intrusion from what we arrogantly call the "real" world.

Well, that's where I am with the whole memory palace thingy, and I better get this post out to you now, lest I forget . . . .  

Faces and Places in the Chord

Dictionary definitions of synesthesia center on the ability to, or the condition of, simultaneously interpreting sensory input through two ordinarily separate modalities. Most often a blending of visual and auditory senses. So a “synesthete” in the presence of a c-sharp chord, for example, would both hear the tone as we would, but would also “see,” perhaps, a bright blue. I first came across the idea when using Gene Youngblood’s seminal work Expanded Cinema as a text back in 1970. Buckminster Fuller wrote the Introduction, a tour d’force in its own right.

Anyhow, I have remained fascinated by the notion ever since. It is one of those things I wish I had been born with - like perfect pitch, a photographic memory, or the ability to draw recognizable scenes, objects or people. But as is often my wont, I have learned how to fake it. Here’s how that goes:

One of my great frustrations is the “tyranny of the eyelids.” No doubt many of you share this condition. There you are, reading along in the tiny hours of the morning, 2:30, maybe 3:00, and your eyelids just ring the curtain down. Slam! Your brain is still up for “the rest of the story,” but "No Way!" say the eyelids - Slam, bang, locked up, like those metal curtains in front of little shops around the world. "Wait! Wait!" cries my brain, but alas in vain.

OK, despite my best efforts I still haven’t figured out how to read through my eyelids, but I have figured out how to use what may be some vestigial synesthesia ability to continue some entertainment after hours. As I have mentioned before, I have music or nature sounds playing all night long. The synesthetic part comes in when I draw rather complex scenes behind my eyelids as I listen to the music. Well, I’m not really drawing behind my eyelids - yech, a little Hannibal Lecter-ish. Rather, I’m imagining a variety of scenes, sometimes animated, sometimes “real life,” as the music supplies the soundtrack. 

There are a couple of advantages to this system. First and foremost, behind my eyelids, I can draw anything in any style. From Disney to Da Vinci to Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun to Picasso - you name 'em, I can paint 'em all behind my eyelids. My problem has never been imagining the images. The problem has always been moving those imaginings in my head to the paper in front of me. That doesn't work so well. However, behind my eyelids, all I need to do is think and, ta da, there it is.  On paper what I end up with are my own rather strange efforts, some of which I share with you here on Schrag Wall. 

Second, when I am drawing behind my eyelids I never forget how I did something.  The issue is this, I can look at look at a drawing that I did years or decades ago - often a blend of photoshop and hand drawing like some of the ping pong paintings I have shared with you. Sometimes multiple blending of those images, and I wonder "How did I do that?" "Clicking what keys in what sequence and in what order?" "How many layers?"  Time was my fingers just remembered the sequences. Like what I imagine touch typing is like. Something else I never mastered. Nowadays often my reply to myself is "I have no idea."  Incredibly frustrating. When drawing behind my eyelids, no problem. I just think it.

However, recently I have become more aware of what may be the most fascinating, empowering, enjoyable aspect of my truncated version of synesthesia. Synesthesia is a time machine.  I have mentioned that I do a blend of meditation, relaxation, reiki, etc., before going to sleep. And as with everything, I play music throughout the exercise.  Every once in a while, while my attention is elsewhere, a song will fight its way to the foreground, and flings me into the WayBack Machine where I find myself reliving some previous part of my life. These are incredibly powerful recollections? recreations? lucid moments? I'm not sure which. I, invariably, am startled out of my revery. I cling to these moments longer than my "normal dreams." Long enough to wonder who was that? Where was I? When was I? I can usually figure out parts of it.  I do know that the “when” was always in the past. The who and where usually boil down to more of a multiple choice question.  Both answers obviously were incredibly powerful moments, strongly harmonic with my chord sometime and somewhere in the past.

I'll have to think about it; to sleep, perchance to dream.

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