(news)letter
"Say the thing with which you labor."
Thoreau
from the porter.micro.press
Volume 1, Number 1 January 17, 1994
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Penis Everyone?
Who's tired of the word "penis" yet? Two trials began this week,
while the details of a third case, "The Whacking of the
Skateress," have me in the biggest tizzy. Clinton's in Russia but
who cares? Lorena Bobbitt's "Penis in the Wrong Hand" case fills
the airwaves while the more important of the two, the trial of
David Koresh's followers, plays second fiddle. But Waco ought be
where the eyes turn: what the government did there and why has
never been adequately explained.
You would think that since I'm writing about it I would know
the details. But I don't. I'm more fascinated with the case of
the maligned skater. Now there's news after an English major's
heart! If I'd been asleep the past three weeks and was told the
details all at once, I'd have thought it a bad mystery novel.
It's too dumb to be true, it's too much the cliche to be real,
but there it is, played out right in front of us.
What an interesting week it has been. And really, aren't you
in the least bit curious about What Went On in Waco?
Let's Take a Shot at Bill!
I have the feeling that the American Spectator does not like our
President. I had no interest in reading this month's cover story,
David Brock's "Living with the Clintons" (18-30). If you don't
like the President, maybe you should read this article -- after
all, you might as well hate the man with a well-informed passion.
Instead, for my obligatory shot at the Administration I chose an
essay by Byron York, "Reinventing Secrecy" (42-3).
In this essay, York attempts to find out just how much the
National Performance Review (NPR) cost the American taxpayer. I
love this idea: the NPR was responsible for the Reinventing
Government hoopla that Al Gore made so much about in September.
Not only were the amounts that Americans would save inflated, but
York cannot even find out how much it cost to find out how much
we could save. It's a secret! This despite the fact that Clinton
signed a bill that loosened the Freedom of Information Act and
used these words: "Openness in government is essential to
accountability" (42).
It is through this new openness that we are beginning to get
a full story about how the government mistreated some of its most
vulnerable citizens with such horrors as radiation experiments
during the Cold War. York's point: does Clinton believe in
openness for his administration? How, now, does his hedging on
releasing personal papers in the Whitewater case look?
Ahhhh, enough of politics: that subject angers me too much
to be interesting.
Manipulate Me for My Sake, Baby.
Joel Bleifuss' "Flack Attack -- How PR Shapes Public Life" in
this month's Utne Reader (pp. 72-77) attempts to show a new
direction in which the Public Relations industry is moving: not
only to convince the public, but to actively monitor and
discredit those activists who oppose them. PR firms have always
been attempting to change our reality for their client's benefit,
the twist is that now the more resourceful firms are providing
their clients with the means to protect themselves against the
threat of opposition. One PR power man (see p. 75) gave a speech
before a group in which he outlined the basic idea of fighting
activists: divide and conquer.
There are four types of activists, so the strategy goes: the
opportunists, the idealists, the realists and the radicals. Since
the radicals are the most dangerous and will not compromise,
forget them. Negotiate and form an alliance with the realists
first, then wiggle the argument around so that the idealists no
longer have a problem, and they'll jump on board. The
opportunists are only in the fight for personal gain, so when
they see that the realists and the opportunists have deserted the
cause, they'll be quick to join. That leaves the radicals out in
the cold, alone, and thence easily beaten.
I don't have my Art of War handy, but I'll bet this is an
obvious strategy for battle generals. The problem is that most of
us don't even consider the idea that those giant PR firms are
fighting. It's like being in an argument with someone and
realizing, just before it gets ugly, that they're taking you way
too seriously.
Lorena Bobbitt, 3:11 am
This picture I enjoyed
from the cover of a
flyer that was in my
mailbox this week. The
flyer advertises a free
lecture series in
Greensboro called "The
Time of the Beast:
Making the Book of
Revelation Make Sense,"
featuring Dave Pollett.
I find it funny to have
this alluring female on
the cover of supposedly
religious seminar (if
you bring the coupon
you get a free Bible,
Pollett makes no claim
to be affiliated with a
religion). A case of using the comic book art to make sins
attractive and get more attention.
I'm on the Info Highway But Where am I?
Found a paper on the Rutgers University computer titled "Science
and Society," by James Burke, and in it he tries to foresee the
result of the changes facing our society. Burke foresees a period
in which "instead of moving to a radically new paradigm, we may,
because of the tremendous facility for interaction that
communications has given us, be moving to a no-paradigm culture."
I'd just pass this off as the ramblings of a name but he has some
good points to make, not just about what we might face, but how
we've responded to changes in the past. The computer is like no
other tool we've had, and "using the tool changes the user." With
the innovations that are ahead for our culture -- interactive
television, the information highway, the CD-ROM -- "the only
constant in our paradigm may well become change itself."
On the Net
Having recently learned how to use the modem for my computer, I
hope to feature more examples of the information that one can
find by traveling the world of Computer Networking. Ever since I
began networking my world has grown exponentially: I can now talk
to people on the other side of the world for the price of a local
phone call. The whole purpose of this newsletter is to keep the
reader informed, and the area I think is most in need of
exploration is the world that the telephone line opens up to
computers. Therefore in subsequent issues I hope to begin a
series that would define some of the terms that are becoming more
and more a part of the common vocabulary, and generally
attempting to make the reader more comfortable with the idea of
global networking.
The first term to define is a "modem." The word modem is
short for "modulator-demodulator," and the modem translates
between the phone and the computer. You hook one cord from the
modem to the computer and another cord from the modem to the
phone line. Then, as long as there is another modem on the other
end of the phone connection (i.e. the number your computer
dials), then you're in business. The modem receives an impulse
from the computer and changes that impulse into a form that can
be carried over the phone lines; when a signal comes back from
another computer, the modem changes the phone line impulse back
into a signal that the computer understands, and lo and behold,
there's a reply on the computer screen.
What could be more simple, right? Just think of the modem as
bi-lingual: she knows "Phone" and she knows "Computer." You only
know "Computer," but all the business has to be transacted via
"Phone," so you need Ms. Modem. Modems come in different speeds
(the rate at which they "talk"), and of course the faster the
better. I have a 2400 bps modem and that's relatively slow. It
means I can transfer information over the phone at the rate of
2400 bits per second, roughly 240 characters per second. That
might seem fast but more and more servers (the computer at the
other end of the phone line) are accommodating the next larger
size modems, 9600 bps and 14400 bps. That's four and six times as
fast, respectively. A faster modem can accept the slower signal,
but the slower modem can never translate the faster signal. So if
you're ready to buy a modem now, spend the extra bucks and get a
really fast one. Be the envy of the electronic neighborhood.
This examination of the modem is overly simplistic, of
course, but I hope you have a better idea of what that little
machine does and why you want it.
Pssst Buddy ... Can I Watch Your Television?
Found an article in The Wilson Quarterly by Frank D. McConnell
called "Seeing Through the Tube" (pp. 56-69), a summary of
television criticism over the past thirty years. He cites, among
others, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: "The problem
is not that television presents us with entertaining subject
matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining,
which is another issue altogether." And on the other hand is
Douglas Davis (The Five Myths of Television Power): the watcher
of the tube knows "precisely what is wrong, as well as what is
right, with the drug that only appears to enslave him." McConnell
equates television viewing to alcohol ingestion: some people can
handle it, some people get a creative surge out of it, while
others it destroys.
Happiness is a Warm Gun
News item: one driver, during the morning rush hour in
Philadelphia, upset at the hand signals another angry driver
flashed him, shoots at the car and kills the other driver's wife.
Even driving up to the neighborhood store can be extremely
dangerous now, and Stephen Dixon's short story in the Fall '93
Kenyon Review, "Interstate 3, Paragraph 1" (pp. 132-138),
captures some of the fear a driver can feel when confronted with
a road crazy. This is a monologue delivered by a driver who has
children in the car, and reading it I could feel my adrenaline
pumping, scared not just for the children, but for the unexpected
conclusions that such an encounter can potentially reach.
"Ice Will Suffice!"
Speaking of the apocalypse, Ken Kesey's first novel in thirty
years, Sailor Song, presents its own vision of the end of
civilization as we know it. The setting is the near future, a
backwater port in Alaska called Kuniak, a somewhat peaceful town
until the invasion of a movie crew from Hollywood. This is a
powerful novel, so complete a creative vision -- it seems he's
thought of everything. It's very surprising to me to have Kesey
drop this on us. I used to think of him as just a Prankster who
had a hit (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), but now I realize
just what a complete writer he is. And what a fun imagination! A
version of the apocalypse as a time of massive freezing is a
vision of the local prophet Billy Bellisarius, the beloved
president of the Loyal Order of the Underdogs (LOUD), Kuniak's
version of the Key Club. I strongly recommend this novel, but if
you don't want to read a large novel (it is massive and it takes
a while to find its rhythm), his short stories in Demon Box show
signs of brilliance as well. Try the essay, "Demon Box," for
starters.
Porter Wrote This While Pretending to be Parker
Another novel read this week was Paul Auster's City of Glass, an
anti-detective story with tinges of Borges. The persona of the
protagonist is convoluted in that it begins with a guy named
Quinn who writes mysteries under the pseudonym of William Wilson
featuring a detective named Max Work. Quinn gets a call in the
middle of the night, a wrong number (the dialer needs protection
and he's looking for a private detective), and Quinn decides to
assume the role of Paul Auster, Private Investigator. Later in
the book he looks up and meets a real Paul Auster, who can't help
him with the detective work that's gotten out of hand. Then, in
the last few pages we meet the narrator, a former friend of the
character Paul Auster. Very fun in a postmodern way, makes me
wonder about the responsibilities as reader, and the mistakes a
reader often makes about the relationship between the author and
the narrator. Confused yet?
And What Do You Really Mean By That?
The Auster leads right into Derrida and Literary Theory, of
course. But even a summary of the history of the Deconstruction
movement and its founder/hero, Jacques Derrida (Richard Jones'
"Sing Doo Wah Diddy With Derrida," in the Winter 1994 Virginia
Quarterly Review) can make for thick reading. One thing I've
always held against most of the modern literary theorists is
their glory in obfuscation, using eighteen words when eight will
do. This article makes clear the lack of focus of a movement in
which the critic was often more important than his criticism. If
you're curious about how Derrida took the literary world by
storm, and the political battles he often generated and delighted
in, Jones' article is a good place to start.
"Those Were the Days My Friend, We Thought They'd Never End..."
Robert Olen Butler's short story in Virginia Quarterly Review,
"The Handwriting on the Wall" (pp. 51-58), looks back at those
singularly tough adolescent years when some of us thought we'd
die without ever holding a woman. The narrator takes a different
approach to courting a woman, literally. I've never been in a
women's restroom, so I'm really surprised at one of his
observations: "I looked first at the walls and nothing was there.
No words at all. I looked closer and there weren't even places
where words had been scrubbed off. The girls had all been silent"
(52). Now that puts a new slant on the differences between the
sexes!
The quote of the week comes from an address given by Benjamin H.
Alexander to the students of Bradley University on October 30,
1993, titled "Is the Time for People of Good Will to Act --
Over?" (Vital Speeches of the Day, (1/1/94), 174-178). A
reactionary diatribe against today's culture, Alexander delivered
this gem: "Recall that Norman Rockwell never did illustrations
for condom ads. And the magazines he read were LIFE, Look, The
Saturday Evening Post, etc., that suppressed our sexual desires.
They were not like the ones many read today that excite their
sexuality." And to think this newsletter started with the word
"penis."
