Readin', Writin', 'Rithmetic, and Dreaming

Readin', Writin', 'Rithmetic,

and Dreaming

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I'm definitely an optimist in the longish term. I am convinced that the integration of DayLand & DreamLand, the cosmiNet, will re-orient our energies in a sustainable way. We'll have a 'place' where violence and aggrandizement don't kill & impoverish.

 

We'll be able to afford to be our brothers' keepers Earthside — or more elegantly in these wiser times, the keepers of our kin — bipeds, in other words.

 

Please, as you would ask your spouse, How was your day?– in the morning, set your alarm 1/2 an hour early for a mutual muse and ask her/him How were your dreams last night? We are ineluctably involved in a larger, very multi-faceted consciousness & it's time for us learn all our capacities.

 

Similarly you can ask your child at breakfast, How was your night at school? They are learning every night from a fabulous reservoir of cosmic experience, and if you attend to their TV & Books & Music, why aren't you attending to their Dreaming? (Tho, of course, they are unlikely to be 'kids' in their dreams!!)

 

There is no skill and distilled joy and fascination that will serve your child or spouse or friend better than to encourage them in active or lucid dreaming to go along with their lucid waking.

 

I recommend giving folks of any age, Dreaming True by Robert Moss, a wonderfully readable master of multiple worlds — grounded, sane, funny. (I was particularly interested to find that Harriet Tubman used lucid dreaming as you might a folded paper map to guide her Underground Railroad folks safely past the hounds and ravening overseers. Not taught to us in our history books.)

 

I know some people think Oh my life is so busy and hectic, I can’t take on any more information. Piffle. We use a trifling 10% of our brains if we’re Einstein. We have storage and comprehension to burn. Think brandy. Distilled. You’ll find dream travel vivifying as much as any possible trip to the sea side or mountain peaks. And good for the fossil fuel crisis, by the way.

 

The 90% of our brains, fallow for most, is hanging out waiting for you to wake up to your multiD, superfab, holovideo game. Sony, XBox – what jokes they are compared to the gig in your head – or full body really.

 

It is true that we will have to be prepared for an emotional calculus that we aren’t in the slightest trained to be aware of least of all grok. We must figure these 5D chess games out tho or the undertones and undertows of our DayLife will be distorted by our self-imposed blindspots. We will be compelled to develop an obsidian sense of humor as vivid as seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling – obsidianing – the 11th sense, astwere. Our shuttered normanrockwell worlds will be shattered – but they are false anyway and the hum below our hearing tells us that. At some point we have to unclench our minds, get out of the cocoon, & find what we find.

 

It is the complex configurations of friendship and ‘love’ that are baffling & bone-aching to our sentimental day minds/hearts. Let’s say that things are more beautiful, but not so pretty?

 

We’re already in the adventure. A question is whether we’ll open our eyes like on the roller coaster or keep them clenched shut?

 

You have to imagine that you’re on at least three interlacing roller coasters at the same time. That’s what all those extra synapses are there to grok. It’s not harder than breathing; you just have to accept that you can breath out of the homewaters. There is a certain vertigo or discombobulation or vortexiness sometimes, but like sealegs, you get dreamlegs, and you can shift from hither to yon and back from yon to hither. Be fascinated and have fun, and you’ll be fine of fettle and mettle too.  

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3 Earth . Caban . Earthquake. Heron . East . tzolkin 236 01.24.06 wed

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..

.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military Budget on education instead

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Plunder Wonder

Jolly Solstice (or whatever winter holiday floats your boat) to you each.

Herein follow my tra la las for your amusement:
 

Plunder Wonder
.

In a sugar plum-colored daze,
May the bounty of days amaze.
The sheep's plush fleece, the gossip of geese,
The cat purrs, licking her elegant whiskers.
Clowns somersault, salts clown around.
We're lucky to have towels and trowels and vowels.
Pluck luck from your pudding like plums.
Succumb to plums.  Steal style.
Flaunt jauntiness.  Hail heartiness.
Be tickled by pickles, relish fellowship.
Butter is better. More butter is best.

When you feel insane,

Butter your brain.
Pirate the treasure of pleasure.

Happiness happens.
Saddle up, pard, and rope them days,
A hot bath, forgiven wrath.
Club a sandwich, belly up to a sandbar,
Have a fine purple purpose,
Flout and rout pouting.
Ponder wonder.
Remember vermilion, the color of embers.
The gilt lilies frothing the field have no guilt.
Ponder only wonder.

.

Be harmless and warm, eschew other arms.
Praise the prize of days, the surprise of days.
'Frolic' means 'swift gladness':
May your gladness be quick and tricksy.
Be facile with docility,
Salacious for salad. Prefer tortes to torture.  Wreak wreaths, not havoc.
Have more siestas, more snoozes, more muses.
Be kind to your kind.

Under the grime of habit is the original shine,

Polish your time.
As you get old, pick courage, not rage.
The cartography of the heart
Is it a maze or a map?

Perhaps it's better to be polite than right?
Get stunned by fun.
With gusto and lusto, be happy, be sappy.
The solstice, the return of light,
The retreat of night
Shining on us all, the same sun
Makes us one;
Equal under the high and shining sky,
All our hearts are star bright.
The only task is to bask
In the holy glow of the fruited earth.
Linger, watch, admire. Remember.
Be a barnacle to your day.
There's lavender, provender, talent, gallantry,
There's silk, salt, and succotash
Be bold, be brash,
Plunder the days for wonder.
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Mirthfully yours,

pogblog

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7 Water . Muluc . The River . East . tzol 189  12.07.05 wed

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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Viscera .. the Obsidian Arts

  Viscera .. the Obsidian Arts

 

   “Spirit, mind, heart — this is the trinity that people seek to comprehend, to tend, to organize. Then their life will be sweet, will be serene, will be complete.

   ” Why is this not so?” Because of what no one can bear to attend to. Because of what seems ‘beneath us’ as civilized persons.
   Viscera. We ignore or disdain viscera to our implacable, even ferocious danger.
   “By ‘viscera’ I mean ‘the guts.’ All the gluck under the heart. Forfend that our highfalutin' philosophy discuss intestines. We are too fine. We are evolved. We have a big brain, a Big Brain. We cherish our heart, we polish our soul.

   “Yeats speaks to the neglected viscera when he says that 'we end where all ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.' I would suggest that he meant the viscera here, the ‘basement’ of the heart. But ‘viscera’ doesn't fit the irresistible rhyme of his lines.

   “Tonight I come to laud viscera — where 'ladders start.' I suggest that unless we educate and placate viscera, we will only pretend to be civilized.”

   Risma smiled at the fashionably arrayed intestines seated before her in the Laugh Institute's lecture hall. The Laugh Institute had busts and statues of her heros in alcoves around the room. Rowan Atkinson, John Cleese, Dame Edna, Patricia Routledge. Risma had always said that she didn't quite trust the Christian Bible because it didn't have enough jokes in it. Risma smiled warmly at the audience and allowed herself an invisible shrug because in spite of the sartorial efforts of the humans she perused, none of them was as elegantly dressed a bag of guts as her perfect, silver Burmese cat companion, Frolic.

   “We want to be generous, kind, patient, even holy. These are not the top four words on Viscera's agenda.

   “In probably the dumbest and most dangerous move in human history, Christianity decided to divide the elemental forces into God and the Devil. Holy moly, what grotesque havoc and hypocrisy that has wrecked upon the hapless world.

   “Twenty centuries have been spent damning viscera instead of educating it.

   “Viscera cannot be defeated anymore than air can be defeated or water can be defeated.”

   Risma smiled, “Once I walked down a long wide hall in the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. There were modern art paintings hung all along this wall. I noticed as I moved from painting to painting, my first response was what I began to understand as purely visceral.

   “I liked this painting. I didn't like that painting. I found myself nodding or shaking my head, making in my gut a mute, immediate, pre-verbal meeting with the painting. I could then go on to speak in heart, mind, or spirit terms why I liked the painting.

   “We are swept away on the tide or mud slide, avalanche or forest fire of viscera because in the aeons before words, viscera ruled our survival.

   “In the beginning wasn't the word. The word came very late. The viscera can still make a fool or monster of any of us.

   “Let's take a moment here to uproot a poisonous myth. We are typically taught that spirit is ‘finer’ than matter. That matter is coarse. That matter imprisons spirit.

   “We see tomes of charts which show spirit at the top of a line, and mind and heart below. Of course, few mention the viscera whatever.

   “A more useful, and truer, diagram would show a horizontal line with spirit at the left and then mind, heart, viscera.

 

 ♦ spirit  mind  heart  viscera ♦ 

 

With this horizontal template, we can begin to deal in our actual experience. God and Devil are not separated — as there can be no metaphysical separation. Now we begin to deal in truth, however awkward or even embarrassing.

   “If we only honor the eviscerated God, we end up with horrific spasms like World War II where the most intellectually advanced people, the Germans, fell into the grip of a visceral force they could not deny. They had training in the mind and spirit, but the non-linear, tricky and mischievous (at best), bloodthirsty and bestial (at worst) Visceral Forces overwhelmed their puny rational defenses and drowned us all in an orgy of devastation before those forces were sated.

   “These horrible collective devastations pale, to me, before the dread secret personal harm we, in visceral throes, daily wield upon those most precious to us.

   “Viscera fuels both wonder and terror. And in so far as you do not fill your life with wonder, both petty and enormous terrors will leech or lurch into the vacuum.

   “In my studies, I can say that viscera is willing to fuel wonder rather than terror, but it will burn.”

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postscript .. I call this fable Viscera .. the Obsidian Arts because we need to study these forces and patterns without prejudice. It is true that there are temptations to too much of this dark elixir, but too much of the thin abstinences of the spirit can lead to a spiritual anorexia which is disdainful of a fatter, a jollier ebullience — as if primness and grimness were more holy.

 

I use 'Obsidian Art' rather than Black Arts because Obsidian is the onyxiest black and doesn't have the historical baggage of the satanic studies. Obsidian is about the next quantum of humor, not about the study of hurt. Hurt already has its addicts. One of their favorite phrases is 'collateral damage' — as if such a thing were conceivable.

 

I'm convinced we can educate viscera to obsidian art — brutal art even. Art doesn't kill anybody. When we grok that difference, we might be out of the LithoDumbness Age. Viscera can be enticed to prefer very dark wit to physical pain, but you can't namby-pamby it up or it'll just jump the levee. And I think you're going to have to ante up more lust than your public probity has hitherto been willing to embrace. You have a choice: dead &/or mutilated people or obsidian humor, art, & lust. Until we are fiercely honest about this stuff, I hope you enjoy Taps.     

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com

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5 Deer . Manik . West . tzol 187  12.05.05 mon 

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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Cheney viperiens extremos & the Humor Transplant

Nov. 05. In my hapless and indelible optimism, I keep waking up like Pippa believing that !today! we'll get it and proceed to the Frabjous Projects of silly abundance. Let's build stuff. More bilbaos please. Cathedrals of Education and Art. But Mr. Cheney abides so far. I am trusting he ain't Methuselah, however.

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Today <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />10-28-05 7:20:54 am Friday, we are awaiting Mr. Fitz and the FixedIntelGate Report. I’ve been up for the many hours and will be adding material at the bottom of this essay-which is an hub of the Obsidian Humor series.  

 

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Cheney viperiens extremos & the Humor Transplant

 

     Myrth said, “In ClownSchool InterD, we don’t just get to indulge in fugu. There is fugu discipline. Fugu is the expert filleting of the exceedingly poisonous Hypocrisy fish, especially those found in the Religious and Political Oceans of Hubris. Gods alone know that our keen tools and our only wyrd and terrible weapons – Be ye terrified ye 12ftTall Lizards Disguised as Human Beings – our wyrd and terrible weapons are words. It’s necessary and fun to kebab the 12ftTall Lizards. I love weapon-words third only to the silver cat and the feloniously handsome Fuller. But we need to turn sword-words into plowshare words after we’ve welcomed the unfanged and unblinded, reasonably cheerful and modest 12ftTall Lizards back into the gallivanting human family. We need to explore with you students of comedy how people live in the aprèsWar world.

     “First let’s remind ourselves of the three great Greek philosophic constellations of inquiry: metaphysics; epistemology; ethics. Metaphysics deals with what is real. Epistemology with how we know. And ethics with what is good. The epistemology, the how of thinking, being, seeing is a lot of what ClownSchool InterD is about.

    “What do you do when you’re not gnashing your teeth; not wasting obscene sums of money on megalomaniacal weapons systems like the fantasy Missile Nonsense System aka Star Wars; and not lashing out at people who snog a Different Deity than you do?   

    “Sursurprisingly, there is a way to live fruitfully and passionately and cheerfully without waking up in the morning rarin’ to perfect more Schemes to mutilate children.

    “But first, the ClownSchool InterD psybio team works holoday round perfecting the Humor Transplant operation that deflates the crazy hubris of the 12ftTall Lizards to bring them back into genuinely empathetic human scale. The radical and aggressive treatment probably necessary for cheney viperiens extremos is emergency splenectomy. The metastasized spleen just has to be hacked out on the spot—at the bus stop (As if any of them would ever ride a bus!) or at the dinner party with the butter knife or at the humvee sales lot.

   “Hustle ‘em off to the ClownSchool ER and stick an Irony Transfusion IV into the soft skin inside the crook of their left elbow (the one nearest their vestigial heart) and play Mozart, Yo Yo Ma, Bella Fleck, and Hui Ohana til you see them giddy with grin. For a Cheney or Rove equivalent, this treatment could take years.

     “For people in less acute stages of satanically septic Reptilianosis, a course of ironyotherapy treatments are critical to recovery. Severe religiopatriosis is, like stroke, an attack whose redemptive recovery is long term – you’re never cured, you’re always a religiopatrioholic in recovery. The high the 12ftTall Lizards get is so fauxEupho that you have to kiss your left little finger 8x a day at the very least to protect yourself from the toxic effects of the effluvius and supperating contact corruption.

   “ ‘What!?’” you 12ft Lizards cry in unbridled disbelief. ‘What?! kiss your left little finger 8x a day at the very least?’

    “ ‘What!?’ the clowns cry, ‘You’re sharing our supersecret occult ritual with the 12ftTall Lizards Disguised as Human Beings? Not. You can’t. It’s our, well, our thing, our secret handshake.’

   “Shhh. It’s ok. They won’t be 12fttall Lizards any more. Their swollen spleens will be removed or de-inflamed. The kissing the left little finger 8x will help them keep on the yellow brick path to recovery.”

   “Well,” Salma Nella groused, “ok, I guess. I liked having one exclusive thing. They had the Jesus blood-drinking, fleshing-eating thing; cathedrals; heavy bishops’ rings that clunk on your head at your first communion; psalm books; hymn books; stained glass windows. I wanted some gear, some paraphernalia, a hash pipe equivalent or two. But at least our Kiss8 secret. Dammit all, Myrth.” Salma glared. “Oh, ok, go ahead and spill the bloody beans.” 

   “Here goes, ClownSchool InterD clownfants. Kiss8.”

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ClownSchool InterDimensional .. Where we learn at the interface between lucid waking & lucid dreaming. And have conscious forays into OtherLand. 

 

From the musical South Pacific, a daring song for the time:

 

“You have to be taught, carefully taught, to hate all the people your relatives hate¹, but you could be taught, carefully taught to dare like a columbus to set sail on the seas of your own art. Nothing could be more of a preposterous chance than those abzurd ships, the Nina, the Pinta. They dared and you can too. And the gold you find by doing your art is more pure and tarnishless than any treasured metal. 

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¹ You've got to be taught
To hate and fear
You've got to be taught
From year to Year
It's got to be drummed
in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught
To be Afraid
Of people whose eyes
are oddly made
And people whose skin
Is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught
Before it's too late
Before you are 6 or 7 or 8
To hate all the people
your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught

from South Pacific 1949

 

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com

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6 Water . Muluc . The River . East . tzol 149  10.28.05 fri 

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the pro-peace world begins today with you

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Mountain View & Google Make Knowledge History

Mountain View & Google

Make Noos-History

 

11.15.05  

  What a sweet night. <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Tuesday, November 15, 2005. A huge full moon floated in an indigo sky. The Mountain View City Council unanimously voted to lease light poles to Google to put up their synapse-devices to knowledge-cast the world’s information, the world’s eccentric and fascinating library, into people’s houses, apartments, schools, and parks.

   History. We lucky few who were there will remember that the next quantum step into the future for humankind began tonight. Daggone – how swell. How intensely cool. It is well wrought.

    You no doubt remember Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher from mid-last-century. He talked about the lithosphere or the original seething rock of our Earth. The lithosphere exudes a biosphere — you, me, leopards, and lichen. He predicted that the biosphere would exude a noosphere or knowledge-sphere or a world brain. In the early '90s as a zealous convert to the brilliant intimacy of computers, I hollered, “The noosphere, the noosphere! The internet. Teilhard just never imagined that there would be a technological interface!”

   Well, tonight at 37.3932N, 122.0778W, the noosphere, the knowledge-sphere took a quantum leap into the exhilarating future. Congratulations, Google. Congratulations, Mountain View. Somersaults all around. Sweet.

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noos-history pronounced new-ohs-history;

the moon-landing & telegraph & Agincourt echos are deliberate;

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11 Deer . Manik . West . tzol 167  11.15.05 tue 

ffwofw 202§8941/24d17h28m25s31.98g5.1g/1131

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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Glorious Move by Google

Google has offered to put wifi up all over Mountain View Ca (my hometown and Google's) for a no-cost hot-town. They will “attach wireless 'access point' devices to hundreds of lampposts throughout town.”

 

 I wrote the following Letter to the Editor of our local paper, the Mountain View Voice. This is intensely thrilling. Readers of pogblog know how long I’ve been on & on about this. (I had nothing to do with this step except pyschically.) Good for Google. Now the next step too.

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Editor:  

   Standing ovations to Google for the farsighted gift of wifi to <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Mountain View. This is so smart and so urgently essential to a knowledge-enhanced future that I'm elated. Hurray and thank you!

   But — in order to “make the world's information universally accessible and useful,” we must collectively let the Other Shoe drop. We must get a cheap, tough laptop to every single Mountain View child K-12 so that all that knowledge brought by wifi can be received regardless of income. We must not have a digital divide, but rather a digital multiplication starting with the poorest children and rapidly expanding to all children.

   The explosion of innovation that could and should be America's future requires both the universal ultraband wifi and the universal laptops. Google has made the fabulous big first move. I call on our City Council to instantly begin the laptop project with other equally visionary Silicon Valley companies and foundations. Mountain View is the perfect place to incubate this full-force exhilarating knowledge revolution that will become a national model.


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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com
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It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.
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11 Deer . Manik . West . tzol 167  11.15.05 tue 
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the education-obsessed world begins today with you
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Hinged .. How to Survive Art

 

Hinged

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   Part of the point is to do as much art as you can and stay hinged. The temptation is to dali or bosch and pterodactyl into the paisley skies of a benign madness.

    One of the rottenest and stupidest things is that people have attached success in art to frilthy lucre. Pifffle. Start your damn art today and be awful at it in the beginning. Bloody persevere. Eventually you get better. I think everyone should have an art that no one will ever see so they can just putter happily making mudpies in it and not worry what the spouse or the neighbor or any bloody anybody will say. People are so horrifically judgmental. Please allow yourself to be in kindergarten.

    The tender bud of creativity is snuffed out by other people’s Idiot Perfectionist, and your own. Not that they have ever even probably done any foray into the forests of art. Or maybe you’ve got them in the one they have a knack for. They should be required to try something they ain’t so handy at. (Like baseball players trying to play golf. Or in a class of 7th & 8th graders I had 38 years ago – all the language-kids wrote this riveting prose and when they read their stories out loud, the non-verbal shrank back into their shells. There was this kid in the fartherest away back corner who doodled fabulous flame-burning cars all day. I had the inspiration to have everyone illustrate their stories. From being the helpless worst, this kid was the fabulous best. When I stood with him showing his brilliant drawings at the front of the class, everyone got a glimpse of how we are all gifted and all clumsy. I always honor most the folks who lurch out of their comfort zone and take a chance on that awkwardness of actually learning something entirely new.

    I will give the evidence another night, but I know as a teacher and as a learner, everyone can learn everything. Drawing was my one exception. And Dear Rafaello in one weekend tricked me into my drawing brain and there is my running shoe, laces, holes and all still on a page to prove that anybody can learn anything. Now I didn’t stick with that trick, but I know it’s there. And you can be tricked by a nifty teacher into learning anything if you just unclench your brain and say, “By Golly, I will persevere until I figure this out.” It may take a long time, but you can get Very Good.  

    When I finally figured out how to teach writing, every single kid ended up writing killer stuff. Because I learned how to trick them into being real, not derivative. There was one kid who wrote about stereo components every night. I couldn’t wait for the next installment. Of course you can’t give a damn about grammar and spelling in the early going – any clod can fix that. What you want is their reality on the page, not yours – their passion for stereo components.

    There only a few tricks to learning to write. First, you need to write every day. Make a vow. Put the whole date. (I have boxes of stuff that are dated May 6 or Nov 14. When I wrote it, I knew what year. Uhh, but now I have no clue. So 11.14.05 is good. I like to put 11.14.05 sunmon 2:14am. The day is necessary. The rest is idiosyncratic. Your vow is to write something every day even if it’s “I’m too darn tired to write.” I have never actually written that though I have permission in my vow.

    Now I’ve done this vow for about 30 years so I ought to have it down. (Because I write allegorical philosophy, I wanted to make sure what I was saying would turn out to be true in a life before I foisted it on the public. I’m in a foisting mode now at last.)

   So, write every day. And never write when you can’t write. If you can’t write it down, don’t think it. You’ll never get the pristine phrasing back. When I’m out and about, I’ll jot down a phrase or two, but I’ve trained myself not to indulge in turning the faucet on. I wait until I’m at a page or computer screen. Of course I often go out to write. That’s fine. I’m talking about when you’re driving or walking with no notebook. Observe. Don’t write in your head. Jotting is OK, but not full-fledged open the flood gates.

    You write every day. You don’t write when you can write it down.

    Some days you write literature. Some days you write glorified shopping lists. It’s the keeping faith with the Muse that counts. She (or he) ruthlessly believes in your honoring the relationship. You will be rewarded for faith. This is a grail quest and you got to be pure of heart. You don’t have to be smart or a natural sentence-slinger in the beginning. You do have to keep faith.

   Write for yourself and the Muse. Your horrid friends seldom have anything useful to say. You’ll find your writing friends along the way and they only whisper sweet somethings into your ear. Say what you like about someone’s work and elsewise Shut Up. You’d be amazed at how many ‘friends’ read with a machete and think they’re being ‘helpful.’ Oh Gods, ugh.

   Then, the best proofreading and editing you can do of your stuff is to read it out loud to yourself. Then you’ll see where it doesn’t work.

    Remember, editing is easy. Flame for ink, ice for ink, blood for ink – that’s the trick.

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com

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It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

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Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:

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10 Death . Cimi . Twins . North . tzol 166  11.14.05 mon

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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IBM vs Education

IBM vs Education .. a melodrama

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   If you send your people to an IBM Leadership Seminar, the instructor will guide and prod, say, 25 people through a highly distilled and interactive experience. All applaud, eat expensive boxed lunches, and may heed a point or two.

   Bill Blarney is a famous well-paid instructor whose renowned programs are available in boxed sets on DVD.

    As the IBM events planner, you go up to Bill Blarney at the end of the day as the late light filters through the graceful weeping amber trees beyond the huge picture windows into the plush seminar room. “Fine job today, Mr. Blarney,” you say. “I want to talk about the terms of your next engagement with IBM.”

      Deeply at ease with his fine status, fine suit, and porsche reputation, fat-cattish, post-canary, post-saucer-brimming-with-thickest-cream, Bill Blarney beams all but beatifically at you.

     “Well, Bill, next week starting Monday at <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />8am, we want you to teach five different seminars before 3pm.”

     “What!?” Bill expostulates, snorting like a startled stallion, “That’s absurd!”

     “Additionally,” you add, “each 58 minute seminar will have between 30-40 students, a different group each hour. Between most of the seminars, you will have no break whatsoever – one group will file in as the other files out.”

    “What?!” Bill’s eyes begin to bulge. A vein on his sweat-slicked forehead visibly pulses. “That’s absurd!”

    “Moreover,” you continue, “each seminar plan involves completely different material.”

    “Well, I, well, er, I – I guess I could do that on Monday if absolutely necessary to keep the lucrative, I mean important IBM account, but well, but it’s overwhelming, it’s unprecedented,” says Bill.

     “And,” you say, “you must do the same pattern with all new materials and enthusiasms on Tuesday and then Wednesday and Thursday and Friday.”

     “What!? You mean I can’t just repeat Monday’s materials? This is preposterous. I’m a leading professional. This is not humanly possible.”

     “Well, you must also give assignments each day which you must correct and comment upon each evening – from at least 150 daily participants.”

    “Nonsense,” barked Bill. “You’ve lost your mind.”

    “Yes, and you will be paid 1/5 of your current salary and have no car allowance.”

    Bill could no longer speak.

     “And after next week’s five days, you will do five days a week thusly every month for nine & ½ months of the year.”

     Weakly, licking the froth off his lips, Bill said, “No business could possibly demand this level of performance from any imaginable instructor. The energy, the organization, it’s simply inconceivable. You couldn’t pay me enough even if I could handle it for one single marathon week, least of all 36 weeks in a row. What has American business come to?”

    “Not American business, BillBoy,” you say, “you’ve been made an American high school teacher.”

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pls send this to your dear teacher friends as a holiday confection from both of us .. if only there were a way to thank them enough.

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com

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It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:

http://pogblog.myblogsite.com

4 Light . Ahau . Flower . South . tzol 160  11.08.05 tues

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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Not One Centavo on Bullets

Not One Centavo on Bullets

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    I saw a tv program on grisly diseases like river blindness and malaria. River blindness gets into your blood and causes constant horrific itching – to the point where you just peel pieces of your flesh from your body. And then when you are about thirty, you go blind and hold the end of a broomstick with a child holding the other end, leading you around for the rest of your life. Until that child goes blind and so on and on. It costs a buck a year or something to prevent this. You probably make 50 cents a month in this country so you brutally itch and go blind.

    Where does the list have to end for you, pilgrim, in order for you to throw up your guts and say FUCKING STOP spending money on weapons? I try to avoid swearing on pogblog because profanity is usually just a failure of imagination, and when you really need it like here, its impact is diluted. But the Military Budget madness is what swearing is for.

    As I said to chancelucky: Dwight Eisenhower pushing the massive interstate highway system was justified on national defense terms tho it actually benefited commerce. The idea was that troops could be shuttled around the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />US better, were there a need.

     The point about universal ultraband and cheap tough cool laptops (wolfbooks I call them 'cause it's cool) is that they'll explode cheap trivial low grade crud, yes, <b>but they'll also explode invention.</b>

    It is invention which will preserve America and a decent standard of living — not more destroyers and fighters.

    Yes, it will take us time to buy out this idiot war in Iraq and all our obligations to its mutilated and their dependents, but at $820,000 per minute for the Military Budget and $200,000 per minute more for Iraq (It's 'off the books'), we can make the transition to an education-invention economy forthwith if we just change the meme or the controlling idea.

  This invention and the savings on destructive projects could be flooded into education and health.

   What BushCo & Ilk completely miss is that we win both allies and friends with spreading what you might call ‘practical love.’ Instead of multiplying vengeance, we would multiply affection. Train paramedics instead of soldiers – the same people, folks, the very same people. Train para-engineers instead of soldiers. The same recruits. The same team work, the same camaraderie. Minus the future nightmares that we bequeath to so many of them. We should use our massive strength (tho we’re owned by the Chinese banks & it’s hard to know when that bubble bursts?) to build for the downtrodden, champion the sick. The Earth is pleading for peace in broken people — they are the runes, the hieroglyphs. You just have to have another tank — and you let another sister go river blind? These things are connected.   

    Is our legacy as America all this hell and hate? I don’t believe it. I believe that we can export engineering and education and medicine — and movies and cruddy hamburgers.

 

    Take a deep breath – we are going to have to believe in actual democracy for better or worse. The Security Council has got to go. No veto. We have to educate an international multilingual police force to do actual peace-keeping. With ceaseless citizens' oversight. Not power decreed by the Old Guard, but elected. We have to stand for our beliefs. It can’t be democracy except when that doesn’t suit us and we go all Adolf Stalin. We have to put our sword in the pit of fire and strike it ourselves into a pen and a plowshare. We cannot tyrannically declare our belief in democracy. We act it or we do not. People can see. Unilateral action can’t be countenanced because all peoples are created equal and have a right to the pursuit of happiness. We are supposed to help with that. Bombs are not help, ever. 

    How can you imagine that corporations should less than tithe? I have a real question as to why a genuine and humble leader needs to make one centavo more than the janitor – what real leader would not want to raise up the janitor and share his bread & or cake with her/him? (I just don’t recall Jesus being into aggrandizement, but maybe I missed that gospel? Maybe the Gospel of Greed was left out of all 36 tapes worth of the New Testament I listened to? Can you imagine Jesus being elected to office in USofA Inc with his platform? I think someone should comb the New Testament and update the language, chapter & verse & try to run on that.)
   Our leaders are supposed to be citizen servants – not bloated have-mores. How can we empower and include more citizens in a relative abundance of education and happiness? How can a leader call themselves prosperous if there are poor, unhoused, unhealed, unhappy? How can we trust any leader who rides in a phalanx of gas guzzlers? Is where they are getting to more important than where you are getting to on the 32 bus? If the leaders rode the bus and lived on minimum wage one week a month, I could listen to one syllable they have to piously mouth. Otherwise it’s all hot air and broken wind.
     Please, some leader, dare to try it. Try it and write a blog about it. We would rally around you like the whirlwind. One week a month. Then testify. Tell the other leaders how hard in fact it is. Put your life where your mouth is, Mr.Bush. Do democracy. Do humanhood.

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com

………….<^>……………..

It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:

http://pogblog.myblogsite.com

3 Rainstorm . Cauac . Redbird. West . tzol 159  11.07.05 mon

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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Chinese Green & SoKo WiFi Dust the USA

    Friends, I hope you escape this very sudden and very harsh presumably non-avian sore-throat-from-hell Event that attacked me a few days ago & felled me for awhile. I wouldn’t mention it, other people's misery in specific being tedium times ten, except that after a few days of a throat so sore, I was wavering – (I haven’t been to an MD since 1979 except once to get an inch long splinter pulled out from under my thumbnail – yes, you would say anything if they started shoving splinters under your fingernails – an answer I could have let someone else discover) – I thought, maybe, you old fool, this is the dreaded avian flu or who knows. But a friend suggested gargling dissolved Bayer aspirin in water – which I take every day any way. Willowbark is the miracle drug for sure, but chalk this in its column too. As an aspirin junkie for 15 years, only Bayer aspirin has the magic. Sorry, something is missing from the generics in this case. Anyhow, gargle away. I am not cough or other revolting drooling symptoms free, but the scary sore throat is Gone, hallelujah, bro & sis.

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But to the real subject du jour.

 

Chinese Green & SoKo WiFi Dust the USA

 

    We either pursue the Burning Child shifting of the Military Industrial Complex to the Education Instructional Complex or we end up, baffled, as a backwater in history. We are spending our $820,000 per minute on an absurdly, obscenely obsolete model of dominance. The new dominance is invention for fun and for survival.

     Thomas Friedman’s China’s Little Green Book, a Nov 2 NYT column, tells how the Chinese are putting a giga-press on getting green. Not because it’s a nice idea, but so they don’t choke to death on the effluents of modernity.

    <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />South Korea, or SoKo as I ultramodernly call it, has grokked that nationwide ultraband is the kiss the frog & turn it to a prince smartest move. The frog being stuck in the past troglodytism and the prince is the collaborative and colludenative future 

     And we are stuck with a bellicose Administration all hopped up on the drugs of weapons and war. Everyone else is looking at us with horror tinct with pity or pity tinct with horror. Ye gods, I’m ashamed for our de-evolution, and a different thing, I am skin-crawlingly embarrassed that we are so belligerently and theistically stupid. We actually, tho admittedly barely, elected Al Gore an environmentalist and futurist who grokked green and the noosphere, the internet change from the competitive model to the instant and intimately collaborative, colludenative model. It is catastrophic to America’s hopes for joining – yes joining, what a novel, almost Navaho idea! — the future that we are stuck with an entire administration with at least three fatal flaws.

    The whole BushCo mindset is a throwback to anti-ecumenicalism in its many useful varieties. First let’s take a breath, as dear Fitz would say. I am not a communialist at all. I like my little personal space without having to pretend to like people’s company more than I do. I like it sometimes, sometimes I don’t. I like have a lair to retreat to – my garret as it were I suppose. I am not a happy hive person, always rubbing and buzzing like in bars on Friday night. So don’t think I have some sloppy sentimental notion of us all hunkering down in some loving commune. Piffle. However, we could care what happens in the next hovel, I think.

 

     How, for instance, does someone get to take their second dwelling off their taxes before everyone has a first dwelling? And tax payers should subsidize mansions? Really? No one makes their f***ing fortunes in a vacuum. You wouldn’t be so damned rich, FattHoggist, if the janitor weren’t making an impoverished wage. You are not worth 431 times more than your secretary per hour.

    So Robber Baron greediness and a complete gelding of the Labor Movement are flaws which pit us in the US against the future.

   In the general BushCo backward-looking, I see no one who groks the niftiness of technology. And, be sure, it is its niftiness which is what wins you over. Anyone who does not have access to home broadband is crippled. If that sounds like a blunt statement, it is from experience that I speak it. I had an overlap of dial-up and broadband. The broadband crashed one day (a rarity) and I discovered that the dial-up was all but useless. You cannot go back without feeling like an exile. All people who do not have a decent exclusive personal  computer and at least our clunky USA broadband are parapeligic, period.

     Going from broadband (as embarrassing as our USA broadband is – more like teaspoon-band compared to SoKo’s gallon-band) back to dial-up is like going from a fine 10-speed bicycle back to a tricycle. Yes, they both have wheels, but they aren’t in fact comparable.

    Please don’t be swayed by people who are not happy computer nuts. What do they know? I have the zeal of the converted. In 1988, I was still sure computers would be depersonalizing tools of an inhumane Corporate Structure. Maybe someone meant them to be, but trippingly around the gigantic feet of the dinosaurs, the tricksy lemurs began dancing under the moon after school.            

    A greatest fear I have is that with the changes happening so rapidly, those kids without computers or broadband, those not rhapsorg, are dusted into a different social species faster than could have happened before in history. The ability to augment your thinking with access to much of the world’s greatest knowledge all-but-instantly makes you different, more concrete, more specific – not disconnected, not more abstract. Now, obviously the same kind of training that a giga-reader of poetry or of the world itself is fortunate enough to get ought be vouchsafed to all these burgeoning brains so that they don’t only get addicted to cotton candy and giddy trivia. But the wonderful possibility of the noosphere is that you can pinball around from profundity to trivia in a trice.

    The freedom I feel as a writer now that I can check up on every nuance of what I’m writing about makes me just plain better in a substantial way. The melody is a gift I’ve practiced and earned, but the ability to check that SoKo has ¾ penetration of 4 times to 64 times faster broadband from an 11.05 article is a micro-solidity I can pass along that is both bloody cool and also makes us both smarter.

    I use rhapsorg instead of cyborg because the word rhapsody means woven song at root. And this future is orgged or organized more like a woven song than the cybernetic-org – helmsman-org model. There is no helmsman. Yet it is not chaos; there is an anti-entropic tendency to melody; therefore, woven song.

   So the kids (or any of us, really) not wired into the symphony are, ipso facto, deprived.

   Please don’t waste our time listing all that’s stupid and wrong with the internet. The same things that are stupid and wrong with people’s private minds – just the old mind was less on display to the non-psychic. Us psychics don’t notice so much difference, sooth to say. The vast garbage ground of pretentious nonsense and davidletterman sophomoric proto-humor is now in every Comment column of every blog that the generic imbecile-redneck-dave can find to bray on. However, I have found more thoughtful and resonant moments than ever I might have before. It requires a rhino-hide for a writer and super-quik junk-thought filters – like surfing the tv if you’re the one used to holding the remote – at a glance you see that it’s just britneyesque or whatever ain’t your poison.

       So the Chinese are doing giga-green and SoKo is leading the probably unwired way. We have got to instantly get this nation to have universal hotspots – the whole damn nation, like the MoonShot. Why were we woken up by Sputnik and not by SoKo? This is an Emergency & it is not a Test. You should hear that noise of alarm This is an Emergency until you shout at your Representatives urgently and constantly. WiFi this Nation Now.

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collaborate = working together;

colludenate = playing together;

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If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com

………….<^>……………..

It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:

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1 Earth . Caban . Earthquake. Heron . East . tzol 157 11.05.05 sat 

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the education-obsessed world begins today with you

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