Radical Transparency

Max: [pauses, tastes, thinks, swallows] Hmmm. Not bad.
Danny: Max, don't pretend you know anything about beer.
Jon: There's a pretty awesome documentary called Beer Wars...
Zeeko: WHALE WARS!?!?!?

Apparently Whale Wars is a real thing. Which is very cool for whales. But which makes that moment of misunderstanding less awesome than if Zeeko's ears and imagination had transformed the words Beer Wars into a world combo / concept he'd never before that moment considered.

Overhearing the conversation (and never having heard of Whale Wars), I assumed the full awesomeness, smiled big, and quickly typed the dialogue into my phone.

And I post it anyway, even given my overassumption and overjournalistic reaction, because, if nothing else, it demonstrates the speed and unpredictability with which conversations turn.

Why are there so many gypsies in rock and roll?

Or is this just my imagination?

Of course, the only example my faulty memory can offer at the moment is Melissa by The Allman Brothers Band, and all my Eat a Peach tracks are scratchy and unpostworthy.

All of which leads me to the conclusion that the internets need a catalog of all beautiful and brilliant and otherwise influential gypsy lyrics.

Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.

Be pretty fun to say that to a bunch of students one day.  And even more fun to have them show up years later with stories to tell.

And I also love the implication that every student can escape the limitations of her teacher's imagination.  I think it's truth.  And good news.  And something to remember not to forget.

Thank you Mark C. Taylor, chairman of the Religion Department at Columbia University, for writing this article and including that quote.

Totally crazy to go to a concert alone?

Or totally awesome?

Never even imagined it until tonight.

I had imagined going to an imaginary local bar down the street from my imaginary apartment in an imaginary city on the imaginary night on which the imaginary neighborhood DJ plays music I love and dancing like an imaginary lunatic.

But concerts are significantly different from mixed music for me.  Impossible for me to dance completely alone at a concert.  I'm always dancing with the band.  Whether they know it or not.  Which they almost definitely don't.  Unless they're the kind of band that's always dancing with all the serious dancers in the crowd.  Whether they can identify us or not.  Which is the kind of band to be.

Anyway, Mason Jennings is playing tomorrow night at my favorite venue ever.  And I'm tempted.

Butterfly is track 2 on Mason Jennings.

Click here to download:

Butterfly.mp3 (2252 KB)

I'm reading Philip Pullman, loving it, thinking about it in relation to (comparison with) the JRR Tolkien Middle Earth Project, and wondering about value.

I think Tolkien's work is immensely impressive in its imaginative scale and as a demonstration of accessible but ambitious storytelling, and I think it's educationally valuable in that it turns people into readers, writers, and explorers of the originally weird thoughts we all have.  In my opinion, however, Tolkien's orcs are a very big worry.  I think it's fundamentally unethical to tell war stories in which the bad guys don't have families.

So.

How do we teach Tolkien?  (If we teach Tolkien.  Which I'm pretty sure we do and I'm pretty sure we should.  Because of the imagination, the fact that his work can be a gateway to literature and learning and love of stories, words, and communication.)

Maybe we teach the man with the work? Explain his personal weirdness and how it contributed to his (in my opinion problematically simplified) vision of good and evil and the virtue in violence? 

Worth some thought I think.

And then there's Pullman.  I'm halfway through the second book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and, so far, I love it.  So far, it feels questioning and complicated and real. 

So.

So far, I say teach it.  For imagination.  For storytelling.  And for truth.

Yikes.  Bold statement from someone that still has 500 pages to read.

Catching up on The Bloggess, and I just learned that raccoons don't have saliva.  Granted, comments of the day from Bloggess readers are not the most reliable sources of zoological information (does zoology include saliva?), but, even if that's totally made up, isn't the thought of a saliva-less mouth really weird?  Like sort of unimaginable?  From the mouth perspective, anyway?  I mean we have seen snake and chameleon tongues, and, even if snakes and chamelons do have saliva, it looks to me like they don't, so my imagination can clearly handle the concept.  If a reptile is involved.  Or a fish, I guess.  Though I wonder if it's fair to call those things in the toungue-place in fish-mouths tongues.  Might we be anthropromorphizing, and the real function of the fishy-tonguey-thing is short term memory?  Though maybe it's not fair of me to define tongue so narrowly.  Who said tongues had to taste, and weren't allowed to remember or farm water-aphids?  If water-aphids exist and are beneficial to certain fish and their saliva-less raccoon tongues.

Ok.  Enough.  Sorry.  I get like this when I read The Bloggess.  It's weird.

Speaking of worms and historical first times, imagine the first time someone used a worm to catch a fish.

Fish live in the water.  Worms don't.  Sure, a few worms fall off banks or roll into ponds and rivers in rotten logs or flow with topsoil in floods, but I'm going to go ahead and challenge science to show me a fish that depends on worms as a food source.  Seems evolutionarily impossible to me.

But, as many of us learned when we were little, fish go crazy over worms.  Worms are to fish what ice cream sandwiches are to humans.

And, somehow, someone discovered that.  Discovered the worms part, I mean.  Though someone did also discover the ice cream sandwich.  To that person, I offer thanks and congratulations.

But back to the wormbait innovator...

Maybe he dropped a worm into a stream and saw a fish eat it.  And, maybe, because he'd seen fish eat lots of other things before, he was impressed with the level of satisfaction he could sense in the swish of its tail.  So maybe he dropped another worm, and maybe the fish smiled, winked, and ate that too, or maybe another fish swooped in and jumped for joy.

But then why did the dude have worms?  I mean it's pretty rare for a person to be carrying a worm.  Was he a worm-eater too?  Or was he carrying them back to his garden?  Showing his kids how weird they are?  Discovering for himself how weird they are?

I feel like there might be an obvious answer to all this, but my imagination doesn't seem to want to let me find it.

Oh well.  Kinda fun this way.

Ever wondered what kind of parking lot shopping cart free-for-all inspired that very first bleeding edge grocery store to sacrifice a precious medium-good parking spot in favor of a mid-lot cart return?
 
I have.
 
And I'm sorry I missed it. Tears. Screams. Riots. Blaring horns. Daring escapes. Wow. I bet someone has home video footage somewhere.

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

David Foster Wallace wrote that.

I agree.

And sometimes I'm afraid that lots of people forget it.  Not that what goes on inside is more than words can handle.  Easy to remember that.  But that it's fast and huge and interconnected.  And unique.  And awesome.  So awesome, in fact, that even our most inadequate sketches are probably worth sharing. 

Thank you D.T. Max and The New Yorker for the quote.

In Scotland, the legendary revolutionary leader was seven feet tall, "and, if he were here, he'd consume the English with fireballs from his eyes and bolts of lightning from his arse."

In Southern Sudan, the legendary revolutionary leader was nine feet tall and "built like a rhino."

Worth considering.