My blog has been quiet for almost a month! What happened?

Work, of course. And it’s been fascinating because my teaching job has taken me out of Busan and up the Korean coast to one of the busiest industrial centres, Ulsan. Ulsan is known as “the most energetic city in Korea” in a country where every street and building buzzes like a beehive. I’m organizing an English language course for a group of automotive engineers. Their company has decided that they must be bilingual. I had just posted an article saying that the only way Korea can withstand absorption by China is to become bilingually English and Korean, when the teaching gig came into the company I work for. No connection between my post and the assignment except the actual need.

It’s an admirable goal but it is an extra task for busy engineers working long hours to perfect the casting of magnesium engine blocks to spend more hours appreciating the ways English speakers use ‘going to…’ to talk about both physical travel and future plans. For me, it’s a wonderful opportunity to get to meet some of the brilliant engineers behind Korea’s surging industrial growth. I’ve already been taken on an enthusiastic tour of one of the engine block factories and watched molten aluminum pouring into cylinder-head moulds. I’m not sure my English lessons can live up to that for excitement…

Hopefully I’ll manage to keep things exciting at work and post on the blog! To calm myself, I like to look at this image of an x-ray of a calla lily - sorry, I have no idea where it came from other than Google Images.

I love the idea of someone x-raying flowers. How delightfully un-busy that must be. And the resulting image is serene and slightly spooky in its silence. Sigh…

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Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died a few days ago. When he retired a month earlier, he said,

“Invincibility is irreversibly established in the world. My work is done.”

That’s a beautiful exit.

I think he helped the Beatles cope with their sudden and massive fame; I’m not sure it made their lives any easier but their wonderful music improved. For that alone, we owe him a good wish as he sails out across the universe…

Rufus Wainwright’s wonderful version of the song is here.

Jai Guru Dev.

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…from my novel, The Invention of Pleasure:

She is walking in the house at night. In a room, she finds someone in bed. The person in bed is lying there calmly, maybe even asleep. She can’t tell if it is a man or a woman. It could be herself. Or a mother or a father or a husband.
She can’t stop herself: every time she goes for that walk, she can not stay away from the room and she can not prevent herself from going up to the bed. She walks up to the bed in the dark bedroom. She is standing by the bed and she looks down at the familiar body covered only by a white sheet. She can see now that it is definitely a woman’s body. She turns to see who it is, to see the face – her body is shivering with the warning not to look!

She can’t stop herself from looking, looking down at the face.

She woke up with a brutal, snapping jolt. Her body was clenched with the tension of the nightmare and sweat was trickling down her side, making her itchy with fear. She got up and walked to the kitchen and took a drink of water, as she did every time. Holding the cold glass, she walked into the studio and looked in the mirror at her haggard face: a gray thing.

‘Another monster,’ she thought bitterly. To dismiss the vision, she said softly and aloud:

“Darkness was on the face of the deep,
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

God’s giant face moved over the waters; he was pleased with his work, pleased with the world: his world. And the waters reflected up into the heavens his face: giant, mysterious, truly wonderful. Far below, the ‘deep’ was no longer the domain of darkness and the demons were driven away.

Into dreams.

She looked at her painting tools. It was 3 in the morning. She took Kate down and found a fresh canvas and bolted it to the easel. She didn’t bother with her painting clothes; she simply took off her nightdress and pulled the paint table around. The ancient goose-necked lamp was made of iron and it threw a strong even light onto the canvas and the spread of tubes and pots. The day before she had scraped clean the board so it was smooth and hard and ready. She opened the can of oil and filled the cup; a smell like leather filled her nose. Her hand went to the paintbrush pot and she chose a square, medium sized brush that she knew as well as her own fingers. The canvas, so flat and white, was an odd partner to the brush. Every time, facing the canvas, there was this moment of tension; she thought tightrope walkers must feel the same way. Or sailors looking at the sea from the harbor. She crossed her arms and felt her muscles for the strength she would need. The brush was between the first and second fingers of her right hand, its fat stem rooted back into her ribs. Her body felt warm and pure. Human.

She started to paint.

The undertones were burnt sienna, shadowy, earthy but sublime. She touched up the color with alizarin crimson because she knew the flesh of the face would need to echo the energy of the sun. Lou drew the lines of the face in deep red brown; into the hollows, she put the deepest green of the poets.

‘Remember the face that kissed you,’ Lou told herself.

Her brush came slightly off the canvas and she stood rigid; she wanted to feel the desire pulling at her like some unruly animal on a leash. She reached for the slippery pot of oil and juiced the brush. Her eyes were like a hawk’s when she was painting. She could see the brush clearly, see the oil picking up the color of the paint from the board; see the fierce, perfect tone of the cadmium mixing with the yellow ochre, flawed and worldly. What color, the result? She didn’t know the name but her eyes knew! Her fingers were rooted through her hand and arm, rooted through her shoulders; her fingers belonged to her eyes and mind.

“Look,” she said, to the dark outline. It was a command and the unpainted eyes of the Postman tried to look. She would have to make him look! She could feel her heart pressing out and moving out to the edges of her flesh; feel her heart beating in her hands. Lou began to furiously paint and the Postman’s face began to appear on the canvas. The hours passed and dawn came; only when his face was there on the canvas, did Lou collapse onto the frayed sofa. The Postman’s face was the last thing she saw as her vision faded. Her heart, soothed and with an even beat, moved back from the edges of her skin, back into her chest, pulsing with a slow rhythm soft enough to let Lou drift away on her own breath.

The demons fled; banished back to the deepest water.

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Television is, obviously, a drug - to be precise: a soporific. It creates a dull and continuous drone that makes its users think they are knowledgeable while they drift off into somnambulent trivia. Fortunately, TV has become so sleepy, so dull that it is ineffective and increasingly unnecessary.

Fine. But what about the web and, to be more precise again, news aggregators such as Google Reader. You may be using one of the other news aggregators but they all do the same thing: suck up your choice of the entire Internet and deliver it in one big hit list every morning. I used to scoff at the idea of the ‘personalized newspaper’; it seemed to be an odd and false concept for a public news delivery system. I agreed with McLuhan, who said that the newspaper was more a Mondrian-styled maze in which to get lost, not found. What you found in the paper newspaper was someone else’s interests, which was not all bad; it may even have been good and democratic.

But along came the web with its myriad places and along came the need (perceived, of course) to track all the sites of interest. Better to have the web delivered to my digital doorstep that to go searching. My aggregator, Google Reader, is Google-in-Reverse: my searches find me.

Like many users, I quickly ramped up my Reader habit: a few subscripted sites became a hundred, then, several hundred. Within a month, I was getting 2,000 links a day. I set aside time to look at, evaluate, sort and file the many possibly readable articles into the few that I would place in my ‘Today’ folder for actual reading. The folder bulged and my ‘Reader time’ expanded to two hours a day!

About the same time, articles began to appear from a host of dedicated bloggers (Scoble et al) expressing concern that we were caught in some kind of news aggregator time sink. It was simply taking too much time to stay on top of the news wave. To be informed was to be deformed - bent out of shape temporally!

Scoble and others suggested strategies, the most reasonable being to ruthlessly restrict your subscription list to a set number of sites that produce a realisitcally readable number of links each day. It seemed reasonable that the entire daily output of the web was worth an hour’s perusal in the morning. The solution was to cut back the Reader dosage.

At this point, for me, fate stepped in. I moved to Korea in order to teach English and, as a result, I was cut off from my dealer-Reader and I went cold turkey. At first, I felt lost, like I’d forgotten something important. Soon, however, the need to read the long list of links faded. In two months, I was established in Korea and I had time to cautiously open up Reader. I faced an hilariously huge number of links that had been faithfully delivered in my absence. I scanned them - if giving the screen a speedy glance before hitting the ‘Mark all as read’ button, can be called ’scanning’.

The interesting thing to me is discovering that I was actually interested in far less than I had signed up for. Now I am addicted again but it is to as pleasant dosage of about 20 sites. The most useful sites are those that pre-digest subjects of interest to me. For instance, Stephen Downes site gathers up pretty well everything of interest to someone wanting to blend teaching and technology. It seems to me that these ‘gathering sites’ are now even more critical in the face of info-overload.

What would be really useful would be fast forums of comment on the links gathered by experts. That way I could have access, have wide coverage but also get quick and deep insight into the selection. How can we build that into Google Reader?

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In Don De Lillo’s Libra, three CIA officers, discredited by the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, construct a plan to fake the assassination of President John Kennedy and energize America’s anger toward Cuba. Win Everett comes up with the idea; Larry Parmenter finds the political support and the money; T-Jay Mackey finds the men to do the work. In their dark world of angry dreams, the plan turns poisonously real, ensnares Lee Harvey Oswald as the ‘patsy’ and kills JFK.

The picture above, taken from the famous Zapruder film, shows the actual moment of Kennedy’s death in Dallas.

Here are three excerpts from Libra, in which the plotters set up the plan.

Win Everett:

A pickup came down the road and they rolled up their windows to keep the dust out. The driver gave a half-wave without taking his hand off the wheel. They waited for the dust to settle, then rolled down the windows. Win paused a moment before beginning to speak again.

“Some things we wait for all our lives without knowing it. Then it happens and we recognize at once who we are and how we are meant to proceed. This is the idea I’ve always wanted. I believe you’ll sense it is right. It’s the high risk we need. We need an electrifying event. You’ve been waiting for this every bit as much as I have. I believe that or I wouldn’t have asked you to come here. We want to set up an attempt on the life of the President. We plan every step, design every incident leading up to the event. We put together a team, leave a dim trail, The evidence is ambiguous. But it points to the Cuban Intelligence Directorate. … This plan speaks to something deep inside me. It has a powerful logic. I’ve felt it unfolding for weeks, like a dream whose meaning slowly becomes apparent. This is the condition we’ve always wanted to reach. It’s the life-insight, the life-secret, and we have to extend it, guard it carefully, right up to the time we have shooters stationed on a rooftop or railroad bridge.”

There was a silence. Then Parmenter said dryly, “We couldn’t hit Castro. So let’s hit Kennedy. I wonder if that’s the hidden motive here.”

“But we don’t hit Kennedy. We miss him,” Win said.

Larry Parmenter:

They returned to their food, their lunch. The voices and noise around them became apparent once more, a tide of excited news, a civilized clamor. George said something perfectly right about the wine, swirling it in the high-stemmed tulip glass. An attractive woman hurried toward a table, showing the happy exasperation that describes a journey through traffic snarls and personal dramas to some island of prosperous calm. There were times when Larry thought lunch in a superior restaurant was the highlight of Western man.

…

Larry couldn’t help laughing. It was all so curiously funny. It was rich, that’s what it was. Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain rumor, suspicion and secret wish. George was laughing too. A wonderful woodwind rumble. They looked at each other and, laughed. They laughed in appreciation of the richness of life, the fabulous and appalling nature of human affairs, the good food and drink, the superior service, the wrecked careers, the whole teeming abscess of folly and regret. Larry felt flush and well fed, a little tipsy, all the right things. The Honduran ambassador said hello. A man from Pemex stopped to tell a richly filthy joke. It was a lovely lunch. It was great, rich, lovely and perfectly right.

Parmenter took the Agency shuttle bus back to Langley. Then he wrote a memo to the Office of Security requesting an expedite check on George de Mohrenschildt.

T-Jay Mackey:

Mackey gave them some background on the operation. Extremely dedicated men were behind it. The idea was to galvanize the nation into full awareness of the danger of a communist Cuba. Direccion General de Inteligencia would be exposed as a criminal organization willing to take extreme action against important figures who opposed Castro.

He told them a shooting was in the works, designed to implicate the DGI. He wanted Frank and Raymo to be part of it and he supplied some operational details. High-powered rifles, elevated perches, a trail of planted evidence, someone to take the fall. There would be five hundred dollars a month for each of them, commencing now, and a nice payday when the job was done. The men behind the plan, he said, were respected Agency veterans, deep believers in a free Havana.

He did not mention Everett and Parmenter by name. He did not tell them who their target was or where the shooting would take place. He would let details drop, here, and there, in time, as need dictated. The other thing he did not say was that they were supposed to miss.

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