Extracts 4

Extracts from the period March, 2004 through October, 2004

03/21/04

Not writing much to anyone these days, am enjoying the expanses of time in reading, programming, and. no doubt errant, thinking.

03/30/04

I think your own instincts regarding commentary about me will be fine. Where I have named the photos, it pleases me to see the name used, but if the name conflicts with the point you wish to make, you can leave the name off. Though I can't imagine the issue arising with you, I would object if anyone used any photo of mine in a way that did not show respect for the animals and plants of the natural world. It is a natural conceit of humans that other things exist to make entertainment or moral lessons for them, but the natural world is unto itself, without regard for our fancies. Still, we are as we are, and it is not possible, or even desirable, to have some perfectly cold objective view. So, we hew to the line, however wavering, of truth and beauty as we know it.

* * *

As to animals and spirits, my understanding is that the word spirit comes from the root meaning "breath", thus all who breathe have the 'spirit' of life. To die is to lose that breath of life. Those who discuss such things speak of 'souls' and seem to mean the 'spark' of divine essence that has been bestowed on us simians, but withheld from 'mere' animals. It is simian nature to attempt an exclusive alliance with higher powers, and think ill of our fellow beings as a means of climbing the heights of self-esteem. If it weren't for the slander against our fellow earthlings, I wouldn't say much about it, as religious discussions are not very fruitful, in my experience.

Basically, there's not all that much that separates us from the rest of the living world, and the little that does would reveal itself more properly by seeing and delighting in the beauty, wisdom, and grit that lives out there in all weathers.

04/20/04

Your mom called last night with the sad news of his illness and poor prognosis. I haven't much to say that is helpful, you already know everything about it, more than you want to know, no doubt, and are going through some hard times, and maybe some good memories as the days go on.

I'm very glad I had an opportunity to visit with your parents, and to finally tell them, after so many years, that I always admired them both. When the lady of the house and I visited them, they were both tossing themselves in the lake every day, and indeed they were fit and active. Both of them took us around their area, and southward, to make sure we saw the sights worth seeing. They even hiked with us in the dunes, though at one point, I went upward alone to see the overlook where I felt the hard-blown sand rising up and over the rim, in the making of more dune. Geology in action.

He is special, people like him don't come along very often. Perhaps part of him was never of the earth with its fervid concerns, but of the free sky and wind and cloud. Maybe it is getting harder to soar in his spirit...

04/26/04

I found out last night at a surprise party for my sister, that he has passed away. I had received a phone call from my aunt to let me know the current situation with him. At that time, April 19, he was very ill with a poor outlook. He died Wednesday April 21, 2004, as sister heard from our aunt shortly after. I heard on the 26th -- communication seems a bit lax in the family... However, there has not been, nor will be, a public funeral, but rather a celebration of his life sometime in June of this year.

I had sent an email to my cousin in sympathy of her father's terminal illness at 11:20 PM of the day before he died; as I was writing, he was still alive, but gone by the end of the next day. He was 90 years of age and had done, so far as I know, all that he had ever wished to achieve in his long life. The last years were somewhat cruel to him in that he lost that amazing sharpness of mind, but there was no pain to flog him toward death.

The surprise party was extensive. There must have been forty or fifty people there and the elaborate surprise plans worked perfectly. When Sister returned to the house from a lunch with number one son, all the people huddled in the small kitchen rushed out with shouts of 'Happy Birthday' and she was indeed surprised. Another cousin and his wife were there, and I had some good conversations with them. She is not very well, it was spunky of her to make the trip.

Your web efforts have been working well. I have been all through the site a couple of times and it looks fine, and gets the information across effectively. The interworking of text and images surely helps in making the information "accessible" to a broad range of people.

Some thoughts:

--You may wish at some point to add a copyright notice on the material, though the idea someone might steal his and your work does seem like a non-starter, but ya never know...

--The admonition with which you end the pages seems too large and bold and "shouty" for the nature of the thought. Wisdom does not need to yell, no matter how enthusiastic the bearer may be-- its expressions are not cheerleading slogans. Just my opinion...

-- On your sending that comment from a friend that I am a “gifted person" -- thanks. It is nice to hear things like that once in a while. I hope it means the images sank, for that person, below the level of the cursory glance where most such efforts expire.

--On adding music to the site: while not in itself a bad idea, my opinion is it should be done carefully. There are problems with it. Especially I think it should be under the control of the user, and not come up automatically, as unwanted music is merely intrusive noise. Secondly, there is copyright to consider as far as putting up the work of others. My guess is, there must be someone among his friends who plays music (I am imagining wood recorder or guitar, for example) and who could create on tape, or better, CD, some original music inspired by the words and images of your web site. This might be just pleasant 'riffs' that are in tune with what you are trying to get across. Anyway, perhaps one could set it up so a click on an image, or icon, would play a short piece of music relevant to the current text or image... hey, a multimedia website!

04/30/04

She told me of the passing of your father. I'm sorry to hear of it, yet I understand it was the end of a long, probably not always pleasant, process for him.

There is a letting go, finally, when the time is right, I suspect. My uncle left us on the 21st of this month at ninety years of age -- his great love was flying airplanes. When he retired from the Air Force, he bought a single-seat glider and spent long hours out there in the Arizona desert and mountains, soaring with the eagles. When he could not fly, he built elaborate model planes and flew them. After long years of declining mental ability, probably hard to bear in one formerly so sharp of mind, I think he just let go and flew away.

Well, words are sometimes inadequate. Sympathetic thoughts to you.

I'll enclose some images, and I know you'll understand, they are my better communications, and it seems appropriate to me, if not to others, to send them at such a time.

05/18/04

The leather background of this email is one I just acquired today. Usually I do my own, but I liked this on a website I visited and so, "borrowed" it.

You have kindly asked for some images, and though I am not going out much these days for picture shoots, I still cannot resist the lure of Spring. There are no baby birds in these shots, but I have a few to send soon in another set.

05/19/04

I guess both of us were up a bit late. In fact, my sleeping pattern has disintegrated and is now not much of a pattern at all. I assume that will change in time, but for now I am all over the 24-hour clock. It seems to have little to do with drinking coffee or not. Well, we are more retired than retiring. Perhaps a little disintegration is a good thing -- it may lead to something not only new, but better.

Thanks for the response to the images. I am trying to push the medium toward a wider range of tones and have had some good results, I think. Contrast is essential for the success of most images, but filling in the tones gives richness of form. I am deliberately underexposing shots to make this possible The zoom lens does help, it gets me closer, but it fights me on any shot less than 6 feet in distance. Most good images of mine are a combination of a decent original shot and careful "darkroom" work, mostly using IrfanView.

There are cameras on the market now that have 5 megapixels (over 4 times what I have) and a 10x telephoto lens. Such a combination would allow creative cropping for composition without losing resolution. In other words, I could crop 3/4ths of the image away and end up with as many pixels as I start with now. This is simplified, but in a sense, this would be the equivalent of having a really good 20x lens.

05/29/04

I am pleased there is enough room at the cabin or your place for her and me -- staying at one or the other place makes a lot of difference to us. The trip is 700+ miles the way we intend to come and will make for a long, long day's drive each way. She can get a 5-day chunk of time off including the 2-day weekend, so that allows 3 days to recuperate between these two big driving days. We hope to be able to have time to visit with family and others, and maybe poke around your beautiful area a bit and take a picture or two.

Yes, we got the memorial service invitation (did you do its illustration?). Am looking forward to your re-do of your mom's cottage. That building seems not to have changed a lot in 50 years, despite what must be rough weather at times. You did a great job in turning the garage into a livable little house. Your dad must have enjoyed working in his workshop in the current garage during the model plane years. Too bad nothing physical remains of all that effort. Don't think I even ever saw a photo of any of his works.

You and the Blue Heeler look a fine couple on that cycle. Would turn a few heads on the road. One of Farley Mowat's books described his family outings in which the open car had, besides two adults and the kids, two adult horned owls alternating wing flapping from the back of the rumble seat, and the dog, which had goggles for sensitive eyes, leaning out to see down the road. Oncomers would be quite stunned.

05/30/04

May as well begin to answer your email and voluminous set of letters (some dating back to the last century, I guess). I suspect it will take a number of emails to match your recent and welcome upspike of correspondence.

Thank you for the comment about the images. I always appreciate any recognition of the images as they take time and thought to create, and, for many people, about a second each to view.

To be sure, images of the works of man may work well among images of the natural (or at least more natural) world. Despite our vanities, we are still part of the natural world, though a particularly volatile and wayward part. We take our wants for needs, and our needs as high-priority laws of nature. Some of what we do to other living forms would be taken as loathsome depravity if some species did it to us. There is a particular form of obsessive-compulsive behavior that involves measuring things incessantly with handspans and arm lengths -- maybe we have that problem in using our measure of mankind as we deal with the rest of the universe.

In general I sympathize with your suspicions about "screens" and media. Whether McLuhan was right or not about media rewiring the nervous system, it is definitely true that media channels are full of propaganda that works not just through the dispassionate mind, but also through the same channels that deliver our inner depiction of the world. For the controllers, there is a higher profit of gaining compliance by altering the world-view of the controllees , as compared with the venerable brute force method.

I am searching around in myself, trying to find a way to encapsulate some of the above briefly. It has been a bane of mine that it has been so hard to discuss this sort of issue without blathering off into metaphysical mush. So, I'll just say this thing as plainly as I can:

1) We never know the real world and truth directly, with the exception of awareness itself.

2) The perceived world is an artifact of the physical self, in concert with the unknown through the senses.

3) The perceived world is compounded from both neutral and biased information in advance of its appearance in the conscious mind.

4) These biases are of several kinds: evolutionary, physical, cultural, historical, social, and psychological.

5) The purpose of the biases is to "twist" the perceived world and its consequent decisions.

6) Originally, the pre-human purpose of the twisting was to maximize the immediate survival value of the decisions.

7) Just about everything humanity does, including issues of money and power, involves affecting this twisting.

8) There is a permanent conflict in humanity between the needs of the individual and those of the group.

9) The battleground of that conflict is the twisting of the perceived world and its consequent decisions.

10) Alas, most of the time, good and evil are shifting things, mutating into one another.

11) The Achilles heel of mankind is a preference for a spurious certainty over an agonized search for truth.

12) There are some groupists who secretly maintain personal lives under manual control, and some individualists who are just awkward puppets.

So say I. Have a duckling:

06/02/04

Am pleased the images are living "out there" in a new environment and making a difference to someone.

Am not doing as much photography, as I have said. The reason is elusive to me. It has something to do with my relation to others, but I cannot characterize it yet. I suspect I am slowly moving to a new direction, but I don't know what. I do know the few images are no worse, and in some cases better, that when I was immersed in it.

Your bouts with the car and the AC remind me of various machine woes I've had. I wonder what they will be like when we add senses, even emotions and sentience, to them. They are often a pain in the posterior now, what will they be like then? Imagine a house of machines gradually going off the deep end. Well, there can be the arbitrator machine, and the emotional counselor machine to keep it all going, I suppose. Perhaps they will all watch TV for us, so we can do other things. What would quiz shows be like, where all the machine contestants were plugged into the Internet and the knowledge banks of the world? The questions would have to be really abstruse.

Hope you and your old college friend have a good time roaming around and catching up over all the intervening years.

Your web plans sound like they will keep you busy for a long while. It definitely pays to have a clear goal in mind, as far as productivity goes. For myself, the time is more one of remembering and imagining and learning, rebuilding the house of self that grew a bit unkempt for a longish while.

06/11/04

Remember Rainy Day People by Gordon Lightfoot? One of the many songs I have listened again to these past weeks. I found Sun Son by the McGarrigles which, like the Dylan song I mentioned, was hard to find. In general I find that the mass of file acquisition programs have more recent or best known works, and not necessarily the best works.

Still, I have found Son House, Robert Johnson, some old Baez stuff, nearly all Dylan, lots of Rolling Stones, etc. More on that as I remember it, as I go along with this email. I have maybe 1200 songs now, but could edit that down to half as many. A "perfect" collection would take many months, and a lot of effort to pare down to a really good list for listening. The fat cats of the music publishing industry will not make anything off of me, but they wouldn't anyway. Anyway, as an official irrelevant person (retired), I play at this collecting when I wish and let it sit on the hard disk for a later return. Eventually I will at least look into getting a good set of earphones and maybe some sort of MP3 player for when I work at mindless tasks (best time to listen to music for me). Music would be acceptable also as faint background ambience for conversation. Give the talkers something else to listen to if the chat waned in quality.

External noise is a bugaboo of mine, I really really dislike it when it is forced on me. And music is among the worst noise in that situation because it is specifically designed to force attention, this through insistent rhythm, the human voice (we are biased to pay attention). and sheer loudness often. Rarely do I enter a store that I do not experience an instant anger at the forced music-noise and destructive thoughts chase themselves down the corridors of my mind. There is a persistent fantasy of mine that I magically have a noise-seeking electronics-frying device in my hat that fries the mechanisms of forced noise. To avoid being stoned to death by consumer-zombies and those who feed on them, the frying would have to have a 15-minute delayed effect so I would not be associated with the deeds.

If this fantasy could come to pass, everywhere I choose to go, the blessings of quiet would follow. Those millions of TV kids who cannot live without such noise (loneliness for the flock sets in), must get their own earphones. This would be a blessing for them as they would be a little bit removed from the ceaseless rant of consumption messages, explicit and otherwise. I say a little bit, because the earphones would still plug them into the now-culture they need -- without it, they feel diminished and empty. Goodbye Inner-Directed, hello Other Directed (remember those terms from our intellectual youth?)

Speaking of earphones, Bose has an interesting product. While it is a high quality device for listening to voice or music, it can be worn without connecting wires as a sound-canceling device that works, as all such devices do, by generating a counter signal that nullifies external sound. I could use this when I go out to the stores, or in any city, to have some peace and quiet.

Well we have heard much these years about rights. Does the individual have the right to opt out of the culture of aggressive propaganda? I sometimes wonder. In the modern workplace there seems to be more and more a right to play one's radio despite the fact that the worker in the next cube may despise the noise. But what would happen to the suffering worker, if he tried to put on earphones to try to escape the noise? Would this be accepted? You would know better than me. In some jobs, such as Wal-Mart (Castle of Crap I call it), the worker must listen to the voices and music emanating from Crap Central or be fired -- the vile music and the vile worker communications are on the same channel (she says the messages, such as to Security, are meant to have an effect on the customers as well as the workers). This group control through sound will only become more insidious and effective through time. Imagine Federal agents on a mission, each with a wire and earbud. Really, it is no longer paranoia to assume the future implantation of cell phone / radio receiver / GPS unit in the body of all persons.

Our bodies will be progressively invaded, and sense by sense, we will be jacked into the mutterings of the larger society. These days we are less persons than assets, but assets that need constant tweaking and monitoring. And through electronics, the Group is becoming a body of its own, a physical and global entity that is aborning....

06/15/04

I have been reading a lot of the fine naturalists from the middle years of the 20th Century and earlier. Later I will try to find if there are later authors as good that I haven't read. Except for John McPhee (not exactly a naturalist, but somewhere in the ballpark at times), I have read few recent authors, except in the odd magazine article or the type of book where style and personal insight are suppressed. I suspect there really aren't writers as good now as then. The coolness of tone of a McPhee seems to be widespread, and there is a "workmanlike" feel to a lot of writing now. I prefer the meandering and delighted sort of mind of earlier authors. The quality of a unique self does not come through of late, it seems. It takes time for the intuitive self to burrow into things, and maybe the pandemic distractedness of later years has reduced ability to do that.

I like that: The child who wept over the picture of the Christian martyrs in the arena because she was so sorry for "that poor lion over there who hasn't got any Christian" was a true philosopher. Great line.

Krutch was a Professor of English Literature, drama critic, man of letters who fell in love with the natural world, and when he wrote of it, there was all that literary sensibility to call upon in writing about it. There was a deep learning behind his observations as he toddled about the living world -- resonances of resonances. I don't always agree with him, but he is always worth reading and thinking about. He was a wise man, not in the sense he had all the answers, but in the sense that his reactions were within an intersection of a closely observed natural present, and the many-layered lives of the mind of the past. If to know a good deal of the history of man's efforts to understand the world and himself is to be haunted by it, then Krutch brings all the ghosts to the party. Behind that young rabbit popping out of a hole is the White Rabbit, late as always.

Just now, for a couple of hours, I've been investigating abrupt climate change, which is hot at the moment. Scientists and others are becoming more acutely aware of the drastic changes the earth's climate has undergone recently, geologically speaking. The thing that sticks out is the sometimes suddenness of climate change where in ten or twenty years something quite different sets in.

And that reminds me of an article I read in a science mag a while back that looked at our cosmic "neighborhood" and found it to be fairly mild at the moment, then contrasted that to the many more dangerous environments in which the Earth could find itself. Likewise, the relatively mild climate of the Holocene, the last 10 thousand years, is atypical -- previously the cold-warm changes were spiky, no plateaus. There have been serious major changes that have initiated over as little as a 10 to 100 year period. Whether the scientists are right or not about the near future, it seems they are very worried because the more they know, the more fragile the global climate seems. The dramatic upsurge in greenhouse gases and the parallel increase in global temperatures has them spooked. They do not have the full picture, their models are too crude yet to match the complexity of the real world, but they think there are stable states of climate and rapid transfers from one state to another. This is different from the former assumption that things always gradually move from one state to another. In short, they think we might accidentally trigger something very big and dangerous. I have by my arm a copy of a DOD report on the national security implications of rapid climate change. I heard it was commissioned by a old military savant who engineered our foray into Iraq. Life is often more vividly strange than fiction.

06/16/04

I am using one of her [Mrs. Smith] efforts for the picnic. After all, she is a white-haired, apple-cheeked sweetheart working in her neat kitchen on a white-enameled wood stove in some beautiful country setting, making all those good pies two at a time. Those who say she is a wheezing factory somewhere cranking out pies by the semi trailer load surely are fibbing. I refuse to believe it. I know she hopes you or I will stop and see her about the time the pies cool, and enjoy a cup of cocoa and, of course, a fresh slice of homemade pie. I would even chop some wood for her anytime. I close my ears to evil rumors.

06/17/04

Still I like your scenario. But think how crazy it is. I mean treating people decently, canceling the daily dose of management BS, adapting the workplace to peoples' needs, leaving them with time and energy to actually have a life, listening to the ideas of others, trusting employees with capital ownership and decision-making. You IDEALIST! Argh!

Still...if the pies were tasty, then I guess...hmm on second thought...OK, let's go for it. I'll be Quality Control Meister on them pies. If I can be crusty.

06/21/04

I have sometimes had the uneasy feeling that "wisdom" is surprisingly cheap. I remember a television show that routinely had a kung fu master guru type telling the boy whom he called "Little Grasshopper" all kinds of wise things -- and these were wiseries made up by probably neurotic show writer hacks in whatever form was needed by the occasion.

I was reminded of this today when I checked into the source text of a spam email from among several that I was in the act of forwarding to the junk_mail address of my ISP. In it was the text below. Why it was in it, I don't know. Not to say this stuff is as wise as the more buffed wisdom from some better aphorist, but some of it has the nagging quality of making one wonder if the notion should be pursued in case one is neglecting some bit of insight.

[Begin quoted material]

Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.

It is impossible to win the race unless you venture to run, impossible to win the victory unless you dare to battle.

Do every act of your life as if it were your last.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

People think that at the end of the day a man is the only answer. Actually, a fulfilling job is better for me.

'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.

Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.

Woman absent is woman dead.

Let us do or die.

What a man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants.

[End quoted material]

Thus ends the spam wisdom for the day. Well, you say, some of these are quotes. Yes, maybe all of them. Still, it is odd to see them garnered by some spammer lowlife. Maybe wisdom is something now to be shoveled wholesale into the maw of the engine of licit and illicit commerce. It is as if the fake and real jewelry of the past were half-melted down until all running together in clumpy flows and power-sprayed randomly on products to make them more saleable.

Is the past to be veneered over the present in random ornament as if content and context were irrelevant? Wouldn't it be ironical if our neo-barbaric generations that did not forget the past, but rather bathed in it, though it meant no more than bathwater? T-shirts with patterns made of the Analects of Confucius, Chartres rose window toilet paper, K-Mart Kafka shower curtains, Nikes emitting Motzartian riffs with each step, rear end jeans patches of Loren Eislely phrasings, free haiku with each order of fries...

06/23/04

I wanted to respond finally to your email before we head to Michigan to the memorial service occasion for my uncle. I'll pick her up at 4:30 PM at work and we head west immediately, munching ham sandwiches and cookies and milk as we go. A chunk of apple pie will go too, courtesy of Mrs. Smith, that wizardess of the wood stove (I refuse to believe otherwise). It could be called a flying visit -- 1400 mile round trip and the time will be 5 days total. Crazy, but that is the way it worked out. Sister will be flying in, probably on a plane.

Very pleased you liked the duckling shot -- it is far from technically excellent, but I care less about that as time goes on, partly because I can never afford the best of equipment, and partly because it is really the meaning of the image that is paramount. Even so, I make the images as good as I can.

The ideas I expressed in the previous email that you refer to are ones I have often come back to in my mind, and they are of an area of philosophy that is hard to express. The sense of one's words seems to unravel as one expresses the ideas. I suppose when one tries to get at the meaning of meaning, so to speak, there is a fundamental problem separating what one is talking about, from the means of expressing it. When we say that something means a lot to us, we are referring to a boundaryless flux of remembered sensory and imaginative experiences. Such is notoriously hard to convey to others. Artists try to express meanings, but it is not ever easy. Everyone has so many experiences of meanings. Those we have in common can be referred to, but otherwise it is the province of artists' language, rather than that of philosophers. I try anyway.

* * *

Oh sure, the camera goes. The battery charger too. With the prices of some of the high end cameras these days, I expect I could just send the camera on a journey and stay home myself. Then when the camera came sloping back, a tired, but slyly secretive, gleam in its eye, I would work with the images at leisure. I might lease it out to travel-weary people who want pictures of Mt. Erebus and Inner Mongolia and such, but are too pooped to go to one more group safari event, or bad Third World hotel, or eat one more ghastly meal at some foreign version of "Mom's Restaurant".

* * *

I found a while back that C-SPAN site has tons of information, including long and rather scholarly videos on-line on the Presidents of the U.S. Now I have found they have the same for American writers

Give it a try. Hemingway, Faulkner, others too. I warn you there is a lot of time involved in mining the resources of this site. I am watching a two-hour special on John Steinbeck now. It is presented in a small window (RealAudio), but the point is, these resources are there at any time of day or night the viewer wishes. With C-Span and BBC and Wikipedia, the Internet is beginning to deliver on the promise of being the peoples' treasury of knowledge, instead of the playground of money-grubbers.

I am nearly finished with the 800+ page book of Steinbeck's letters. I am in a mood to go back and read a lot of Steinbeck. Never did read Wayward Bus or East of Eden, so those are in the queue. I really need to find an old-fashioned cheap bookstore, but the online ones are also $-savers.

* * *

That buying of a lottery ticket problem [not buying] has always limited my wins too.

The telephoto definitely helps, in fact anything extra a camera can do for one helps. Taking good images is hard enough without being burdened with a poor camera.

The only lesson I can think of, I can pass on now, though we can get out together and see if we can snag some decent shots when you visit. The lesson is: anticipate. I try to get into a picture-taking mood where the distractions fade away, and through watching and moving, I can be there ready when the shot happens. It is as if a shot were presenting itself at some intersection of space and time, and if the photographer is late (or oblivious), then tough beans, it's gone. Even so, there is no guarantee of a good result. Luck helps.

07/02/04

You are probably knee-deep in work, especially if your hay has become available, but write when you can. I like the written word -- there is a depth and flavor in it that is lacking in other communications, excepting the better sort of conversation. She and I will send an email note and images to your brother and his wife soon.

By the way, I put a link to my web site on your mom's desktop and explained its use. I also helped her save to My Pictures the marmot images your brother sent to her. As with so many people, she resists the confusions of the computer, but will enjoy email and pictures when she realizes that it is just a machine to help one do what one wants (and that, yes, the computer IS a pain in the posterior sometimes, even without the active assistance of the user in making it so). I noticed she is developing an impatience with the slowness of dialup connection -- that is a sign of an emerging computer user who is trying to get things done, rather than worrying about "can I do this?" Someday maybe even I might get an email from her :-)

* * *

Forgive the onslaught of images -- it's just what I am doing at the moment. As you see from them, my real pleasure in images is the natural ones, animals and plants and scenery, though sometimes people end up in some of my shots.

* * *

Although I did take a bunch of images of people, my real pleasure in images is the natural ones, animals and plants and scenery, though sometimes people do end up in some of my shots as, I suppose, they are animals too, albeit with, usually, considerable pretensions. In some of the better shots of people, the faces are turned away or in shadow, and that helps. I think that may be due to our huge bias toward faces, a built-in face-scanning mechanism that has been part of our sociality. When the face is de-emphasized, it is easier to see other things -- the shapes, textures, colors, gestures, meta-meanings etc. that are explicit in images of animals and plants and river deltas, and so on.

I finished the massive Steinbeck: A Life In Letters. Have dived into America and Americans by him. It is a collection of his non-fiction. I wish it were twice as thick, as it probably could be.

I have recently begun reading Scientific American again, magazines from the library, and it has been worth doing. The absolute craziness of the various models of the universe, and of the quantum world, are way beyond the imaginings of speculative fiction. Interesting to think of the successive displacements of the human ego from god-centered and earth-centered to a will-o-the wisp in an obscure part of the cosmos. That has been hard enough to take, but also Darwin, and Freud, and Neitzsche (man as self-enslaving bozo). As we are reeling in amazement, our self-esteem swirling down the cosmic drain, along comes more science to imply that we are alive merely by luck amid a corruscating interplay of multi-dimensional realities and the fine-print is all paradoxical. A drooling insanity would seem to be a rather conservative response. Gibber, gibber. Have...a nice day. But heck, we're tough. Reality be damned! As long as the hamburger holds out, we're OK. Then: NEWS FLASH: World's hamburger supply threatened by (ta-dum!) Abrupt Climate Change. More at eleven. Interesting times...

07/03/04

Am awake, slightly, because I was peering at a RealAudio-based two-hour presentation on John Steinbeck on the C-SPAN site. There are quite a number of authors that C-SPAN has done shows on, and all the shows are available on the web. They are also major treatments, including academic talks, on the American Presidents. C-SPAN and the BBC are the two main sites I've found so far that have serious works available on the web in audio-video.

Glad you got something from the images. Even though I did capture some faces, there were fortunately some animals too, and even a plant, so it was an OK photographic experience overall. I was pleased to add horses and a dog to my regular crew of talent, and I was especially pleased with one of the hen turkey shots.

I didn't risk my swollen left knee (now healing apparently) at Sleeping Bear, though I wanted to go, but the postcard shot scanned well.

Yes, it is odd that you should know the area well, as I think not all that many Americans have found there way there from as far away as the West Coast.

07/04/04

Thanks for the note saying you received and enjoyed the images from the memorial service journey. Perhaps you will want to print a few of these images for a photo album sometime? The photo albums you have from Mom and others are so valuable now. I wonder about ways to preserve them -- maybe inserting whole sheets in oversized plastic protectors?... I am aware of a sort of paradox in many Americans of latest generations who buzz about furiously with their lives, but do not believe in thinking about what they do, and do not believe in recording anything for later contemplation or for future generations. I guess they believe the past is dead, gone, and irrelevant, and as for the future, "Hey, what has it ever done for us!" And speaking of that, how could our aunt have all those relatives, cousins and their children, and we never knew or met them? All very strange...

07/05/04

When I mentioned to her that I couldn't again find the web page from which I liberated this leather background, she jumped into one of her favorite search engines and found it in a disconcertingly short period of time. I wanted to go back there to snag the little colorful image that you see at the top and bottom of this message. I liked it with the background originally, thought I saved it, but couldn't find it on my machine. Well, now I have it, and can use it when I like. I showed her how to create custom "stationery" (under MESSAGE ==> NEW USING...) so she can create her own if she wishes. Such creation is kind of fun, in that one's own images can be used, as I have done, or exceptional backgrounds, like this one, can be "borrowed" and used to create a stationery template for easy use at any time. In practice, I have created many, but only a few of the better ones get used much in the end.

Thanks for your note about the photos -- I always like to know how my images are faring out in the great world. I am certainly glad you look at the images, think about them, react to them. That is the whole idea. Also, it is nice you are continuing to enjoy the calendar. Our own calendar, also made with the help of the Calendar program you sent, has some different images, so our new image for July is two ducklings swimming in gold waters.

After a massive, government-funded study, I have ascertained what has been sent you of the recent photos, and what has not. Since you enjoy the animal shots (that is very good, as it is what I most like to do!), here is perhaps my favorite shot of the journey, the hen turkey against a dark background, and another of two of her young ones as they hunt, barely visibly, among the plants. I noticed when the hen became uneasy with the straying of her young, she would make stylized pecking motions high in the air. I wondered if this is a silent "call" derived from the tendency of young birds to join their mother when she found food that they could share.

07/07/04

The gathering was great -- at long last we all got together. It seems most of the people in my family have conversation genes and can talk a blue streak. I've met many people who are not like that, who spend words sparingly, as if they were the gold coins of a miser. From what she says, you both were wise. By attending the punch bowls, everyone came to you two, some many times, and you were able to cover the conversational field, by not moving much at all. I was lucky too. Besides good conversation, which is one of the few basic Good Things of life, I also got a few decent wildlife shots, not counting the people.

As the images are on my computer, she forwarded your nice note, so I could send the images.

I am never sure what the servers are at the other end, so I tend to send these moderately fat images (such is the technological march that the image resolution of my camera is fast becoming outmoded) individually to avoid constipation of cranky web servers. So here is the first of several emails to transfer the images to you. Am glad to send any others that you want in this full size for printing.

07/08/04

Hmm, I sent some of the images originally in a modest size -- at 700 pixels wide -- for easy viewing in an email, but suggested a larger size for printing. The more dots, the sharper the image.

So-o... The smaller images will be in this email, but I recommend printing the larger images using a program that will allow you to use any size of image and print it to any size you need. I use IrfanView, which is a free program of amazing quality given the price. The link to it is http://www.irfanview.com If you download, install and try it, you will like it. And the print quality will be better. The author even updates the program regularly! I use it for about 85% of my image manipulation, and go to the other graphics programs for some special purpose.

We appreciate your offer of hospitality, and you may find us on your doorstep someday. I always did like your town and high country generally, and watching people fling themselves down the sides of mountains has been one of my avocations. The marmot shots you sent your mother were great. I thought marmots were shy, but maybe that one thought he was dreaming when you and your friend appeared and took his photograph. I would welcome any such shots from you that you might wish to send (I already have the marmot shots).

07/12/04

Thanks for your note about the picnic -- and I return the thanks to you both for helping make it a "fine afternoon picnic in the park". Good food and good conversation go together so naturally, and I think we take nourishment from both. I know that is true for me, and I was getting a bit anemic, conversationally speaking. As to getting together -- just name the place and time and, if it isn't contradictory to the laws of nature, we'll be there.

As to forgetting Cumbre Vieja, she says, when she forgets something, her brain must be getting too full of information, and she needs to do some spring cleaning of her mind. In my case, a whimsical memory has been with me all my life, so it is nothing new to reach for a fact, and find it has been re-filed under Miscellaneous or tossed out by the maintenance staff. Often the notion will drift back through my ken when I have no need of it, which makes me think the psyche has a sense of humor, whether it is appreciated or not.

I checked the link you gave me on Cumbre Vieja and added it to my list. In my catastrophe/disasters search, I found an interesting article on calculating the odds of a significant disaster affecting one in the next forty years. The calculation can be done by anyone willing to give odds or chances of a each particular type of serious upset occurring. For example, what is the chance of a mortal disease becoming pandemic in the next forty (or whatever period) years? Given the Great Influenza Outbreak of 1917/18 and AIDS, the chances may be seen as high, say 1 in 3. Converting to percentages, then Will Occur is .333 and Won't Occur is .666. The odds of being involved in a major earthquake would depend to a degree on the person's location, but we will guess 1 chance in 500, as an example. The rest of the list of possible natural disasters is filled in according to the best information and the best guess. Then the Won't Occur numbers are multiplied together and the result subtracted from 1, and that is the answer.

If the answer is fairly high, say between 30 and 70 percent (which it probably would always be), then simple prudence would seem to dictate an effort to prepare for this. Governments can do some preparing, but, logically, individuals and families should prepare also.

Thinking about this now, I can see how, instead of this being seen as "Armageddon randiness", to use her term, it might have a salutary effect of reminding us that our modern network of high technology is not really robust, and that humanity's long apprenticeship as animals in a dangerous and uncertain world is still relevant today. And that perhaps we should give up our illusions of "man as consumer" and take up a more sober, mature vision of our condition. And prepare. End of such musings.

As to "my expertise", I'm glad to do anything to advise, help, or just kick ideas around. Whatever I come up with, it will probably be in terms of the "keep it simple" principle. To the good, I think, I have always been interested in how to impart information and understanding in the most direct way, yet recognizing the learner's need to convert the information into his or her own terms at the moment of understanding. As it takes two to tango, it takes attention of both the teacher and the student to pull off the transfer of knowledge. I admit I did not take it well, when I did my part, and the student did not do his. Given this, I think I would do better to communicate through writing and images, than otherwise.

Today has been one of librarying, books, and photo printing, a very good day so far. I have a few picnic memento images to give you.

To your spouse: your cake lives on in memory. Also, it had the side effect that my strawberry concoction remained temporarily intact.

Onward, and once more, hurray for retirement!

07/20/04

Yes, I did think I had been lost in the shuffle. Good to hear from you. I can imagine how busy you are, but if it helps, you have my OK to consider letter-writing to be a common chore, like stacking hay bales, organizing the schedule of the crane, or petting the soft noses of horses :^D), thus it will be put in the queue of necessary things and probably be timely done.

Thanks for the images. The one of me should doubtless be deep-sixed, but the ones of your brother. and of my sister are keepers. I will send you the rest of the images from the visit soon. That send will have all the horse and cart shots that you said you were particularly interested in. If you download the very handy image-manipulation program called IrfanView, which is totally free, it can do lots of useful things with images, especially control the size of the printed image. As the printed image needs high resolution to be good, it is best to use a large image for that purpose. So, if you want any of the images in the original 1600x1200 resolution, let me know and I will send them. I gave the same advice to your brother. and, as far as I can tell, it was beyond him to deal with. I understand this (it is the near universal response), but really, it isn't hard, and it is nice to be able to produce good printed images for one's photo album, or for framing.

If you get him to reply, it is more than I usually get.

Let me know how things are going at your place as it unfolds. With all your activities, if you forget how to relax, just check in with me, I will always remember. How are your learning projects coming?

She and I loved the coolness of the days and nights in your part of the world, but I suppose you, who know all the seasons intimately, have a different view? We are not heat fans, energy seems to drain away, the body is happily somnolent, but the mind frets.

Say hi to your spouse for us, remind him that even giant persons such as himself must mind health matters and rest sometimes.

* * *

I decided to finish the sending of photos from our recent visit. Mostly these are ones not sent to you before. There are some others unsent that are probably of no interest to you, I'm assuming. Many of the ones included here, especially the animal ones, but also people ones, are sent for a look, but toward the end are horse and cart images. Your niece’s limping in from her spill is here, and there is one of just you on the cart that seems good.

Thanks again for taking me on a ride. That was great. Hmm, that reminds me -- now you have a sleigh... "Over the river and through the woods to..." Well, chances are you will be a Grandma someday. It would be great to hear the sleigh bells, pure magic sounds, on a cold day with the horse breathing out steam and everyone's cheeks bright red. Funny that farm folks fled so fast to the city, and took no time to think about what they were losing.

07/24/04

Got your letter today, a good one, thanks. I'll respond more specifically to it later. Here is what I'm thinking about at the moment. I'm sure you have a perspective on it.

Am enclosing a web page in this letter (bottom). It is an example of the strange ignorances that haunt us simians. Scientists, and those who should know about matters maritime, have been denying the existence of these huge waves for many years, and now, all of a sudden, it has been found that not only do they not occur "about every 10,000 years", but are in fact common. And get this, there are on average two large ships lost at sea -- sunk -- every week! You have been a news junkie and, I assume, you still are. Were you aware of that? If not, howz come this news has not been reported? Were we instead to hear of the new breast size of some celebrity?

The implications of these questions are most interesting to me. I was recently accused of negativity ( a great sin indeed of our times) in response to my saying I did not think we would adequately respond to the great changes coming about due to our surge in population and advanced technology (they go hand in hand). I said it was the "stopsign syndrome" that I noticed as a kid in Ohio: it took several deaths at different times at a crossroads before authorities put up a stopsign. By extrapolation, it takes a certain quantity of death and misery before governments/societies respond, and the responses are usually inadequate. So, it follows that we will be always well behind the curve of the forces of disintegration that are at hand now, and which will be increasing in the future.

Little note is taken of my hopeful added comment that though we will have to endure two or three hundred years of a succession of miseries, we will eventually learn, and make eventually successful responses to them. Simians don't handle such time frames well -- the attention span and the scope of concern of most people are too small.

However, in that two or three hundred years, profound changes to the living earth will take place. Thus, though we will probably rise to the occasion over the long haul, there will be terrible lasting damage to the biosphere that gave us birth. The price of our eventual understanding, and acceptance of the relation of ourselves to the rest of life, will be very high. We will have much to regret when the day comes we are wise enough to deeply see what we have lost.

I read recently that the British magazine Nature recently predicted the loss of up to 50% of earth species by 2050. This may well be too pessimistic, but big figures are being thrown around about this period of history -- it is referred to by many scientists as the Sixth Mass Extinction of Species -- and mostly this is due to homo sapiens.

07/28/04

I am glad to hear from you. It has been a while, but I thought you were involved with your friend's visit or projects. And I can't say much about writing, as I am writing to others less frequently than I did, I guess. However, from your comments, I am wondering if you did get the two emails I sent you, one before the memorial service for my uncle and one just after returning from it. The June 23 one had an image of fish, one of the best I've had of them, and the July 1 email had many images of the memorial service trip. If somehow you have not received these emails, let me know and I will re-send them.

Go ahead and rename the photos if you need to. The naming I did was inconsistent over time. The acceptance of naming images was part of my learning to comment on images, and that commentary has become very important to me. I have come to feel modern folks are so "hyper" that it is hard for them to actually view an image -- they want to move on before their brains register the image, and before their feelings can react to it. The commentary, if they read it, slows them down long enough to have a human response to the image, and of course, the commentary has a mood of its own...

As to photo shoots, well, to be sure the pattern is broken, but I still do get out sometimes. I still enjoy photography. There always was a lot of time involved, especially in the "darkroom" phase, and in preparing the set of images for permanent recording on CDs (I'm way behind there). The July 1 email I sent you had many images in it, with many more unsent. I don't know when I will update the web site, but I do think about it, and I have enough images to make 2 or 3 new photo pages.

07/30/04

I read over your letter again, liked it again, and am at least beginning this email now in response. I will save it with CTRL-S to send it to the Drafts folder, and finish it soon.

The Internet is a sort of black hole of one's time, like a library, or a newly discovered part of the country to which one is visiting for a longish while. As an example, I started out to work on my list of web sites that have significant works available in audio or video (such as the Reith Lectures on BBC, and I somehow ended up reading a longish summary of Philippines history. I ended up at the official site of the current president, a lady named Gloria. Interesting there is an official Office of the First Gentleman for the lady's husband. He seems to specialize in matters of the common touch, kindly things, helpful things. The term "First Gent" appears on his web site.

Reading: I am glorying in the time to read, though I've always been a slow reader, and I am currently leavening the mostly non-fiction I read, with some fiction, including some of the better fantasy writing. Fantasy, with its magic and other dimensions, give me as much to think about as does the non-fiction.

I am about finished with The Wonders I See by John K. Terres, which I read in the mornings, a few pages at a time, savoring the pages. She and I have adopted a great Christmas/birthday present practice -- we give the "right" to spend some undefined amount (understood to be in the $100 range), on books, especially ones purchased used over the Internet. The Terres book is one of those. A book just finished is The Biography of a Tree by James P. Jackson. While I like about any book to do with the natural world, I especially enjoy ones that use the techniques of fiction to tell a story, though a true story, of what goes on in the natural world. The Jackson book does that, to tell the life history of a white oak tree going through its trials and triumphs, and then dying in its 263rd year of life, the life of a major being in the world. Off the top of my head, two other books that do story telling as they inform: Under the Sea Wind by Rachael Carson, and Watchers at the Pond by Franklin Russell, both are recommended. Curiously, this technique is more associated with books for younger readers, but it is worthwhile for any age. We have reference books for data, but we need understanding too. Wise people have internalized the information and, via their own natural integrating power, have given the understandings depth.

And that reminds me, I have been trying to think about the difference between good information and wise information. One thought is that wise information collapses time and space -- it sees relevance further than just knowing things. A small example from the Jackson book: in discussing water needs of trees and the effects of drought, he says the first year of drought kills seedlings, the second year kills damaged and diseased trees, and the third can and does kill healthy trees. So, there he has summed up and extended the details he has presented about water and these lifeforms. I can imagine a book by you called Orchestrating the Symphony as it is Being Written and laying out what works, and what doesn't, and why. I suppose being retired and unavailable would help in the aftermath.

Several days later...

Recent definition I liked: Deja Moo: the feeling you've heard this bull before.

Back to reading. When I write about books I've read, they are usually the more slowly read, savored books, but there are lots more from the library or elsewhere, that don't get mentioned. I imagine that is true for you too, when you write about that topic to whomever. I thought I'd list some of the current ones to give a flavor of the other things I read, although the books are merely the current ones, and change every few weeks. So, here goes:

The Okefenokee Swamp is surprisingly well-written, I'm enjoying it quite a bit. The author is an accomplished naturalist, but not a native of the Swamp, so is often disconcerted or discombobulated by it. Though the Swamp is not huge, 400K acres or 25 miles square, one could disappear into it and not be seen again. Many surprises about it, for example, there is not much mud in it, and there are "prairies" in it, as well as trembling land made of buoyant half-rotted vegetation. The famous Swanee River (Suwannee River) flows out of it to the southwest into Florida.

A book on exobiology, which gives an overview of earth life from the perspective of theoretical life elsewhere.

A book of fantasy by Philip Pullman, a British author. His current big work is His Dark Materials, a trilogy that, though for young adults probably, has some trenchant things to say and imply about the Christian religion. I'm surprised there is not more of a flap about it. He sees Christianity, and perhaps all religions?, to be an attempt to prevent a higher consciousness from developing in man, in that it is a negative response to the explosive effects of the quantum jump taken in the efficaciousness of the mind that occurred around 30-50K years ago. (I do see this latter notion rising in the literature -- there does seem to have been a large leap forward in culture and tools around that time.)

The Sawtooth Wolves by Ballantine and Ducher. This is an amazing book that was created as part of a project to film the interrelationships among the members of a wolf pack. Jim Ducher and his wife Naomi braved the state and federal bureaucracies, as well as months in high cold country, to do this. The images are affecting, and show insights into the lives of beings so much like ourselves (large, carnivorous, socially-oriented, cooperative, communicative, etc.) My sense of the wolf reentry programs is they show the current state of our inexperience and lack of wisdom. There are people trying to do the right thing, trying to share the earth with other species, but it is such an uphill battle, with hysteria and confusion quite pronounced.

Besides the standard greed that humans have about "what's theirs", there is also a very strong economic incentive to adopt a grim striving to increase wealth. I think I've asked for your understanding of this before, but I don't think you responded. In a nutshell, my impression is that the higher standards of living (urban), drive out lower ones. If it were possible to have a range of local incomes-standards, then we could move forward on many fronts -- we could survive in the rust belts, the non-corporate farm areas, the boonies. We could experiment with alternate ways of living and caring for the land. But we are all forced to pay urban taxes and prices, and that leads even rural people to demand all the comforts, hockey rinks, tennis courts, etc. that the urban types have. The rural is being swallowed up by the urban -- it is all one market.

A thriller by Thomas Perry, one of the better writers of action suspense.

Seasons of the Desert by Susan J. Tweit (wonder how that last name is pronounced). This is obviously a work of the heart -- it has good and personal descriptions of the four desert types in the U.S. and of its plants and animals. The illustrations are little works of art.

And so on, lots of these sorts of books. Some of them are so good, they become "major reads" and I renew them at the library to read them slowly. For me, to experience a book, it is necessary to read slowly because it takes time to reflect, it takes time to feel.

Gad, this is becoming a tome. Fie! Off to you,

07/31/04

Thanks for the nice response. I am answering more in the time-frame of a traditional letter, rather than an email. One of my relatives, who at least does respond to communication, always runs her email lines breathlessly together in one paragraph, as if the hounds of time were baying at her heels :^D

You are welcome. Yes, it was good to be able to make the trip an it was not only a way to celebrate the life of an exceptional man, but to see relatives, including some I'd never met before. And she and I did get out and about a little to tour around that beautiful area. I wish we had an extra week to do more of that. I am attracted to the Great Lakes area generally, and would like to roam around there for a few months, taking pictures and camping, but alas, that may never happen.

Have not been to Red River Gorge in Kentucky, sounds great. True, we do get blasé about our great country. It takes quite a bit, like a Grand Canyon, to penetrate our human self-absorption and raise our minds to grander vistas. And, like a large library, such things remind us uncomfortably how little aware we are compared to what is available. Individually we may fight this insular perspective, but our intrusive media lays over the mind like a soggy blanket.

Sounds like you have some good options there. I would always vote for water, for where water is, there is life and change in abundance. However, it need not be some narrow lakefront among millionaires, a weedy lakelet or large pond, or even riverside lot would do for me. When she and I took a nostalgic (for me) trip to the Cass Lake / Lake Andrusia area of northern Minnesota, I fell in love with the lakes there that are all connected in a chain by narrow channels, and which are part of the Mississippi River system. There are places near there where one can step across the Mississippi. In a small boat, one could spend years roaming those lakes and channels, and birds, plants, and fish would make any naturalist happy. Or one could eventually end up in New Orleans -- what an adventure!

I think you and I have some tendencies in common. I think sister told me you had been interested in saving the family farm, but the lure of $ was too strong in others. The farm my mother grew up on was lost the same way. Instead of the loss seeming less with the passing years, it seems greater. People talk a lot about their concern for their kids and grandkids, etc. but not where money is concerned. An irreplaceable heritage of future generations is casually thrown away for mere cash, and that cash is often frittered away on junk that is not distinguishable from the other junk after some time passes.

We are fine. I am still retired and she still isn't. I have taken to retirement like the proverbial duck and its water. I am mildly surprised that no focus has emerged, but I'm in no hurry and have nothing to worry about along those lines. I am doing more reading than I have done for years. I am interested in nearly everything, so the scope is wide. I read about 80% non-fiction, especially in nature and science generally, and the rest fiction. Someday I may get back to art, other than the art of photography, or maybe not. Likewise I may do some writing for publication, but right now I have a low energy for that.

Do keep me informed of your studies and findings in your academic endeavors as I have a longtime interest in things computerish and in privacy issues. My general take on privacy issues parallels that on care of the environment: there is more pressure from those looking for a profit in the violation of privacy, than there is pressure from those who wish to preserve and extend privacy rights. Speaking not from a political ideology, but from a fascination with psycho-social dynamics, it is amazing how the gravitational pull of money distorts the orbits of value and character. I've been trying for years to hone an aphorism relating to about any profession, but especially those of doctors and lawyers: "There is a surprising congruence between the professional judgment of the expert and what would be most profitable." Those who are not more than a bit cynical are just not paying attention.

* * *

Thank you for featuring yours truly in your newsletter -- my first magazine appearance! And I appreciate the care you took in the production of the it, and the naming of images. Good too, your tribute to the person who made such a positive difference in your life. I have looked at, but not yet commented on, your last three newsletters. A lot of effort went into them, as I, who have done things similar, know. Wouldn't it be nice if some of our recipients were energized to create these kinds of efforts too, and share them?

As to reducing the size of the images, for most recipients, those whose speed is not really slow, it may not be necessary, as all of the images are already reduced in size to the degree I thought necessary, and they were saved with jpg compression to make them load fairly fast. My website has only 10 megabytes of space total, and I get several photo pages on there each with 15 to 20+ images. So they are definitely compressed. I was so concerned about speed of loading in earlier days, that I did have smallish images, but came to feel that below 640x480 pixels, the images lost too much due to small size.

The impact of the larger image is worth the extra bandwidth! All this just my opinion as someone who has fought the wars of image effectiveness for a while...

I'm pleased you did get the two emails. I thought I sensed something lonesome in your email -- if so, it is a feeling I sometimes have myself. People like us, who have a fairly rich mental life, cannot get easily get used to the silences and mental flatfootedness of many others. My mind tells me not to expect much of most people, they are just built that way, but I cannot help it, I do persist in looking for some echoes at least, if not original reactions, from them. There are so many out there, who, if one were in a crowd of them, would be more alone than a dragonfly in the Badlands of the Dakotas.

Heh, a "collusion of cousins" -- a continuous and coruscating collaboration of capabilities...

* * *

Lots to respond to in your email. It might take me several emails to get to it all. Here I'll focus on stationery and image sizes.

First, congratulations in creating your own stationery! It may seem a small thing to you, now that you have done it, but now the sky is the limit on what you can create to match your mood, or your theme. I have had a lot of fun making the background images for stationery, and quite a few really didn't work as well as I wanted, but some were just fine. Also, the web is full of background images that you can right-click on and save to use yourself.

The trick with creating such small images is to cause them to blend -- that is fussy work. In the beginning, just "borrow" background images you like whenever you see them on web pages (remember, right-click on the background to save).

Of course, there are some stationeries I make that seem good until the typing is being done, and I find the text is lost in the background. Not a real problem, customized stationery costs nothing, so I make more stationery until I'm satisfied. For the moment.

Topic: image sizes. There are two things to keep track of: 1) the pixel size, and 2) the file size.

To explain the first item, pixel size, it is straightforward. It dictates how large the image appears on the screen, assuming a given sized screen. If an image is say 1600 x 1200 pixels, then the number of pixels is 1600 times 1200. If, for example, such an image takes 1 megabyte (Mb) of storage, then if I create a half-size version of it, the pixel size is 800 x 600 (each side is halved), then the total pixels is 1/4th as many, and the file size is now 1/4th of a megabyte, or 250 Kilobyte (Kb) in size. There is only 1/4 as much information to be saved.

Now, if I decide that 250 Kb is too big a file for a web site, or for email, then I can use jpg compression. This does not change the number of pixels -- the image is still 800 x 600 pixels. It still appears the same size. However, the file size is reduced. The image can be compressed a little, or a lot. The more the image is compressed, the more the image quality suffers. So it is always a tradeoff -- file size vs. quality. And, different images are affected differently. Simple images, e.g. a simple flower against a dark background may shrink wonderfully in file size, with a small amount of compression, hence little degradation. A complex image would not shrink as readily -- would need more compression to bring it down to a small file size, and it would suffer visible degradation. The poor image manipulator must make these harsh decisions :^D

Anyway, where possible, I do think images should be larger in pixel size rather than smaller. That can be a rough guideline. There simply are no hard and fast rules. One must go for the best results. Also, try to work from large pixel size images down to smaller ones, rather than blowing up small images to larger ones. That doesn't ever work well, because the smaller images simply don't have the amount of information in them, so the result of enlarging is always to degrade the image. Therefore, when you scan images in, save largish images, then later size them down as needed.

And you mention the monitor problem, and that certainly is a headache. Nowadays, the minimum pixel size of monitor screens is 800 x 600 -- hardly anyone has the old common 640 x 480 setting anymore. Probably a near majority of people have their monitors at 1024 x 768 pixels, or larger. Her home machine is a small monitor and is 800 x 600. She can see the width of my 700 x 525 images, but, probably like you, can't quite see all of the height of 525 pixels. (I'm assuming you open the email, not use the preview screen). So, I guess I should drop the size of the images a bit, but it does bother me to do it. (You may be able to set your resolution higher, I don't know. Maybe check with the lady who helped set you up if it can be done.) Here is an image of one of my images being viewed on my 17 inch monitor which has a 1280 x 1024 pixel setting.

This is what the image looks like to me when I'm creating the email, lots of room, but you see it as if it were huge, because your monitor has fewer pixels. With no clear standard monitor setting, I, and anyone working with images to be shared, face this problem. Some say to heck with it and do as they wish and assume people will catch up to them, some always go for the low end to avoid losing viewers, some, like me try for a compromise that is never perfect. Like I said, frustrating!

08/01/04

How pleasant to hear from you. I wanted to respond fairly quickly to let you know your foray into electronic mail has been successful.

I'm glad you enjoyed the images. Your daughter has many more you haven't seen on her computer, as I mentioned before, and you can see them the next time you visit, if you haven't already seen them. As sister is the family expert on the genealogy side, I have a least a modest place as the current photographer for shared photos.

Getting organized again after the house modifications will take a while, I think. If a person tries to reorganize everything all at once, there is the endless problem of "where will I put this particular thing?" and that always entails finding a place for the current thing sitting in the place of the preferred thing. All those questions get solved over time, especially by people like the lady of the house, who actually throw away things not needed. I am a born keeper of stuff, and find this precipitous business of throwing stuff out disconcerting. "I might be able to repair a widget with that five years from now", I think. "I'll just wedge it down in this box where I can get it when I need it." Then I forget all about it. Hey, it works for me.

The local weather has become hot and sultry, as it is wont to do in August. That is our least favorite type of weather. We are OK with spring, fall, and winter, and with well-behaved summer, but this stewing in one's juices is Not Good. I would sue someone, but don't know who to sue, so will just endure it. You were smart to choose the area you did. True, your weather must get a bit melodramatic -- Bronte-esque -- in late fall and sometimes in winter, but for people who like to talk and read, it is a good excuse to do more of that.

Speaking of reading, a lot of what I read would be described as nature writing. I finally finished The Wonders I See by John K. Terres. It took a while because I savored the book. She and I use the Internet for book shopping more and more to find older books, and simply to save money on purchases. We roam about the Web, looking for gems, books we have heard of that we want to read in a leisurely way. Of course the library provides us with the dozens of books we don't care to own -- good old library! (Our benighted state has cut library funding, so services are being lost.) One of the great things about retirement is having the sheer time to read and reflect. Those who don't know what to do with the free time of retirement have my sympathy, poor goofs.

You mention the Democratic Convention -- it was quite a show. I grow less partisan as I grow older. I guess it is not ideology that makes the difference in the quality of governance or of private life, but the foolishness, greed, and manipulation of so-called leadership, the same inadequate types that mismanage our government offices and our businesses. Inadequacy is an equal-opportunity status. While it is obvious that Bush should go back to Texas, it is not so obvious that Kerry will be as much to the good as Bush is plainly to the bad. Well, there are big things impending related to overpopulation (a topic I assume you care much about) and the environment. The lesser issues of today will be swept away and made irrelevant as time goes on. Will great leaders arise when we need them? They haven't yet, but then as a people we are still asleep at the switch, we have our noses in the Wal-Mart trough, the rising winds of change have just begun to chill us, and make us wonder if we know what is happening on life's greater stage.

Meanwhile, I am enjoying life, and hope that is true of you. Good conversation, good food, good friends, and good books, times of reflection, and art to satisfy the spirit -- all are there to be embraced. Some say they are too busy for such things; I say they are just too busy, or if truth be known, too distracted to remember to celebrate what makes it all worthwhile.

08/03/04

This is a test, it is only a test. If the emergency were real, you would get under the desk and put your head between your legs (the better to buss yer nethers goodbye, I guess).

Not much communication of late twixt us, don't know what your situation is these days. We still flourish at the old stand. I am retired and she isn't. I quite like retirement, it is a good disguise, and the hours are also good. Am reading at three or four times the rate in more work-oriented times.

If this reaches you, and you reply, then I'll send a longer missive. Am still playing with digital images.

* * *

Very good to hear from you. I have thought of you also, wondering how life was going for you in Lotusland South. Arnold may be a joke, but at least he is interesting. Gray Davis nearly put me to sleep just seeing his name in print. You are right -- government does seem to be a joke, a bad one. But at least it is entertaining there in CA, whereas here it is more like what goes on under a decaying log, centipedes and, er, things.

Speaking of such, I applied for Social Security $ online, though had to take in my birth certificate to the local office. There was a heightened security alert, so the old security guard frowned when I mentioned I had spoken by phone to a Mr. Bentley. Yet I didn't seem to be a 20 yr old Muslim fanatic, so he let me proceed. Then, 10 minutes later he said he figured out who I had been speaking with, it was a Mr. Bettwy. Maybe the guy had mumbled his name because he wasn't happy about it? Anyway the guard had said, in response to my abbreviated explanation for my presence, "You are retired!" and he beamed in anticipation of his own retirement, images of leaping fish and rustic cottages dancing in his head.

This business of cardiac / vascular incidents is not a good idea, I don't recommend you continue fooling about in that way. It reminded me of John Steinbeck. I have recently finished reading an 800+ page book of his letters edited by his last wife, Elaine. Also, a collection of his non-fiction called America and Americans, which has the same name, and includes the text from, the last book of his that was published in his lifetime. (I am slowly reading his update of Malory called Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights which was published after his death, though he could not bring himself to finish it to his satisfaction. And that fact is interesting to Steinbeck fans, and it was tied in with his concern for the course of America, its fears and moral failures.) Soon I will get some of his novels to read, or reread. Anyway, he too had such health incidents, that could not be clearly diagnosed as either heart problems or strokes. He paid as little attention to them as possible and kept on truckin'.

Your email came in as being from a different name, so I guess you are being troubled by unwelcome correspondence? I put you in my address book as it was given, but will change it if you wish. Let me know, as I prefer your real name. I have been successful so far (knock on masonite) in keeping spam and such down by having a second email address for any non-friend/family contact. Really, I should have three addresses: personal, business, and spam-me-stupid. Anyway, I am known to many as ***, a dead-ringer for the guy pictured on the side of Brawny paper towels. He is the guy that registers on sites that have some desired information and which demand an email address. Oddly enough, he is free of spam, except for a few things I don't mind getting, partly for the pleasure of ignoring.

As you know, I don't mass-post funny stuff from the web (email address harvesting bots love such emails), but I do pass on good stuff to individuals once in a while. So, Definition: Deja moo -- the feeling you've heard this bull before. Blonde joke: Why does the blonde have TGIF in her shoes? It means "Toes Go In First". And one of mine: I have a great respect for discipline; for example, I really like whipped cream. And, with trepidation, here is a joke I liked (but feel I should hang my head in shame): Two muffins were sitting in the oven. One says, "Boy it's getting pretty warm in here." And the other says, "Holy cow! A talking muffin!"

Ahem. Well, I have lots more to say, and to catch up on with you, but will restrain myself

Let me know if the images came through OK, and if you want to see more. I never know, if people don't tell me, if the images are viewable, and welcome -- such are the many variations on the way images are experienced by different people. I am happier when people can see the images inline in the email.

While I am not doing as much digital photography as before, I still enjoy it, and especially like the digital "darkroom" as opposed to the real, smelly thing of yore. The ability to crop and modify the images makes all the difference to the finished result. I can't recall if you have been involved with photography, along with your writing (still doing that?)

Looking forward to hearing from you, and resuming your valuable company, for now,

08/07/04

Thoughtlet for your newsletter: I wonder if some of your family and friends might not enjoy contributing something to it as I have done with images (you can give them awards for good efforts), You might have to specifically ask some of them to make written or image contributions to the "Guest Section", to get responses going. It might be fun to see what your nurse friend might have to say on health, or roses, or whatever she likes.

I have sort of half realized you and I have different tendencies in background images -- both equally "good". You are attracted to color and I to texture and shapes. You are well on your way to developing a color-driven ambience to your emails and newsletters. I seem to be aiming to endless patterns that are as subliminal as yours in saying something with subtlety, but not letting it interfere with the written communication, rather enhance it. Still, I am attracted also to the "pixillated" style you got in one of your emails. I will be trying something like that soon. And, so far, I have had a problem with a contradiction in some of my background attempts -- that I am attracted to rich backgrounds, but, so far, I have not wanted to do light text. Thus most of my backgrounds are on the light side, so I can use dark text. Yet light backgrounds mean washed out colors, darn! "You pays your money,..."

* * *

Dave Van Ronk is no longer with us, and, when I stumbled on this old image of him and Dylan from another age, I thought of you and decided to send it.

Last letter I got caught up in books, and when I came to, I realized I could write volumes about the books I have been reading, so bailed out to save the bandwidth. Balance in all things, etc.

Have been listening once a week or so to various songs, mostly folk, and [here I vanished from the email for three days] some pop stuff, some blues. I like this intensive listening experience, though it is rare for me to just sit down and listen to music. Old habit, I suppose, I used to fix books back in the book store days, and listen to music, mostly classical. This went on for many years. I OD'ed on classical. While I never could read music well, I listened to so much classical music, that I grew to be quite critical of it -- I became sensitive to triteness in phrasing, and would mock it. Funny, I think I had elevated my perceptions to the point that composers could get away with little. Even geniuses must take the easy way out sometimes if they can get away with it. I guess if a person looked at art works for thousands of hours, they would sneer at a careless smudge, or fuss about the lack of rhythm in the brush strokes, or exasperate at a cheap combination of colors or forms...

Got your post card a couple of days ago. Sounds like you had a lot of fun with ol' Ramblin' Jack, still ramblin, possibly still gamblin', and stayin' out late at night. I may try to find some of his stuff on the filesharin' Internet. I do have a bunch of Woody Guthrie's songs -- I best like the ones he sings by his lonesome, rather than in a group. I read a biography of him recently. His mother was seriously unstable, started fires, may be responsible for the death of Woody's sister, whom he loved. And who could not like the Big Sur area? I thought Henry Miller had good instincts that he went from Paris to there -- maybe someone gave him good advice.

The National Steinbeck Center is in Salinas. Might make an interesting stop for you some time, some trip. You weren't far from there on the Big Sur journey.

Am now into the Short Novels of John Steinbeck, an old book from the library (in fact it is 51 years old!). I am roaming Tortilla Flat with Danny and the boys, consciences loose enough for most occasions, and plenty of wine to help the words flow. I read it so long ago, I have forgotten nearly everything. I also have The Long Valley, the short stories that I am looking forward to.

Am also just entering Journey Into Summer by Edwin Way Teale. The book is one of a quartet he did over a number of years which celebrates the seasons. He and his wife traveled many thousands of miles following the particular season from state to state. As the books were written in the '50s and '60s, they also have a lot of observations interesting from a social historical point of view of that time in America. Recall my comments on people and their intrusive music and other noise? Here is Teale on the topic in 1960:

"Sitting relaxed, aware of all the little sounds around me, enjoying the peaceful calm of these mountain heights, I remembered the young barber who had cut my hair in a small town a few days before. His great ambition, he said, was to work in New York. There was a city! For a good many years, he explained, each summer he had visited his grandfather on his farm in the country. But he couldn't stand it any more. Everything was so quiet! It gave him the creeps. He felt like going out and blowing a trumpet or pounding a drum—anything to make a racket. He represented that new breed, growing in numbers, the Noise Needers.

From the outboard motor to the jet airplane, through the radio and TV, the electric razor and the power lawnmower, almost every mechanical advance has added to the noise of the world. Each successive generation lives in a less quiet environment. In consequence, evolution is at work in massed urban centers. For evolution concerns the present as well as the past, ourselves as well as the dinosaurs. Noise is evolving not only the endurers of noise but the needers of noise.

Those whose nervous systems are disturbed by uproar are handicapped under such conditions. They are less fitted to maintain good health, to endure and to increase their kind than are those who thrive on clamor. What is strain and distraction to one is a stimulant and a tonic to the other. In step with noisier times, the number of Noise Needers is growing. I was told recently of the art editor of a chain of magazines who carries a pocket radio with him all day long and even places it, turned on, under his pillow when he goes to bed at night. Noise is comforting and reassuring to him. He seems in his proper environment when quiet is eliminated. The metallic clangor of rock-and-roll music is, perhaps, symptomatic of the steady rise in the number of Noise Needers. For them, quiet is somehow unnatural, stillness is somehow unfriendly. They feel better, more at home, when they are surrounded by a din—any kind of din. They do not merely tolerate noise. They like noise. They need noise.

Their world, and those who inhabit it, were far away as I sat in the hush of the mountain glade. They were equally remote that evening when Nellie and I walked slowly along the summit paths surrounded by the famous thrush chorus of Mt. Mansfield. The light of the day was retreating..."

Ah yes, I do like scanners, handy little things for moments like this, wanting to share a bit of writing with a friend. And maybe Teale is right, the evolution of society may make people like me extinct, or if not, then a different species, being unable to cross the noise barrier to interbreed.

So it goes, all for now,

* * *

You are welcome to the pictures. I'm glad you liked them. That one of you alone in the cart should do for a "cart shot" of that time and place.

The ride you describe sounds great. The hen turkey was doing her job, and dealing with people, horses, as well as the wayward turklings must have taxed her intellect a bit. I consider turkeys to be major animals, wily and careful, and good survivors in their dangerous world. I was so pleased to have got the shot of a hen turkey that I did.

I actually got an email from your mother recently! I almost fell out of my chair. That was a first. Yet I assume she will come to really like the handiness and speed of email to keep up her contact with friends, family, and fellow cause fans.

You asked about the plant shot. I don't know what the plant is, but I took it at the front of the Cherry Republic. It looks like the Big Bang of the Universe, among other things -- obviously a plant that thinks highly of producing seeds and no fooling around.

Much reading of late, I seem to be getting deeper and deeper into that thoughtful state of mind. About 60% of the reading is non-fiction, mostly nature writing, and, for fiction, am reading (and re-reading) quite a bit of John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat at the moment, but I have eight of his short novels in one volume. Time, always in short supply, seems to suggest we filter out the junk and focus on the good stuff.

So it goes, and what's happening up there? Darn, I never did get a chance to look at your digital camera. Fire off any pics you choose to. I'm always ready to see images from your part of the world.

08/08/04

I'll do something along the lines you suggest for your newsletter. I'll think about it, and send you something. probably in email which you can just copy and paste into a Zaysdays section.

I know you will like IrfanView the more you use it. The main reason I recommend it to others is that IrfanView makes so many things one does frequently so easy. Most other graphics programs are either dumbed-down, or alternately, way too hard for beginners in that they have too many features, each one of which is a study in itself. As I and a CA friend agree, you can do about 90% of what you need to do in IrfanView, and use the heavyweight programs for the rest. I think of IrfanView as the "base" graphics program that I reach for constantly. You can even set IrfanView so it will send the current image to another graphics program when you need to. It can do "batch processing" of many images to which you wish to do the same operation, e.g.resize, compress and save copies to a different folder, sharpen all, change contrast and gamma setting, etc. And, very importantly, it helps print the image to the size you wish, regardless of the size of the image in pixels. Lots more too, and it keeps getting better...

Your collecting of images is a good idea, the more things you try, the higher the rate of success and satisfaction (sententious, but true). The fall colors should be worth trying, for sure.

08/10/04

I just finished my article for your newsletter on photography and have sent it to my copy editor (she has done that professionally), so I rely on her to catch errors in punctuation and phrasing, etc. Also it is a way of sharing.

Will send it to you when the editor releases it :^D

08/11/04

The text and images below this paragraph is the article on photography you asked for. If possible, given the layout needs of your newsletter, it would be good if the piece ran in your newsletter as laid out here.

* * *

Included in this message is an article on photography I wrote for a newsletter of a sort of relative. She sends it out to family and friends as a way of staying in touch, and, probably more importantly, to exercise her mind and keep interested in things. She has printed some of my photos in the newsletter, and also in the web pages she has produced to celebrate the writings of her son who died over twenty years ago at a young age as the result of congenital health problems that could not be cured, only painfully operated on and controlled for a while.

I suggested to her that she invite some of her recipients to send her guest writings or photos, as I had done with my images. I thought it would generate some interest in the newsletter, and people would be pleased to be included. I mentioned one particular person who could contribute, as an example, and that person promptly suggested that I should go first, so to speak! Hmm, Machiavelli host on his own petard. So, that is the background to the article below.

I thought you would like to see the article, especially because one of your images is in it. The lady of the house helped a lot in her role as copy editor. She is good at that difficult job, but it has low "status" because few people understand how difficult it is, and how knowledgeable one has to be to do it. Perhaps someday she will have an opportunity to exercise her skill, and be recognized for it.

08/13/04

I sympathize about the on-again off-again lady and the eye doctor. For some people, agreements are just wishes that can change any time it is convenient (for them), and if it is inconsiderate to others, they think "but I'm a nice person, my actions can't be judged that way". This is a frustrating type of person to know, to put it mildly.

And all this program stuff is, believe it or not, normal growth pains as one works with the computer, and that comes from one who once said, "I wish these computers had necks, so they could be strangled now and then."

08/14/04

You have had guests recently, journeyed to fabled Cape May, and visited in Ocean Pines, Maryland. Do any memories remain of all this experience? Any photographs? Any stories to tell, anecdotes heard, local characters to describe, insights to share, walks of discovery to relive? That is what I always ask myself when similar things happen to me. I see in myself how deceptively easy it is to just live in the moment, breeze through the zephyrs, chat semi-consciously with others who are in the same state, live in the colorful high-tech dream produced with no fuss by the busy mind. The ease comes from our animal selves, evolved to dance along with the context, to pluck what we need from it, and move on. And later, also like a dream, it fades into a featureless pastel of feelings, the details faded away...

Not to pick on you, by the way. We are all in that boat. The future is felt to be all-important, but it can't be true -- we care so little of the fate of all futures, which is to join the forgotten past. "Don't look back, something might be gaining on you!" That modern shock-aphorism does say a lot about the way we all live now. We avoid knowing what we, it, and they were, though that makes us what we, it and they are, and in turn, that controls the fusing of all the possibilities of the moment into the actualities of our lives. And if our compatriots are asleep at the switch, does it not seem a rude affectation, a pretentiousness, not to join them?

She [in a photo] is with some acquaintances who are both professors. They were worthwhile talking to, though both are afflicted with the modern religion of being positive at any cost. The one who teaches teachers, spends a lot of her time thinking about the important questions, so I had fun talking with her. While I was talking with humorous glibness about the news being full of natural-cause Armageddon scenarios, and that I was beginning a collection of them, he objected, saying it was "soul-destroying" (strong term!) to dwell on that. I said I was an artist, so had a license to poke into any matter regarding the human spirit. Interesting sparks there, and I had a lot to think about later, which is what a good conversation should do. He reluctantly admitted that it was accepted in his field (ecology) that Man is the primary cause of the current great species extinction, of which there were, in earth's history, five previously. So we are right up there with asteroids hitting the planet, and ice covering all of it. We've hit the Big Time! (more glibness)

* * *

Yes, the gulls seem to just be tourists there at Kroger's, or perhaps the other gulls have been spreading false rumors of a plague of grasshoppers, like North Africa is actually having.

Black walnut trees are paragons among trees, wonderful wood and delicious nuts. That nut taste is like no other taste, I would recognize it in a million flavors. A friend, who felt the same, one time made the only black walnut pie I have ever seen and tasted. It was perfect.

A parting joke I read on the Internet somewhere, perhaps a little unkind, but funny: "I want to die in my sleep like my dear old grandpa -- not yelling and screaming like the passengers in his car."

08/19/04

Yes, 8 megapixels is a whole bunch -- nearly 4 times the image area of my pictures. With that camera, I could crop away 75% of an image, and end up with what I now start with. Are you trying to make me weep? His camera is 5 megapixels, but he croppeth not, so the surfeit of pixels does little good.

08/20/04

Your response, with your natural good writing style, was a pleasure to read, especially given most of the email so-called communication I receive, which is characterized by a scurried brevity and paucity of anything personal or thoughtful. This tendency on the part of most people has become emblematic of the curious brainlessness of the current culture. The more means of communication people have, the less they have to say, and say it they do. Somewhere right now someone is calling someone else via cell phone who is at the other end of the table, and, to make it more annoying, it is probably in a library where the maximum number of people can be disturbed.

A couple of evenings ago, I took the garbage down for its morning pickup. There was a college student, hands in pockets, railing volubly away as he stared at the traffic going by. But he was not a deranged street person (at least not an indigent one), he simply had a hands-free setup on his cell phone.

She takes the bus a lot, and as the deafening yowls of music issue all around, there are many people babbling away on their cell phones as well. Many an intimate detail of life, as well as utterances of mind-numbing inanity has she heard, whether she likes it or not. Well, Marshall McLuhan never said the global village wouldn't be tacky.

You certainly think big! Having that much land to wander around in sounds like paradise to me (infinite photo possibilities). I wonder about the ATVs, though. If they were mouse quiet, and didn't tear up the countryside, they might be alright.

There is a continuing contradiction, probably built in to us humans (simians), that loves the wilderness, but wants to drag wilderness-damaging and usually noisy technology into it. When Bush decided it was fine to have snowmobiles in Grand Teton and Yellowstone parks, I decided he is an unsound person to have as a manager of any wilderness or natural lands. The only exception I would ever make, would be for infirm people using battery powered vehicles, who would otherwise have no way to enjoy the wild lands. There is simply no way to roar around in the natural world and at the same time be in an intimate relation to it. Also, such roarers inevitably rob others of that relation also, through both noise and the sheer numbers of people that the technology would allow.

We need to alter our priorities such that an ordinary person has the time to be many days in the wilderness at little cost. Walking, canoeing, kayaking, skiing -- all can restore the spiritual health of man. Let the frenzied urban areas bubble as they will, but confine them, so they don't, amoeba-like, engulf the natural areas of the world. This is hard because people tend always to take the easy way, the consumer-friendly way, the life-as-superficial-excitement way, the cheap and fast way. And if they kill the thing they love, well hey, there's always something new around the corner. But no, in this case, there isn't.

All the news I read of the probable fate of species and habitats is bad news. It seems we are in the act of tipping into a scary time of extinctions, climate changes, and social disarray. This is an odd, but spookily interesting, era in our history where we humans are blatantly dominant on the globe -- and we don't really know what we are doing! Of course we don't; no species have never done this before, that we know of.

Perhaps after a few centuries of misery, bad faith, and false starts, we will arrive at a practical mix of technology, social habits, and values that work. Our population may be held to a reasonable level, our lives may be a healthier mix of action and quietude, our minds may be calmer, and less in need of constant social tuning through the media, we may sustain a delight in a varied and healthy natural world.

If that does happen, and I have at least that much optimism, one thing for sure will characterize that world: money will not be allowed to dominate as it does now. This comment is not from a "social justice" perspective, but an ecological one. Money is for us a sort of bacillus gone pandemic. It is like a life form that actively molds its environment in terms of its needs. This environment prevails over all our values and insights. It acts to force everyone and every place to the same terms. To fail to meet the challenge, or to resist it, means destruction. It is like the Borg: "You will be absorbed." I saw it when I lived in a rural area, but had to pay city prices for things. It is very simple, really, if you want to play, you have to play at the urban money level. The country is converted into the city. The farmer, in some crazy way, must have an SUV and a satellite dish (or be able to buy them), or he is gone. This also explains the rust belt areas of the country. If they could have their own money, and that money pegged to the local level of production, all would be well, or at least, sustainable.

Another example is the peculiar fact that of the, say, 30 thousand lakes in the country, nearly all are surrounded by high-priced lots, and these owned by city dwellers. The land is not for the use of those who actually live in lake country, it is for urban "foreigners", who spend maybe a twelfth of a year on their land. So, the urban standard of living controls the use of land far from the city.

Whew. Nothing like a nice diatribe. And these things have been occupying my thoughts more and more of late. I have never been an activist, never sure I knew better than others how they should live, and I doubt if I will change. But the stakes are now so high, and the times so serious, it is impossible for me to be neutral on these issues. Time is growing shorter. Children and grandchildren have some hard experiences ahead, as some more thoughtful parents and grandparents have told me. They sense it, like an approaching storm.

I remember being surprised that a man, supposedly of God, was only interested in talking about money. I liked him, but wondered about his priorities.

That must have been a bittersweet experience for you, getting the tour of the family farm by strangers. And it is passing strange how some families rise and sustain, others fall, like civilizations. It was not for me to do, but I have speculated on what is necessary for a family to continue through time, doing well, turning out worthwhile scions as it goes. At the center of my reveries along these lines, is always a farm...

Let me know what classes you take, how the assignments go, and anything that takes your fancy. Good old IU, I remember it so well. For spendables, I was a dishwasher at the Regulator Tavern -- all the Tom Collins drinks and hamburgers I could inhale. Otherwise, classes, papers, library, bull sessions, trips to Brown County went on. I even learned some things. Lived on Kirkwood in an apartment place called Novon...

On "crushed idealism": only the idealistic are subject to pessimism and cynicism. The natural realists, who were born knowing dog-eat-dog, are immune to these philosophical slants of mind. More than a few people, sometimes charming folks, are basically sociopaths who have a damaged empathy for others. Some "people-people" are that way. Being realistic, they train themselves to hide their fundamental indifference to others, so they can busily manipulate all situations to the maximum benefit to themselves. It is hard to defend against such people, as they do not live in the same emotional world as do those of more natural feeling, nor do they have any sense of ever being in the wrong. To threaten them sends them scurrying to others to damage the reputation of the source of the threat.

However, my best thought on crushed idealism is to say go ahead and embrace pessimism and cynicism and still stay idealistic. Pessimism may be said to be the stance that does not expect the good to triumph without great difficulty. Cynicism figures the motivations of most people most of the time are largely selfish, narrow, short-sighted, and easily manipulated. But optimism can be wise or it can be delusional. It always looks for the good, wants to nurture it, delights in its growth. The "negative" virtues will protect one from foolish expectations and from dangerously trusting others (trust but verify). The optimism can remain, like an eye that, tired from seeing ugliness, still able to open wide to beauty.

"Not interested in data-based policy" -- does that mean we don't want to hear it if it does not corroborate what we've already decided? But whatever, I sense the thing to do is always look for other sources of funding, even that of a private business of one's creation, rather than bet on being always in good odor with those who control the pursestrings.

* * *

P.S. I certainly agree with you about Castle of Crap, which is what I call Wal-Mart. I also agree that too big is reason all by itself to break up huge companies. Beyond a certain point in size, there is already "restraint of trade" and no more reason need be looked for to split up companies. Chop, chop, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, AOL / Time-Warner, etc.

08/22/04

Ticked, traumatized, turmoiled by trashy technology, but otherwise cautiously content as a Cornish coot…

08/23/04

Thanks for your note of encouragement in my hour of computer tragedy. As you can guess from the background image. my main computer is working again, has wireless connectivity, is in Internet touch with the world. How much its restored state is due to my ministrations, prayers, and curses I don't know. I think my computer was traumatized by Service Pack 2 and needed time to heal itself. Of course that is the technical interpretation.

* * *

Thanks for the images -- they were a lot of fun, and I think I'll pass them on to a select few.

The background you see was done from a picture of flowering plants using the technique I described in a recent email, using Explode function to pixelize the image in a way reminiscent of pastel paintings. Then the usual tweaking, but also a lot of edge blending which is tricky, but with a particular plug-in I found for IrfanView, the way is made easier. It cuts the image into 4 quarters and rearranges them so the outer edges are placed inside the image where they are easier to blend. The blending was done with a cloning tool in one of the other graphics manipulation programs. The final step is to run the plug-in function again to restore the image to its original form, ready to put in an email (or web page) background, and all the edges behaving themselves.

* * *

The pictures you asked about were Wallace and Grommit, a British claymation animated creation. There were three episodes of that state of the art work, very good. Johnny English, a spoof of the James Bond films starring the lead figure in Blackadder, Rowan Atkinson (yes, more British comedy). Finally, I had never seen The Lady and the Tramp, the Disney film, with Peggy Lee as the featured voice: "We are Siamese, if you please. We are Siamese, if you don't please..." So, now I've seen it, and I found it to be just fine. Of course, I have seen pieces of it over the years, but not the whole thing. As you can see, it was a light-hearted weekend...

08/25/04

Am reading like mad, finished Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell. I've read it before, a long time ago, and I liked it just as much this time. Books, I wish I could swim in them...

09/04/04

It is great that your work is moving along apace. It is always a good thing to have a goal, as the I Ching and common sense say.

Wherever the photos seem to fit with his comments, then yes, I think there is augmentation if, for no other reason, the mind of the reader becomes more focused and engaged. The close attention of the reader is no longer something that can be assumed, as it was more so in the past. The page, or web page, need a centripetal quality to draw the reader in and help the experience of the work come to life. That is the new dimension you refer to, which, like the design structure of a good painting, dynamically directs the attention of the viewer.

Your comment about placing photos on floppies reminds me I have a major catch-up chore to do -- backing up all the images for many months onto CDs or DVDs. I intend to try the DVD route because then I could get close to a year of images on one DVD. But the CDs are OK, I can get two month's worth of images on one disk, and that isn't bad. IrfanView makes it so much easier to edit the images than any other program I have seen; I don't know what I'd do without it.

I have been working again on the Larch web site. I cleaned up a bit, got rid of some old pages and images, thus freeing room for other things. I changed the background images too. I put the article I sent you on there in case someone wants to know more about how I work, or to get some notion of what creating digital images entails. I may write other articles eventually. And I finally added another set of photos -- Photo Page 1103. (It was slightly strange to get back to that state of mind again.) The home page background is from an image of a turkey hen in tallish grass.

Now that I did the first guest article for your newsletter perhaps your two friends and others will be encouraged to produce some articles / reminiscences / recipes / photos / whatever for your newsletter. You may have to gently badger them to get submissions :^D

The pedometer is a good thing, I have one too. Now I have to get around to using it more. Sometimes I wear it around the house. When I am lazy I attach it in such a way that it registers the slightest movement. Once, it recorded intense activity and all I was doing was eating supper.

09/08/04

Yes, I've had some fun with my pedometer, but strangely, I have rarely remembered to take it when I have headed out for photos. I may put it in, or on, my camera bag.

I like a couple things about FireFox: the "zoom" ability (increase or decrease the size of any web page), and the ability to control the size of the page when printing (good for avoiding text-clipping, and for reducing the number of pages printed). I may install the full FireFox package and see if I want to work in that instead of IE and OE. I have done all the web pages in the Composer component of Netscape. It is a WYSIWIG web page editor, simple and functional. When the page looks OK, I click a button and upload it to my ISP.

Thanks for your nice words about the descriptions. This part of the process of creating photo pages means more and more to me as time goes on. And it has a wider scope than I might have predicted. I can speak just about the image, or of the subject, or of the taking of the shot and feelings then, or of my reactions to the image, aesthetic or factual, or of something it reminds me of -- anything at all that fits the sense of the image.

When the idea [of putting my ‘how-to’ article on the Larch site] occurred to me, I thought "of course". Your newsletter had "first publication" though :^) I may even do more articles as time goes on. I can't remember if I mentioned to you there is now a link to the Larch photo pages on naturewriting.com. This is the first time my name has been associated with the Larch web site; am still not sure how I feel about that.

Good for those two, boo on your family for being so silent (how well I know how that goes; thoughtlessness is a widely practiced art). There is always a chance that one of the people you know who do try to write something for you will find they enjoy it. It may be a nudge that does a lot of good. Impossible to predict which seeds will root and flourish.

Living in Japan must be about as different as it can get, and still live in a civilized urban setting. Strange people, much beauty, emotional pressure cooker, capable of amazing things, and great concentration of purpose. If it weren't for China being a more obvious potential threat, I would worry a lot about Japan. They have been rather quiet these last few years...

By all means, let the hen celebrate life on another web page. More joy. And yes, I want the viewer to slow down, focus, feel, react, incorporate the image into memory and feeling. We talked a while ago about the less emotional nature of sight -- it is sensing at a distance, cooler, more analytical than other senses (though all such comments about the senses are relative and vary with circumstances). My take on it is that sight is becoming more and more separated from emotion because there is an emphasis on the rapidity of information input via sight, but emotion and feeling chug along at the old pace. People are increasingly divorced from feeling, as if information were the important thing, not understanding. Theatrical plays that once caused Aristotle's "purging of the emotions" would now cause only a ripple in the psyches of many people. McLuhan said there is a rewiring of the brain (particularly for children?) with every change in information processing. Perhaps you and I are fighting a rearguard action in defense of simple genuineness of living.

09/12/04

I liked the sentiment of the poem, not entirely sure about the somewhat choppy form, but the overall expression was good, and the displaced farms popping up here and there is a great way to emphasize the problem. Hope you complete the farm memories piece, I'll look forward to it.

Speaking of saving image files: the she of the house got a new computer a couple of days ago from Office Depot, and I set it up yesterday. With rebates, it is just $489 + tax! Amazing so far, for the money -- it has a DVD, a Read/Write CD drive, 512 Mb of memory, 80 Gb hard disk, 17 " monitor, and a little Lexmark printer. The point of all that is, one of my tasks was to give her around 900 images to cycle through with her XP screensaver. With a little help from IrfanView, I did a modest JPG compression on all the files to reduce their size to around 60% of the original file size and that allowed me to get them all on one CD disk. They then loaded onto her machine very fast, and, with another disk that I had done before, of a year's screensaver images, she now has around 1400 images. The JPG compression did not reduce the quality much for that purpose.

After trying various methods of organizing image files, I settled on a simple chronological order. I have a folder called ZZ-Images (the ZZ is to force the folder to show at the bottom of the list of folders on the C: drive). In that folder are maybe 15 or so sub-folders. The key ones are the ones named for years: 2001, 2002, etc. In those are sub-folders for the months: 0201, 0202, 0203,...0212 (I use backward order for the names, e.g. today is 030912 which ensures the names are sorted from oldest to newest). I print out a "contact sheet" of all files (though I need to catch up on that). I have found the need to create a grouping of "the best of" (say, 20% of the files) from these files for the screensaver has been useful. This gives me two groups: all files, and the selected set in Screensaver folder with sub-folders by year. I have a 100 Gb hard disk, so no problem with storage room so far. Someday I will retire the "all files" set of earlier years from the hard disk and just have them on CDs or maybe DVDs. Also, hard disks are getting really cheap, so I have the option of installing a second hard disk for the image files, if I want to. But, no matter what one does, it is still time consuming sometimes to find a particular image :-(

Bummer. We had some bad disks at work and sent most of them back.

Scanning seems to be a bit of an art -- so many variables to keep track of, including the resolution wanted (and the resulting file size).

By the way, I was able to reformat your text to match my margins with a little freeware program called PureText. One can select and copy any hypertext, whether it be from OE or from a web browser, then click on the PureText icon in the system tray to strip all formatting out of the hypertext (gets rid of images too). It is a nice example of a small useful program. There are a lot of freeware programs out there, if one looks around a bit.

Aside from things computerish, we had about 22 hours of rain from Frances and the rivers rose to the top of their banks. I should have gone down to the park to photograph that, but didn't. I have been gnawing away at work for the Larch web site, and otherwise reading, with the occasional DVD rental movie. She is getting interested in the British stage actors and theatre, partly due to seeing the Harry Potter movies, and we have tiptoed back to cinema, which we had ignored for six years.

The reading is all over the map, but orbiting the natural world mostly. I just finished a good book on dinosaurs, Walking with Dinosaurs, that has very good illustrations, and it made an effort to make the details of dinosaur days come to life. Another book has me interested in the changes in North America over the last 20 thousand years, especially the last 10 thousand years as the glaciers retreated and plants and animals returned to the devastated landscape. Reading such things takes me far away from the present with its woes, political and social. Am also reading an amusing work by the Canadian author Robertson Davies who is witty, learned, urbane.

09/19/04

I went a-picturing yesterday, wanting to record the effects of the Ivan-caused flooding in the park area. Here are a few shots from that outing.

That is Schitzel's on the right -- they were definitely not eating outdoors yesterday...

This is looking up Spring Creek from the High Street Bridge. Locals were shaking their old gray locks: "Never seen it high like this in September, in Spring yes, sometimes, but not this late in the year."

You and she have driven on this water-covered road which parallels Spring Creek and heads to Buffalo Run Road.

This shows the general scene from the east side of the Creek looking back to High Street. The water covered all the ducks' safe resting grounds and much of the main Park area for picnicking.

A house that got its feet wet on the far side of Buffalo Run.

You have been over this bridge and down the steps in drier times...

And that's the way it was,

* * *

I got your intellectual care package a while ago, searched it in vain for a note from you, and set it aside to be read as time goes on. I noted some of it was on Cartier-Bresson. He was one of very few photographers who entered the public mind and shaped a sensibility here and there. Interesting that it has been the black-and-white image makers who have much of the success at that. There is a power in the range of tone and the tableau-like image of black-and-white, as compared with color.

As a photographer, and one who has worked in that medium, I consciously try to infuse that power into my color work. The author Oliver Sacks wrote about an island population who were mostly color-blind. Those people spoke of the emotional force of tonal gradations that are not reported by those of normal vision. And, I would add, are not normally seen by color film. This topic is hard to clarify, I think, judging by the little I have seen published on it. Color is often a bright gaudy smear that obscures the texture and form of objects. My goal is to convey color, beautiful for its own sake, without losing the frankly deeper forces related to texture and form. I have, for example, worked with layered images where a grayscale version is overlaid with a colored one. When I do this, I see again the loss when I add the color. Here is an example of one experiment:

This image [of a daffodil] was too indistinct as to the form and patten of the petals of the iris. By the means described, I brought these back, then re-colored everything. The intensity of the color has been reduced, but the overall image is improved. It is in the direction I want to go in, but is not completely successful.

Of course, the resolution of my digital images is less by far than that of non-digital photography, and consequently it is harder to have the visual impact of it. This limitation is one mostly of time and technology -- there is a great range of possible improvement, a couple of quantum jumps worth. But I will probably never be able to use it for lack of funds and, of course, death which not only messes up one's day, but all days thereafter.

09/25/04

Good to hear from you. I can well imagine you have been busy with groups, classes, books, orienting yourself to the student lifestyle. It is a strange existence, looking back on it; there is a mental split between the hard work side and the lack of responsibility to do, or at least care about, the many other aspects of life that can take one's attention. It is a privileged state of being in which learning, to paraphrase the sport aphorism, isn't just everything, it's the only thing. Too bad it has been over-associated with work and money. Learning is something that is a good all by itself.

I have spent a large part of my life learning myriad things that school did not teach, or taught it perfunctorily, or from a narrow point of view. Alas, so much slips away when it is not used. Also, some real fools have Masters and PhD degrees -- perhaps they are the ones who view learning as merely the price they pay to get what they want. Another source of foolishness sometimes is the provincialism or rigidity of the various colleges and department within the university, or, for that matter, of the disciplines themselves. Certain assumptions and values may be allowed, and others not. Often areas of academic expertise fall into long periods of uncreative decline. When I took some fine arts courses at IU back in another millennium, the Thing To Do for painters was to produce murky, often brown, abstract art. It was the Mud Period, I guess. Perhaps you can find examples littering a museum there.

All that makes finding creative and curious and free-minded people that much the better, and I hope you have good luck at that. So much of real education is in the form of conversation and friendly debate. That is why it is sad to see some students who work too hard, either from self-fascism or just because they have so little money -- they miss the vital extras: the plays, the poetry, the walks, the talks, and of course the healing qualities of the natural world. It isn't just about the research, the essays, the exams -- there is also the integrating of the mass of information within itself, and within the whole being, emotional, moral, intellectual, social, and just plain personal. Of course, you know all this, but it doesn't hurt to hear it again...

The service projects sound interesting. I always feel the best learning is project-oriented, that is, has a coherent purpose, definable goal, and which can be perceived to succeed or fail. To do something "service-like" for others implies communication in a human (social) context, so one cannot simply know something, but must translate the knowledge to a form accessible to others.

Well, research of course, but also teaching -- I sense a pedagogical philosophy here :^D

The privileges [for PhD candidates] sound like appropriate for people who are permanently stressed, as PhD candidates are. By now maybe you are less overwhelmed, just mid-whelmed. And yup, IU is an old stomping ground of mine, as my tattered academic career careened along. Oddly there is an Indiana University here in PA, and locals are only dimly aware there is another such named place somewhere else. Indiana, the state, is only known to them by legend and myth. This area is called ridge-and-valley country, but them ridges are full of "hill people", and as such are clannish, insular, family-oriented to the point they have to really focus their minds to admit the possibility there are other peoples and places that might have some interest. The world they see nightly on TV is just a jittery dream. It is permanently odd to see a major university in the midst of this -- a vision like Plato's Academy in the land of the locals. There is a parallel with IU. I remember the town-gown split there at Bloomington, and the slighting comments about "those farmers in the Indiana legislature".

I was worried you might take exception to my comments. They were uncharacteric for me to send in a letter, but ATVs seem to push a major button in me. They have come to represent the vicious yahoo side of humanity for me. When I was young I shot a lot of birds with my BB gun; I was a mighty hunter, a cowboy, a force of nature. Later I graduated to a .22 caliber rifle and continued my deadly ways, though the hunts were much diminished in frequency. More and more my elation was darkened by the regret I felt holding a ruined life in my hand. I remember leaning against a black walnut tree with a hawk in my sights. I was a good shot, the bird was mine, all I had to do was pull the trigger... A thought came into my mind: "Why kill the hawk? The hunt is already proven, his life is in my hands, nothing more needs to be done." And I lowered my gun. I did not hunt again after that. That is, I did not hunt until I got a good camera.

So,... the joy in life and the living defeated the flaming ego of young homo sapiens, whose fathers had walked the millennia hunting to live. I would still kill to live, but those who live to kill and mutilate for whatever trivial desire happens to flit through mind are those who have not grown up into a larger mental and moral world.

Maybe this has to do with the cult of youth, the fear of growing old. Or maybe it is religious superiority, as with Thomas Hardy's neighbor who, saying as he was criticized for beating his cow: "But she bain't a Christian!"

Maybe it is just willful stupidity and loutishness. I have read of "hunters" who post themselves along the great migration flyways of the birds to blow them out of the sky. When we owned the newspaper, a wildlife officer brought in two dead swans -- swans! -- shot by some thug or thugs unknown. We ran the swans' pictures, asking for information to the police.

And one can't forget old-fashioned greed: I have read of stupendous wholesale slaughters of game in pioneer times, of single blasts from huge shotguns killing a hundred birds at a time. There is market hunting, and of course fishing, that has pushed species, even whole ecosystems, to the edge of collapse, and sometimes beyond... State officials have used dynamite on the gatherings of crows, creatures of high intelligence that are so much like ourselves, yet not much studied until very recently. What cute little simians men often are, that wandered out of Africa, puffed themselves up with fire, firewater, and fiery sermons to become the dark lords of earth.

I went to the American Society for Information Science and Technology website (HA-ha, hardly any information on there) and found this little summary about Tim Berners-Lee: "Berners-Lee envisioned a global information space where computers everywhere would be linked and available to all. The existence of two technologies – hypertext and the Internet – would let him turn his vision into a reality. Hypertext would allow any document to be linked to any other document. The Internet would allow those documents to be transmitted. And thus were planted the seeds of the World Wide Web."

What a lot is contained in that "Hypertext would allow any document to be linked to any other document"! And how amazing it is that the WWW came to its present state in 13 years. I can imagine a paper called "Information Drag -- the Need for Streamlined Information". The paper would detail the many countervailing forces to the free flow of information. And the old enemies of information flow are still there, will always be there.

I have been amazed at the quick development of Wikipedia, and am interested in the Simple English Wikipedia that is now developing -- Simple English (2-3K words total to be used) might speed up instant translation of knowledge from culture to culture. I think this is very significant.

Let me know how the cooperation and communication go (two features that tend to be lacking in the world of work) among the 40 PhD candidates. This is a good thing in theory, probably mostly good in practice, as long as one remembers that understanding and creativity, as opposed to information, only happens individual by individual. The current idea that the group is superior to the individual is laughable. It is based on a foolish confusion between quantity and quality. The group may, in a limited sense, know more, but it cannot evaluate and integrate the knowledge, even though it may accelerate the evaluation and integration by mutual stimulation.

Yes, those whose interest is served by restricting information flow are quite articulate, even reasonable sounding. Good is Bad. War is Peace. Submission is Freedom. One should be ready to routinely sabotage their sabotage.

Maybe the flag of Florida should be a big bull's-eye as far as hurricanes are concerned. Jeanne is due to hit in a few hours.

October 10, 2004

[Of 'Windblown World': Kerouac's Willed Spontaneity’ By Walter Kirn]

…that it seems fairly said. Years ago, I thought on reading one of those publisher minings of the author which was made of writing exercises and experiments and journal jottings, that here was an author who worked very hard at his trade. If his productive enthusiasm was like a spraying firehose of words, then volumes of past observation and practiced expression were the reservoir.

Too bad he didn't have the brass of a Twain that could stand up and blow the public mind with sharp speech, then return to the privacy of his own mind for good company. He could perhaps have lasted Twain's 75 years. Maybe like Van Gogh, he had a mortal sensitivity. I wonder how one cares a lot without being destroyed by it. I cannot yet conceive how to work effectively within the vacuum that surrounds us each. Maybe we need more magic in this technological age.

10/24/04

The pix came through just fine. Nice comfortable-looking cats showing the way to better living through dynamic relaxation. And the little cottage in the mountains looks good too. By (buy) all means, do acquire it -- it would be a nice cozy retirement environs for the exalted retired. Wonder if a butler comes with it?

* * *

Scanned the articles. They are standard brass-and-glib school of social commentary. They remind me of the latest pop music and fads that constitute a free pass to the Land of Cognoscenti for the reader. Still, Dylan is a phenomenon that is fun to watch arc by. I'll read Chronicles if the library gets it.

And that is all I know about them. No word from either of them for some time. He is probably still adjusting to retirement. Last I heard he was doing babysitting, the baby and he no doubt warping each other's minds.

This just in on Yahoo News: JOHANNESBURG (AFP) - A South African preacher baptised a thoroughbred racehorse called "Running Reverend" in front of his congregation in a controversial bid to raise church funds.

Funny thing, I had a notion once that Koko, the sign-language speaking ape, might be a candidate for baptism if she expressed an interest and a rather broad-minded preacher could be found. But I had forgotten the money issue, how could I? The horse might be worth a bet. Thank the gods for refreshing looniness.

10/27/04

Yes, I was very pleased with the dubious geese image. The geese are wary, and are good and brave parents.

One of my favorite features in XP is a screensaver called My Pictures Slideshow. One can, in its Settings, tell it to show all the images in a given folder and that folder's subfolders. When the screensaver comes up, it shows the images full screen, one after another, at the speed, and with the special effects one has chosen. I made a shortcut to the screensaver and put in on the desktop to bring the screensaver up whenever I wish.

My computer is visible from the breakfast table, and from where I do a lot of my reading, so when I look up there is a fresh image to see. I take little breaks gazing at images I have not seen for a while (the images are randomly chosen from among many hundreds of images). It is a small, relaxing, and pleasing thing.

10/28/04

This date is distinguished in at least one way, it is my birthday. I are 62 years old. This time thing must be a joke. I remember at the age of 20 snapping my fingers as I said, "Twenty years has just gone by." I remembered that twenty years later, and did it again. Sure enough the next twenty went by in the snapping of fingers. I believe I allowed the 60th year to come and go accompanied with no finger snapping.

A goose mood is a good mood. Yes, I remember your telling me about your computer being in a room away from other living activities, but I didn't know if that still was the case. I continue to have the old Windows 98 computer hooked up and working, so I set it up to show 2001 and 2002 images when it is not being used for other things. The main computer shows 2003 and 2004 images, so I get quite a show when both screensavers are operating, the monitors being side by side.

I may go back and rechoose the screensaver images, which are identical to the "best of" selections. It will take a long while to do that (choosing from thousands of images), but it can be done over a long period of time. I have different criteria now, and my choices may be different. An advantage of a smaller subset of quality images is that I can find images faster.

While this [IPOD pocket music device with mass storage] could of course be used sensibly by sensible people, it is easy to extrapolate lesser scenarios. Punk, rap and hip-hop 24 hours a day forever. Implants so no teacher or cop can separate a fan from his chosen noise. On the other hand, one could nullify that damned music every retail store foists on one by overriding it with one's own choice of music (defensive music). That reminds me, the audio folks of Bose have a battery-powered noise-deadening earphone that could be worn to reduce the imposed audio culture to good old-fashioned silence. If this actually does work, it would make a good investment (and may be illegal someday because who does one think one is that refuses to participate in the wonderful world of social/commercial control through manipulated popular culture).

The Paneras trip sounds good. Decent food, what a concept. And aging seems to be an involuntary sampling of the full panoply of pains and inconveniences. But as long as some mobility is there, and enough pain-free periods to poke around in selected interesting doings of life, it is OK, considering that nagging alternative. Still, I inform any sentient powers of fate, if such there be, that I'd just as soon pass on the pain thing if possible. I'd prefer a more abstract study of the subject, even at the risk of loss of ennobling effects.

Sadly, I have not got a lot of fall shots this year, and as you say, this year seems better for fall color than the past several years. None has been really stupendous. We have had much overcast and rain too, and opportunities for photography have been limited. I did go out Tuesday as the sun was actually visible in the latter part of the afternoon, and the light was good. She and I took a trip around the Finger Lakes region of New York recently, and there were a few visions of fall color in the mist that were very beautiful, especially one scene in an intimate mountain pass. As we drove along, the tatters of mist clung to the colorful trees like smoke. A camera would have been challenged to capture a tenth of the quiet beauty of that passage.

Thinking about cat's tails -- they do tell a tale, don't they? Sort of a feline grammatical device to punctuate the rest of the animal's expressive mood.

I have been toying with the idea of attempting to keep a journal. If the past is any prologue, it won't happen, but I see the advantages of doing it. And it fits with my idea that the history of each of us is important, an idea that used to have more currency.

10/29/04

Herewith I begin to answer your letters of late.

Rereading your October 13, 2004 letter, all 11 pages... You comment on its unusualness, its beginning/end features, its chunkiness.

The General Plan draft, multiple meetings (people are like some birds that gather in some prominent tree, shake all the branches, vocalize in a mishmash of sweet and discordant tones, relieve themselves mightily, and buzz off to obscure venues), closed-door (woo! confidential personnel material) evaluation reports (yes, do send some of the interesting stuff), and all like dat dar. I always wondered where that met / exceeded expectations / exceptional terminology came from, and whether it is really an unalloyed Good Thing to subject mature people to that kind of potentially demeaning assessment from which there is no effective appeal or guarantee of objectivity. I am not flatly asserting that it is wrong, but wondering if there might not be a better way to go in encouraging people to do good work.

For me, if some obtuse manager failed to lead, inspire, communicate, or to register that good work has been done by me, and then gave a poor evaluation, I would not be encouraged to improve, I would be more encouraged to lose interest in the whole process and my heart would be out there somewhere looking for a better job. Is it really so hard to manage the processes, and to reward good work with a kind word now and then? Communication, constant and effective, and cooperation among all parties is the real mechanism of good work. If a worker simply does not do what is asked, and refuses to learn better ways, then that is time for a heart-to-heart talk with the worker and his manager and that manager's manager and, ideally, with a worker representative as witness. Time then for recording in some fearsome jacket of evaluation that warnings have been given.

Managements of the world, take heed. No amount of high-faluting talk of paradigms, leveraging, or "outrageous customer service" can take the place of unremitting and dedicated communication and cooperation and focus and follow-through. Dump half of all meetings and use the time to get involved. Ignore the breezy, expensive, and faddy corporate philosophers that infest the world of work. They have little to add, their function is nothing more than cheerleading. And what can cheerleading do for a crappy team? In the animal world, it would be called displacement activity.

It seems we in the West have yet to recuperate from the fact that the Japanese and other Orientals have found new effective ways to organize work. In trying to learn from our eastern brethren, we ignore the real processes they developed, and embrace the encouraging "songs" they make as they do what they do. The songs, or verbalizations, are merely the cultural hubbub, the equivalent of chittering of house sparrows in a tree at dusk. In short, we ignore the lyrics and embrace the melodies, getting the melodies wrong, of course, because they are not our melodies. We seem to have had real trouble even to this day, in rising above the lord / serf pattern. Management would dearly like to blame the serfs, er I mean lesser-grade colleagues, but news flash -- almost all process failures come directly from management. Many of these self-described people-people have no more empathy with workers than a salmon-packer has for the beings he encylinders.

My, I better move to page two of your epistle. You said we are still leaning on the New Deal economically and the Sixties culturally. You mention Philip Roth...

Which reminds me, I have been doing a bit of research in the general question of mind-control / social control / marketing / propaganda / spin / and, of course, plain history. I have no conclusions yet, but do think that this is big business indeed. There are those who are convinced once you have a picture of a person's self-image, he is predictable and hence controllable. From the base fact that an individual needs some inner touchstone to refer to in a changing world in order to make decisions, comes the conclusion that if you can control the input of that changing world, you can pretty much make the marionette dance to your tune. We assure ourselves the inputs are so varied as to be uncontrollable, but the busy social planners have found that there are key elements that have a magnified effect on the person. Society has been studied for these keys, and ways to control them. Any thoughts on this?

Back to the economy briefly. As someone in the general throes of finances, what is your take on the source of wealth in the U.S.? If our manufacturing is down to 16% of the GNP, then where is the rest of the money coming from? Farming is in the basement [as far as jobs], but presumably adds much $ to the economy. We are not exporting much compared to what we import. The balance of trade is not much of a balance. Is our economy just a habit? It is so curious that we are so rich, and others so poor, if the main difference is just fancy financial legerdemain. I keep thinking you must see strange things in the way of magic wealth that depends on the skill of the magicians.

10/31/04

Beware crap via the Internet, and especially from pass-it-along wisdom in email.

So compare this [previously listed] mundane background [of Beethoven] with the info in the email: "If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally retarded, and she had syphilis, would you recommend that she have an abortion?"

Ludwig's mother was married at 16 and her child and her husband died. She married Ludwig's father at age 19, and her first child by him, born in 1769, died. Of a serious nature, though loss of children was more common at that time and place, it affected her. Ludwig was born in December of 1770. She did not have time between 1769 and 1770 to have had 6 children with that impressive array of disabilities. In short, your forwarded email is bad information. Bad information offered to "make you think", yes, to think badly.

Also, Hitler was not married until a few minutes before he blew his brains out, so of course "he never cheated on his wife”. Also, his earlier love affair with his female relative ended with her suicide. Again, between the spin and outright bad information is offered as a good thing to titillate and "make you think", but it makes me think about garbage in and garbage out. As to Roosevelt's consorting with crooked politicians, well, it was probably like the situation with Truman, either deal with the crooks without being crooked, or get out of politics, n'est pas?