Roads in America have long symbolized the ideal of freedom. Just like the pilgrims who came here to escape religious persecution, and the pioneers who wanted to homestead their own way in life, the idea of traveling down the road to get away from one place and go to elsewhere, the notion of liberty has always traveled along with the people who take to the roads to find their way.

When the roads became paved, and when you could travel down them with speed, it added the idea of velocity to the metaphor of freedom. If you could afford a car, anyway. When cars first appeared, motoring was a novelty for the wealthy. Cars also became one of the epitomes of the Faustian machine age, rearing generations of motorheads into states of enraptured ecstasy by the spell of purring engines, enervating sensitive types with the cacophonous noise of their splutter.

As the antihuman forces of front line assembly systems riveted the steel beasts into ascendance, the price dropped to the point to where they came into the purview of the middle class, but not all the middle class. First it was just the white middle class. The oil fields had been tapped and gasoline was flowing, cheap and plentiful for a time. People looked to the car as another means of escaping enforced limitations, and eventually African-American’s of the middle class could also afford cars. Yet even when African Americans could start taking to the road in combustible vehicles, the road wasn’t always a safe place to be, especially in the years of Jim Crow.

After the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, Jim Crow was in effect in the Southern states. It was legal for Americans to be segregated by their race and the full power of the law was behind that segregation. Rules, regulations, and systemic racism had the net effect of ensnaring Black people in nets of harassment, and much worse. Human rights were denied and access to what the rest of the country thought as basic was curtailed through severe prejudice.

Yet the road still called, it beckoned as place to roam, out of the drought of oppression and into a world of verdant green where life could be enjoyed.

A man named Victor Hugo Green helped his fellow African American’s get on the road and find hospitable places, people and businesses. Green was a New Yorker through and through, born in 1892. His parents named him after the famous French author whose work championed the outcast, the poor, and the dispossessed. He was the eldest son of William H. Green and Alice (Holmes) and grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey with his two siblings. In 1913 he started working as a postman in New Jersey, but became a worldly entrepreneur, though he remained with the postal service for his entire career, even after becoming a publisher during the Harlem Renaissance where was a participant and witness the proliferation and blossoming of Black culture.

GREAT MIGRATION’S AND THE FEAR OF THE RED

The Great Migration was great because it was one of the largest movements of people finding new places to live in the recorded and remembered history of North America. Jim Crow was in effect, and it was the driver for the approximately six million Black people who left the American South for the North, the Midwest and the West. Though the boundaries of time are fuzzy, the Great Migration lasted from about 1910 until the 1970s. Even in places where segregation laws did not exist, segregation by custom was ubiquitous. Even as the laws changed during the Civil Rights era, with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the legacy and aftereffects have continued to ripple through time, and the social and economic factors driving the movement of African Americans across the country continued.

Looking at it now, the Great Migration can be seen as having had two distinct phases. As with so much else in the United States and the world, the upheaval unleased by World War I and II mark the period of the two phases. The first phase happened roughly between 1910 and 1940. In this time period Black southerners made their way to Indianapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and New York. A war always needs a body, and for this, able bodied men were sent off to be machine gun fodder in the trenches as the efforts to fight were escalated in 1917 and people got sent off to Europe. With industrial jobs vacant by those who’d gone off to kill and get killed, jobs opened up for African Americans to fill those spots.

Americas internal migrants had found better jobs after fleeing from a South mired under the oppressive Jim Crow apartheid, but other difficulties awaited. Injustice and prejudice wasn’t confined to one part of the continent and country. It is estimated that around 2 million Blacks left the south during the first phase from World War I to World War II. The social shake up to the norms wasn’t easy for people who felt their privileges were being infringed upon. The perceived threat of Communism was another cloud hanging over the minds and livelihoods of capitalist businessmen who were fine with the way things were.

The Russian Revolution was on everyone’s mind, erupting into paranoia. Politicians, government workers, and capitalists especially feared an imminent commie uprising. African-American commies they were even more afraid of; Black people were already advocating racial equality. Throwing in labor rights made the situation feel even more threatening for those with vested interests in the same-old, same-old.
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In March 1919, President Woodrow Wilson said that “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.” This was the opening statement of fear that exploded in yet another wave of white violence against African Americans who had relocated in the search of making a living and a better life, in the search for just a small slice of the American dream. The Red Summer of 1919 saw race riots explode across the land starting in the April, from Georgia to Maine, to South Carolina, Indiana, Texas and Arizona. Four days of mob violence formed an early peak in Washington D.C. in July, followed by more mob attacks in Norfolk, Virginia on Black veterans coming home from the war.

The Chicago riots of late July into August marked another peak. Hundreds of Black homes and businesses on the South Side of the Windy City were destroyed in the riots that followed the cruel drowning of Eugene Williams, guilty only of swimming in the wrong place. More rioting happened in Omaha, Nebraska, and from the end of September and into November of the year a massacre occurred in Elaine, Arkansas, sparked by fears of socialism as sharecroppers began the work of getting organized into a union.

Charles Hillman Brough, the governor of Arkansas, appointed a Committee of Seven, made up of good old boy businessmen to investigate the business of the Sharecropper’s Union. They came to the conclusion that it was a socialist enterprise made “for the purpose of banding negroes together for the killing of white people.” Articles about this in the newspapers stoked the flames of hatred and agitation, leading directly to further violence. All of it amounted to an anti-Black pogrom with a hefty dose of anti-communist Red Scare mixed in to whip up people into an irrational frenzy of bloodlust and belligerence.

The second phase of began as World War II brought the war industry (called elsewhere the “defense industry”) into expansion. This continued on into the 1970’s when America’s loss of morale in Vietnam put a cap on the number of jobs for war related manufacturing. In this time frame African Americans continued to move North, and further west into the major cities of California and up into the big cities of the Pacific Northwest. In just twenty odd years after World War II another 3 million Black people had migrated to these and various other points in the United States.

In the meantime, the Civil Rights era had ended Jim Crow but redlining and other systemic forms of racism were still in operation, along with usual overt kind. Neighborhoods might not have been segregated by clear and visible laws, but discrimination in housing and restrictive covenants kept many disparities in place across the United States. These scars on the collective landscape continue to reveal layers of psychohistory, and the effect of this psychogeography on the people who dwell in each area continues to be felt.

It was in this time period of the Great Migration that Victor Hugo Green’s travel book offered a roadmap for navigating such a harshly stratified society.

IN THE HARLEM GREEN

Harlem was one of the hot spot destinations of choice in the early phases of the Great Migration. Alma S. Duke had come up from Richmond, Virginia as part of that movement of people. In general, people moving up from Virginia often went to Harlem and New York City, while people moving away from Mississippi often went to Chicago. People were moving away from plenty of other places in the South as well, and there was variation, but these were two of the prevalent patterns. Alma was one who had come up from Virginia.

In 1917 she married Victor Hugo Green. The happy couple moved to Harlem to be in the happening place. They settled in the Sugar Hill community. They made it just in time for the Harlem Renaissance.

African-American music, theater, painting and visual art, and of course, literature, was going through an incredible fertile period as artists took back “the Negro” from the stereotypical tropes of whites. An identity and consciousness apart from middle class bourgeois values of the white Victorian era was crafted. The Victorian reality tunnel looked out on the world through colonialist, imperialist and racist belief systems. This renaissance of artistic activity was happening in other parts of the U.S., but the main concentration of energy was in Harlem.

At the same time as Blacks were making Harlem a hotspot of American cultural life, some were also getting on the road as people entered the middle class and had the ability and opportunity to afford a set of wheels. But the road can be harsh, and even motoring along, there were many gas stations that wouldn’t fill a tank, mechanics who wouldn’t work on a Black owned car, places that wouldn’t serve African Americans a meal. This treatment wasn’t limited to the South, as the events of the Red Summer showed (and many other events afterwards). Northerners were just as cruel and racist. It made staying put in a safe place with known elements less risky than traveling the country to visit family, especially when traversing places where White Supremacist groups were active.
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Yet it wasn’t all hatred. African Americans businesses were also springing up, and gradually there were businesses where acceptance of everyone’s humanity was the key. Green had the idea that he could list such places in a book to help Black people get around the country and enjoy the freedom of traveling, the freedom of being free. The result was “The Negro Motorists Green Book.”

He first published his guide in 1936. The first edition was only ten pages and focused on New York City. The prevalence of “Whites Only” restaurants and “Sundown Towns” -places where African Americans weren’t welcome after dark- meant that going somewhere new was a dangerous business when violence and hostility could be expected. With a list of places where it was safe to go, new possibilities for real freedom opened up, and Green’s book came into high demand. He continued to publish new edition each year, expanding the range of cities and towns covered with each new version.

His job at the postal office was a key to this enterprise as he was able to use it for networking with other postmen and connect with Black business people along their mail routes. Once contact was made, he asked them if they’d like to advertise in the Green Book. These same businesses listed in the book then became venues where the book itself could be sold and bought. It was an underground or parallel system operating outside of the mainstream. With the book in hand African American citizens had another way of making and forming connections to people offering needed services, of finding dance halls, cafes, shops and other places that were safe. Places to just chill out and relax.

All of this nurtured community and the networking was one of the things that helped set a stage for growth of the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement in turn depended on financial independence. The Black businesses that made up the book were the foundation of success.

Of the many African Americans who used the Green Book, many did so for the purpose of earning a living. Salespeople, traveling musicians, entertainers, athletes and others who had to take to the road for work in one capacity or another were among those whose lives were made easier through the travel guide. Blacks in the middle class and above working as trained professionals in fields such as medicine, law, insurance and engineering were also looking to spend some of their income and treat their families to leisure time. Relaxation and recreation at the standard resorts was often barred from Blacks due to segregation, so as new options and opportunities became available, these got listed in the guide. Idlewild in Michigan was one of the leading resorts during the Jim Crow era and it had reached the height of its popularity by the 1960s.  

Off the back of the Green Book, Green started another enterprise in 1947. This was a Vacation Reservation Service and travel-agency, again specializing in Black owned businesses. By the end of the 1940s, his guide had gone outside the confines of the U.S., showing how to get around in places like Mexico and Bermuda. He did all this while still maintaining his day job, from which he retired in 1952. That was the same year he changed the name of his publication to the Negro Travelers’ Green Book. It wasn’t just about motoring anymore, but about experiencing life out in the world and all it had to offer.

HAVE OIL, WILL TRAVEL

Without gasoline and oil, a car is just a heap of metal and parts. These days it might just be fiberglass, metal and parts. Without a place to fill up, getting on the road means nothing. Without oil and petroleum products the American conception of roads and cars as the keys to freedom would be a dream. During the time period of the Great Migration, Shell stations had been known to refuse Black customer’s service. Not so with Esso Standard Oil, a company who became another key to the continued success of the Green Book. They had enlightened policies, and franchised gas stations to African Americans.

These days the company that was Esso is better known as ExxonMobil. The name “Esso” came from the way a person would say the letters S and O, for Standard Oil, the immediate predecessor of the company. Strange how these corporations live longer than humans, but with genealogies just as tangled.

Standard Oil was based in New Jersey and had started marketing products under the Esso brand in 1926. During those Jim Crow years, they hired Black intellectuals in a time when African Americans with higher education and training under their belt had a difficult time finding employment. In 1934 one of the people they hired was James Albert “Billboard” Jackson. He wrote a column called Jackson’s Page for Billboard, the famous music and entertainment magazine, where he wrote about Black performers in New York, Chicago, and other big cities. His column was very popular and Black newspapers in the North syndicated his work under the byline “Billboard” Jackson.

Writing about music and cultural life in the 1920s put him into direct contact with many of the greats from the Harlem Renaissance, and his work as a critic was crucial in getting their work out to a wider audience. Like Green, he was another pioneer in Black business and entrepreneurship: he was an advisor to the U.S. Department of Commerce on that very subject between 1927 and 1933. In 1934 he was asked to come and work for Esso Standard Oil Company in the role of public relations and marketing specialist, the first African American to hold that role. He also became the first African American member of the American Marketing Association in in 1940. All in all, he had worked for Esso for twenty-one years. Jackson was very active in African American fraternal groups and business associations, and was a member of some thirty-seven different voluntary groups. He had developed quite the network of influence.

While Jackson was working at Esso in the marketing division, he convinced the company to sponsor the Green Book so their Black customers could “go further with less anxiety.” By the 1940’s a little less than half of all Esso dealers were Black making this coordination effort a natural fit. 

The 1949 edition of the Green Book included the following Esso endorsement message:

“As representatives of the Esso Standard Oil Co., we are pleased to recommend the Green Book for your travel convenience. Keep one on hand each year and when you are planning your trips, let Esso Touring Service supply you with maps and complete routings, and for real 'Happy Motoring' – use Esso Products and Esso Service wherever you find the Esso sign.”

Alma Green, who had worked on the Green Book as an editor at various times continued publishing the book after her husband died on October 16, 1960. She continued to serve and publish as an editor until 1966, the last year the annual book was published.

When the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 it marked the end of legal racial segregation. Sundown towns may have been blocked legally, but racial profiling by local police and sheriff's departments, harassment by everyday racists, and other aggravations continued and continue. Driving while Black remains dangerous. The influence of that reality has left a deep mark on the psychology of collective America, and the memory of that is permeated across the land.
 
RE/SOURCES & FURTHER READING

Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance by Alvin Hall

Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin

​Overground railroad: the Green Book and the roots of Black travel in America by Candacy Taylor

Driving While Black (2015 feature film directed by Paul Sapiano)

Driving While Black (2021 Documentary directed by )

The Green Book (2018 feature film directed by Peter Farrelly)

“There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of a ten miles radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.” -Henry David Thoreau

​There is a very prevalent attitude within the culture of creativity, for those that want to make it big, a person needs to leave their smaller city or small town, and go to the big city. I guess making it big has always had the underlying assumption, also super prevalent and at large in the greater culture, that bigger is better. Big cities represent places with more opportunities for expansion in whatever field of endeavor one wishes to make it big inside. There is often more there in these places: LA, Chicago, New York City, Seattle. Some of what there is definitely more of is competition. More artists, writers, musicians, and actors of high caliber vying for their slice of the pie. More artists, writers, musicians, and actors of high caliber working as baristas and waiters and cooks. That’s no slight against the service industry. A person has got to eat and my wife and many friends and family are veterans who have served in the trenches of the restaurant biz. I’ve assisted in numerous caterings myself and spent my share of time as a dishwasher. I’m not afraid of getting dirty and wet.

The question remains, however, of why a person would want to travel to a big city to compete not only for work in the creative industries, but also for good day jobs, when they could stay in a smaller pond where there is more potential to become a bigger fish. Yet not just the kind of big fish a fisherman would like to catch from the deep, but part of a school of fish: in other words, a community. Not just a community of elite artists presenting their work to the world in galleries, at readings, and from the stage, but a community of people and beings to be embedded within and serve.

At the end of the day, art in any medium is a service. In its debased forms, it can be a service to the artist looking to glorify themselves. I won’t pretend its ever an egoless endeavor. Yet, when that becomes the sole purpose of art, for the artiste to extol their own creative ability, something essential gets lost, the act of making things that nurture and feed the creative and spiritual part of other beings.

I say other beings, because art may not even just be for humans. If St. Francis could preach to the animals, why couldn’t an artist also make a sculpture for the enjoyment of the trees, or for the birds, snakes and turtles? Why not tell a story to a bee or sing a song to the wind and sun and stars? These too are part of our community, or rather, we are part of their community.

Yet we also do want our human connections, and to be seen for what we do and are capable of doing by our fellows. There is nothing wrong in that desire to be seen, heard, known. It’s something we’ve done since time immemorial. We aspire to be like trees and have our work be around for a long time, yet even their centuries pale to the aeons of life and light given off by the stars.
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As the 17th century English poet John Hall wrote in his poem “The Hourglass”:

How senseless are our wishes, yet how great!
With what toil we pursue them, and with what sweat!
Yet most times for our hurts, so small we seem
Like Children crying for some Mercury. …
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Desires of wealth anothers wishes hold
And yet how many have been choked with Gold?
This only hunts for honour, yet who shall
Ascend the higher, shall more wretched fall?

(The poem was set to music by David Tibet in the above harrowing Current 93 song.)

Some of the fruits of human art are more robust than others, and the seed planted from one poem into the heart of another, can turn up and grow in some other area of life. Storytelling, poetry, song are all for the community. To grow, they need their own strong roots so as to generate future seeds.

As culture returns to a preindustrial level of homeostasis and world travel becomes less common and more adventurous, the globetrotting artist will become increasingly rare. Even those writers and musicians and actors who gain larger renown, will likely live somewhere. Sure, there will always be nomadic types and people who live in different locations at different times in their lives, but the urge to grow roots and remain in place will also loom large. An artist who is devoted to the place where they live and breathe will be a boon to the local pond where they swim.

BIG TIME CITY GLITCH

Novelist and writing guru Steven Pressfield wrote a book called Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be. In one of the blogposts that became part of his book, he contended that aspiring screenwriters and people wanting to work in the movies should move to places like Los Angeles to be around the scene where much of the work of screenwriting is done.

He wrote, “Sometimes people will write to me. ‘I want to work in the movies. Do I have to move to Los Angeles?’ Or, ‘My dream job is in fashion design. Do I need to be in Manhattan?’
The answer is yes and yes.”

It sounds logical. Yet art doesn’t always work on logic. Sometimes it works best by being counter-intuitive, so I say the answer is no and no.

I like much of what Pressfield has written to help creative people in the world, so I’m not knocking him as a whole, but I want to push back on what he says about moving to the big cities. I think that is a glitch and stops people from pursuing their dreams in the soil where they were raised. When they move away, that same soil gets depleted instead of getting enriched, while overloading and putting a strain on the place they are moving.
Louisville and Lexington, Cincinnati and Columbus are just as in need of screenwriters (or likely playwrights in deindustrial times) as anywhere else. A motivated playwright is much more likely to get a work made and produced under their own gumption away from places where there is a lot of direct competition against them.

In Stevens Point, Wisconsin the In the Pines Studio has set up their operations. Founded by Winter Williams and Matthew A. Brown, they bucked the traditional notion of centering their creative endeavors in film in California and instead focused on the Midwest. If more film students, producers, writers and directors got together to do things on their own, the allure of the big time wouldn’t be as strong. They could make it small time.

In an article titled “The Paradox of Skill” on Dying Breed, Brett McKay wrote about the role of luck in achieving dreams he gets into the idea of more opportunities being available when the pool is smaller.

“If you’re a talented videographer, don’t move to LA for a career. Talented videographers are a dime a dozen there. You’re going to be relying mostly on luck to get a break. Look for a smaller market where the pool of talent is shallower, and skill is the deciding factor. I know a talented videographer in OKC who has made a successful career for himself overseeing commercials, documentaries, and corporate videos in Oklahoma. Is it as glamorous as LA? Probably not. But he’s thriving in a career he enjoys. Also, OKC ain’t that bad. The cost of living can’t be beat, it’s got a World Champion NBA team, and a great onion burger restaurant to boot. You can always take a direct flight to LA from Will Rogers World Airport if you need a weekend of LA glitz and glamour.”

Such a business as the one described above could also be pivoted from making commercial work to making artistic during the downtime. The success of the one could pay for the possibility of the other.

The glitz of the big cities may just be glitches. I am an urban dude. I like to visit a big city. I live in a small city though, and the size is just right. People say that, in Cincinnati, there is only one degree of separation between folks, rather than the usual two degrees of separation you often hear people talk about. In a place where the social connections separating you from another person are less, it’s easier to develop a reputation (of any kind) and have an audience for your art or craft.

The struggle to gain confidence and build an audience in any art form is real. The person who seeks to do so on a global stage has a lot to overcome, many barriers and obstacles in their way. The person who wishes to perform for their friends, to make music on the porch, to read poetry at a café, to submit to a local zine or quarterly, has more of a chance to start putting themselves out there and working on their craft. There are still obstacles also the possibility of making connections.

The other thing, here too, is doing your art for the community. I think the whole thing of being very polished in performance or an art is what keeps people from doing things like this for the people in their life, but I think as a whole our society needs to embrace the way someone with a skill or talent, even if not “the best” can add to our experience together and inspiring each other to improve, and not just leave things to so-called professional entertainers and the like. In your own home town, you can make it small and still have an outsized impact.

Much good can be had by staying put. Tiny forces and small movements can make big waves.

A process of internal migration is already underway now, where people are migrating away from the bicoastal mindset of LA and NYC dominating the cultural life in the United States, with folks coming back home to the heartland, or moving to the former flyover country for the first time.

Much of that is economic. People are starting to realize they can have a cheaper life, work a decent job, and do their creative thing with more ease, less stress, and more success in places where the cost of living is lower but where the artistic life is just as vibrant.

​These aren’t slights against the big cities themselves. I have very much enjoyed my visits to Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. If these are your local, they are your local. Then you might want to go more micro inside such big ponds and make it small in the neighborhood rather than the city at large.

​GOOD ENOUGH

Normal never was, and sometimes good enough is good enough. Going big presupposes polish. You need to have your act together and you need to make it look professional and sound professional. Again, I have nothing against being a professional. At the same time, how much potential gets stopped in its tracks, because a person witnesses the work of a virtuoso and instead of getting inspired by them, they say, “I will never be that good” instead of thinking, “if I commit to a practice, I could do that.” People feel degraded by the simulacra of big time entertainment. There is a failure to realize we can all entertain ourselves and our family and friends, same as it ever was.

I think in a large art that is because performance has become spectacle. Music was enjoyed for much of its history, socially. Sure, there were always people who were talented and reached for perfection in their art, but there were also the everyday practitioners of the art who sang for the practical enjoyment of singing and for the simple joy doing it gave them. Isn’t that good enough?

For me, this is part of the appeal of punk rock. It was focused more on the energy of the sound, and the ability for anyone with the gumption to put a band together. It is why I like the genre of vaporwave and sound collage: have the tools? Put something together with them. It doesn’t need to be perfect to be fun. It doesn’t need to be perfect for somebody else to get something out of it. It doesn’t need to be perfect for it to help you along your own path. If you stick with it, the confidence and the greater ability to do what you envision with the medium will come.

For a long time some, friends of ours held an annual Winter Solstice potluck with performance. They usually rented out a small hall in the neighborhood. People put money in a pot to cover the cost and the food was all brought in by everyone. Homebrewed beer and wine... The amazing part was the variety show.... music, skits, jokes, poetry, tap dancing and more every year, put on by the people in the extended friends group. They were about a half generation older than my wife and I... of hippie stock and really believed in the philosophy that a community could provide its own entertainment for itself.

The same is true of so many great shows I have been to in VFW halls, community spaces, and scummy basements. Conditions do not need to be ideal. It’s better to play through a shitty PA then no PA. Working outside of ideal conditions leads to grit, resolve, and strengthening of will and courage in face of obstacles.
This essay doesn’t need to be in ideal form, either, before I share it with readers. I like to revise. Sometimes I like to revise more than I like to write the new thing. It allows me to keep fiddling. With that in mind, I am resisting endless revision here. Hence, minimal polish. Unfinished ideas. There will be time circle back to all the things I intended to write in this piece and didn’t really get to, because I went on off on some tangent. That will just be fodder for the next one.

[ Josh Datko has a great essay on the grain of soul found in art when you go on and do a thing without worrying about being totally polished.]

AS THE FIELD EXPANDS, THE SCOPE OF SUCCESS MUST BE LIMITED

Being local and staying small can also relate to finding a niche and working from the freedom of the fringe.
Working in an area that is overcrowded and overhyped, the luck needed to get work out into the world becomes greater. Where there is a lot of skill and a lot of people doing great things great with that skill, something else is needed to set one apart. Part of what is needed is a bit of luck. Part of what is needed is a unique, iconoclastic flavor.

Electronic music was in the past, a specialized field of activity, a niche area of music making. Now all kinds of people have modular setups, or are just producing music on computers at home using readily available software, or even just using programs like Suno to take the song idea from their head and make it so it can be heard. In a way, this makes that kind of production a folk art in its own right, just as collage has become since Dada and Surrealism opened that practice up to the wider public and anyone with some scissors and glue. One of the things about folk art is that there isn’t as much variation between artists. It can still be really good, and the virtuosos become known and appreciated for their skill and rise to the top of their craft. Something within their ability sets them apart from all the other people singing those same songs or making those same vaporwave beats.

The same is true of poetry. As literacy has increased, the number of writers has increased. Before, there were a few stand out poets who rose to the top in every generation. Now there are dozens. It’s much easier to get to know who the “best” poets are in a local area or scene, than it is to know the “best” in the nation, because there are so many more people writing poetry and getting it published in chapbooks, online and going to readings.

This is also why a field of creativity such as contemporary poetry and electronic music is impossible to know with the breadth that a person once could know it several decades ago.

Standing out in an overcrowded field becomes part of the game. Instead of making it big, pivoting to making it small is a way to sidestep internal creative pressure. Within the boundaries and limitations imposed by working in a smaller area and at a smaller scale, new possibilities emerge.

Another way to approach the issue is to embrace microcultures. In music, microcultures can be seen as the proliferation of genres. Your band might not be the best metal band. But they might be the best blackened sludge thrashcore. You might not be the best producer of ambient music. But you might be one of the best maker of ambient-emo, or of chiptune emo, or get known for your “hardplaza” skateboard beat productions.
In the poetry world, where free verse has flourished for decades, a poet can set themselves apart by mastering a form such as the ghazal, or as Marilyn Hacker did, the sonnet, sestina and villanelles.

Radio is another area where a person can stand apart from the podcast party. The tricky there thing is getting access to a radio station, but if you have a community station in your community, that is the place to go to build the community. With so many forgettable podcasts, it’s really something special, if you are transmitting into the aether. Plus you reach more random listeners than a focused podcast might. Some of those randos might turn in to your regular listeners.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

Another reason to celebrate the local is to become a repository of local knowledge. This is what I wanted to write the most about in this essay, actually, except I went off on a rant against LA and NYC. I plan to revisit and enlarge on this theme in a separate article now that I’ve gotten some more of the bicoastal bile out of my system.

In any place, time stretches back to untold vistas, and to know even some of the history of the land and its people, and those other people, the people we call plants and animals, gives a new sense of appreciation for the land. When we stay close to the land, connected to it, do not move far away from where we are born, we begin to sense and appreciate its longer cycles within the much smaller wheels and cycles of our own lifetime.

In this way, when we listen to what the land has to say, we in turn can become speakers for the land. Our art can be embedded with materials from the place where we live, whether those materials be wood, stone, or mineral.

Those materials might be knowledge about the quarreling between two different families and the feuds that have ensued over generations. Such a tale might get turned into a novel or a ballad. The material might be a song passed on from one person working the coal barges and the riverboats of the Ohio and Mississippi, sang to another and then another. That song gets worked into a set played at a local festival or down at the bar, and in turn inspires the people who hear it to know something more of the many stories that have flowed along those rivers.

No matter where you are, it’s possible to get into a creative flow state, to make and find opportunities for a being a local artist, poet, maker.

The great philosopher Robert Anton Wilson had an experiment in one of his books. It was about perception and how we put filters on our perception and either allow information in or block it out, depending on what he called our reality tunnel, or the filters we see the world through. His experiment was to look for quarters when out and about. If the mindset of looking for quarters and finding them was adopted, the person doing the experiment tended to find more quarters than the person who didn’t bother to look at all. It can be so when we look at the place, we call our own local. From that solid ground our work as writers, poets, musicians and artists can take root and shape.

Do we see opportunities for enrichment of our art? Do we see opportunities for the way our art can enrich the community? Do we see ways we can incorporate the history and specific knowledge unique to a place into what we do, so we can become memory keepers and sharers of knowledge to those who come after us? This is just part of the work of the local artist who has made it small.

.:. .:. .:.
Thank you to all of my paid subscribers for keeping me caffeinated!

The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.


☕️☕️☕️

The text below is transcribed from radio broadcast I picked up while on a recent time travel DX foray into one of the futures of northern Ohio, about the Lighthouse Coastal Academy, a school set up to train the mentat minds of Generation Q:

Calling all parental units! Calling all parental units!

We know you want the best for your kids and at Lighthouse Coastal Academy they receive the best: the best instructors and teachers gathered from all points across Eerie Lake Country. Our instructors have repeatedly received high accolades from the top educational journals and societies for providing classes as unique as the students who take them. But it is the students who really shine! The educational philosophy itself is built upon the best tenants from Waldorf-Montessoria, alongside access to the traditional instruction of many technical guilds, art and craft societies we partner with in our work-study program. The Lighthouse Coastal Academy is built around core principles of Love, Work, and Wisdom and we seek to develop the capacity for those all those who seek knowledge within our halls and walls.

The story behind the Light House Coastal Academy is one of reclamation. The town of Vermillion wanted to do something with its decaying Light House. There was also an old abandoned hotel on an adjacent property called the Captain’s Bell. Once destination spots that drew tourists to the area, the Captain’s Bell and Light House had become more of a blight for Vermillion. Town leaders decided to turn these properties into a college. The first wave of teachers and students helped fix up the places. They attended classes in rooms filled with leftover hotel furniture. Anything else they needed they built out of materials taken from the bin. It was all very much a Do It Yourself endeavor. In time the Lighthouse was restored and its lamp was relit. Since that time, the lamp of knowledge has never gone out, and it has become a beacon drawing seekers from all around the Lake Countries and beyond.

Though there are many courses and preset learning spirals available for the students to choose from, it is our evolving self-designed curriculum that remains the most popular. We realize that each student is on an individual journey, and we excel by helping them excel. Our decentralized network of mentors and teachers are there to act as guides and resources as the students flow through an ecological web of learning and knowledge. We also believe that education should never be separated from useful work in the world.

And though the lighthouse on our campus is a kind of tower, it is no ivory tower. We have seen in our history books how the college and university systems of the 21st century imploded. The causes were many, but were in part due to a tendency that privileged theory over practice. Academia had become completely unglued from teaching anything useful, and existed within its own self-referential echo chamber. Unmoored from reality, and after many scandals, financial, and otherwise, the majority of these institutions slipped into a neglect from which they never recovered. Our work-study program is an antidote to that. All of our students are required to get there hands dirty in practical jobs in positions throughout the Lake Countries.

All of our learning spirals, whether preset or self-designed, have an emphasis on interdisciplinary synthesis. No field of knowledge exists alone. One spiral of study leads to another, and as these interweave and interlace, they become a braided knot. On this knot the glass beads of learning can be slid. It is from this approach of synthesis and recombinant aesthetics that several of our students began working out methods for bringing the Glass Bead Game of Herman Hesse out of the realm of fiction and into the world of form. With these scholars early success in this matter the Lighthouse Coastal Academy has become the host of the biannual Glass Bead Game festival.

One of our students most beloved of interconnected spirals are those in the harmonic science grouping: music, astronomy, and geometry. Those who have made a thorough study in these areas have gone on to the great work of unleashing frozen music in the form of public buildings. The Akron Amphitheater was one such piece of frozen music designed by graduate Genevive Kaspel. The specific psychoacoustics within this building have been most useful for the all night sleep concerts held there used to enhance collective dreaming. Students of the art and science of radio are also known to participate in the harmonic science spiral. The voices and ideas of our students are well known throughout Eeerie country as they have full access to our campus AM, FM, and Shortwave stations, all operating under the WLCA call sign.

Speaking of communications, the communications spiral focuses on everything from radio design to broadcasting, analog internetwork analysis, and how to run and operate a successful amateur press association. Hands on learning is a must, and those interested in the textual side of things will love making their own newspapers and zines using our collection of antique movable type printers and mimeograph machines.

The natural world and local ecology of the Lake Eerie watershed are never far from our minds. Spirals focusing on bioremediation, water science, and agricultural studies -everything from permaculture, organic gardening, food forestry to urban farming and deep ecology- are available. A full course catalog and representative syllabi are available upon request.

It’s not all just hard work and study at the Lighthouse Coastal Academy. A rich tradition of sports and games permeates the air, to say nothing pranks. For those who want to get physical our Three Sided Football team is always open to anyone who wants to learn the art of goal defense. Our hiking and rowing clubs are also ever eager for new members. These only scratch the surface of clubs and societies created by our students and faculty, and we can’t even say much about those of, shall we say, a more clandestine nature!

Since our first days when the Captain’s Bell and the Lighthouse were our only buildings, we have managed to acquire further properties from the town, and have created a large library and laboratory. Your student will have access to these and all of the other amenities we have to offer. The Lighthouse Coastal Academy has brought new life back to Vermillion and the town is now filled with cafes, cabarets, music venues, clubs, and coffee houses. Many of the major and minor guilds now have a presence in Vermillion as representatives have come to be close by to the students who wish to learn from them. These guild members have opened many store fronts to distribute glasswork, woodwork, electrical circuits, spice, maps and more. Safe and walkable, Vermillion is only a short train ride away from the cities of Sandusky and Cleveland, and from these hubs other points around Lake Eerie Country, the Lake Countries as a whole, and points beyond.

Take a spiral ride with us into the realm of Love, Work and Wisdom. For more information please send us a letter, radiogram request, or for those with telephone service, call our offices at 1-888-555-CSTL, that’s 1-888-555-2785.

This message has been brought to you by the WLCA Radio League of Journeyers and by the Lake Eerie School of Retrocognition.

.:. .:. .:.
The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.

☕️☕️☕️

New World Records and the American Experimental Tradition part 4

​It’s hard enough to be a composer. Have you ever tried writing music down on paper from your head and then finding, and asking, a bunch of highly trained and skilled musicians to play the stuff you heard inside your head? The opportunities to write a symphony or chamber work were there- finding the opportunity to get it performed and played, another matter all together. It was hard enough to do this as a man. If you happened to be female, well, the opportunities were even fewer.

Electronic music offered a workaround for this. It was in part why so many composers got into the electronic music game. Sure, equipment could be scarce or expensive, but at its most basic, the tape machines, a composer could still get to work crafting their own material. It was also part of the reason many women composers in the 20th century took to electronics: it was a way to bypass the barriers to entry and just start making what they wanted. Many of these works ended up being for recorded media, as well as being intermedia.

In this post I am going to look at just one album, a compilation, and introduce some of the wonderful women composers. Consider these some of the founding mothers of electronic music in America. The album is called Women in Electronic Music 1977, but it has the prominent subtitle, New Music for Electronic & Recorded Media.

As Charles Amirkhanian wrote in the original liner notes, “The music on this album exhibits an exciting, wide-open, freewheeling approach to the medium of electronic music which has come to be typical of this genre in the late 1970s. No longer are composers obsessively concerned with the agonizing, expressionistic, and purely ‘electronic’ (synthesized) sound formulas which marked much of this music composed between the mid Fifties and the late Sixties. Instead, today we have composers willing to mix media and sonic materials in thoroughly inventive ways to achieve ends which are new-sounding, and often more engaging, than that of the ‘academic’ avant-garde.”

By combining mediums and genres, the work here is often healing, humorous, thought provoking, and at times transcendent. Megan Roberts work takes in the world of rock music, lending an entry point for listeners unused to the sometimes uncompromising sound worlds associated with experimental music. Laurie Anderson’s emphasis on poetic narrative gives listeners a net of words to latch onto in the sonic sea of miasmic bliss. Other pieces range from sinewave meditations to exploratory field recordings.
​
The entire album is a snapshot of an important and fertile time in the arts. Looking at what other women artists were doing around the same time gives something of the flavor of the era. Joanna Russ had just published her science fiction novel The Female Man in 1975. It’s a tale following the parallel lives of four women in universes parallel. Each world has different ideas and notions about gender roles and shows how those societies operate according to those roles. In 1978, Russ came out wit her short novel, We Who Are About To… Camouflaged into the typical survival story of a group of spacer astronauts colonizing a new world, is a story of what happens when long-term survival is threatened. The men think the only way to continue is to impregnate the unnamed narrator. As the tensions build, she reaches the point where she has to defend herself against rape, and kills the men, before going hungry, and ultimately (spoilers) ending her own life. A lot of critics panned the book at the time, but Samuel R. Delany, whose critical imagination is itself unparalleled, suggested in his introduction to a new edition that the book was “a damningly fine analysis of the mechanics of political and social decay,” and that “Russ suggests that the quality of life is the purpose of living, and reproduction only a reparative process to extend that quality—and not the point of life at all... only feudal societies can really believe wholly that reproduction... is life’s real point.” (Emphasis mine.) Being itself gives its own meaning to life.

​The 1970s also saw Kathy Acker’s literary rise that would culminate in the 1980s. Acker was a experimental novelist who was as transgressive in her words as was Delany. She made extensive use of her own biographical material, and sent it spinning through a centrifuge of cut-up techniques and other ways of working with words as she grappled with sexuality, trauma, language, identity, and an ever-simmering rebellion.

​In the visual arts Cindy Sherman was shaking things up with her photography, and she herself was the subject of much of those photos. Transformation was the name of the game, and she transformed herself continually, shedding her skin like a snake through the use of makeup, prosthetics, wigs, ornate costumes and elaborate sets. At the center of these transformations was the detournement of an array of female stereotypes culled from popular culture and history.

The sounds heard on this album can be thought of as a corollary to these other kind of avantgarde and artistic activity in other media, and they are all from women pioneering their own paths in the last decade before the Reaganomic nightmare unfurled.

I continue to find inspiration in the works of artists such as these. Yet there are many amazing women electronic musicians working right now. That’s why I want to tell you about this year’s Oram Awards. The awards were named after the founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram. The award exists as “a platform to elevate the work and voices of women and gender non-conforming artists innovating in sound, music and related technology.” For details on how to submit your music check out oramawards.com You will have until July 19th to get something in, and you don’t have to be any previously released music or work.

THE SPECULATIVE SPHERES OF JOHANA M. BEYER

One of the charges that gets leveled against the kind of music often made by avantgarde composers is that it is too academic. That no one outside the academy has any use for listening to such “music,” that it is all just stuff for the brain and little for the heart and emotions that music has so long sought to stir.
Music will forever stimulate the heart and music, but tastes vary, and not all music stirs people the same way. Some music was designed to stimulate the intellect, the mental body, and this is as valid as popular love ballads and dance floor hits.

Some music will forever be speculative. According to composer Phil Legard, “speculative music combines metaphysics, cosmology and acoustic science to relate harmonics and tuning to the music of the spheres, and the moral qualities which those spheres were believed to affect in men and women.” While speculative music has its origins in ancient times and millennia past, the appeal of speculative music for composers and listeners has never disappeared, even if its appeal is a minority taste.
​
Speculative music appears on this compilation album showcasing the contributions women composers have made to the ars electronica, because even in the age of the machine, musicians have never stopped turning their ears to the music of the spheres. In the opening piece on this album Johanna M. Beyer tunes into the cosmic celestial movements in the heavens above us.

It is fitting that her 1938 composition starts off the album. It is one of the first known works scored for electronic music written by a female composer.

Beyer was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1888 but emigrated to the U.S. sometime in the late 1920s or early thirties. She was a pianist but in 1934 she took the percussion class that one of the ubermensch of American experimentalism, Henry Cowell, taught at the New School for Social Research, aka, the University in Exile, aka The New School University.

The New School was a very experimental social milieu indeed. It was founded in 1919 by a group of grouch, dissatisfied intellectuals who were sick of the bulbous bureaucracy and blasted biliousness of so-called higher ed in America. Among its luminary instigators were John Dewey, Thorstein Velben, and Charles Beard. It started off as a night-school where lectures could be taken in for a modest fee. Since the New School was not in the business of handing out degrees, they were free to dispense with any kind of admission requirement. In places such as these adventurous music teachers could teach a curriculum of their own calibration.

Beyer had a very close friendship with Cowell, perhaps a romantically intimate relationship, but her life was intertwined with others reveling in the modernism of those past times. She knew John Cage, theosophist Dane Rudhyar, and the folklorist and musicologist John Seeger, his wife, the ultramodernist native Ohioan, Ruth Crawford.

Charles and Ruth had a daughter, Peggy Seeger, and some guy named Pete. Their family was significantly involved in the folk music revival. Ruth had worked closely with John and Alan Lomax, and Peggy went on to marry British folknik Ewan MacColl. In a roundabout way all of this tangential information leads us to the contribution Laurie Spiegel made on the Women in Electronic Music Album.

LAURIE SPIEGELS FOLKSY GROOVE

Spiegel was one of the key composers exploring the new frontiers of science and music at Bell Labs was Laurie Spiegel. The year was 1973, and at age twenty-eight she was already an accomplished musician with a restless curiosity when she started working with the GROOVE interactive compositional soft-ware. Having honed her skill and ability through scholarly devotion to musical practice and study, she was the kind of person who could see the creative potential in the new tools the facility was creating and make something timeless.
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This compilation features the first movement of her Appalachian Grove, made like much of her other early electronic output at Bell Labs. The piece here is built around folk harmonies and shows how electronic music can also be folk music, parsing out themes as pastoral and rural even with the use of machines.

​Like many musicians before her, Laurie Spiegel had been fascinated by the Pythagorean dream of a music of the spheres. When she set about turning Kepler’s speculative seventeenth century composition into music, she had no idea her music would actually be traveling through the spheres. Putting forth Kepler’s third law of planetary motion, Harmonices Mundi was based on the varying speeds of orbit of the planets around the sun. He wanted to be able to hear “the celestial music that only God could hear,” as Spiegel said, continuing, “Kepler had written down his instructions but it had not been possible to actually turn it into sound at that time. But now we had the technology. So I programmed the astronomical data into the computer, told it how to play it, and it just ran.” Her realization of Johann Kepler’s Harmoni Mundi, a cut of which is featured on the Golden Record sent into outer-space on the unmanned Voyager exploratory craft.

(I have explored Spiegel’s work in further detail in my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory.)

IN THE FLUX WITH ANNEA LOCKWOOD

If all roads lead to fluxus, it should be no surprise to find those who have a connection to Fluxus on this album as well. Annea Lockwood is the one to represent. It makes sense that Fluxus would leave behind a trace of inspiration here. On this record the idea of electronic music is considered as a medium, but it is just one media among many, and many of the people documented were inspired to combine media with the electronic music. Indeed, this can be one of the effects of electronic music in general. Electronic music is a malleable medium, built up from electrons and shaping of sound waves, as such it is relatively easy to mix and combine it with other mediums. So much so, electronic sounds have become the background music of our time.

Lockwood was born in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1939, moved to England in the beginning of the sixties where she studied at the Royal College of Music, and attended the legendary Darmstadt course, and completed her studies at Cologne, stomping ground of Karlheinz Stockhausen. She took courses in electronic music with Gottfried Michael Koenig, who was at the head of the WDR Electronic Music Studio. Lockwood was very hip to what was going on back in the states, though too, and felt a kinship with the people who had put together the ONCE Festival (Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley) and those who later became the Sonic Arts Union (Mumma, Ashley, David Behrman and Alvin Lucier) as well as Pauline Oliveros.

In 1973 composer Ruth Anderson (see below) invited her to teach at Hunter College, CUNY, and so Lockwood moved to the United States. During the sixties she worked on the Glass Concerts.

During the late 1960s, Lockwood created works such as the Glass Concerts, and audio-visual performance work for amplified glass that exuded otherworldly timbres. My first introduction to her music was a recording of the A Sound Map of the Hudson River, made from extensive field recordings along different locations of that great body of water.

Perhaps her most fluxus feeling work is the series of Piano Transplants she did between 1969-82. She had been inspired by the work of cardiac surgeon Christian Barnard who pioneered the realm of heart transplants. For her work, she took broken down and disused pianos and further burned, drowned, beached and planted them in an English garden. Pianos continue to be burned around the globe as part of the adjacent Piano Burning work.

In the seventies she started to get deeper into the possibilities of field recording. Lawrence English, who reissued the late 1975 work World Rhythms for his Room40 label, an excerpt of which is featured on this comp, put it this way: “It represents one of the first creative works exploring the potentials of field recordings in a multichannel setting. It is a landmark work and a composition that, on its 50th anniversary, has gently carried forward over the decades, but arguably now is only starting to come into true focus, and be understood for exactly how revolutionary it was.

World Rhythms was a work concerned with a practice of sustained listening into the world, and beyond. It expanded outward from many of the compositions and themes Annea Lockwood had been exploring since the 1960s. It sought to take those learnings and apply them to a new set of terrains and circumstances. Moreover, it suggested a sensing of sound that was drawn from profound curiosity, matched only by patience.”
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That sense of patient, slow, deep listening is reflected throughout her work. In 2016 she created a tribute Pauline Oliveros, a graphic score called “Bayouborne, for Pauline” that maps six of the converging bayous around Houston, Texas, the birthplace of Oliveros.

THE SIDEBAND BUTTERFLYS OF PAULINE OLIVEROS
Pauline Oliveros is another artist featured on this compilation. How could she not be? Her influence remains pervasive across the field of improvisation, electronic music and her own efforts at establishing the practice of deep listening, continues to inspire new generations of sound explorers.
As I mentioned in one of the recent pieces I wrote on her work, this piece, “Bye Bye Butterfly” was my first introduction to her work, and the creative use of sideband technique in audio, still blows me away every time I listen.

(Read my other articles on Pauline Oliveros:  A Deep Listening Starter Pack and Slowing Down, Listening Deep)

THE ELECTROACOUSTIC PUNK OF MEGAN ROBERTS

The burgeoning punk ethos of the seventies and the legacy of rock and roll gave Megan Roberts one strand of her inspiration. She married that with electroacoustics, creating an experimental work that also has a touchstone in the world of semi-popular culture.

“I Could Sit Here all Day” is full of aggressive wailing and screaming. It’s best played with the volume cranked to eleven. There is a raw, ritualistic feeling to it, just like there is to the primitive convulsions and gyrations of punk. We can see in her a parallel to that of Diamanda Galas.

Roberts was born in New York on October 12th of 1952, and then moved to California while still a baby. Decades later she was studying under Robert Ashley at Mills College in Oakland where the experimental scene was in full flux. There it was all about multimedia exploration in the realms of audio, video, dance and theater, melting into that swirling chaos, the decadent and primal rhythms of rock and rolls tribal beat.

In 1976 she had created a work using unichore- ovideoelectrobiosonics called “Suite for a Small Chamber.” What is a unichore? It is a kind of dance choreography where the body movements of the dancer are wired to electronic devices to trigger synthesizers and tape-loops. The ovideoelectrobiosonics is reference to her work combining bird and animal sounds, live audio and video feeds, along with other biological elements. “Factory” is a video she made that came out in 1976, and for this piece she utilizes the technique of strobosonic photophonos-copy. In other words, it’s a percussion piece where ultra-fast cuts from one image to another. The colors and motion map onto sound as rhythm and timbre. The work recalls the film Ballet Mecanique by Fernand Léger and the filmmaker Dudley Murphy that set the music of George Antheil into a Dadaist centrifuge.
​
“I Could Sit Here All Day” is scored for birds, drums, and disembodied human voices, and is a descent into preterhuman realms of consciousness.

ON POINT WITH RUTH ANDERSON
Evelyn Ruth Anderson was born in Kalispell, Montana on the spring equinox in 1928. She spent two decades studying music. Among her teachers were the legendary Nadia Boulanger and Darius Milhaud, whose modernist influences extended vastly. She also hung out at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center where she studied under Vladimir Ussachevsky. Among her paying gigs she worked as an arranger for NBC-TV, doing compositions for their programs, and later worked for the Lincoln Center Theater. Artists got to eat.
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Her collage piece SUM (State of the Union Message) is included on the Lesbian American Composers collection, issued by the label CRI (Composers Recordings Incorporated -many of the titles by this label later got swooped up by New World Records to keep them in print).

​SUM is a masterclass in commercial audio collage on her piece “SUM.” It is literally commercial, because its source material is made entirely from commercials. In this piece you can hear such wonderful juxtapositions as “America’s favorite snack: Geritol.” Supposedly it also mimics a speech given by Richard Nixon. This is a precursor to the willfully disdainful and humorous works of people like Wayne Butane. DUMP is another one in the same vein, both from 1970.

Points is quite different from these collage works, and is a minimalist drone piece using pure sine tones. From an electronic point of view, these are the building blocks of all sound. The person who crafts with sine tones crafts their own sonic universe, and she was such a craftswoman. She died in 2019 shortly after she approved the test pressings for an LP of her work, entitled Here. The record was put out by Arc Light Editions in February 2020.

THE VIRAL NARRATIVES OF LAURIE ANDERSON

The last two pieces on the album are from another Anderson, this time Laurie Anderson. More than anyone else on the album, she has made her imprint further into popular culture. Like David Bowie, and her late husband Lou Reed, she embraced the androgynous, and played roles in her performance art where androgyny was showcased.

​Again, she has worked across the multimedia spectrum. Born in 1947, her early artistic training started with the violin and sculpture. Her recorded work and performances have focused on the poetic power of language, electronic technology as artistic tools, and idiosyncratic use of visual imagery.
This album features two of her early pieces, “New York Social Life” and “Time to Go.”

n the 1980s she catalpulted out of the insular art worlds and into expanded public consciousness through her UK chart hitting single “O Superman,” part of her larger expansive work United States Live, though it was featured on her debut album Big Science. United States Live can be considered as her early magnum opus (others would follow). Through spoken word, animated vignettes, and performance art and strange sounds she gives her impressions about the vagaries of life life in the United States.
Thus Anderson can be seen as completing this electronic circuit of American music. Her concert film Home of the Brave would come out in 1986. Her unique voice and interpretation of the American spirit warrants further exploration and contemplation.
.:. .:. .:.

Read the Rest of the New World Records and the American Experimental Tradition Series:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

In other news, our 11 year old cat Flynn was getting sick over the past two weeks and we just learned has diabetes. You really know you are living in America when even your pets get diabetes. We just got hit with a hefty vet bill, so if you have any spare change to throw into my coffee jar here here it'd be much appreciated.

​​The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.

☕️☕️☕️

I was new at the refujaunt camp, so I tended to keep my mouth shut, at least with regards to casual conversation. I didn’t want to get kicked out on account of anything I said. My mouth had a way of getting in front of me. That can be a tough thing for a translator, as I’d often want to interject. The way I was raised you had to shout over top of all the other sibs and aunts and cousins if you ever stood a chance of being heard. Funny too, that somewhere along the way I did learn to listen, at least enough to translate. It’s a good skill and kept me out of some real trouble, out of the firing line, and there was no shortage of lines drawn in the sand, and fire on both sides of them, when I was coming up.

I spoke myself three languages, Spanish, Mandarin, and English, but I also knew Sign Language. Not to mention the language of signs. That had come from my conscription, seeing as how I wasn’t fit for much else with my acute muscle pain on account of the Dengue fever I’d had as a kid. It seemed like the mosquitoes followed me north when I left the swamps of Tennessy.

I’d been put in charge of minding after a girl we all knew as Zelzemel. That was the name we gave her. She refused to talk, but knew the rudiments of sign, and I’d been able to coax some of her story from her. She was just one of many orphans. Just one of many who had been separated from her parents by forces outside of her control. She’d gone to sleep in her People’s Army of Missouri issued canvas tent straightaway after the cornbread and pinto beans had been cleaned off her plate. She was an eater, I’ll give her that. Not everyone who ended up in this place was at all healthy. Some had the wasting sickness, no appetite to speak of, anything they put inside their bodies got chucked back up. The medics and nurses thought it was the chemical exposures, depending on where they were from, or some new hatched virus if they couldn’t figure it out otherwise and ways.

I’d grown used to the girl, but I hadn’t signed up to be anyone’s nanny. Yet she did need my services as translator. On the other hand, if she’d just deal with the cards she’d been dealt, and just speak, then things would be different.

I was minding my own business around one of the fires, keeping my fingers warm by clutching a mug of mulligan stew, when a new batch of refujaunts meandered into camp, led over by our chief. They were a raggedy and despondent looking bunch but not many people sought solace with us if they were flush with the clink of coin and on the up-and-up. I figured they must have hopped off that train I heard whistling by not more than an hour ago, and had been drawn in by the light of our fires. One of the new ones was more animated than the rest. She had long wispy blondish hair, on the dishwater dirty side. Her face was full of grit and hard determination.

“This one can’t talk,” Murrie said. “For all that she’s been gesticulating like a mad woman. These others seem to think she’s looking for someone. So come on now, Bobbie. It’s time you earned your keep.”

I scoffed at that last remark even though I knew he was joking. My keep wasn’t much, and my name wasn’t Bobbie, but he called everyone Bobbie, he was always forgetting their names. It wasn’t like my skills got me much more than the daily plate of beans, same as all the rest. There were other perks though, but I can’t get into those here. They are kind of like on a need-to-know basis anyway.

“You got it sir!” I saluted the chief with mock respect and signed for the lady to come sit on down by the fire.
This is the story she unspooled for me, and what a sad tale it was.

Daniela’s Story

My dada cut my tongue out when I was twelve. I’d already lost a lot of my hearing by then, from the way he boxed my ears. My mother was powerless to stop him, as she was half mad, incoherent, from soljuice, and nepenthe when she could get the stuff, which wasn’t all that much, the soljuice was bad enough. I’m sure by that point her brain was cobwebbed and dusted. Because dada was the dealer, that was the only reason she was around. It’s a wonder she ever took a pittance on me, as she wasn’t the only one he kept. I had two other mama’s but they made sure to let me know every chance they had that they weren’t my real mamas.

I’d go out and play and be gone for hours, for as long as I dared. I’m surprised I hadn’t left before I was sixteen when I finally did get the nerve to go. I first met Arnie in the woods behind the houses between our street and Cyclorama Drive. There was an abandoned concrete bridge there that used to connect our streets together, but parts of it came down in the floods and mudslides. It used to cross Valley View Road, which went back to being a creek more or less, with trees of heaven coming up from all over out of the concrete long before I was born. Most of the houses on Massona had rotted and crumbled and that was my playground. There was some other woods there too, on the sides of either hill behind the molded homes that looked like pus sores along the valley. Some of the old trees I liked to talk to and they talked back to me. Old Man Nik the Oak, he used to tell me things. He told me to go, to get my stuff and get the hell out of the flop shop I’d been born into. Besides Old Nik, Arnie must have been my only friend in the world.

One day Arnie and I got to kissing, it was the first time for each of us, and it was something special, there underneath Old Man Nik, the only one who saw us do it. It was after then he brought me his trinket, said he loved me.

His dada was a repo man, often working out on the old highway between Cortland and Syracuse. He’d repo some fine things off any high minded dandy he pleased. One day he brought me a trinket and I weren’t durned if it was some kinda silver, all shiny like an old soul caught in metal.

It was real dumb of me to tell mama. Don’t know why I felt any obligation to her but I did. I’d come home and take care of her, after the soljuice had worn off and her lips were half blue, covered in red spittle. I’d giver her little snorts of the revivver and she’d wake up enough to go into a lull. Then I’d tried to feed her some eggs if we had any or corn mush. Sometimes Arnie would give me some racoon meat, but mama didn’t hardly have any kind of appetite except for the soljuice. Whatever was left my other mas would fight over, if they was in an eating mood, and of course I had to cook for dada, and it wasn’t no lol if his dinner was burned.

Lucky he weren’t home all the time but down at the dog pit, gambling over them dogs, seeing which one would live. He really liked himself a cock fight too. Or when they made those broken soljuice men fight for a shot, he liked that too. There weren’t much of a fight he didn’t like.

Now some of the folk who lived over on Cyclorama said Arnie was a headcase. At the time I didn’t know what it meant, but later I knew. I figured it out. He just didn’t think like other people, and it sometimes caught him off guard, as he didn’t know what to say or do. We’d meet down by the bridge as often as we could, and sometimes hunted for crawdads together. They lived in the pools where the asphalt had sunk as the creek took over the abandoned street.

Arnie’s dada gave him lots of goodies, and every once in awhile, he’d get enough to buy me some candy nuts or a little cheese to take home. Then the heat started overtaking our bodies in the summertime when we were thirteen or fourteen. We made ourselves a nest there under the deep copse of honeysuckle, the best smell around. All those kisses had led to other things before, but now they really led to something. I was careful of my moontime and I stole some of this drink my mamas had that was supposed to keep the babes away.
It worked for awhile anyway.

Then my mama had another one of her close calls, almost died before I found her and gave her the revivver.
I’d gone and gotten a candle with some words written on it and oils. It was dedicated to Lady Maria of the Stars. But dada came home and saw my praying with the candle, chanting the prayer just as I’d been told and he blew out the candle and threw it down the hill in our backyard where the rest of the garbage was, and whomped me on the ear over and over again. That was when the rest of the sounds started to disappear. I’m surprised I made it through, but I think Lady Maria was watching over me, if not my mama anymore.

I wasn’t there when she died. I was in the woods again talking to Old Man Nik. I felt bad always pouring out my woes to the Old Man, but he listened better than anyone could, better than even Arnie, who understood me without words. Dada came looking for me, which had never happened before, and he heard me talking to the tree, talking about him, talking about mama, talking about Arnie, and how I was scared because my blood was three weeks late. Talking about what the hell I was gonna do if I was with child.

I never even felt the blow come to my head because I was so wrapped in my own thoughts and mind, and I hadn’t heard him creeping up on me. I woke up at the house, and I was all tied up in a chair, and he was yelling at me for talking to a devil tree. That I was a witch and I’d cursed him and mama. He’d blamed me for his losing streak betting on the dog fights. He was blaming me that his rival Zane had stolen most of his soljuice bidness.

I tried to protest and he said only one way to stop me using my magic was to cut out my tongue, so I could speak no more spells on him or anyone. My own mama was dead in the other room, she’d taken her last drink of the juice, and I hadn’t been around this time to bring he back from the edge of the forever sleep. My other mamas held my mouth open as dada sauntered over with his buck knife. I struggled, but they held open my jaws even as I tried to bite. After the cut, when blood was spilling down my mouth and all over my greasy shirt and skirt, he held it in front of me as he railed, talking about how I’d never talk back to him again, how the devil would never speak through me again, how I would never be able to cast another spell.

I ran down to the lady I bought the candle from and she knew how to cauterize my tongue.

My other mama’s had built a pyre in the backyard and burned mama before I ever got home.

The next day when everyone was partied out and asleep I crept out back down to Old Man Nik. Arnie came along and I showed him, my tongue never to meet his again, but I still had my lips. He told me he was going to take me away. His own father had been missing for a few weeks, probably killed on one of his repos.

That night we left for the coast where Arnie thought he could make a living as a salvage trawler. We left right then and right there, it weren’t as if we had anyone to tell, or any stuff to gather. It was a long long walk but we had some luck on us then. That’s when we met Sister Argyle of the Cord Cutters Guild and she started teaching me the sign language. She came around quite often to check on us in the encampments surrounding Hartford, who were something of her flock, and she made a point to visit us. It was Argyle who delivered Anzelma.

I can proves she’s mine. We have a birthmark in the same place, on the left shoulder. It’s part of why my father thought I was a witch, having the mark of Cain and all on me since birth.

Arnie brought in enough to keep us mostly fed. It was better than the life I’d had growing up, and we were happy, but it was hard. Then he got cut on something, wading out in the tidewaters scrappoing, pulling in whatever he could find. It was a bad cut in his leg, and he kept it hidden from me, not wanting me to know. Two days later it festered and he was feverish, and something was in his blood. I fetched Sister Argyle and she tried with all she had, but the fever and infection spread and he burned himself out. She seen something like it before, a mixture of all the chemicals and bio contaminants pulsing together in the hot soup of the intertidal zones when the summer heat got to a rolling boil.
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I didn’t know what to do after Arnie was gone. He’d always been my protector, my provider. Argyle helped Arnie transition, helped me build a pyre I got to light myself this time. She knew my plight and said their might be a place for me working for the Cord Cutters. I took her up on it, and stayed there for a time.

When Sister Argyle was called to go to a nearby town to help with an outbreak, I went with her. Two nights into the trip the three of us were camped in a large parking lot at one of the empty strips of stores. The sound of motors woke me up and set me on a path to disturbance. I couldn’t hear them all that well, as most of my hearing was gone by then from the repeated slaps to the head, but I could feel the reh-reh-reh of motorbikes outside, vibrating through the dirt and land.

Anzelma was only five at the time. As they got closer we were running and hiding, inside the abandoned store. I hid her under some rags, and put one of the fallen pieces of moldy drywall over her and then I let myself have them, hoping she wouldn’t cry and give herself away.

I don’t even want to tell you what happened when Jimbo and his crew got a hold of us. Eventually Sister Argyle and I did get away from them, and we spent our time searching for Anzelma to no avail, and I worked with her and learned, and one day she got sick with a fever that never came down when we was tending down by the intertidal. I didn’t know if I had what it took to be a Cord Cutter, so I lit another candle to Maria of the Stars and started combing the land again looking for Anzelma. In between then and now all kinds of different things happened. I was traveling with these here refujaunts, tending to them as best I could with the weeds I was shown, and we all hopped a train.

.:. .:. .:.
When she was done telling her story, I wen’t over to Zezel’s tent, rather Anzelma’s I should say. I gently woke her up and bid her to come out to the fire. She was hesitant and I understood her reluctance. The fire was usually no hang out spot for kids. It was the place where old fogies recounted their own youthful foibles. There weren’t many others her age at all in the refujaunt camp. Those who were less than teeners had a tight leash kept on them, if they had any kind of parental authority over them at all. There were plenty of kids who had run away from a mom or a dad high on soljuice. My own authority over this child was about to end.
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When she finally saw I wasn’t going to leave her alone and came to the fire, and she saw her mother there, and her mother saw her daughter, and they were reunited, no further words needed to be spoken or signed. Everything they had to say to each other was done in quietude, and for that, no one needed any translation.

A Secret History of the LOUTS Research Unit

Ahistorical Immaterialism is a temporal theory about the way that immaterial forces make impacts on the physical plane and manifest throughout human society at all levels. First postulated by ancient shamans, mages, priestesses and priests in times immemorial, the idea that forces of the unseen beyond the ken of the rational mind might just have something to do with the way history appears to play out from our time-bound perspective, has once again been gaining traction as the limits to rationality come into the sight of society at large.

One of the key ideas of Ahistorical Immaterialism is the postulation that events on higher planes of reality do not need to have “happened” or will “happen” in the same “time zone” of physical manifestation to have an impact on things that are happening in what human’s experience as “now.” The energy from a supernova that exploded thousands of light years ago may just now be hitting our planet after all. Its effect is no less apparent in the day-to-day goings on of your average shop keeper, but it still remains. The same is true of those beings gathered inside the timeless inner library of the upper astral plane, who might release a book down into the dreamworld, from what in our perspective, might have been a thousand years ago, but it takes an artist or scribe until “now” to pluck the relevant ideas out of the aether and brings them to fruition in so-called present time through the work of the quill.

But where did the theoretical underpinnings of Ahistorical Immaterialism come from to begin with? (Besides the proverbial psychedelic campfires and shaman sessions of the ancient past.) In order to satisfy the rational mind about irrationality, a theory was needed and to that end, a group of dissident fringe intellectuals came to the fore and answered the call. These new-yet-timeless ideas about Ahistorical Immaterialism started to sprout around the end of the last millennium and in its first decade, but only in a small group of weirdos who liked to hang out on online message boards.

Theorist and researcher Sardaku Sawai was a formative member of this renegade group who became something of a cybernetically inclined research unit when they all started working together. He was teaching at the Free School of Momentary Cognition in Gary, Indiana when he met Amity MacHale. The Free School had been set up by wealthy folks who had escaped from the Chicago suburbs to start a new life for themselves in a place most other people were actually trying to get out of, but who did not want their kids to go to the local public schools. But that’s another story. In Saradaku’s free time, tired from leading field trips into the ruins of the Midwest rust belt, she would go online to try and find people who shared their quirky interests. Eventually they stumbled across Amity.

Amity was a historian without a job, but was supported by her wealthy parents who were corporate lawyers in Bentonville, Arkansas. She had recently published a livejournal post called Slaking the Thirst for Rational Cause and Effect in Historical Analysis. This was just the kind of thing Sawai was interested in and the two hit off, and started chatting on IRC.

Even though they met through cyber systems, they were quick to realize the Internet itself was not all it was cracked up to be, even as it allowed the spread of their ideas and the finding of the others.

Slaking the Thirst became the driving force in determining the methods and ideas that would synchronistically converge around the strange attractor of what came to be called Ahistorical Immaterialism.
Music critic and redoubtable raver from Detroit, Marc E. Piscator, also started logging on to the webwork of messages boards that became the initial hub for the movement. His analysis of so called “Hauntological Graffiti” (and his paper of the same name) became another node in what was an emerging field of research. A few other intellectuals, inside and outside the academy, came to be a part of the loose association, and it wasn’t long before they formalized their emerging group as the LOUTS, Lurkers Outside Time/Space.

The LOUTS held their first virtual conference in October of 2001. It was not lost on them that a hole in the pattern of the future had been ripped open by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. What came in its aftermath, particularly the further enforcement of the burgeoning surveillance state, in the U.S., was a focus of much of their research at the time. They were also interested in the negative effects of corporate capitalism, and what to do about it in their version of the then present, but they were also just as averse to crony communism, and so the theories of Marx and Engels held virtually no appeal. It was their search for something else that led them further explorations of Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy. This was because quite a few of the members had been dissident psychoanalysts. They were far more attracted to the lineage of Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich in psychology than that of B.F. Skinner and his reductionist worldview.

While they deeply respected the work of Wilhelm Reich and his formulation of the life force as orgone, they weren’t always as convinced about his avowed socialism. Yet it was while they were doing some charity work bringing orgone accumulators to the inner-city urban gardens of Gary to help boost vegetable production that Stevie Brooks had an out of body experience. His spirit guide during the experience transported him to a realm of oracle scrolls where the words and messages were not written at all in any kind of linear order, but were instead made by a more metaphysically advanced form of William S. Burroughs cut-up method. Brooks returned from this voyage with a seed planted inside him and from that he wrote the book Clockwork Cronyism in Corporate Capitalism and Communism. It was also at that point he could no longer deny something existed inside of him beyond just his physical body.
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A complete kundalini awakening experience then unfolded with the blossoming of his third eye.

The book starts from a consideration of how time is completely different on the astral plane and in the dream world, and how yet the astral and the dream world still have major effects upon events in the material world. From their it is argued that immaterial events outside of time and space have direct impacts upon what is perceived as time and space now. Only this isn’t how it really is, only how are brains sort it out so we don’t get fried by the overload of too much sensory input. As other hangers on of the movement started adding their own writings and critiques it led to the further development of Ahistorical Immaterialism within this strange milieu. Another key aspect of the book was how the creation of clocks had balkanized the minds of humans to accept the working conditions brought on by both capitalism and communism.

To get out of this conundrum, the LOUTS investigated various ways to move beyond the limits of the dialectic. Asger Jorn’s triolectic system was tried out, and once it was tied in with homemade analog ternary computers, the fun really got cracking and cranked up among the LOUTS. Triolectical Immaterialism thus became a subfield of the research and activity.

Ahistorical immaterialism thus dispenses in many cases with logic altogether, yet at other times, goes beyond the polarizing rhetoric associated with binaries, and applies the logic of triolectical immaterialism to human civilization. This then began to have economic implications.

All human beings must engage in economic activity for the necessities of life.​

In the writings of Karl Marx he identified four modes of production that humanity has already used: hunting and gathering (sometimes called primitive communism), slavery, feudalism (serfdom), and capitalism. Then his big idea: communism. He hadn’t foreseen, however, that just as capitalism created a new class of people, industrial workers and their CEOs, the communist also created their own social order with their apparatchiks who never did any work. He also never foresaw how many trust fund kids doing bong hits and playing video games would be the main promoters of communism.
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Clearly a different way was needed. This was when the LOUTS realized since a lot of stuff didn’t make sense anyway, surrealism would be a potential model for a new economic theory and practice. The whole area of “automating” became fruitful, especially when applied to car culture in the United States. (Automating is as much about cars and other vehicles joining together in sexual congress as it is the “absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” in the process of picture making.) Automating thus became the real “motor of history” for the LOUTS.

In the aggregate, surrealist economics means that every society relies on unconscious eruptions for injection of new ideas into the modes of production. The LOUTS had decided that both capitalism and communism were pretty damn boring, and the use of other methods employed by the surrealists, such as frottage or the exquisite corpse had not yet been explored enough in their application to money, trade and organization of the workforce.

When the numbers on Wall Street get used as stimulus for the creation of abstract electronic music, for instance, new possibilities are liable to emerge that no businessman would ever be liable to think about. As the LOUTS continued their work, the theory of Ahistorical Immaterialism caught on in fringe artistic groups, such as the steamwave movement, trash sculpturists, and among anti-foodie diner denizens, among myriad others along the fractal fringe. The fact that history is not solely caused by economic activity has liberated a generation of intellectuals who are now free to pursue other ideas and systems outside of those that have been handed down.

Who knows what yet might happen. The LOUTS were only the beginning.

.:. .:. .:.

​The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.



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STEM Education Gets Probed Àla Marshall McLuhan & HEM Starts Stitching

​In an ever-changing, increasingly complex world, where enshitification keeps hitting the fan, where infrastructure keeps falling apart, where polarizing politics put people in disarray, where environmental empathy leads to feelings of despair, it’s more important than ever that the citizens of the world find ways to stitch back together the places where our relationships (with each other, with animals, with the land) have become frayed. People need to know how to navigate predicaments and make sense out of the seeming randomized chaos of modern life. These are the kinds of skill that life long learners develop when they apply themselves to HEM, that is Humanities, Ecology and Memory.

Most everyone knows about STEM at this point: science, technology, engineering, and math, including computer science. It could be said that an education curriculum and mindset too focused on these subjects has left little room for the adaptive powers of intuitive thinking that study of the humanities encompasses. Ecology, which also encompasses systems theory, shows how interconnected everything is, and gives us a greater appreciation for all the creatures in the web of life with who we share the world. Memory and its training are also key, because if we forget history, forget where we come from and the collective wisdom of the past, if we forget how to remember, it leads to the kind of dismemberment of experience so prevalent in the abandoned chopping malls of too-late corporatism.

This article has been written as just one tiny nudge to inspire the next generation of thinkers, makers and feelers with accessible screen free experiences for exploring the life of mind and world. It is just a brief run-down on the idea of HEM, how it contrasts with STEM, and why the HEM alternative might be something other people want to put some energy towards.

STEMMED IN ON ALL SIDES
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Back in the early 2000s after the Y2K fiasco and the dot com bubble collapse, educators still wanted to continue pushing a collective focus on what they then called SMET: science, math, engineering and technology. Perhaps SMET was too similar to the word “smeg” a catch all cuss word in Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s humorous scifi series Red Dwarf. In the world of Red Dwarf space ships powered by AI with low IQ drift across the universe in hopeless disarray and talking toasters form the only potential hope for Lister, the last human left alive. SMET is kind of smeg, so in its place, the forward thinking president at Winona State University had a functional brainwave and rearranged the letters into STEM.

By this point the idea of rote learning by memory was itself considered stupid. Aging teachers were looking at the world and thinking something along the lines, “shit is getting fucked up, we better teach the next generation to save our asses. And they better learn how to work together.” The idea seems to have been to teach the subjects they thought the citizens of tomorrow would need to come up with the solutions for humanity; so we would finally figure out the pathways to solving any number of problems, such as how to get clean limitless energy in a world powered by dirty, limited, fossil fuels. Problem is, they aren’t just problems, but predicaments, and predicaments don’t have straightforward literal solutions, but require lateral thinking.

Mitigating black swan events arising from our interconnected predicaments, then, requires different modes of interacting with the world. Since the industrial revolution, the pervasive influence of engineers has geared our collective systems to adapt to machines. It is doubtful however that mindset of engineering alone can retool the machine once again. Rather, our relationship to the machine, and the way of thinking it produces must itself be set aside, so different modes of thought and relation may be (re)activated.

There was another idea behind STEM that was part of its overall project. That was to get students to work together in cooperation. In the minds of educators, the breakthrough revelations of solitary visionaries were out, and the communal efforts of groups working together at a shared goal, with their endless meetings and committees, were in. Meetings and committees and collaboration were clearly the way to fix the future. Just putting that on the table for discussion, and possible ratification.

The STEM boosters also crafted their curricula around the idea that memorizing facts doesn’t prepare people for challenges, and that solitary study and immersion in a topic doesn’t produce the same kind of people pleasing people behavior that a focus on collaborative creativity inculcates. One of the key ideologies within the movement was the notion that “facts don’t matter; if there is nothing practical, you get out of them.”
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Facts about the web of life within the cosmos can produce wonder, yet wonder itself was not deemed an outcome worthy of practical effort. Remember, effort must always be practical. This is likely one of the reasons that dream interpretation and do-it-yourself psychotherapy were not part of the curricula of STEM.
As a throwaway bone, some educators proposed the idea of STEAM, with the A standing for Arts. For some reason in our technocratic society, STEAM never got any STEAM, and the only ones who really got into it were a subculture of people known as STEAM Punks. STEAM Punk still remains relevant to the inevitable shift to a lower resource base of living, but most STEAM still requires some kind of coal for combustive power, and much of it is still focused on the supremacy of the machine

​Over the past twenty odd years as STEM has been pushed inside of America’s collective educational systems, the continued effects of Scientism, Technocracy, (cultural) Engineering, and Mathology (arithmetic focused on cold calculation and numeric quantity over numeric quality) has led to some of the following outcomes in the U.S.A:

The Great Dopamine Drain: the ubiquitous use of various social media platforms among adolescents and their adults has rewired their brains, exploiting dopamine pathways for the addictive hit of getting “just one more like.” In person social skills have atrophied. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and issues with body image have all been amplified. Suicide rates have gone up, and loneliness is a national epidemic even while people are connecting endlessly over the always-on-internet.

Computer Aided Disintegration: Over-reliance on Computer Aided Design tools has created a generation of engineers and architects who lack the ability to draw with pen and pencil. The geometric proportions that give harmony to the world are all based on the human form. The geometric proportions of the hand get bypassed when the hand does not know how to draw a plan. Meanwhile the infrastructure in the USA remains in critical condition. Enforced obsolescence of older infrastructure systems (such as the network of copper wires that once powered the telephone and internet) has left some population segments in a lurch when they do not have enough funds to adopt the latest corporate pushed technology. Meanwhile the older systems slip into further disrepair. Brown outs and energy grid failures are one outcome when smart grid nodes are installed alongside energy systems that elsewhere have been left to languish. Instead of repairing old systems, enforced “upgrades” meet with incompatibility issues. Lack of support for those who wish to keep older systems working becomes non-existent at official levels. As cars have become ever more computerized, the ability to work on them without specialized computer equipment has likewise eroded, where it hasn’t been made illegal. This causes many citizens to be “left behind,” yet recuperates walking, public transportation and bicycle culture for those in the underclass.

Quantity over Quality (The Pathology of Mathology): Businesses operating within the competitive capitalist cultures of the past had at least some notion of creating quality products and services for their customers. Creators prided themselves on making something that would last for decades if not a lifetime and beyond. Globalization has reversed this trend, and now the capitalists is focused on quantity of the numbers in bank accounts and asset holding, number games and rackets. This is reflected in the consumer who in many places have become hoarders. The person with the most cheap plastic happy meal toys wins. At their own expense of course, and to the benefit of mathologist accountants and day traders.

Collective Dementia: The ability to recall, to memorize, to hold on to something over a long period of time by the power of the applied mind has likewise atrophied. The ability to google something has diminished the ability to spend long periods of time researching a topic of interest or just a subject that a person needs to know about. The effort required to go to a library or talk to someone who might know what needs to be known, has withered the ability to look things up in books or engage with people with developed skill sets and the knowledge that comes from being alive for a long time (i.e. old people, who now get shut up and carted off to old folk “homes”). Since people don’t talk on the phone as much either, they don’t need to know as many phone numbers and have them memorized. The smart phone allows them to forget more than they ever remembered. Personal memory of special moments in life are likewise uploaded to the cloud in the form of digital pictures. Instead of recalling happy memories in the imagination, memories are scrolled through, as long as bills are paid and access to the correct accounts is maintained. AI further accelerates the effect of this collective dementia by outsourcing thinking and creativity.

All this while the federal government has spent approximately $3.9 billion annually on STEM education programs as they did in 2021. As of 2025 the National Science Foundation alone had a total STEM budget of $1.17 billion dollars. It is one thing to teach about these subjects and make them available. It is quite another to put the full weight of educational institutional support behind them when there are other topics and subjects valuable to teach and inspire young minds.

The great raconteur and thinker Marshall McLuhan developed a fourfold way of looking at media and cultural artifacts to see how they what they enhance, obsolesce in the present, retrieve from the past, or reverse. If we look at STEM through this tetrad lens of McLuhan we find that:

STEM Enhances: After school programs where kids build and design “battle bots” and drones preparing them for future jobs in the military industrial complex designing battle bots and drones for the “theater” of war. STEM also enhances techno-narcissism, even as their competing drives accelerate neurosis caused by a digitally fragmented sense of self.

STEM Obsolesces: An individuated sense of self is hindered by STEM, because outcomes are placed in the hand of machines rather than the personal unconscious. Theater kids required to memorize their lines and pursue active imagination in the amalgamation of the arts are also made obsolete. In many cases they have been replaced altogether by the CGI of computer generated imagery, and voices synthesized by machines. Hand drawn blueprints, schematics, and other detailed plans are no longer required. The slide rule gets relegated to the dustbin (or to the STEAM Punks) along with calculations worked out on pen and paper. STEM attempts to obsolesce death, but does not succeed.

STEM Retrieves: Amateur radio and other old school hobbies, such as photography and film with film, when a few of the STEM kids trickle into the radiocentric fold to become STEAM Punks. As economic disparity gets enhanced, for tech lords on the high quantity of numerals in their bank accounts, it also retrieves feudalism in the form of the sovereign corporation-as-nation-station (sovcorp). The CEO is president and king with a bevy of microserfs to carry out his commands.

STEM Reverses: the other aspects of science that are focused on living systems. As ecology, biology and the life sciences get de-emphasized by engineering brain, they transform and mutate into biohacking, terraforming, blood doping, smart drugs, cryogenics and the desire to extend life beyond its natural span. STEM progress reverses gains in literacy and reading made by the educational system as vernacular video becomes a preferred means of communication and learning among youth.

With these thoughts in mind, it should be clear that the continual problems caused by technology, engineering, and the focus on certain types of science at the expense of others, are in many cases a liability more than an asset. The need for people with intuitive, lateral, and artistic grasp of the world around them is itself a practical way to work-around the many predicaments facing humanity in the decades ahead. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics may not know jack about HEM careers and jobs just now, but they will be “tomorrow’s jobs” because the negative spillover from industry, corporate group-think, and the collective dementia of cognitive detachment is going to continue to tear at the social and environmental fabric holding the world together.
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HEMMING IS PATCHWORK, HEMMING IS STITCHERY

​The great thing about HEM is that no government program is needed to get it up and running. No one needs the permission of anyone else to become a stitcher, to start making your own patchwork quilt exploring the humanities, exploring the terrain and terroir of your local ecology, to cultivate the habit of retention and memory. Permission and official programs may very well be counterproductive to getting any kind of useful work in this area done.

HEM, as I conceive it, is not anti-science. I wrote a book on the history of technology and music, after all. Such technology seems to be more useful when also put into the hands of artists, HEM just takes the emphasis out of the sciences that have put the focus on machines, and instead attempts to re-balance that tipped scale back towards the earth and her inhabitants. HEM re-emphasizes ecology in service to all of life. For that it requires the deliberate training and cultivation of memory. When the stories associated with a part of the land we live are not remembered and consciously transmitted to others who also live on the land, and will dwell with the land in the next generation, vital knowledge is lost. The emphasis on the humanities encourages lateral thinking and the development of individualized artistic intuition. It also gives the mind fodder on which to think, and material worthy of retaining in memory. Stocked with this useful supply of material, new streams of creativity open up to the prepared mind.

Predicaments don’t exist outside of our stories about them, our memories of their causes, and of the web of complex relationships that intermix between them. As such those who keep memory, who train their memory to hold onto stories, poems, and songs, who hold in their mind an aesthetic web of beauty, music and art will be liable to make strong connections and draw water from the common well of deep knowledge to share with their fellows.

If we look at HEM through McLuhan’s tetrad the following can be found:

HEM Enhances: appreciation of the arts, literature, history, including personal history and family history, along with local history. On the ecological side it enhances knowledge of the local flora and fauna, as well as stories of the same from local folklore. Place names often reflect the kind of plants and animals that lived their before they were desecrated into strip malls and suburbs (White Oak Community, for example, or Salamander Hill, etc.) Appreciation of such life is likewise enhanced. When life is appreciated instead of taken for granted and thought of as merely something else to consume, steps can be taken for its protection.

HEM Retrieves: The role of the bard, the storyteller, the griot, the local poet, song writer and epic rapper. It retrieves the mentat’s from Frank Herbert’s Dune and places them back in the trajectory of another possible future. In this possible future the Art of Memory (see Frances Yates) and other mnemonic disciplines are restored. It retrieves oral storytelling on the one hand, but also book learning and deep research in analog archives on the other. Systems theory as a part of ecology is also retrieved as we look at the net effects of small actions and the positive and negative feedback loops they create in the total environment. The cybernetics of Norbert Wiener is likewise retrieved. The humanities retrieve the seven liberal arts and also Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, her nine children.

HEM Obsolesces: Cloud memory storage and data centers. Recording everything on the phone via photo images and video of special events is sidelined in place of savoring the moment and later reminiscence through the power of mind and recall. Personal participation in the surveillance state of data collection is likewise negated as digital spy technology is less readily adopted.

HEM Reverses: globalization and corporate work mentalities. The focus returns to local and bioregional levels of production, participation and activity as the baseline. It also focuses on individual effort and encourages the proliferation of outsider art. It reverses the brain drain on communities, as it gives reasons for people to stick around their hometowns. Other environments and cities aren’t “better” by default. Creativity, culture and cooperatives instead become the norm. The rust belt and other parts of flyover America don’t get gutted by the best and brightest, but the best and brightest regenerate the homefront with their own efforts continuing to nourish the local environment. Perhaps most important, it reverses the decline in cognitive ability by restoring rote learning and the memorization of facts. While what is remembered can certainly be arbitrary, the fact that HEM practitioners are giving their memory muscles and mind a work out ensures that creativity and ability to use their mind will go beyond just recall and into true comprehension and intellectual wrestling in the world of ideas.

As hemmers and stitchers begin to work by reading the classics, studying the traditions of the world, listening to its great music, and looking at artwork and film, it will help stem the tide of slop propaganda (or propaganda slop as one feeds into the other) inundating the mind. As they explore their environment, get back in touch with family history and their personal history, will see the rich world of their own experience and all that it has to give outside of McCulture and the military-entertainment complex. The same with the wonders of the natural world in their corner of the world. Urban dwellers will also have much to love as they learn the history of their city, and also much to love in the form of nature: nature is not absent even when brutalist concrete and even when its pristine ecology has been spoiled by the smegma of sprawl, wonder and beauty are still ever present for those willing to let themselves be enchanted.
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What is held in the mind and memory can never be taken away. Data centers can be unplugged, destroyed, or go offline. What is stored in the cloud can disappear due to breaches or a change in a contract. The eternal memory of the soul withstands even the horrifying and sad vagaries of dementia and Alzheimer disease. When muscles atrophy and the body gives way to old age, the achievements of the mind cannot be stolen back by any corporation. They will never go offline because they are internal, imaginal, eternal.

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​The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.
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☕️☕️☕️

An Interview with an Amateur Naturalist + Easy Outdoor Learning Activities

​The purpose of this particular article is quite simple. It is to help readers get more pleasure out of the vast recreational opportunities available in your particular bioregion. I suppose it also has another purpose, to excite readers about all that awaits them outside, to encourage people to turn off the screen and head into the green. To be really honest, there really is a third purpose, and that it is to get people to take up the hobby of the amateur naturalist. As a way to spend leisure time it has a lot to offer, not only to individual happiness and fulfillment, but as a way of giving back to the community, through sharing knowledge, and to the earth, by applying what is learned.

I’ll be honest about something else too. Being a naturalist is not something I have any experience of beyond enjoying the outdoor activities of hiking, camping, and a bit of gardening. Naturalism is something I am interested in, however, and try to always think of writing as an opportunity to learn. “Write what you know”, the conventional wisdom goes. The conventional wisdom is also what got us into our current disconnected relationship with nature, so I think a case can be made for going with unconventional wisdom instead. Some time ago, the writing guru Steve Pressfield gave this liberating advice, “When we write only what we know, we limit ourselves to territory we’ve already covered. When we write what we don’t know, we launch ourselves into terra incognita. That’s where the good stuff is.”[1] I’ve tried to keep that advice in my back pocket, my instinct has often been to use writing projects as a way to explore unfamiliar subjects. Such is the case with the matter at hand.

Exploring is one of the things a naturalist does as well. Heads off into terra incognita, even if it is the terra incognita right near your home. Exploring is as much about expanding our sense of curiosity and getting back in touch with the sense of wonder nature reliably gives. Naturalism is a cheap thrill, because it doesn’t require much stuff beyond a willingness to open up our senses to what the world has to teach. This learning in turn helps sharpen our powers of observations. A few tools can help in the endeavor, but they can likely be sourced second-hand.
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Society as currently organized isn’t really doing much to change the way we relate to the ecological web, instead seeking to keep us glued to an electronic web. Having a richer understanding of the way the insects, plants, birds and beasts exist within a web of interrelationship and connection can help us to see the ways these creatures and beings are not separate from our own life. Seeing how we are embedded within the complex associations of an ecosystem might go a long way helping us begin to repair the many damaged relations and threads of connection within the web of life.
For this iteration of the column, I thought I’d something a little different and talk to someone who does know some things about being an amateur naturalist. He is my friend Erik Brueggemann, fellow public library employee and an Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist. I asked Erik a few questions to see what insight I could glean from his experience.

INTERVIEW WITH ERIK BRUEGGEMANN, VOLUNTEER NATURALIST

JPM: You’ve always been an outdoorsy person since before I’ve known you, but what inspired you to become an Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist (OCVN) in the first place?

EB: I went over 20 years where I went outside and liked being outside but I didn’t look at it or experience it, just enjoying hiking and going different places but not really knowing anything about where I was or what living things were there. And then I rediscovered Jewelweed. I can’t remember when I rediscovered Jewelweed but the first time as an adult when I reencountered it and had a seedpod explode - my childhood came flooding back. I started to remember all this stuff, this life, that I had forgotten. As a child of the 80’s and 90’s before screens became so important, it’s really all we had - go outside, read, or watch a Police Academy marathon on Star 64. All things I enjoy but there’s something to just spending time outside and not having anything else to do with an agenda or any meaning or making any grand statement besides preventing boredom. That’s where great life happens. I’m trying to get back to that as an adult.

JPM: The OCVN program required you to do forty hours of instruction and forty hours of volunteer work. How did that go for you and was there any particular part you enjoyed and any part you disliked?

EB: The only part I actively disliked were the exploitive or commodification of nature that I experienced during the class - this was not part of the class itself but something I started to pick up on. It completely turned me off from contributing to pay-to-play nature. You can get good nature without spending a dime. I get you want funds but bragging about commodifying every nature experience. It’s asinine. The class was also a very broad overview of everything. You don’t really learn much until you start volunteering. But, as you get out there and volunteer you realize that broad overview of everything really helps you understand more. The best part was just being out and getting excited about seeing a certain bird or plant or whatever and everyone around you showing the same excitement.

JPM: You’ve been at this for a number of years now. What kind of work have you done?

EB: Cleared invasive species, monitored streams, planted trees, planted flowers, made trails, remade trails, got completely disheartened when you start to recognize all the invasive species, gotten reenergized when you start to look past them and see what’s also there, I cut down the biggest multiflora rosa bush you’ve ever seen and then someone turning some of the wood into a pen for you as a surprise before the cuts from all those thorns on your forearms were even healed, led volunteer groups, monitored cover boards for Kirtland’s snakes, learned how to grow trees and flowers and then giving them away, and I helped turn a patch of neglected land in my neighborhood into a showcase for gardening with native plants. The best though is just being out there with other people and bullshitting about whatever and teaching each other cool stuff you’ve learned, not talking about experiences that aren’t replicable or “you had to be there” moments but about stuff you want others to be able to experience or notice. And then telling them where to go to see it or just showing it to them because it’s right there. But, this is why conservation works and why it matters - great nature should be easy to find and experience. The fact that conservation works so well should be recognized as this amazing thing. You can help. You should help.

JPM: What kind of programs would you like to do or see implemented around the city, (state, bioregion…)?
More local offerings and more recognition for how important conservation is. When I started, I spent more time getting to volunteer places than I spent volunteering. I decided that wasn’t working for me. I’ve committed to trying to do almost everything locally in my neighborhood. I can walk or ride a bike to volunteer. It’s better. There is so much good nature right outside your door that you don’t need to travel to get it, and you can help improve it. It is literally right outside your door. You don’t even need to open that door - just look out the window. We should encourage eliminating maintained turf that is unutilized for sport or recreational activities and replacing them with native plants that are contributing to bettering where we live. I’m all for turf as a landscape accent but using flower beds to accent turf? Flip it.

JPM: Keeping your certification requires an additional thirty hours of volunteer work and / or continuing education every year. What does that look like in practice?

EB: It’s pretty easy. The opportunities are out there in abundance, you just need to find what type of volunteering you enjoy. Try a bunch of places - if it doesn’t check all your boxes then try somewhere else. I’ve probably stopped volunteering at 75% of the places I tried because it wasn’t a good fit for me or whoever lead the events retired or switched jobs. In Cincinnati it’s been pretty easy to start volunteer groups at the parks closest to my house and just regularly hold events that are supported by our local Parks. People show up to help. At a certain point you might transition from just showing up to wanting more. Doing more is also possible when you’re out there regularly learning things and meeting people.

JPM: How has becoming a naturalist changed your relationship with nature?

EB: Good nature is everywhere. I think exploring everything close to you is often overlooked in pursuit of grand vistas or experiences. Look closer at what you got. Learn more about what you got. It’s worth it. You can help make it better. If you can’t get good nature by looking out a window - whose fault is that? It’s yours. I always try and get people to go with me when I need to drive somewhere for nature. The amount of good nature that is within 2 hours of Cincinnati is pretty phenomenal. I want to get more people to recognize it. To look closer to where you are. Travel less. Experience more. Help maintain it.

JPM: You’ve worked at book stores and at the public library for a long time and I know you like to read and collect books. What authors or books would you recommend for someone who wanted to become a naturalist?

EB: Whatever speaks to you. Novels are a great place to get great nature writing. Rereading some of the novels I read before I knew what the things mentioned look or act like is a completely different experience. I’ve gotten paid to recommend books for over 20 years - I can’t just generally recommend stuff. I need more info. I can give you a list of what I like and enjoy but you might hate it because we aren’t the same even if we’re both interested in the same. Kathleen Jamie and Jim Harrison come to mind. They couldn’t be more different but, as far as nature writing goes: you can’t do much better. Once you get out there and start to learn more, you’ll realize you’re very interested in this thing but not at all in that thing and then roll from there. A great place to start is just having an idea how interconnected everything is and/or how important certain living things are for other living things. The Nature of Oaks by Douglas Tallamy is a great intro on this topic. Any book about a specific place over time is also a good primer for this. If you start to read something and you don’t like it - stop. Find something else.

JPM: What would you say to someone who is interested in becoming a naturalist, but maybe lives in a state where they don’t have a program like this and they are starting off alone? Have any advice?

EB: Find a group close to you and get involved. Start something if you don’t have anything around you. Get involved with your Community Council. Talk to your Park boards. Think smaller. Lower your goals. Be patient. Be practical. Start in your yard. Just start doing stuff.

JPM: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

EB: Just go outside. Go for a walk. Expect nothing. I probably enjoyed my walk to work today more than someone did on their last trip to wherever. Take binoculars or don’t. Get a fishing license to start exploring all that happens under water. Just sit somewhere for hours and absorb what happens all around you because that’s the best thing you could be doing. Be interested in learning new things and trying new experiences. Have your mind blown in your backyard or around the corner. Don’t forage in urban areas where native species are less prolific. By all means experience nature by touching, smelling, and tasting but don’t take it home with you and make a meal if you didn’t grow it. Leave it for someone else to experience. Learn how to grow whatever you’re enamored with. Delete all your social media and stay off the internet unless you can’t - live through your own experiences not theirs. Share with the person standing next to you.
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JPM: Thanks for sharing your experiences with us, and your attitude of “just get started where you are,” it’s very much appreciated.

As Erik pointed out, becoming a naturalist might be as easy as staying off social media and stepping outside your door to go for a walk. Even just adding a little bit here and there to what you already know about the flora and fauna in your neighborhood can help you feel more connected to the vibrant intricacy of life happening all around us. In the spirit of “just start doing stuff” let’s look at four activities for getting out there and on with the show.

BIRDOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS

Bird is the word. Look to the air! Birdology is to biology what biology is to… oh, nevermind. Studying our feathered friends in the sky is a timeless pursuit. You can even do it in the dead of winter, looking out your window. No special equipment is required, but some might help. A few bird identification books. A pair of binoculars. That’s more than enough to get going. You might want a notebook if you get serious about this form of playfulness. Making notes and filling in the birds you’ve “collected” in your sightings along with other observations is as much of a thrill for the birder as is catching a distant DX station for the radio geek.

Once a bird book has been secured (check one out from the library or pick one up from a good independent or secondhand bookstore) choose a bird from its pages. One you haven’t seen before, but is one that would be in your area that time of year. With this bird picked out, make an effort to go out and find the bird. When you have tracked down the bird in the wild, even the urban wild, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment, and now your mind will know this creature and have a connection to it, and you won’t have to look for the book to know what it is you are seeing in front of you. Rinse and repeat.

Another way to go about this is to flip the above process, and go out and see what you might find, then identify the bird. With each new type and species of bird you see, you’ll be adding to your inner repository and grow the ability to check things out in the library of life. The same approach can be taken with trees, plants, insects...

Matching birdsong to the bird singing is another way to proceed in the fine art of birdology. Or you can learn about murmuration and the behavior of flocks. The more you learn the more you’ll want to know. For instance, did you know that flocking is a way for our feathered friends to conserve energy? Long flights along migratory routes require a lot of energy to be spent. Flying together increases their aerodynamics, reducing the amount of expenditure they each have to put into arriving at their destination.[2]

​ACCEPTING DINERGY

The energy flows involved with a bird species during migration are just one example of the way energy makes up a vital part of an ecology. As regular readers of mine will perhaps understand, we live in a world of limits. The disturbances and multiple crises ongoing around the world can be understood in one way as the result of people trying to ignore the limits of growth, the limits of extraction, the limits of how much energy can be used with giving energy back.

Yet limits are what give form to our bodies, and the shape of everything we seek to study in the natural world, whether it’s a hawk making a spiral in the sky or a mighty oak tree, gnarled and twisted. The architect and philosopher György Doczi showed this with elegance in his book The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art, and Architecture. This illustrated book shows just how much form in art and nature is predicated on the limits and forces impinging on a natural feature or species. In his book he also introduced the concept of dinergy, a word he coined, to describe the relationship between energy and its limits. He arrived at the word by combining the Greek dia, which means across, through, and opposing, and energy. Opposition gives something to push against, a thrust block for their own evolution causing them to adapt in ways they wouldn’t have if not faced with particular limits.

Dinergy can itself be contrasted against synergy, which is about the cooperation between two or more people or forces. Synergy has caught on quite a bit more in our culture as a concept than dinergy has. Embracing limits and limitation isn’t popular in a society still caught under the spell of bigger being better, and expansion as the only form of growth. Despite its fringe status as a concept, dinergy is a useful one to have on hand in the mental toolkit. Studying how limits work in nature, can give us a greater appreciation for limits in our own life. Instead of thinking of limits as things that impinge upon our freedom, we can start to think of limits as powerful ways for shaping the way live into something more beautiful than it is now.

Limiting the area we explore and work in the quest to learn more about nature is one way to apply a useful limit. As Erik mentioned, looking to the grand vistas of faraway places often causes people to overlook what is right outside their doorstep, in their own watershed.
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FLOWING WITH YOUR WATERSHED

If energy flows and limitations can shape a species, those flows certainly shape the environment and ecosystems of the world as carved out by the precipitous flow of H2O.

Learning about the watershed you live in, and how it supports a plethora of life is another to way to ease into getting a better sense of our immediate surroundings. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a watershed is “a land area that channels rainfall and snowmelt to creeks, streams, and rivers, and eventually to outflow points such as reservoirs, bays, and the ocean.”[3] If you live inland exploring your watershed could begin with visiting the rivers and lakes nearest you, tracing the tributaries from the large rivers to the little streams. There’s not much better than a wild swim or a paddle down a glinting stream or glistening lake in the summer months. If you happen to be near an ocean, it doesn’t get more primal than interacting with the ebb and flow of the tide and its ever-shifting waves, the salt wind in your hair.

As I mentioned in my last article on bioregions, a watershed seems to me a more interesting way to think about plots of land rather than the sighted lines and squared off bits used by surveyors for partitioning space. Another way to think about bioregions in terms of water, would be by looking at the major aquifers underneath our feet.

A fun way to get an idea of your watershed and its contours is to find a map of your area with its rivers, creeks, lakes, and put a piece of tracing paper over top of the map. Trace out only the areas of water on the map. Starting to see those lines as the primary demarcations of space, can shift your mental mapping of your home area away from streets, big box stores and coffee shops. Everything becomes more squiggly, curvy, less linear, boxed in to a square.
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FUN WITH MINEAROLOGY

Go to any stream and your liable to find a plentitude of rocks. Or at least dirt and mud. Hanging out in the creeks, you might just study the stones as much as the crawdads swimming in a shallow pool, The stones themselves composed of minerals. Taken for granite so much of the time, understanding something about the mineral kingdom gives new appreciation for life and how shaped we are by these raw materials of life.
Minerals are like geological Legos. They build things up, but we need many kinds of them to make a structure. Eight different elements make up most of the minerals. These include aluminum, calcium, iron, magnesium, oxygen, potassium, silicon and sodium. In order to be considered a mineral these elements need to repeat in a regular pattern.
Knowing a thing or two about minerals can also help us with things like gardening. Erik had mentioned to me just how much “bedrock influences soil pH. It’s another reason why some plants won’t grow in certain areas besides sun and moisture. Hamilton County [Ohio] is alkaline because of all the limestone. Areas with sandstone are more acidic - rhododendrons and blueberries need acidic soil - we don’t have either of them occurring naturally in Hamilton even though they’re native to Ohio - head East Young Man.”

READING THE BOOK OF NATURE

I usually end these articles with the RE/SOURCES section that is at once bibliography and suggestive reading for further exploration on a topic. Instead of doing that this time, I’d like to go out and suggest that you hunt for your own books. As Erik noted, your particular inclinations in studying nature will draw you to what you like, more than I can direct you to what you will find inspiring. I have books on vultures, turtles, wolves, wildflowers, the arctic regions and an urban tree handbook stashed among the local hiking guides and other titles.

That said, I can’t help but make an observation and a suggestion when it comes to books about nature and science. Working in a library for my entire adult life thus far, one of my favorite things to do has been to wander the stacks. These are a place of wonder. There are stark differences between the books published for children between the 1950s and the 1980s, and those published between the 1990s and the 2020s. Comparing them is instructive. Perhaps the most striking thing about these differences is how much smarter those books seemed to expect the children to be, how much more they already expected them to understand about the world around them. I think it also points back to the time that Erik mentioned when it was routine for kids to go outside and be left to their own devices.

At the same time, it wasn’t as uncommon for kids to have hobbies that were a bit more involved than what is on the market today. When I think of some of the noxious things I mixed up with my chemistry sets, it’s perhaps not hard to wonder why, in this land of lawsuits and litigation, those kind of kits and instructional books aren’t as widespread as they once were. Kids used to really experiment with things back then, and I’m not just talking about playing doctor. I’m talking electricity, chemicals, biology.

I’ve found those older books just as useful for learning about a topic such as botany as an adult, as I have some of the most current creative nonfiction. They make great primers and would also be useful sharing with any children in your life. See if you can hunt any of these down at the library or pick up on the cheap second hand to add to your own collection.

​The best book to read is outside. So after you’ve taken in the stories presented by our intrepid editor get outside and let the play of light on water, the sound of the wind in the trees, the sight of birds in the sky, and the crossing of mammals in the field, whisper their own stories.

​[1] https://stevenpressfield.com/2010/06/writing-wednesdays-6-write-what-you-dont-kow/
[2] https://www.hummingbirdsplus.org/nature-blog-network/flocking-behavior-provides-energy-conservation-during-migration/
[3] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/watershed.html

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​This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of New Maps.

(Video and music above made from a Donna Tartt interview with Charlie Rose by Matt Pope. )
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“Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening.”-Pauline Oliveros
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Two people sitting, talking at a table. Telling stories. Listening to each other. It seems so common, but also uncommon. When was the last time you went over to an aunt’s house, or an older sister, and let her tell you something from the deep wells of her mind and heart? When was the last time you listened to the village wise woman tell you a tale around the fire?

To really listen to a tales such as these, a person needs to be silent, and when silent, listen. To be silent we need to slow down. What else is as cheap and free as entering into silence so we can listen?

Silence has a way of clearing the head. How can we hear our own inner voice, the voices of our sisters and brothers, the voices of the animals and trees, the voices of the rivers, the voices that come in on a warm and gentle wind, if we don’t stop the frenetic pace of production long enough to hear what they have to say?
Slowing down gives us the pause that revives.

Talking is only one side of the equation in speaking truth to power. To hear the power of truth, we need to first shut our mouths and open our ears. To cut through life’s noise we have to turn off the volume of the worlds chatter and mental chatter and go into deep listening. From that silence the voice of our own intuition might just be one of the things we hear awaken.

Lucky for us the composer Pauline Oliveros left a roadmap for re-tuning our ears to inner and outer voices. We can use it to slow down and enter those silences that are pregnant with sound.

FROM THE DEPTHS OF SILENCE, INTUITION

The title for this chapter comes from experimental sound artist, composer and ritualist Pauline Oliveros. A Tejana native of Houston, Texas, born in 1932, she was already playing music in kindergarten, the beginning of a lifelong fascination with sound and listening. She listened to everything, all the time. When she was nine, she started to play the accordion which was to be her lifelong instrument of choice though she became an accomplished multi-instrumentalist. She also became a maverick explorer of tape music, electronic sounds, and the creator of her own specialized delay systems.

Pauline was the definition of a deep listener. To her, the entire world of sound was rich with latent musicality. Reflecting on listening as a kid she said, “I used to enjoy my grandfather tuning his crystal radio. I liked the sounds of tuning the radio much more than the program. My father had a shortwave radio, which also I enjoyed the sounds of the shortwave tuning as well. Those were sounds that I liked.”

As she continued to excel at music in school, and with the encouragement of her pianist mother, she added violin, piano, tuba and French horn to the list of things she could play. At age sixteen, feeling the call of her vocation, she resolved to become a composer, and in time went to college in California. There she supported herself in part by giving accordion lessons. It was at San Francisco State College where she met the poet and composer Ramon Sender, the burgeoning minimalist master magician Terry Riley, and the devotee to avantgarde musical expression, Loren Rush.

With Riley and Rush she formed the very first free improvisation group outside of jazz music in the modern west. Riley had been commissioned to make a piece of music for a film score, but he hadn’t written anything, so he recruited Rush and Oliveros and took them over to the studios at KPFA to use their trusty Ampex tape recorder. They sat down with their instruments and no score. They improvised and caught the results on tape. Riley was on piano, Oliveros on French horn, and Rush on koto and percussion. They improvised several five-minute takes, and in the process realized how much fun they had playing unscored music together. When they listened to the playback together, they all realized they wanted to continue playing improvised music together. It’s an experience many kids who formed bands in the decades afterwards replicated: playing crazy ad hoc music, recording it to tape, and listening back with astonishment to the results. There is an entire world of seldom heard basement tapes containing such untold treasures.

Oliveros spent the remaining years of the 1950s steeped in Beat era circles of strangeness, making friends with a variety of iconoclastic composers, artists, and poets. Sender became one of her improvising partners, and the practice of improvisation became a key to the development of her work. For her twenty-first birthday, her mom had gifted her with a tape recorder, an expensive gift in 1953. The medium of tape created another avenue for creative composition and was another part of her greater destiny.

The legendary electronic synthesist Morton Subotnick was one of the strange ones who was called to the cultural scene in SF and he started swimming in the same circles as Oliveros. Soon he struck up friendship with Oliveros and Sender. They were all interested in electronics and what could be done with tape. With a hefty helping of the DIY spirit and some elbow grease, they cobbled together the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962 that functioned as a non-profit recording studio and performance space for experimental arts. (The full story of the SFTMC and how it evolved into the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College is a fascinating story in itself, and is something I’ve covered in a series of articles you can find in my archives.)

Over the next decade Oliveros continued to compose, to write, to listen, to meditate and to collaborate. By 1971 she had performed and published her piece, Sonic Meditations. Oliveros was a lesbian and part of the feminist movement, and the piece came about from working intensely with a group of female-identified artistically focused spiritual explorers. From this sapphic locus of creative energy, the teachable practice of Deep Listening was born. Sonic Meditations was published in 1974, but the basic practices were further modified, tinkered with, adapted and extended over the next decades until her passing along with her growing body of work that included compositions, recordings and performances.

Oliveros explained Deep Listening as:

“a life long practice. The more I listen the more I learn to listen. Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it, and all that there is…

The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening – listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time. Deep Listening is exploring the relationships among any and all sounds whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary. Thought is included. Deep Listening includes all sounds expanding the boundaries of perception.

We open in order to listen to the world as a field of possibilities and we listen with narrowed attention for specific things of vital interest to us in the world. Through accessing many forms of listening we grow and change whether we listen to the sounds of our daily lives, the environment or music. Deep Listening takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.
Deep Listening is a birthright for all humans.”

One of the many close collaborators with Oliveros was her life partner Ione, herself an accomplished playwright, poet, writer and explorer of sound. They worked on the practice of Deep Listening by developing further sonic meditations, incorporating bodywork, and interactive performance. On a personal level the work included paying attention to “the sounds of daily life, nature, one’s own thoughts, imagination, and dreams.” Ione brought dreamwork into practice as a core element. Our dreams are something are something to be heard and attended to. The effect of the work creates heightened aesthetic appreciation music and environmental sounds but doesn’t stop there. Deep Listening shoots its roots deep into the internal world of the imaginal realm. Through its deliberate cultivation it can help create a field of awareness where personal and community growth occur through “experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness.”

This practice opens a door to the growth of our intutive capacities. Such intuition is necessary not only for those who wish to improvise music in a group setting, but also to storytellers and writers looking to bridge scenes and sections of work, and for anyone who wants to lie there life as a creative work of art.

To get to that one of the first steps is slowing down, get comfortable with silence, as the master John Cage taught us. Cage also taught about response ability. In his essay “Experimental Music” he wrote that,

“Hearing sounds which are just sound immediately sets the theorizing mind to theorizing, and the emotions of human beings are continually aroused by encounters with nature. Does not a mountain unintentionally evoke in us a sense of wonder? otters along a stream a sense of mirth? night in the woods a sense of fear? Do not rain falling and mists rising up suggest the love binding heaven and earth? Is not decaying flesh loathsome? Does not the death of someone we love bring sorrow? And is there a greater hero than the least plant that grows? These responses to nature are mine and will not necessarily correspond with another’s. Emotion takes place in the person who has it. And sounds, when allowed to be themselves, do not require that those who hear them do so unfeelingly. The opposite is what is meant by response ability.”

The ability to listen deeply is also the ability to pay attention. In that attention we develop our response ability. Rather than react, having actually heard, a person can decide whether to remain in stillness or move into action.

Listening, then, is also tied to slowing down. To minding the gap between an impulse and whether or not it is worth following.

Listening becomes a creative act and a necessary rebellion in a time of deindustrialization. It creates a space for discernment amidst cognitive dissonance and conflicting narratives. Listening allows us to choose our own adventure within the available options, showing us new options as we grow the ability to pay attention for longer intervals of time, to hear what other people are really saying and doing, and await the response from our own inner voice. In difficult times listening will give us the ability to improvise with what life is calling to our attention.

Since Oliveros passed away in 2016, Deep Listening continues to be taught at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The work is also continued on another dream level and spiritual level by the Ministry of Maat, a group dedicated to “Spiritual, Educational and Holistic support for women and the full spectrum of cultural and gender identities” started by Ione.​

​SLOW AND LOW THAT IS THE TEMPO
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When I listen to music deeply, I slow down. I decelerate to the hiss of cassettes. I rewind the vinyl to hear it crackle and pop. I pop in a CD that might glitch and skip because of an imperfect surface scratch. When I slow down, I also think of how precious music used to be, before the era of recording. Then it can only be experienced live. Every performance was unique, never to be repeated. I thinking of the time and effort spent in learning an instrument, the time spent in composing a song or symphony. These heavy time investments continued with the dawn of recorded music. Artists and bands spend incredible amounts of time in the studio perfecting an album. Yet the glut of available recordings, especially when accelerated to streaming platforms, have made the experience more disposable. People don’t pour over the liner notes with the same obsession as music fans of previous generations did. On Spotify, there are no liner notes.

Art can help teach us how to be present with our attention. Present to looking at a painting for longer than five or ten minutes. Reading a book more than one time. Listening to an album multiple times, and then come back to again and again, with new experiences to hear what else is inside.

Patience in creativity is a factor here too. I was inspired to write about the slow and steady route of creation in part from reviewing the album Electric Voyeur by Big Blood. They spent ten years making that album. It would have felt dismissive to write a review of the album if I’d only listened to it once or twice. It was good to have some time with the album before I wrote my review, considering the time they invested into creating the masterpiece. On this album, they not only played all the music, they also built all the electronic instruments that were used to play the music. Hours and hours and hours, days, weeks, months, years were spent going between the soldering bench and the home studio. Yet the result can be listened to in under two hours. Artwork can be consumed with such brevity, but the time it takes to create art is long. The personal life experience required to make art is also something that cannot be rushed. No one gets to be an elder without the harsh personal experiences that have a weathered a person and given them the necessary gravitas to make lasting work. Such experiences run in parallel with time devoted to learning a craft.

Donna Tartt is a writer who listens deeply to herself and takes her time writing a book. Somewhere in an interview Tartt mentioned that it took her about ten years to write a book. Her breakthrough masterwork The Secret History came out in 1992. Her next novel, The Little Friend came out in 2002. Goldfinch was published in 2013. While I can admire the work ethic and prolific pens of people like Stephen King and other one-book-a-year writers, I cannot argue with the deep saturation and grain of language to be found in Donna Tartt’s novels. The prose is exquisite. True master craftsmanship. That takes time. I’d love to read another novel of hers. It has been over ten years since the Goldfinch came out. I hope she is still working, and if so, I imagine it will be worth the wait. The secret processes of the soul and creation cannot be rushed.
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The musician Matt Pope (Milhaus) made the amazing video and music here from an interview with Donna Tartt on the Charlie Rose show. It took a lot painstaking edits to make something like this. It took a lot of listening to her words, to her voice. It took a lot of time to make this beautiful video and music.

Creating a body of work as an artist takes an entire lifetime. If that body of work is to have grain, the same kind of gnarl and character as a tree, it is slow work. In the attention economy where everyone wants eyeballs on a finished piece, sloppy work and to AI slop is just one one result. With the financial economy in constant chaos and shambles, perhaps it is also time to opt out of the attention economy. Attention isn’t a bad thing. It is a good thing. Yet the more attention is craved, the more attention seems to go towards its own bankruptcy and deficit. When I give my attention to shallow clickbait, my attention accelerates into hyperactivity, my focus decreases and my efforts become scattered. I lose my ability to hold attention and concentrate on something for a longer period of time in the rush for immediate gratification. The ability to concentrate for longer periods of time necessary to do what Cal Newport calls “deep work” is eroded. Giving up becomes easy, staying with something, or with someone, over the long haul, is just another option instead of a lifelong commitment.

Slowing down to extend our attention gives grain to a work, it gives what the science fiction writer Rudy Rucker calls gnarl. It is something he seeks to put into his novels, which are my favorite of the cyberpunk writers. His works went beyond cyberpunk of course. As a mathematician, his books are of high philosophical concept, and the way he used stories from his life and transposed them into science fiction settings (a style he calls transrealism), make them so unique, there is nothing quite like them in the SF canon.

In one of his blog posts Rucker describes gnarl this way. “I use gnarl in an idiosyncratic and somewhat technical sense; I use it to mean a level of complexity that lies in the zone between predictability and randomness. The original meaning of ‘gnarl’ was simply ‘a knot in the wood of a tree.’ In California surfer slang, ‘gnarly’ came to describe complicated, rapidly changing surf conditions. And then, by extension, something gnarly came to be anything with surprisingly intricate detail. As a late-arriving and perhaps over-assimilated Californian, I get a kick out of the word.”

Rucker sought out the gnarlier end of literature for inspiration and sought to put the same high gnarl into his own writing. “If a story hews to some very familiar pattern, it feels stale. But if absolutely anything can happen, a story becomes as unengaging as someone else’s dream. The gnarly zone lies at the interface between logic and fantasy.”

Gnarl cannot be easily automated, because part of what makes something gnarly is the grain of weathered experience, the slow growth of rings over the tangled knots of life.

THE SLOW GROWTH OF MEMORY
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Human memory is another thing that has atrophied under the influence of viral media that burns out after just a few infectious days. News cycles (or as I like to call them, noose cycles, because they cut off circulation to the head) are as disorienting as they are vapid. Memories should be generational, if not longer. Our phone enhanced collective dementia places some of our stories at risk of swirling down the collective psychic drain.
At the beginning of this essay I asked, “When was the last time you went over to an aunts house, or an older sister, and let her tell you something from the deep wells of her mind and heart? When was the last time you listened to the village wise woman tell you a tale around the fire? ” Hanging out with Pauline Oliveros, Ione, and her other collaborators feels like hanging out with some older wise aunties, even when I am only listening to their recordings or reading their words. Reading the words of Donna Tartt I feel like I am with a cool older sister. When I read the stories of Bette A. in her book Slow Stories, and listen to her words in the collaboration with Brian Eno that was made for the book, I feel like I have been invited over to a hearthfire for a cup of tea and to hear the wisdom of another time. It’s like I’ve gone to see this storyteller who has things inside of her she needs to share, and that I need to know. These stories seem to come straight from the dreamworld and carry me to a place beyond material reality.

​Listening to Bette A.’s voice and the soft ambience from Eno on the recording, I feel safe, in a cacoon. It is this primal feeling I get, of having a mother or an aunt or a sister read to me while in bed. It’s so primal. It’s so timeless, as we are taken into the world of story.

(As of now, there is only a vinyl version available of the recording. I got to listen to a promo as a music reviewer. It would be wonderful if they released an edition that made the recording affordable for everyday fans. That said, the entire art package does go to a charity, The Heroines! Movement, a global storytelling movement around women role models, co-founded by Bette A.)

The quality of Bette’s voice is such that it fills me with emotion. It is this feeling of being read to, slowly, softly. I realize I haven’t experienced this in so long, that I am overwhelmed with a grief I did not know I had, grief for something I did not know I was missing. I listen to audiobooks sometimes but those don’t really count. Podcasts can be even worse. Poetry readings are good, but there every poet wants to be heard. When was the last time someone told you a tale and you really slowed down enough to listen and take it, be absorbed into it, be absorbed by and saturated by the story?

The fact that they are slow makes them better. This isn’t an audiobook you are rushing to listen to because you need to fill up your information gathering quota. Information isn’t knowledge. These are stories and there is wisdom inside them. The information highway sped things up, this is an analog off ramp inviting us to slow down.

When they started to record the stories in this multimedia project, Brian’s only instruction to Bette was to read her tale “Slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow.”

It seems to me that “Slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow” should be a new Oblique Strategy.

Slow down, listen deep, and find the grains of wisdom spoken by the wise woman in your life.

A Cheap Thrills Vacation Primer for Beating the Heat

May Day marks the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. It’s also the time of year when people start really figuring out what they are going to be doing for their summer vacations if they are lucky enough to take one. While it may not yet be blazing hot, the humidity and higher temperatures are coming, at least on this side of the hemisphere. With that in mind I share this Cheap Thrills article on what beating the heat might look like in a world of accelerated climate weirding and lower resource base. Along the way we take a dips in the lake at a summer Chataqua, hang out with Thoreau at his cabin, visit a bungalow in the borscht belt, and stop off for some gelato before having a siesta in the height of Ferragosto.
This article was originally written for the summer 2025 issue of New Maps and was edited by Nathanael Bonnell. 

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.” – Sam Keen

​​Sometimes you just want to get away from it all. Hit the road. Get out of Dodge, go someplace else for a little while, and then come back. One word for it is vacation. People really started going on them when the railroad hit its stride. The car, bus and airplane expanded the options of where to go, and for a time, long distance travel was relatively affordable. It can now be expected to become quite expensive again in the years ahead, thanks to the downward-sloping curve of Hubbert’s peak. Feeling that pinch doesn’t mean folks aren’t going to want to hit the escape button, though, as vacations have become a habit for the world’s industrial denizens.
Vacationing is, for the most part, a product of our industrial culture. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century the word itself generally meant a time when teachers and students vacated the schoolhouse. The main reason for vacating the schoolhouse was to get busy with the other work that needed to be done in the prime of growing season. To actually take a break from work, people had to have a bit of money, making vacations and resting cures the domain of the wealthy. As the oil gush of prosperity drove everyone’s fortunes up, the middle and working class were able to start taking a break too. A bit of surplus meant that taking a week off for a bit of rest and relaxation didn’t have to drain the coffers to their dregs.

Nineteenth-century physicians started to advocate that such breaks were good for the nerves, while other advocates of leisure suggested that they could be used as a time of spiritual renewal. This was all in contrast to the way many Puritans and Calvinists preached the gospel of work from the pulpit, proclaiming that idleness created a playground for the Devil. As more liberal forms of Protestantism such as Unitarianism came to the fore, they pushed back on this work ethic, and contributed to the idea of the good that could be had by taking a break. The influence of the Transcendentalist movement, and their ideas of taking time for reflection and self-culture, played no small part in this change of attitude.

The practice of going on a vacation is something that can be saved as a habit of leisure even as the industrial economy continues to decline. Adjustments into how far and how often a person will travel will need to be made, especially by those belonging to the international jet set class. Even those of us who are used to more modest vacations will need to change our expectations. The days of hopscotching across the globe in planes are, in the long run, numbered. Most folks never could afford to go even to the other side of the country, much less another continent, anyway. Finding contentment in our home counties, states, and bioregions will be one of the waves future vacationers aim to catch. Meanwhile, those with an entrepreneurial spirit, and who live in the right kind of place, might even be able to cater to the wants and needs of future travelers as a secondary source of income in a time of decline.

The issue of climate change and seasonal work is not unconnected to vacation. Decline brings with it many difficulties, and one of them will be adjusting to harsh outdoor work as the limitations of air conditioning begin to assert themselves. Summer is the traditional time of a break from school in the United States. This was ostensibly tied to the needs of farmers. Extra hands were needed in the barns and fields during the long hot days. Yet hot days also make hard work more difficult. In places like Italy, where the summers can be as humid and scorching as here in Ohio, it has become tradition for most of the country to take off for at least the first two weeks of August. One way to cope with increased heat is to slow down and go for a swim.

The exact patterns around vacationing will be different in Illinois and Indiana compared to Texas or Maine. For one thing, many people in North America are landlocked, and it won’t be so easy for everyone to get to the ocean to escape the heat, though rivers and lakes are likely accessible, and even closer to home, so are swimming holes in creeks and ponds. If trains can be kept chugging for a longer time, and buses used in place of atomized cars, they may take some people away to a variety of shorelines. The trains were the first to take people to the oceans for getaways in the first place.
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To return to the Transcendentalists, it was in the nineteenth century that one man made a personal escape, and set a promising pattern for future vacationers in America. That person was Henry David Thoreau and the pattern he pioneered was established in this nation’s collective consciousness when he built a small and economical cabin for himself down by Walden Pond.

​For the American, getting away from it all seems to have started when Thoreau went to Walden to live his life in the woods. Walden wasn’t that far away from his original home in Concord, Massachusetts. He could easily walk back as needed, and he did so often to eat dinner with family or friends like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Being a prolific walker, heading into town was no problem for Thoreau. His isolation was, in this respect, mostly internal, as he also received visitors. But just being on the outskirts of town, it was enough for him to help his mind escape from the kind of thoughts people had in town, to really start thinking his own thoughts. He collected those thoughts in his book Walden and now they continue to echo down the years. I think they have led to the establishment of a permanent Walden in the American mind. He moved in to his cabin on the Fourth of July, after all.

It seems appropriate to start with Thoreau when talking about vacation, considering that in the last issue I wrote about the practice of naturalism. Of all the things Thoreau was, he liked to consider himself as foremost a naturalist. His imprint is all over the environmental movement. Yet the word vacation and the name Thoreau aren’t often thrown together, even while for many people a vacation is a way to get back to nature. At least for citified folk like myself, I often think of vacations as a journey to a place where I’m going to do some hiking, some swimming, some walking, some spending time outdoors. They’ve often included camping, and it’s always a bonus if I can get far enough away from the light pollution of the city to really be able to see the milk in the Milky Way.

​As Thoreau’s good friend Emerson wrote in his essay “Nature”:

​Restoration from real sorrows can come from being alone in the woods, in communion with the trees, bathing in the air of a forest, the light of the stars. A cabin is a place to, in Thoreau’s words, “Simplify, simplify, simplify. ” This is in contrast to the complexity of the contemporary vacation, whose planning, execution and cost often create as much stress as they are supposed to alleviate. It can be hard to simplify when our internal and external lives are a cluttered mess. Breaking from regular routines, forgetting about work, errands, and chores, and stopping long enough to allow what matters to us to register inside our minds can be considered a first step towards simplifying.

The urge to rusticate loomed large in our collective imagination even in 1845, when our population was smaller and our square concrete cities less sprawled. Despite the language Thoreau used to talk about Native Americans (“savages”), it is clear from his writing he truly admired their way of life and gives many passages of his prose to praising it. One way of looking at his experiment at Walden might be as a white man’s vision quest, a search for what a person could be in America. Thought of in this way, a vacation can be used to retreat from society at large, a tool to recalibrate ourselves to our own inner vision. A cabin retreat is a great place for such a quest.

The cabin in the woods takes on another resonance today as a possible place to “bug out” when the shale hits the fan. A person would flee to such a bug-out location if their main domicile was struck by a disaster of some kind, whether natural or man-made. Stocked up and equipped with the tools of survival, these kinds of shelters are for more than just getting back to the basics: they’re places to hunker down for shorter or extended durations. Consider working on them as a kind of vacation a prepper might have now, before taking a permanent vacation later.

Thoreau’s cabin escape was, for the most part, a solitary venture. Not all vacationers have the luxury of that kind of alone time, nor the funds for a plot of land and the permits required to build if a person wanted to keep it legal. A secondhand camper or a repurposed van is more affordable for people, as evidenced by the many modern-day nomads living in them. There are lots of people already living in campers and vans stationary as well. As the cost oil continues to go up, living in these kinds of vehicles, parked in the yard of a family member, a vacant lot, or hidden away elsewhere, will continue to be a downwardly mobile home option.
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Sometimes being alone isn’t really what a person wants anyway. Sometimes they want to get away with a spouse, family and friends. This brings us to a slight detour at summer school, or summer camp anyway, and that convivial movement of gathering together for self-improvement known as the Chautauqua.

he Transcendentalist movement helped to get a number of ideas and practices around education into circulation. The majority of Transcendentalist movers and shakers had worked as teachers to one degree or another. This includes Emerson and Thoreau, but also Amos Bronson Alcott, whose ideas were a forerunner to much that is taken for granted in education today, such as his taking kids on field trips to learn through experience. Field trips were a radical idea in the 1800s. Now they are standard educational practice. Thinkers like Elizabeth Peabody promoted a view of education emphasizing the innate knowledge within a person, and teaching as a way to help facilitate a flowering of what might as well be called intuition. Getting an education, then, became a mode of self-culture and spiritual refinement. As such, it was considered to be a lifelong endeavor.

In time, people would even take vacations from work to attend lectures in the summer as part of the Chautauqua movement, which had a precursor in the Lyceum movement.

The Lyceums were kickstarted in Massachusetts by Josiah Holbrook in 1826. He was another believer in the notion of self-improvement by learning across the span of an entire life, and his efforts promoted the transmission of “useful knowledge” through public lectures. After he created the National American Lyceum to teach his method of teaching, other Lyceums grew up all around the country as if a colony of fruitful mushroom spores had just erupted from the soil. By the mid-1830s there were 3,000 Lyceums catering to the public’s inclination to learn, and to be entertained while learning.

A number of the New England Transcendentalists got involved, using the Lyceum as a way to transmit their philosophy to the wider country on the speaking circuits that developed with their growth. Emerson and Thoreau were both avid Lyceum lecturers, and many of their talks were later polished up into poetic prose for publication.

Following the chaos of the Civil War the Lyceum waned as a cultural touchstone, but in 1874 the Chautauqua waxed in its place as something of a successor. The Chautauqua started off in western New York near a lake of the same name, as a summer training program for Sunday school teachers and other churchy types. The Methodist ministers John H. Vincent and Lewis Miller were the two people behind it, and like other summer traditions, it was first organized as a camp, this one geared towards religious instruction. As interest and enthusiasm for this camp of learning grew, they loosened things up a bit to include talks on general topics, music, and recreation. The success of the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly was such that the format was copied and other Chautauquas sprouted around the country. Later in 1904 the enterprising Keith Vawter and Roy Ellison took the show on the road and presented the Chautauqua in tents as they traveled from town to town, city to city, giving people the chance to pay a modest fee to attend.

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering its religious origins, that mixed in with the whole Chautauqua shebang was the idea that society could be improved through teaching citizens to be morally upstanding. As such it was in direct competition with other circuits of the time that had more in common with the circus. In other words, vaudeville. Whereas racy vaudeville offered humorous and libidinous ways to take the mind off of everyday stress, the Chautauqua billed itself as being able to improve the mind and character. As such it aimed to appeal to self-styled upper-crust highbrows, and keep out those deemed rancorous, lowbrow, and lower-class. Failing that, it would build them up into something better.

As the role of education continues to be questioned in America and change with time, the possibility of developing a new kind of summer school for “useful knowledge” might be a potential model for vacationers who want to improve their life of mind and have uplifting entertainment. As with any organic social movement, it is the people in the movement who get to decide what it is about. If I had my druthers future family summer camps would be devoted to the Humanities, Ecology, and Memory, or what I call HEM (in contrast to STEM). The inclusion of some bawdy songs and ample time dipping in a lake might be enough to keep it free from moral grandstanding and appeal to a variety of peoples. For that matter, there might as well be multiple types of summer camps catering to the needs of a diverse array of communities. After all, WASPs bent on social reformation aren’t the only ones looking for a distraction in the dog days of summer heat.

For the greater part of fifty years smack dab in the middle of the twentieth century Jewish vacationers from New York City regularly headed to the Catskill Mountains to what was called the Borscht Belt, also known as the Yiddish Alps. In a large part, it was driven by the need to get out of the hot multistory apartment buildings of the sweltering metropolis. The mothers and grandmothers would get a place at one of the five hundred resorts that catered to people at various income levels and head up with the kids as soon as they were out of school. This vacation land was in its prime between the 1920s and 1960s. Excluded elsewhere, especially during the 1930s, the Jews found an oasis in the Catskills. In the seventies, the rise of affordable AC, cheaper air travel, and the decline of rail service to mountains all contributed to their downturn and, in many cases, eventual abandonment.

There were fancy hotels for the wealthy, but for those of lesser means, bungalow colonies and kuchaleyns. The bungalows were little cottages all grouped together. Usually just a bedroom or two, kitchenette and screened porch to play cards in when it rained or get away from the mosquitoes. The same families rented the same bungalow year after year so when the kids went up with the women for the summer, they got to meet up with their summer friends, different from the city friends they had the rest of the year. There is something about being with certain group of people for a specific set amount of time during our adolescent years that lends itself to creating a sense of enchantment.

These bungalows had communal centers where people gambled in little homespun casinos, comedians told jokes, and movies were screened in the evenings. Sometimes a musician would pop in. All of these and more were standard fare at the hotels as well. Meanwhile, the kuchaleyns were even a bit more down-at-heel than the bungalows. This Yiddish word means “cook it yourself” and was used to denote boarding houses where people could stay but no meals were provided. People went to them anyway and managed to have a good time.

Modern stand-up comedy in its present form owes quite a bit to the entertainment circuit of the Borscht Belt. Just as the Transcendentalists polished their material through Lyceum lectures, Jewish comedians crafted their art of talking into what we now know as stand-up comedy on the circuit. Comedians such as the late Joan Rivers cut their teeth catering to the roughly half-a-million people who went up to the Borscht Belt each summer, giving them plenty of experience for their further efforts in showbiz. Others such as Sid Caesar and Jerry Seinfeld were influenced by that particular style of humor. All of this has left an indelible mark on American culture. It makes me wonder how future patterns of summer leisure, and the entertainments provided for them, will in turn influence the larger cultures in which they are nested.
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During these summers it was standard for the men to stay in the city to put in their work hours for the week. By the time Friday afternoon rolled around they were eager to get in on the comedy, the card games, and time with their families. They got into their cars and headed up to the bungalows as fast as they could. This particular behavior is less likely to be emulated in a time of increased fuel shortages, but the other pattern, where children and their caregivers (of whatever gender) go to a kind of retreat for a part of the summer, just might. Another possibility for getting away with the whole family is to just shut everything down for a few weeks in the summer, like they do in Italy.

​If summer has a last stand, it’s in August. The promise of a summer and its freedoms are in full bloom on Memorial Day. As Labor Day draws near those promises start to wilt. I can still relate to punk rocker Henry Rollins when he wrote, “August used to be a sad month for me. As the days went on, the thought of school starting weighed heavily upon my young frame.” I remember wanting to pack in as much time with friends as I could before the school bell rang again. August is a time when everyone might as well have one last hurrah for the summer before getting back to the grindstone, and the Italians have good enough sense to just close it all down for half of the month.

They call this time of year Ferragosto and it goes all the way back to Emperor Augustus in 18 BC. He gave the first day of August off to farmers following the rigors of the summer growing season. When the Catholic Church gained ascendancy, the holiday needed some religious mojo and got moved to August 15 to celebrate the Assumption of Mary into heaven. During the Fascist years when Benito Mussolini was in control, he threw the lower classes a bone and gave them three days off from August 14th to 16th and made tickets on the trains cheaper so they could go to museums in the cities and to their beloved beaches. People would pack up lunch supplies and head out for fun. As the twentieth century wore on, many workers got in the habit of taking a week or two off in August. Since this made it difficult for anyone else to get anything done with so many other people just taking it easy, the culture as a whole followed suit. These days Italian businesses by law give four weeks off a year, and most companies generally just close down for Ferragosto, and that word is now associated with this collective pause. Travel agents advise against going to Italy in August because many of the shopkeepers and the like are on holiday, the big cities are deserted, and everyone has gone to the beach.

Part of my interest in Ferragosto came from when I was reading about the “Lazarus Lizards” or common European wall lizard (Podarcis muralis), that was introduced to Cincinnati around 1950 by the son of the owner of the Lazarus Department store. This so-called “invasive” species is now prolific. Someone else told me how the climate here is similar to Italy (hot and humid in the summer). One branch of my family is Italian (from the town of Ripafratta, outside Pisa) and I had been reading about the kitchen gardens of Italian immigrants in the United States. Thinking of the climate being similar, I started to wonder what else I could learn from these ancestors, such as how they coped with the heat.
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Soon my mind turned to gelato and how a summer vacation isn’t really a summer vacation without at least one stop at an ice cream stand. One of the most beloved of my Italian ancestors was a guy named Ice Cream Johnny. He lived from 1851 to 1943 and made his life in the hills of Kentucky outside of Frankfort. While so many of our other relatives are forgotten, we are still talking about him. That’s what being an ice cream maker will do for you. Give you immortality, or at least your name a longer memory.

Hand-cranked ice cream freezers were invented in 1846 by Nancy Johnson in New Jersey. Before that time, ice cream was an occasional luxury of the rich. After that, with new ways for transporting and keeping ice frozen, ice cream became something even poor little whippersnappers could get as a summer treat. Ice Cream Johnny had his own dairy cows to make his own ice cream with, before taking it into town on a horse-drawn wagon to sell to his fellow Kentuckians.
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Hand-cranked ice cream is a low-tech process, so the possibility of ice cream can remain in our hot futures as long as ice itself can be kept and the special metal-lined bucket and canister used to make it can be crafted. For that matter, shutting everything down for a two-week holiday requires zero technology. What it does require is a willingness to slow down and set aside production to practice il dolce far niente, or the sweet art of doing nothing. In a world of strict energy limits, periods of time where no work gets done can be great for everyone.

RE/SOURCES:

​Aron, Cindy Sondik. Working At Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. New York, NY.: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Carter, Jamie Betesh. “Back to the Borscht Belt.” <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/back-to-borscht-belt-jewish-catskills-revival>
Groubert, Mark & Hunley, Eric. “Levine’s Bungalow Colonies.”

​I first heard about the bungalow colonies on this episode of America’s Untold Stories. Mark Groubert is a great story teller and he tells about his time as a kid growing up and spending summers in one of the bungalow colonies. He even snuck off to visit a music festival known as Woodstock. I don’t endorse Groubert or Hunley’s political views, but for history and JFK assassination lore, the earlier episodes of their program are worth digging through.

Hayes, Brittany. “The Fourth American Institution.” <https://ushistoryscene.com/article/chautauqua/>
Joelle, Memoree. “Comedy in the Catskills: Remembering the Borscht Belt” < https://newyorkmakers.com/blogs/magazine/comedy-in-the-catskills-remembering-the-borscht-belt>

Minchilli, Sophie. The Sweetness of Doing Nothing: Living Life the Italian Way with Dolce Far Niente. London, UK.: Thorsons, 2020. This little guide to slowing down in the manner of the Italians is the perfect thing to read in a hammock.

Nichols, Ashton. Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement. Chantilly, VA.: The Teaching Company, 2006. This course of 24 lectures on DVD with accompanying guidebook was a great source of pleasure to listen to this past winter. There is no need to watch the lectures as it is just Professor Nichols talking with occasional slides. I listened to them on my headphones while working, playing the DVD in a computer. Courses from the Teaching Company are the kind of thing you might be able to find at your local library!

Provenzo Jr., E Eugene F. & Provenzo, Asterie Baker, ed. “Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education.” <http://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/foundations/chpt/lyceum-movement>
Visit Italy “15th of August: origins and facts about the Italian Tradition of the ‘Ferragosto’” <https://www.visititaly.eu/history-and-traditions/ferragosto-origins-and-facts-about-the-italian-tradition-of-august-15th>

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