Month: December 2006

Portal Headings

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Noodling around possible chapter or portal headings for my hypothetical reader—one might be “What am I?”  All the headings will have the single letter word “I” in it.  As in “How Do I Feel?” protalheadingThere’s a bit of a pun in that one.  One asks how do you feel and one says well, I feel fine or whatever.  But I mean “how” does one feel in biochemical sense—what are the emotions/feelings/affects biochemically speaking.  This heading too might point in the direction of those “lower” portions, down on the brain stem, that seem to have something to do with the primal fight/flight response. 

Adrenaline.

Dopamine.

Seritonin.

“What Do I Feel,” however, pretty much says what it means.  What is one feeling?

“Who Am I” points in the direction of identity.

But what am I?—that’s a bit odd I think.  I guess one would first say—man or woman.  But I think I am thinking some lower down and a bit more primal than that: the distinction or the attempt to make it between human beings and the animals.  Aristotle: the rational animal, Hegel the sick animal.  My response though would be more in the direction of: human beings: the social animal.

My readings in and around evolutionary theory suggest that may be really What One Is?  The social animal.  In spite of all the nonsense about the selfish gene, human beings appear not selfish but completely gregarious and mutually supportive.  Selfishness is the epiphenomenon of this deeper phenomenon.  People throw out the baby with the bath water on that one, depending on the fish they want to fry.  But what gets us along in any case is not individual, atomistic selfishness, but group being and group creation. 

Thus human beings: the social animal.  And so, sociology points out at the extreme, coming at times quite close to a tabla rasa notion of mind, that what human beings know is what they have learned from other human beings and from the very social structures (quite real structures like building and roads) that guide them in their responses to each other without really having to know anything.  Human beings have moved or changed rapidly because they leave behind them structures upon which the next generation builds.  Genetic adaptation is not necessary, since we build our own environment.  But this capacity to erect a social environment that might be built upon is no doubt the result of a genetic predisposition.

The downside of this or at least one downside—because there are others—is the business about hyper conformity.  Nietzsche emphasizes this aspect with his quite correct characterization of human beings as the herd animal.  Supposedly—this is the ideology—individuality, individual effort, and most especially individual responsibility are prized qualities or values…But it’s well nigh impossible to buck conformity.  Hell, it is impossible.

Remark re: history of ideas.  The enlightenment set off this whole view with people like Helvictius and Rousseau later.  Nietzsche is made possible by the sociological view—in fact his philosophizing might be an attempt to figure out how individuals might arise from the herd.

 

Wikipedia

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As I was saying, thinking about materials for a reader I went online.  Who needs a reader, a hard copy one, I mean.  I didn’t have even to go that far into the mess to be overwhelmed by mass of materials out there on every subject known to humanity.

And Wikipedia is turning into a really useful instrument, especially if you are looking for info on current stuff.  They have decent references on the diverse subjects they treat and unlike your regular encyclopedia, mostly because their space is unlimited, there’s no filtering device, i.e. a certain limited number of pages. 

knowledge pyramid 

I wonder if one might construct sort of a knowledge ratio to the effect: limited amounts of documentation, limited space, high or low, produces a greater or less constricted knowledge hierarchy.  In the old encyclopedia Britannica for example one might possibly have found an entry on Andy Capp and his creation, Little Abner, but I don’t think one would have found much more than that Capp drew a comic strip called, Little Abner, that appear in such and such number of newspapers.  Certainly not, as one may find in Wikipedia, a list of every damn character that ever appeared in the strip along with a short “biography” of each.

I wonder if some sort of knowledge flow chart or graph could be constructed: data base plus space plus labor.  The greater the factor under each of these items the more the knowledge curve or knowledge hierarchy would tend to flatten towards infinity, while the less under each category the more the chart would approach a perfect pyramid.  The very peak of the pyramid would consist of the longest of all documents, as the determinative of their importance, with as one went down more and more documents with less and less space devoted to each.

In any case, on the web, there’s plenty enough to go around.  Within minutes, I had located articles, magazine and journal, as well as video on the “topics” I was trying to look into.  This is the “death” of the reader.  Already, one can think of the reader as a portal to web based research, reading and viewing.  Eventually the portal will disappear into the very thing it is opening up.

The web not the book is, without a doubt, the future of reading and writing, barring of course some natural or unnatural disaster that sends this whole electrical thing into the void.  But barring that, the teaching of writing has to become more and more rooted in that digital universe.  The web of course can not teach people how to read and write, but the fact of it will alter individual’s relation to both and the purposes of each.

One of my lit. teachers back in the 60’s let us write extra credit papers on the Death of the Novel.  I forget what I concluded.  But clearly THE NOVEL is dead; or rather the novel has found itself a niche market.  The Book too will die, if it is not already dead, that thing I grew up holding in my hands, the pages of which I turned, slowly or quickly, whatever you did the pages had to be turned—The BOOK will find its niche, but it won’t be where the big bucks are. 

 Information, not contemplation, is the name of the game these days.

 

Death of the Reader

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Talk about your misleading entry title.  My subject here is not as profound as the reader might larrybassume.  As the author has died so must the reader, I guess.  But actually I am referring here to “readers” as they are called in the world of writing instructors.  These are collections of articles, essays, and other sorts of writing/readings assigned by writing instructors to their students for the purpose largely of giving students something to write about when they write.

I have hardly ever used these collections myself.  I did for a while when I was the person training teaching assistants to work in our Writing Program.  They were required to use Behrens “Reading And Writing Across the Curriculum” or WRAC, as we came informally to call it, and so I used it too.  That seemed only fair.   

One may find quite an enormous variety of such readers.  Back in the day, when publishers were possibly less cost conscious, I was flooded with the things, new ones appearing every other day it seemed in my mail box.  I think there are still quite a few of them, and they can be money makers for their editors.  Larry Behrens, for example, had an office two doors down from me, and I know he made more than chump change off his book.  Also, one door way, and two doors away are the editors of Common Culture, a reader that has made its co-editors some money.

I have toyed for years with the idea of making up a reader and making some money from it.  Why not?  But I never get very far with the idea.  It just seems like too much work, or too much of the kind of work I don’t really want to do, sifting through articles trying to find ones that might work with your average, generic American college student.  And, well, I must say, I am not entirely in favor of such readers.  Not because they are bad, but because in my opinion writing teachers should always make their own readers.  That’s what I have done, so everybody else should do it too.

Aside though from this rampant narcissism, I have a slightly more rational reason for taking this position.  Making up your own reader tends to compel the instructor to think a bit more about the readings, their over all purposes, their levels of difficulty, and how they might be used in writing assignments.  Your pre-packaged commercial reader doesn’t require the instructor to do this and sometimes I think they act a bit too much as a prop for the writing instructor, though I do know your average free way flier instructor simply may not have the luxury of the time that I have to waste putting together a reader, when they are readily available pre-canned as it were.

My reservations, though, re: readers did not keep me recently from putting together a proposal for just one such reader that I sent off to McGraw Hill.  I haven’t heard from them yet, and I don’t expect them to take me up on the project, since my ideas tend towards the eccentric.  Still, for the heck of it, I started in the last few days to put together a trail run reader that I will use in one of my courses this upcoming quarter.  Looking around for readings, of course, led me to forage on the web, and this foraging has led me to conclude that your basic “reader” is dead, but doesn’t know it yet.

To be continued…..

Exhibit B: The End of Tingle Road

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As I established by Exhibit A in my last entry, Tingle Road, as I will always know it, started not very far from the Paron Primitive Baptist Church, ran North then for a number of miles, hung a left, as it approached the county line between Monroe and Butts Counties, crossed Brownlee, and terminated at High Fall Roads.
highfallsign
Since the South end of Tingle Road had no street sign and only local opinion to give it official stature as any thing other than one of hundreds of nameless dirt roads, my wife and I made a point of driving to the Northern End, and there located Tingle Road in its black topped manifestation complete with street signs as documented here .

When I first devoted a web page, now scrapped, to Tingle Territory, I had to look high  and low for maps.  Now maps abound on the web, and so to check my memory, and my facts, and to see if there was more of Tingle Road than I had thought at the time, I googled Tingle Road and much to my displeasure found that it had significantly shrunk.

The green tack—Istoodhere—in the google image marks the intersection of High Falls and Tingle Road where I stood to take the picture above of the street sign marking the corner of High Falls and Tingle Road, but as the viewer will no doubt note directly to the right of the marker is a road called “Teagle” not “Tingle.”  Apparently, I will never again be able, should I wish, to stand at the corner of Tingle and High Falls Roads.  The whole upper end of Tingle Road has been changed to Teagle Road on MSN maps as well as Google.  istoodhere

I asked you, dear reader, what possibly could have been gained by this change from Tingle to Teagle.  Perhaps the locals didn’t like the sound of Tingle and so changed it to Teagle or perhaps some stupid redneck failed to copy Tingle correctly and had signs made up as Teagle.  tinytingle

And just as perturbing, if not more so, The Red Dirt Tingle Road near the Paron Church has also disappeared.  I direct the viewer’s attention to the tiny Bit of Tingle Road (microsoft map) that now runs into something called “Gordon” Road.  Why this part of Tingle Road is called Gordon Road I have no idea.  Who is this Gordon person?  All that remains now officially of Tingle Road is that little bit of the triangle, hardly a quarter mile long.  Better to have wiped out the whole road rather than leave that mockery of a vestige of its former robust self.

Exhibit A

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Exhibit A, so called, is the first piece of evidence in the mystery of the vanishing of Tingle Road.  The Tingle Road, of course, of which I speak, is the one resting at the center of my Particular Tingle Territory, the one located at the upper or northern edge of Monroe County, GA, itself located monroemapmidway between Atlanta and Macon off inter state 75.  That’s the thing I most wanted to see, when I went in 1994 to visit my people in the South,  not for the beauty of the spot, it being after all just a dirt road pretty much in the middle nowhere and not much to brag on, but to see if it actually existed, as family had suggested it did.  Not that I doubted their word, but it was just one of those very, very few things in my life I have felt the need to see with my own eyes.

So when I was back there and had the chance, my wife and I drove down 75 and then took Route 42, at the center, as you the viewer will see, of Exhibit A, up to little known, because little populated, Blount, Georgia.  There we found, as indicated in the yellow blotch in the middle of Exhibit A, the Paron Primitive Baptist Church, that had among its founders, in 1823, a number of ancestral Tingles, whose bones rested directly adjacent on the one side to the church, and  was directly adjacent, as brought to my attention by elderly bent old woman, on the other side to Gregory road which, if I took that would take me a piece, over a little bridge, and right beyond that the entrance to the southern end of Tingle Road, though I should keep my eye peel it being somewhat overgrowed. 

If the reader or viewer would take a moment to direct his or her attention to Exhibit A, he or she will see that things were just as the elderly lady, living repository of local history, had indicated.  Though, the end of the road was not so overgrown, having only a few branches overlapping it, and once one got through those, the road stretched out pretty much open and straight ahead as pictured two entries ago and worth, I think, repeating here.  troad1I drove this stretched as far as I could in my rented car until my wife freaked out when we crested a little knoll and Tingle Road just ahead became a little boggish, no doubt from recent rains.  I was still not quite deterred, and walk aways ahead to determine the depth of the water.  When though I sunk up to my ankles in the red mud, I decided that we had reached the end of the road figuratively speaking.

I can’t say then that I have seen all of Tingle Road with my own eyes, for I failed to drive it end to end as I had wished, motivated by some strange irrational urge to see the whole damn thing.  I don’t know how long the road is exactly, but as the alert viewer, reader will note in Exhibit A, Tingle Road runs on up to cross Route 42, past the Webb Cemetery, across Brownlee, and then runs on a bit more (not pictured here) to High Falls, acting for a way, as it goes, as marking the line between Monroe and Butts Counties.  It terminates, rather abruptly at High Falls, I say abruptly because while the dirt road continues to run some ways, officially it’s called Country Road.

That’s how things were back in 1988 when the map of Monroe County was map, and when I visited in 94 and again in 98, but that’s not how it is today if current documentation is to be trusted.

To be continued…..

The End of History

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I suppose I could just lie and make up things about Tingle Territory.  I don’t think anybody would notice.  I think writing a blog is like talking to one’s self and for some odd reason, writing down what one is talking, and then putting that in the paper shredder.  I wonder if writing bogs will produce a new aesthetic movement—let us call it the Garbage Dump Movement or GDM.  No museum for this movement, just a dump, with all that implies.  Mostly the temporality of all stuff, junk, writing, and TV sets.
landfill

Actually I first had the idea for this aesthetic many moons back in the early 70’s.  I was going out front to bring in the trashcans, and as I did so, noticed some paper there on the ground, folded up, like a letter with ink markings on it.  I thought about just leaving it but it was litter for one thing, and I was a little curious to determine if it was a letter. 

I don’t know what I expected to find.  It was a letter, four pages of a letter, in smallish handwriting, every word of it detailing—and I do mean detailing—its author’s ongoing battle with her weight.  I sat on the fender of my nearby 1959 Plymouth Station Wagon and read the thing through.  I was transported by its purity…  I don’t know what else to call it.  There was no pretension, no pomposity, no philosophical fog, or ideological yammering or, having done with it, no unpleasant, lingering aftertaste of thought.  Just a detailed, down to ounces, individual meals, particular temptations, and specific food items, record of the author’s struggle to master her weight.  One might say it had no depth, and maybe for that reason, it had all the depth in the world.

Having read the thing, and been transported, I had no desire to keep the letter, but put it back where it belonged.  In the trash.  Eventually, the trash would be picked up.  It would be taken to the dump, and once dumped would lie there, unto a tractor pushed it along with many items into a pile and shoved the whole ball of trash into the hole, where eventually it would all be compressed into landfill.  Depending on the wretchedness of the landfill—whether it had trapped gases or stank incredibly—a park might one day be put there or maybe even houses would be built atop it.

I think now of the alien archeologists who come across our moldering globe and with their modern archeological tools begin to unearth the dumps to today to find hard drives, millions, nay billions of hard drives, each to them rather like that letter was to me: something left, passionately produced, but pointless, wayward, and useless accept for what it might tell the curious aliens about how these long gone beings lived—things as they say of historical interest.

Some idiots a while back were talking about the “end of history.”  They were wrong about what they were talking about, but maybe right about what they weren’t.  History may be ending alright—in an outpouring of documentation that might require the entire Grand Canyon and many more such canyons as holes into which to dump it all.  Never before have the lives of individual beings been so documented.  What a prodigious mass of information is now being churned out for some future historian.  That might be the end of history, for I can well imagine this historian, upon unearthing this mass, to throw up his hands, put back into the trash what she had been examining, and say to hell with it.

Tingle Territory?

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I found when I would wake up at 530 and it’s pitch dark outside and I am painfully buzzing from effexor withdrawal that I could steady myself a little by compulsively futzing around with the tingleroadcomputer.  I supposed in the olden days I would have taken out my knife and whittled all day.  But the computer has its own way to whittle things, and so I launched into a project I have entertained for some time, and that is to construct a web page for what I call Tingle Territory.

But once again I pooped out and the further I went to the project the more futile it felt.  Part of the problem is one’s audience.  Who the hell are these Tingles?  Well, I have found that throughout the USA one can locate a goodly number of Tingles, though obviously, this odd name is infrequently heard. I am trying feebly to say there is potentially at least more than one Tingle Territory because one can find more than one Tingle and they have all been in different territories or parts of this USA.

So I find it a bit pretentious or possibly grandiose to put up a page called Tingle Territory as if my tiny piece of Tingle Territory is the whole story.  Some Tingles on line out there in the Ether might go to my Tingle Territory and not be pleased.  I don’t want to offend any Tingles, for they are a fierce bunch. 

Or they are fierce, if, as I believe to be the case, most Tingles in the USA share common genetically linked Ancestors.  Most of the Browns or Smiths or Bushes in this country are probably genetically unlinked.  But the rarity of the Tingle name alone suggests a likely linkage.  Who would voluntarily take on that name, I ask.  Also the little I have gathered about Tingle genealogy suggests common ancestral and genetic links.

Rumor has it that six Tingle brothers came to the Colonies in the 1680’s.  I can trace my line back to a Solomon Tingle, known to be in the colonies in the early 1720’s and, though I cannot document it, I think it logical to infer he was the son of another Solomon Tingle, one of the original six.  The brothers appeared to have fanned out across the country.  I was driving through the “historic” district of Cincinnati once and stumbled on the Tingle House.  An elegant old structure once owned by a William Tingle who owned and operated a brick making plant.  Also, a Google Search documents a pretty large number of Tingle Roads and even Bridges scattered across the country from Maryland to Washington.

I have to believe these roads and bridges were named after people named Tingles who either lived near by or owned the land through which the roads ran and which, at watery places, were sustained by Tingle bridges.  The “Tingle Road” in my family line is located near Blount, Georgia.  That’s where my particular line, fathered by one of those six Tingle Brothers, headed, down South, by way of North Carolina to arrive in Georgia in the early 1800’s.

I don’t know if this is why things start, after a point, every time I try to write up a Tingle Territory page, to feel futile and a bit overwhelming.  My Tingle Territory is but a tiny bit of Tingle World.  Maybe, I could solve my problem by giving the page a different name, but I refuse to yield that alliteration.

 

crazyface

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I wonder who this guy is.  I must be fond of him since I have had his picture somewhere in the files on my computer for more than ten years.  More than once I have gone back rummaging through https://www.nicktingle.com/crazy1a.jpgcrazyface1files trying to relocate him, and I always do because I called him or his picture rather “crazyface.”  That’s easy to remember.  It speaks to me somehow—that crazyface—and recently I looked him up again and reduced him mightily to 16 by 16 pixels and stuck him up there next to my URL as my favicon.  And, as you will note, I have over stuck him in my last three entries on depression.  He seems right stuck there in ruminations on depression.

In fact, I think whenever I write an entry on depression and related mental illnesses I will stick him there in the entry as a sign to the reader: this is about depression and mental illness, read at your own risk.  Perhaps I will construct another little site with a photo gallery of this guy and the ways I have massacred his face, hack it, chopped it and colored it.

I first came across this fellow in Darwin’s “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” and, as the reader will note, the picture here is labeled by Darwin as being from a photograph by one Dr. Duchanne.  Darwin uses Dr. Duchanne’s photographs constantly throughout his book and also refers to Dr. Duchanne’s work, “The Mechanism of Human Facial Expressions,” (1862).  The man in the picture was called by Duchanne “The Old Man,” though honestly I don’t think he looks that old.

He was Duchanne’s model and his experimental subject.  I say model because Duchanne photographed him and experimental subject because the various expressions on the “Old Man’s” face were not spontaneous but the result of a galvanic or electric discharge.  Duchanne applied electrodes to muscles as a way to isolate the muscles most responsible for facial expressions in general and for particular facial expressions. 

He would then make a photograph of the Old Man under the influence of electodes, show that picture to regular, ordinary people and ask  them what they thought this particular contraction of configuration of contractions “expressed.”  As indicated, people thought the Old Man’s face, as pictured here, expressed Horror and Agony.

I find something troubling in all this. Or should I say: quite modern.  My crazy face is not expressing as from his psyche, Horror and Agony.  He is not even an actor mimicking Horror and Agony.  He is being electrocuted in a very exacting way.  History records that the “Old Man” was

afflicted with almost total facial anesthesia. This circumstance made him an ideal subject for Duchenne’s investigations, because the stimulating electrodes he used were certainly somewhat uncomfortable, if not actually painful.

If this is true—and I hope it is—my poor “crazy face” could not even feel his face.  I wonder, if this is the case, if he knew when he was smiling or when he was frowning.  Or did he have to carry a mirror around with him.

What isness is…

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I feel a bit like Bill Clinton with his, it all depends on what the meaning of is is.  I was glad Bill was crazyface4not a Republican, but I never liked Bill.  But better a man who solved his masculine inadequacies with out of the oval office blow jobs, than the massive overcompensator we now have.

But as I said.

I think there’s a difference between saying:

A:  “I am depressed.”

And B: “I am a depressive.”

A.J. Ayer dismisses all of Sartre’s philosophy as a pun having to do with “is-ness.”  Dickhead!  Talk about a tree getting in the way of the forest.

 This came to me in insomnia soaked moment somewhere towards dawn, another product of Effoxor withdrawal.

But what a difference a noun makes or maybe an adjective makes.

Twenty four little hours—and the difference is you.

But as I said.

 In “A” the emphasis is on “am” and followed, as it is, by an adjective, the “am-ness” here constructed is all temporality.  “A” says, I am, not that I was, or that I will be.  Just that I am, at this transparent moment.

 

In “B” the emphasis is on “depressive,” I think, and the “am-ness” here constructed takes to itself the air of a logical proposition.  Or maybe it’s that little article, “a,” that makes all the difference.

I have known for years that I “am” and “was” depressed, and for years that was different than saying, “I am a depressive.”  I am still reluctant to say the latter perhaps because it means, in its logical finality, that I have given up all hope of things being otherwise.  But lately, I have thought it more applicable; when one hits sixty—I know I generalize—but at least in my case—one has doubts about any important change.

Still I am reluctant because if one says, “I am a depressive,” that means being depressed has become part of one’s self-concept.  Being male is part of my self concept; but if I say I am horney I could be either male or female, horniness not being gender specific.

The problem though—and it is not a small one—is that if one goes around saying I am depressed and not I am a depressive, one is not adequately positioned, I think, to deal with one’s depression qua depression, to accept it as such, and to find accordingly ways of dealing with it or, if not that, living with it. Because it’s hard enough being depressed without being hard on yourself for being depressed.

Brain Shivers

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The epistemological question I have raised a little lately as to whether much is happening in the world to piss a body off or whether this body is at present predisposed to be pissed at anything is crazyfaceredthe product, over six months or so, of my effort to stop taking the anti-depressant called Effexor.   Why I might not want to stay tanked up for the rest of my natural or unnatural life on anti-depressants is a question itself.  Isn’t it really six of one, half dozen of another?  One is tanked up on something all the time biochemically speaking—caffeine perhaps, or sugar, sugar, sugar, and so on and so forth.  In any case, not taking anti-depressants is no more natural than taking them. Why in God’s name in any case would I want to know what I “really” feel like at age 60?

But that’s another question, as I said, maybe for another time.  For now, I see those moments lately of a pure and clean anger that come on fiercely like a summer squall and then are gone as symptoms of withdrawal.  I thought six months ago maybe these moments would just dissipate like yesterday’s cold leaving no permanent scar on the psychic tissues.  But I was wrong.  I kept cutting back and cutting back on the drug from an original high of 375 milligrams, and for a bit things would flatten out and then wham! Up aside the head again.

Finally, I was down to the smallest dosage they have of this nasty stuff.  37.5 milligrams.  I should have known something was up when my psychiatrist suggested I split this up even for a while.  This required pulling apart the capsule—not easy to do with my eyes going—and dumping its contents of tiny white little orbs of something or other into a bowl.  Then with my fingernail, I would scoot one half of the orbs over to one side of the bowl and like a dog tongue out the other half of orbs, and later in the day tongue what remained.  Then I started throwing out some of the little balls and dividing up whatever remained for the course of the day.

But shit! Say I.  I got the feeling I was just prolonging the misery and decided to flat out just stop.  The act of gradually tapering off as I had over the last six months just didn’t have, as far as I was concerned, the intended effect of lessening one iota the final scream of withdrawal like some malignant ghost that just refuses to go over to the other side.  I was caught so by surprise I went online to see what others might have to say about Effexor withdrawal just to confirm to my enfeebled brain that I was not going nuts, because that’s what it felt like.

What I found confirmed what I felt up to and including reports of the mysterious brain shivers.  I had not thought of it that way exactly; the word shiver implies a shiver, I think, as a reaction to coldness.  Whatever it might be that hits my brain at odd moments is not a reaction to coldness but to darkness, a palpable, right there behind the eyes darkness, that is almost, if one could just completely give into it, a restfulness beyond all restfulness, that seems as if it is lightly sucking at you, like a current or undertow pulling you down and back.  But doesn’t.  As if getting just to the relaease of orgasm one can’t get off. ….  Maybe that’s the shiver part.