Technology overload vs. the world in a cup

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I've been trying to read books and printed articles as a balance to online surfing. The nagging voice to "read more books" (sometimes through friends in kind and subtle ways) is finally taking hold. The excuse that my eyes are too sleepy at the end of the day is getting ignored as long as it's before 8:30.

So it was great to find an interview with Nicholas Carr (author of Does IT Matter?) in The Sun (see Carr's blog and home page too), titled "Computing the Cost." It's about how the Internet is rewiring our brains. (The entire March 2009 issue of The Sun is about technology and its effects on us.) By the way, I read the print version.

Apparently we use different parts of our brains for reading a book or other print materials than for reading online. Carr refers to the book iBrain, by Gary Small who studied two dozen people, half of whom had little Internet experience, and half of whom had a lot. Dr. Small and his colleague scanned their brains while they searched the Internet, resulting in different patterns of brain activity. The subjects with little Internet experience showed activity in language, memory and visual centers, typical of someone reading. The experienced Internet users had more activity in the decision-making areas of the brain. Disturbingly, within a few days of surfing, the previously non-users' brain activity resembled that of the frequent users. I haven't read Small's book, but Carr questions whether we are losing a vital part of our brain function that thinks and synthesizes information.

While reading the interview, first off, I felt pretty good about myself for trudging through The Ambassadors week after week, because I have felt, decisively, that on p. 144 I am more easily grasping content than I did at p. 1 or 10 or even 80. It doesn't really bother me that it's taking so long to get through James' novel, because I'm getting through it. And I am finding it possible to sit for longer periods reading it too. Thirty minutes is longer than 15. And 60 is longer than 30. That's about what I'm up to, 30-60.

Second, I recognized that when it comes to information, more is not necessarily better. While access to oceans of information is great on one hand, on the other, a) it is overwhelming and b), as Carr says, we are becoming big flat pancakes with lots and lots of facts in our heads and at our fingertips, but losing deeper thinking skills. If I read a political story, then read four blogs about it, did I give myself a chance to reflect on the event? And what influence will government or other agencies use to control me one day, if I am too reliant on this medium?

Clearly, the Internet's value to become more informed about current affairs, geography, history, literature, the environment, ways to help and not least, meeting friends around the world, is vast. And by limiting information intake I don't mean I want to close my eyes to the world's problems.

I'd like to contain the world in a cup, which of course isn't possible. But I don't mind keeping my world smaller than the Internet and its Googles and Wikis want to pull me into. I think a deeper, more focused world is a richer one.

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stardust memory

Composite image taken from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope

- found at National Geographic's space photo galleries

My stardust moment was in 1976 at 7,000 feet in the Cascade Mountains, not far from Ashland, Oregon (on the west coast of the U.S.). It was 11:00pm on one of my first nights of a fall semester studying there. The air was crisp and clear but not cold when I stepped out of the library onto the porch. Light falling on my shoulders through the library windows was the only light visible to me in the black night. I left the lit porch and crossed the two-lane mountain logging road and continued on the dirt drive home, lost in thought and darkness, face down, walled by Ponderosa pines almost invisibly black, when something caught my upper peripheral vision, stopping me in my tracks. No, not a moose. I was utterly Alone.

It was the sky. Stardust. Not a single patch of sky undotted with a star. But more than that, some dots were so densely clustered they melded solidly into Milky rivers and lakes of stars. It was a revelation to a small town 20-year-old who had only ever seen the dot-to-dot of major constellations like the Big and Little Dippers and Orion's Belt. Though I was sky-challenged and didn't have a clue what I saw, I was staring at the spiral arms of the Milky Way branching out from the center's Sagittarius. Life was different after that. There was a shift from knowing everything, to imagining what there was I hadn't yet seen.

Besides the 1980 Woody Allen film "Stardust Memories" - some say his best, and the 2007 fantasy movie "Stardust," there is also the song "Stardust" recorded in 1933 by Louis Armstrong (a jazz standard, it was also recorded by Sinatra and Nat King Cole).

Below is Louis Armstrong's recording of "Stardust." You'll hear him repeat the line "O memory" three times at the end, giving us the phrase "Stardust Memories." I never knew that three "memories" sung by Satchmo are the origin of this familiar phrase. Plug in your good speakers for this one, it's worth it.

Stardust

And now the purple dusk of twilight time

Steals across the meadows of my heart

High up in the sky the little stars climb

Always reminding me that we're apart

You wander down the lane and far away

Leaving me a song that will not die

Love is now the stardust of yesterday

The music of the years gone by

Sometimes I wonder why I spend

The lonely night dreaming of a song

The melody haunts my reverie

And I am once again with you

When our love was new

And each kiss an inspiration

But that was long ago

Now my consolation

Is in the stardust of a song

Beside a garden wall

When stars are bright

You are in my arms

The nightingale tells his fairy tale

A paradise where roses bloom

Though I dream in vain

In my heart it will remain

My stardust melody

The memory of love's refrain

[oh memory . . . oh memory . . . oh memory]

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John James Audubon

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John James Audubon

April 26, 1785-January 27, 1851

Birds. How exasperating they are! Even when I lift my camera to shoot them through the window, they scatter. Light, vulnerable and deft, they hide in the branches until the frightening woman with the black box vanishes. They must think my camera shoots bullets instead of photographs.

I told you about my single attempt to photograph birds in the meadow in winter. None appeared though I sat for an hour and a half and froze my tush, never to embark out again this season.

Not so Mr. Audubon. From the time he was a baby he felt an intimacy with birds bordering on frenzy. He spent most of his life chronicling them, often in harrowing conditions. (See field notes from his journals, below.)

The portrait, above (now where Sasha and Malia can see it daily on the west wall of the Red Room in the White House), of Audubon by John Syme shows him as he must have looked in the years 1820-1824 when he explored Mississippi, Alabama and Florida in the start of his attempt to paint all the birds of North America. One of the treasured books I inherited from my parents is Audubon's Birds of America, the greatest picture book of all time. It has 435 watercolor plates of birds painted by John, well my edition has photographs of the plates. In all, the field work and paintings took 14 years to complete for the book. Yes, the gun there means he shot birds in order to draw them. At the time of the painting of this portrait in Edinburgh by the Scottish Syme, Audubon was in the British Isles looking for a publisher for the book.

mourning doves

He intended to include paintings of eggs in his book, but they didn't make it into the final copy. (In my 1966 edition, Marshall B. Davidson included Audubon's eggs in his Introduction.) Eggs are more docile subjects, no need to shoot them. But at first glance at his drawings at the right I thought the pen scratches under them were feet!

The book has 435 hand-colored prints of over 700 North American bird species. He tried unsuccessfully to get it published in the U.S. Eventually in England it cost more than $100,000 at the time to print (over $2 million in today's money). Copper plates had to be carved, and the original edition was hand tinted and printed with the aquatint process.

cardinals

It seemed to us as if we were approaching the end of the world. The country was perfectly flat, and, so far as we could survey it, presented the same wild and scraggy aspect. . . We now and then passed through muddy pools, which reached the saddle-girths of our horses.

- from Audubon and His Journals, chapter "Spring Garden"

scrub (or Florida jay), Stellar's jay, yellow-billed magpie, Clark's nutcracker

In the morning when I arose, the country was still covered in thick fogs, so that although I could hear the plain notes of birds on shore, not an object could I see beyond the bowsprit, and the air was as close and sultry as the previous evening.

- from the chapter St. John's River, Audubon and His Journals

purple finches

The National Audubon Society was of course named after John James Audubon.

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the hard boiled egg

a;souiehr
a;osifh

It's poetry week. Every three weeks or so several of us meet with our poetry professor from college days for conversation, poetry work, and dinner, which our former professor - now mentor and friend - prepares and serves with grace. It's a pretty cool deal. Two women skype in from Boston and one from Tennessee. I'm still working on a draft of a poem for tomorrow. Meanwhile, below is one from 2005 BC ('Before Chickens' on the farm). In this case, the egg came first.

I find that some people are tormented if you ask them to read a poem. "Is it long?" they whine ask. If you're one of them, stop here, consider this a very short post, and maybe imagine what is in the drawer, above. If you're not one of them, or if you're willing not to be, read on. I think poems should open a little drawer in your head, or at least make you want to know what's in the drawer.

In the stanza about conversations, this was BB (Before Blogging). PB (Post Blogging), it's even more true, thanks to you.

The Hard Boiled Egg

As I peel my egg,

shell adheres

to the clear membrane

in chunks, like ice floes

on the surface of water.

Before I bite

the end, cool and round,

I know the felt-like yolk

will mix with the metallic white,

an aggregate flowing with

grains of pepper and salt

on the riverbed of my tongue.

Every day is a completeness

like this. Conversations

like embryos fresh

and awake for surprise.

Nakedness under a shell.

Nourishment begun

at my mother’s white table cloth

that spreads to the snow

fields around this farm peppered

with thistle crowns and bare

branches emerging from

under the mask of white

that curves around the world.

~

Ruth M., December 2005

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6 weeks old

While Decembery tempests blasted Nature outside the barn, inside the coop a Partridge Cochin hen insisted at eight months that she was ready for motherhood. She kept stomping her foot at Don whenever he would pick her up and set her down off the eggs she'd find and set on. "Ok ok," he finally relented and swooped Broody and her adoptees up and nestled them into the brooding box. With the wind banging bare lilac branches against the window, she sat there steadfast under the warm lights on those eggs, and on the 20th day seven of them hatched. They survived and grew and grew. These are the first hatch from eggs laid by our own Green Barn hens in their first year of life.

This week the chicks are six weeks old. For all we know, there are seven mothers of the seven chicks, and Broody the brooder may not even be one of them. We do know Khan is the proud papa.

Here you see two shots of the same six-week-old chick on the occasion we invited her/him/it into the house for a photo op. We won't discover its sex until certain leg and head features develop. Don't ask me what those features are, I'm just la-di-da-ing like Lisa here on Green Acres. Don is the expoit (read farmer, farmhand and farmer's wife). The highlights of these gorgeous days-old feathers look quite different under the lamplight shining on the ottoman, compared to the natural light from the window.

Look, all this from an egg.

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1996 Oscar: one scene in The English Patient

I watch few movies now, and I can't for the life of me list the nominees for Sunday night's Oscars show the way I once did, let alone say I've seen them all. I know there's Pitt and Winslet, a Slumdog and a Wrestler.

So I'll do what aging people do when they start losing touch with the changes around them: I'll reminisce. About a 1996 film about WWII, too famous and parodied for you to be ignorant of it. But even so, it gets me thinking about how sorry we all are for this fractured world, and sorry for ourselves too.

So, in the movie, there is brutal war among the world's powerful governments trying to shape boundaries and mindsets in the decades to come. Human beings and Nature together have grown soft and muddy with grief, hatred and killing.

For Hana war is not just a story in the news. She has watched her best friend explode in a jeep that hit a mine. Then in the hospital tent under mortar attack she has discovered that her lover, an officer in another regiment, has been killed. As a war nurse, her ears are deafened with bomb blasts and agonized whimpers of broken men. She holds their torn flesh and bones like crushed fruit.

So when Kip the mine sweeper carries her on his scooter into town for an escape and a surprise, Hana's whole body lights up with childish anticipation. They enter an empty church where frescoed murals adorn the walls up high. Too high, and invisible in an unlighted church. Kip harnesses her on a hanging rope with himself as counter-weight on the other end, hands her a flare after lighting it, and hoists her to the level of the paintings. He operates the rope deftly as if he has practiced this every night for a week, causing her to sway gently in a hanging dance that he controls so she can examine the painted faces up close while she twists and dangles.

Kip knew Hana could not extricate herself from the plodding pain engulfing her, just as he himself had struggled to block out the strain of his mine sweeping job. As love surprised them, he shared a secret window of art and joy with her. I appreciate the grace of the scene for showing two people crushed with war fatigue determined to absorb available beauty, for each others sake as much as for their own.

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Everything but the . . .

It is where she has filled the cool cavities of 18-pound Thanksgiving turkeys with stuffing in her fists. It is where she bathed her babies, their soapy skin so slick she was terrified they'd slip and gouge their heads on the faucet, yet they cooed at her unafraid, blinking and sputtering when she rinsed their heads with cups of clear warm water. Cabbage heads and cauliflower heads were washed here too, and fingers of carrot scrubbed with a stiff white brush. Teapots and soup pots filled. Flower stems clipped before layering them and their velvety heads in water-filled vessels. Here in soapy water she broke her favorite glass rotating her hand inside, and she watched the perfectly sliced V between her knuckles blossom and point at her heart candy apple red, then blood red, then wick into the fine rivulets of her skin. With a turn of the faucet handle, cold water instantly streamed to cleanse the cut, as it had streamed, washed, rinsed, and filled dozens of times a day, every day, for decades.

Indoor plumbing has brought water into this farmhouse kitchen for 80 years. She is one of only two thirds of the world's women who can turn a faucet and receive a rush of water right into sinks in their homes. The rest are lucky if they can gather clean water from a pump a mile away and carry it in red plastic jugs on their heads back home, spending hours a day on just this simple collection. Some only pray for adequate access to clean water. Some = over a billion.

You can read about global water issues at the Global Issues site, like how because of CocaCola's production that depleted water resources in Plachimada, India, local farmers had to dig 450 feet and still couldn't access water.

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