Jogged down here from my hotel digs by the big GM factory in the city of Pontiac. Friday night, first week of June - the week of GM's bankruptcy. Notice the closed-up store behind and the nearly empty parking lot.
But this fellow sure isn't giving up. From Midwesterner's practical mindset and (relatively) work-together approach, I think they'll figure something out. However, it's hard to see anything like the economy Southern Michigan has known persisting very far into the future.
Word is Pontiac got some movie making business going. There is so much lawn here. How will they maintain all these lawns with the economy going where it is?
Welcome to The Crystal Cabinet, a Vox group where you can post your thoughts on how poetry you've read connects to and illuminates topics of common interest in current events or history. In "Blake: Prophet Against Empire",
And they enrich each other tremendously: That's the reason for for this group! In my undergraduate honors thesis, "The Mass Sacrificial Spectacle: The Doors in Poetry and History", I took a page from Erdman's "Prophet Against Empire" and found that the poetry of Blake-inspired poet (and yes, rock star) Jim Morrison seemed to similarly mirror the events of the "counterculture" revolution of the 1960s. Working with Jim's UCLA film school classmate and Doors filmographer Frank Lisciandro, I found confirmation of this from Frank, an actual participant at the time.
The relationship can best be expressed by comparing Blake's "The Crystal Cabinet" with the lyrics of The Doors' "The Crystal Ship". Both have dimensions beyond historical events, but both relate to apirations for a better world. While "The Crystal Ship" is a short lyric, most of Jim Morrison's poetic opus can be found in these three works:
The late Duke University scholar Wallace Fowlie gave some more official credence to the notion that Jim Morrison might have been a real poet in his work, "The Rebel as Poet".
However, I was left with the feeling that Fowlie just never did the historical work that an Erdmanesque approach entails. Fowlie didn't seem to be very aware of the events of the 1960s, perhaps most notably, from three to six million people killed in a U.S. military bid to contain "Communism" in favor of an equally dubious puppet state in Vietnam. That causes him to miss a huge dimension of Jim's poetry, much as Northrop Frye misses much of Blake.
When Oliver Stone's movie on The Doors came out in the early 1990s, with many others I was similarly disappointed. Fowlie's later book (it followed the movie by about five years) has marked quite an improvement. Now, things are looking up even more: A new documentary on The Doors (website, trailer), reputed to be very unlike the Stone movie, has premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and has now garnered the narration of the movie star Johnny Depp.
At the other end of the pendulum-swing from the draw of movie stars, science itself seems to be affirming some of the more apocalyptic themes of Jim poetry. As Western lifestyles and technology continue to develop and are adopted across the globe, we face looming, catastrophic environmental and human impacts. Climate change and mass obesity are a couple of my "favorites".
Perhaps more immediately, we witness now the collapse of the great counterrevolution to the movements of the 1960s, the Reagan Revolution. As it dies in a cascade of revelations about the economic Depression-bringing filth and cheating behind Reagan's vaunted "Morning in America" of "deregulation" (policies carried in large part through the Clinton Administration (1) (2)), the world begs for new visions. The mix of poetry and history is hard to beat for that.
I'll end with an invitation to post your best here, and a quote from Morrison's "The American Night":
Now damn you, dance
Now dance
or die sleek & fat in your
reeking seats, still
buckled for flight
Starting out from Menlo Park, heading up Kings Mountain Road: Some solid groves of redwoods (click on any picture to see a larger version, and click on that version to see the largest version).
The Tour of California bike race will go through this intersection up on the mountain (at the Google Maps links on this post, you can always get a "Street View" option: Drag the little person to see a 3D panorama of the entire route!):
Snow at the summit of Kings Mountain! Descending from Kings, with all that rushing, frigid air, it was time to stop and put the hat back on.
Woodside Road and Skyline, site of the locally well-known Alice's Restaurant:
The turn-around point on this ride, La Honda and Old La Honda:
Old La Honda affords some nice views as you twist up the mountain on the windy road:
The town of Woodside is home to a rustic flavor of venture capitalist:
Fully expecting this triathlon to be roasting hot, as it usually is there in Sonoma County, CA in late July, we exulted as the heat never really came. Instead a maritime blanket covered the noble Russian River and most of the bike ride through Sonoma's gently rolling, truly endless and buff grape vineyards.
This event is logistically challenging: The race pamphlet says there is plenty of parking in Guerneville by the river, but I think that's true only if you arrive there at 5am. I joined some much more proficient triathletes in the pantheon of participants who almost missed their swim start due to taking too long finding a parking spot and trekking from that far flung place to the swim start. It was an insanely rushed last fifteen minutes.
The main challenge of the Russian River swim at this time of year is not scraping your hand on the bottom. Swimming upriver felt like being in a movie inspired by "Heart of Darkness". The overcast and dim weather gave a gloomy, soothing, mysterious feel. My favorite part was passing under a large, old, moss-encrusted, high and ornate bridge out there in the seeming wilderness.
The more expert swimmers stayed near the center of the river on the way downriver, and away from it on the way up, I suppose to leverage the current. Makes sense to me anyway.
Outta the river:
The bike was fast and rolling. The scenery of enveloping oaks and green vineyards was enough to keep you going if you got tired.
The sun did come out for the run, but was not too hot, and the finish
was there to carry one through. I felt so great at this finish. I
think a lot of it was having dropped a few pounds at this time of year. It felt like some of my better races in highschool and college:
Despite all this I got my PR of 6:13! Never could have come close to that without so much generous coaching and teammate help in the couple years I've been doing this. Now, just a little less cheese and fewer chickens in the diet and 2009 . . .
Back in October our team, Team Sheeper out of Menlo Park, CA (next to Redwood City), won the National Triathlon Championships for Division II ( 70.3 miles distance)! You can find me at the far left in the photo below (click on it, wait, and when the page refreshes, click on the photo again to see the full-size view) and near the bottom (!) of my age division in this race here.
The generous coach, whom I'm standing next to in the photo, let me,
"cubicle guy" these days (obviously
not the big scorer on the team :) ), hold the trophy for this shot!
Despite the fantastic scenery, it was
a pretty tough bike ride out in that desert with all those hills and
the heat by the end of the day; was 90 for the run. The swim was the
nicest ever, there in calm, warm, shallow Lake Mead (formed by Hoover
Dam).
Lots of press lately about how Yahoo is moribund, in trouble, what will it do, and so forth. To me it seems rather straightforward: While search may be Google's game, there is room for more than one provider of online consumer software. No doubt, Google Docs is great. But YMail beats GMail hands down in my book. I am so happy to pay $25 per year for YMail without ads.
Contemplating some of the gaps between the founder's stated vision for Stanford University and the reality of Stanford today can be a little eye-opening.
Where Mr. and Mrs. Stanford wanted a University that taught co-op economics through a University professor as an alternative to plutocratic capitalism, we have something altogether different. People do refer to it affectionately as "The Farm", even though they never heard of the actual farm at Stanford.
Where Mr. and Mrs. Stanford wanted "To maintain on the Palo Alto estate a farm for instruction in agriculture in all its branches" (Article 17 of the University Charter), we've had basically a patch of pernicious weeds with a few intrepid gardeners staking outposts amongst the ravenous squirrels. Of late, even, golf, that sport so closely associated with corporations, has encircled the Stanford Community Farm, limiting growth opportunities. Various individuals have poured their energies into the place on ultra-meager funding, so far always to be dropped off the payroll as my august alma mater has more important things on her mind than sodden agriculture.
One of the main paths at the farm, planted on either side in beneficial-insect supporting plants:
Lately a new academic position around the Stanford Community Farm has been created. This is definitely a cause for celebration, but the incredible work (depicted above and below) of a friend of mine who has been the latest "farm lover" has been all but ignored thus far in the process. Taking the farm from where it was with the weeds to what you see here was a feat not only of long persistence but also of organizing and energizing students to help out. And goodness knows that a little practical education is a good thing for the Stanford student population. But at least the new position is more of a "real job".
And we have all this while the University proclaims its Environmental Initiative. It's great, but then what about learning a little of what it really is to produce food from the land? As someone who spent eight years in produce farming, including as a paid manager of a mid-sized produce farm (organic, which I'm proud of, but farming is farming), it looks like that little bit got lost amidst all the important academic papers and theories of public policy.
To address this situation, and specifically, the gap between Stanford today and the founders' vision of a University that teaches agriculture and cooperative economic structures, I propose that the alumni form The Committee for a Traditional Stanford. Perhaps the magic depicted above and below can be grown into a key part of Stanford. In fact, insofar as Stanford must uphold its founding charter, the University is obligated to do so. 2008 is a long cry from 1890 when the University was founded, but the planet and the people on it would be thankful.
Led by Steve Masley, a Stanford employee, students and other volunteers created this outdoor pizza oven (fully certified by the fire dep't). The idea of it is to interest students in the farm. The original inspiration came from a garden pizza oven at Yale, where they are a little ahead of the curve:
This detail shows the oven chimney, in the form of a red-tail hawk's head, almost completed. The stucco and cracks have now been finished off with another layer of adobe-like material:
Click on the photo below to see the whole collection -- this first slide is of the surrounding golf course, the early bare edges of which we planted in beneficial insect-attracting perennials:
Wow, does Sonoma County have a lot of grapes! That was just one take-away from the Vineman 70.3 Tri, a great Northern California 70.3 ("half") and full Ironman event. On the day of the 70.3, the weather was extraordinarily merciful and it was really fun to roll through grape fields for a few hours on the bike.
I'd like to add some personal color to my previous post on the McCain vs. Obama choice. It's a well-worn saw that the tone of a company's culture is set by the CEO. Watching Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay and currently National Co-Chair for the McCain presidential campaign, cheer madly at the Republican National Convention highlighted contrasts for me that I think, if you work for someone, you'll find well worth your attention.
First, let me say that despite having had to deal with Meg's eBay, I went on to build about 40% of the interactive features of this very website, which won Best Web 2.0 Innovation for 2007. During that time I also graduated with over a 4.0 GPA from Carnegie Mellon University's Master of Science in Software Engineering. And then I went on to be Senior Staff Software Engineer at a major financial firm, where I am currently after about two years, and where I've been privileged to write some of the greatest code I've had the opportunity to create.
Back in mid-2004, I was hired by eBay on a three-month contract-to-hire basis as a software engineer. I gave two week's notice at my current job. One working day before I was to start at eBay, eBay canceled the contract, with neither recompense nor apology. I know that they did this to several people at that time, from information I had from the good people at the staffing firm I worked with. Luckily, I worked for some of the best people ever, and I got my old job back, if barely as they were about to hire my replacement. That was a very close, very scary call back in the job market at that time in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Then eBay called me six months later, and I was hired again for the same job and on the same terms. Wanting get back into full-time software development, I went ahead with it. Then a graduate student (in software engineering at Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast campus), I was told three months into the contract that the contract would be renewed for three months and that I would not be hired while I was still a student.
Huh, why didn't they mention that up front? Anybody see a pattern here? But that's just the beginning.
At the end of that contract, it was renewed for only two weeks. I was told that because of an upcoming re-organization of the department I was in, my contract could only be renewed for two weeks as staffing plans were not absolutely sure yet. I promptly found a much better job, dutifully gave and honored my two week's notice, and did a decent job on the knowledge transfer/hand-offs of my current projects. Five days before my last day, my manager came to my desk and asked me if I was sure I wanted to leave.
Can you guess my answer? Well, of course it was "yes"! In the years since then, I have heard from countless others about their, or their friends', similar stories about eBay. While eBay certainly has many very skilled and creative employees, it must be much more difficult for them to hire in the "Silicon Valley" than it is for almost any other company.
Regardless of where you stand on the legal rights of employees, would you really want live in a country with a politics any more heavily-influenced by the people who were behind this way of doing business than it already is?
McCain's candidacy seems to be coasting on the odd perception that the Iraq misadventure is somehow a "victory". We see him neck-and-neck with Obama in the polls despite the recently-revealed fact that he doesn't seem to even know how many houses he owns. Against this backdrop, I find myself realizing that I just don't know how Dubba (who maintained "a gentlemanly "C" average at Yale" -- and how do you get into HBS with a low "C" average?) or McCain (who had at Annapolis a "a low class rank (894 of 899) which he did not aim to improve") made it through their higher education. It's possible that thinking hurts too much for them to do much of it.
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Laurence Schmidt said:
could be a painting i think read more
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