"One of the reasons I felt so weird about him before I met him was because he wrote this piece of filthy doggerel for a mimeographed zine called 'Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts,' which Sanders was doing. It was a very daring name back in 1962. He has these notes on the contributors in the back and he described Weber as having written this poem after an all-night sexual romp in the Central Park Zoo. I believed it! Sanders would make up things like that and people like me would say 'Wow, what a free spirit.' To fuck a gazelle all night long in the zoo. I'm sure he would have if the gazelle had been friendly."

Take a wild guess who wrote that. I dunno, though. Maybe I should hire a decent PR outfit to flog this puppy. Right now it's in the shitter. Amazon Sales Rank: 873,201. Of course, it won't be out till January, so maybe that's not so bad. Who knows? Here's a clip from one of the bits called "Signs and Portents."

Awash in panic. Alone in my cabin in the high Rockies, I had clearly eaten too many of the innocuous looking little mushrooms, and now I was veering out of control, alarms triggering down every internal subsystem, neural klaxons going off like explosions, each calling for more adrenaline. Suddenly removed from the sky, white clouds, impossible summer sunshine, mountain air: all were mocking, distant, alien. Lost between heaven and earth, I was falling headlong into the wreckage I'd created of my life. Unable to hide, to beg forgiveness, to continue living.

I stumbled out from the cabin to my truck, testing just how self-conscious is was possible to be. Deeply embarrassed by the trees, so obviously belonging there unlike my stupid interloping self. What was I thinking to have come here, done this? And how would I survive the next eight hours? A meaningless temporal division in a life so abruptly terminated. More to distract from my patent doom than anything else, I slotted a tape into the deck and hit the play button, closed my eyes.

It took forever for anything to happen after that. Hell is for eternity, just as they say. Curious that Pat Metheny was in hell along with me, plus someone on vibes, a drummer heavy into cymbals, a piano. Maybe it was "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls"; that was the right year, 1981. The music began as random sound, unbearable, without purpose or direction. I thought to turn it off, but my hand was so far away it was not responding. More panic! I was paralyzed, gripped by iron bonds of aimless yet inevitable consequence. Nothing was worth doing. Yes, I could move my hand if I really wanted to, but why bother? What would it prove, cut off from the human race forever, sitting alone in some automotive contraption on the side of some random mountain in East Jesus Colorado, that I could turn a cassette tape player off? Nothing. I slipped deeper into whatever lethargy had stoned my heart and sapped my will and tried not to fear the fear any more than it seemed to be demanding as its due. I blanked and disappeared. Then back then gone again.

The noise of the music was all there was, and maddening interminable time. Because there was nothing else to do I found myself watching the notes unfurl. I remember noticing the stereo was much better than usual. As I blindly drifted closer, each bit of sound took on a shape, an iridescent color, almost a personality. They were moving against each other as if confused, searching for some better arrangement. Then, wait -- even though all was lost, though nothing mattered -- this was very nearly interesting. They were forming into patterns, then falling back apart. Hard to describe the constellation this created. It held yet shifted, twisted, flowed, like the edge of a Mandelbrot set, fractal recursion collapsing in on itself only to repeat, the same yet different on every iteration. Like rattlesnakes suddenly in fallen leaves. Because of this movement my vision was drawn to something larger that the local piece was just a part of, and in that moment the music shifted focus, dropped into gear and somehow opened to reveal a huge ring of synchronized diamond fire hanging in black space, beginning to turn, to glow, to become one whole and living, breathing mandala. Sharp edged, terrible, immediate, real. Beauty beyond all pain and sorrow. Not of myself or other either: original face.

Nothing left, I rode the music right on through forever and was almost thrown again when it began to slow and faded, finally ending. "Fifty- five..." someone called out matter-of-factly on the tape. And in the far background, "...let's do it again," then laughter. They know, I thought, amazed I hadn't seen it sooner. Skillful brothers and sisters always bring you through.

I opened the truck door and got out. The clouds had massed the sky and the wind come up. My eyes were liquid with ancient knowledge, and the world they took in was no longer outside. I opened my hands to the earth. I breathed and stretched, a certain animal once more. So good to be back.

...more...

Man, this shit is making me paranoid! I'm going back to bed. But you say you want "a cool, flashy banner ad"? OK. I don't know how "cool" it is. But then, context is everything, no? La dolce vita, baby...

Gargantua's Discourse on Bum Wiping

I have, said Gargantua, by a long and curious experience, found out a means to wipe my ass, the most lordly, the most excellent, and the most convenient that ever was seen.

What is that, said Grandgousier, his father, how is it?

I will tell you by and by, said Gargantua. Once I did wipe me with a gentlewoman's velvet mask, and found it to be good; for the softness of the silk was very voluptuous and pleasant to my fundament. Another time with one of their hoods, and in like manner that was comfortable. At another time with a lady's neckerchief, and after that I wiped myself with some earpieces of hers made of crimson satin, but there was such a number of golden spangles in them (turdy round things, a pox take them) that they fetched away all the skin of my tail with a vengeance. Now I wish St. Anthony's fire burn the bum-gut of the goldsmith that made them! This hurt I cured by wiping myself with a page's cap, garnished with a feather, after the Switzers' fashion.

Afterwards, in dunging behind a bush, I found a March-cat, and with it I wiped my breech, but her claws were so sharp that they scratched and exulcerated all my perinee. Of this I recovered the next morning thereafter by wiping myself with my mother's gloves, of a most excellent perfume and scent of Arabian Benin. After that I wiped myself with sage, with fennel, with anet, with marjoram, with roses, with gourd leaves, with beets, with colewort, with leaves of the vine tree, with mallows, wool-blade, which is a tail-scarlet, with lettuce and with spinach leaves. All this did very great good to my leg. Then with mercury, with parsley, with nettles, with comfrey, but that gave me the bloody flux of Lombardy, which I healed by wiping me with my braguette. Then I wiped my tail in the sheets, in the coverlet, in the curtains, with a cushion, with arras hangings, with a green carpet, with a table cloth, with a napkin, with a handkerchief, with a combing cloth; in all which I found more pleasure than do the mangy dogs when you rub them.

Yea, but, said Grandgousier, which torchecul did you find to be the best?

I was coming to that, said Gargantua, and by and by you shall hear the tu autem, and know the whole mystery and know of the matter. I wiped myself with hay, with straw, with thatch-rushes, with flax, with wool, with paper, but...

Who his foul tail with paper wipes,
Shall at his ballocks leave some chips.

What, said Grandgousier, my little rogue, hast thou been at the pot, that thou dost rhyme already?

Yes, yes, my lord the king, answered Gargantua, I can rhyme gallantly, and rhyme till I become hoarse with rheum.

...now I prithee, said Grandgousier, go on in this torcheculatif, or bum-wipatory discourse.

Afterwards, I wiped my ass, said Gargantua, with a kerchief, with a pillow, with a pantoufle, with a pouch, with a pannier, but that was a wicked and unpleasant torchcul; then with a hat. Of hats, note, that some are shorn, and others shaggy, some velveted, others covered with taffities, and others with satin. The best of all these is the shaggy hat, for it makes a very neat abstertion of the fecal matter. Afterwards, I wiped my tail with a hen, a cock, with a pullet, with a calf's skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney's bag, with a montero, with a coif, with a falconer's lure. But to conclude, I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail napkins, bung-hole cleansers, and wipe breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose that is well downed, if you hold her neck betwixt you legs. And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard to the softness of the said down, and the temperate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut, and the rest of the inwards, in so far as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains. And think not that the felicity of the heroes and demigods in the Elysian fields consisteth either in their Asphodel, Ambrosia or Nectar, as our old women here used to say; but in this, according to my judgement, that they wipe their tails with the neck of a goose, holding her head betwixt their legs, and such is the opinion of Master John of Scotland, alias Scotus.

I find that I read Chris Locke (aka Rageboy) on a fairly regular basis, and have recommended his weblog to other people. I don't always understand exactly what he's saying, or why he's saying it, but it's usually interesting and he has a lovely way with words. Not surprising considering that he's a published author with two successful books and a third on the way. Not Harry Potter successful, but most likely keeping him in his preferred vices.

As I was reading his weblog a couple of days ago, I decided that his writing is a test of some form. It's either a test of openess, and disassociated thinking, possible intelligence and humor. Or it's a new and more efficient drug test that doesn't require a cup -- if you understand what Chris says all the time you've got to be stoned.

Regardless, I need to have a little more fun with my weblog, be less serious, indulge in a little more disassociated thinking. Weblogs should be a place where we try something new.

Truth be told, Locke seems more like a social critic or humanist at heart than a marketing consultant, and his essential disdain for corporations (which are anti-human, he declares, despite all their philanthropic tootle) leaves the reader wondering whether he really wants e-commerce to effectively pervade the Web's truly democratic, populist microcommunities for its own purposes. As his wonderfully cranky cult Web zine, Entropy Gradient Reversals, and his alter ego therein, RageBoy, have proven, the man's a smart, witty, broadly read cyberpundit. In Gonzo Marketing, he tweaks everyone from Disney, Time Warner AOL, and IBM to fellow biz-book writers like Seth Godin (Permission Marketing), and if you read it first for its own eclectic, acerbic delights and second for a postboom e-marketing primer, you'll be rightly pleased.

Gonzo Marketing was also ranked #5 on Computers & Internet editor Brooke Gilbert's Amazon Editors' Choice 2001: Digital Business and Culture hit parade, sandwiched between some very fine books by Steven Johnson, Steven Levy, Linus Torvalds, Larry Lessig, and Michael Lewis. Collect the whole set!

There are a couple full-text chapters of Gonzo on the book site, if you want to check it out. Or click on the Gonzo Engaged grafik to go to a multi-way "partyblog" discussion, already in progress...

David writes:

I'm probably overdue to update this weblog since the last update was, let's see, November 20, 1999!

Yeah, I tried this weblogging thing two years ago. But it's not how I like to write. I like to let things sit before I show them to people. Yes, I recently finished writing a book in public, posting each day's draft at a public web site (www.smallpieces.com). But I was very uncomfortable doing it. The feedback made it worthwhile, but showing people what I'd written but not revised made me feel as good as getting a rectal exam in a Macy's store window.

When he entered through Customs, Marek reportedly said he had "something to declare," though a strip search revealed nothing. Baffled, the officials told him he was free to go -- whereupon, he headed dutifully (and duty-free) for the men's room. In related news, Marek's blog was recently acquired by Joe's Brake and Lube Centers. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

I haven't been to the site for awhile, but just checked the page linked above and... viola! Very cool. More evidence of the "propagation and amplification" effects unique to blogspace. On the same theme, here's how Gonzo Marketing ends:

While the reasons the gonzo model is necessary and inevitable may be complex, the method is simple. Hook up, connect, co-create, procreate. Redeploy. Foment joy. Brothers in arms, sisters of Avalon, champions of the world get to work.

The recent flurry of meta weblog discussion continues. Why this is happening now is unclear to me. Is it just the linguistic gas supplied by Chris Locke?

While I'm gassed that Jim would think so, I find it more interesting that many definitions tend to be reductive. Look for words and phrases like "simply" and "really just" and "nothing but," which usually signal such reductions. A blog is simply a diary. A blog is really just a journal. A blog is nothing but a web page. For instance, Steve writes in part:

Blogging is simply history repeating itself, except this time the technology is just more sophisticated. People have really been blogging since the beginning of time in one form or another. Call them meme's, call them diaries, call them journals -- call them whatever you want. Whatever the term, the one common denominator is that blogs offer an individual's perspective and observations of the world around them.

Nearly 20 years ago, standing at a Tokyo news kiosk, I read an interview with Keith Richards in which he said he saw Mick Jagger and himself as being in direct line of descent from antique bards and medieval troubadours. In place of "Let It Bleed" and "Sympathy For the Devil," I suddenly flashed on the lyric poet-musicians of the 12th century, on Beowulf, Homer, and even further back to bones and rattles and skin drums around some Neolithic campfire.

Although Steve's post cites (i.e., hyperlinks) contributions to this "thread" -- very loosely construed as such -- from Dave Winer, Doc Searls, Tom Matrullo, and myself, he misses important entries in the conversation from Mike Sanders, J.D. Lasica and others quickly becoming too numerous to mention.

The point is not to fault Steve's citations, but rather to surface the significance of the too-numerous-to-mention dynamic, which seems to be an inherent quality of blogspace. And which, I think, begins to provide some kind of delta from other forms -- both online and off -- that blogs do not so easily reduce to.

Perhaps a recent exchange -- or more accurately, a non-exchange -- with my friend and co-author David Weinberger will make this more concrete. It did for me. Last week, I sent the following mail to Doc Searls, Dave Winer. Robert Scoble, Tom Matrullo, Eric Norlin, Marek, Martin Jensen, Elizabeth Locke (my sister), and David Weinberger.

Sent: Saturday, November 10, 2001 8:50 AM
Subject: language: it's a virus

Fully realizing that your mileage may vary, I nonetheless ask you, pretty please, to propagate and amplify:

Sex, Lies and... Marketing
http://www.rageboy.com/2001_11_01_blogger-archive.html#7015572

Call it whatever you will. The "meme" debate is a red herring. A McGuffin. For them what may need it:

http://www.bencom.tm/mcguffin.htm

But whatever you call it, I guess it proves what William Burroughs propagated and Laurie Anderson amplified -- language: it's a virus.

perhaps one of you could fwd this to Mike Sanders -- don't have his address, though much of that screed is addressed to him. ;-)

with best regards all round,

chris

Please understand that David's not a dumb guy. Far from it. (Not as dumb as he looks anyway.) Although he had not been a part of the discussion up to that point, I included him thinking these were issues he had some interest in (in fact, I know they are).

I wrote back to David: "Well, I was looking for a little SUPPORT, actually" (as Winer was kicking my ass bigtime, and I was looking for ammo to kick his ass back; etc., so it goes.)

And David replied: "Support for WHAT? I have no idea what the two of you are on about or why I'm on this mailing list. Or why anyone else is. Or why that particular set of people is."

However -- the plot thickening, as plots will -- at the same time that Weinberger was basically going "HUH??? WTF???," the cluetrain list -- of which David is a regular denizen -- was awash in these very same issues. Note two things here:

1. The cluetrain list was discussing these questions largely BECAUSE they'd first been surfaced in BLOGSPACE. In fact, several members of the list who span both "worlds" (Tom Matrullo, Doc Searls, Marek J., Eric Norlin, etc) seem to have propagated (and amplified) these questions from blogspace to listspace -- plus weblogger Robert Scoble seems to have joined the cluetrain list during this same period.

2. David Weinberger had no idea where this sudden upsurge of blog discussion had come from -- the very discussion I was pointing him into the heart of -- because David is not tuned in to blogspace.

Actually, what interests me most about weblogs is (you should forgive the expression), memic propagation and amplification. And if there's one thing that EGR (and by extension, or implosion, or somesuch, RB) gets off on, it's... that's right, you guessed it: memic propagation and amplification.

"This is evil genius stuff," Doc wrote later, "and nobody is better at it than RageBoy."

Are you confused yet? If not, you're probably a weblogger. If so, you're probably not. Trying to explain to David Weinberger a) WHAT had happened that I thought he might find significant, b) WHY he might find it significant, and c) precisely HOW it had happened, would be like trying to tell a stranger about rock & roll. Or a blind man about the color of an orange. What I was trying to point David to was like a "location joke" -- you had to be there.

The complexity of blogspace -- and the immersive engagement this complexity calls for -- are closely related to something I wrote about in Gonzo Marketing:

...this exercise smacks of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls "thick description." Using a complicated tale about sheep and thieves and justice and the lack of it in colonial North Africa in 1912, he demonstrates that any time we attempt to describe "a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or whatever," we end up spinning stories about other people�s stories about yet other people�s stories, and sorting it all out becomes next to impossible. It�s a rich tapestry, and thick description, while it may seem confusing, often comes closer to what�s actually going on than would "thin description" -- the kind of succinct clear-cut abstraction that appears perfectly plausible, but totally distorts reality. Not that I'm claiming any methodological rigor in these musings, but the thickness I'm attempting to suggest is what music and painting and literature -- what we roughly call The Arts -- typically point to. And what the specialized languages of logic and science and business typically do not. It�s a Zen sort of thing you could say. I could say; who�s to stop me? Finger indicating moon-illuminated finger. The thickness of life as life is lived between the inexorable poles of birth and death. "Man is an animal suspended," says Geertz, "in webs of significance he himself has spun."

Webs, yes. And although the Big Daddy Web did not exist when that was written, that�s why the choice of quote. That�s where we're headed. It�s where we already are. But wait. Though we have these words for our current situation -- words like Internet and World Wide Web -- it seems to me they obscure at least as much as they explain. Because networks are inherently social realities, any attempt to definitively say what they are becomes immediately suspect. It depends on where you're standing when you look at them, and what sort of baggage you've brought along to the observation deck.

It'd be a lot like asking: so whaddya think about Islam?

It's not any one post that makes a meme; not any one event that makes a culture. Actually, Winer has it right: it's the cloud of cross-polinating, trans-resonating ideas that has developed in blogspace that makes blogspace different from the web that came before -- and that will create the web that comes after whatever it is we're doing here.

This is some deep shit, bro. Word up.

OK, OK, I know, yet another bad Dylan quote. Couldn't resist though. (Oh crap, I guess the lyrics say "edges" not "borders." Oh well, fuck it. Close enough for government work.)

Here, I'm quoting myself from a three-round email debate with IBM's John Patrick:

You say the Net is transferring power from institutions to people, and I strongly agree. But that means that it's high time for companies to stop asking how business can use, leverage, exploit, and otherwise take advantage of the Internet -- and to start asking what "the people" are actually using it for. In most cases, the promise we see as "outsiders" is precisely not to become more efficient, friction-free consumers, but instead to become more fully human. As I wrote in my gonzo musings, "We are more than is dreamed in your marketing plan, Horatio."

So, yeah, I freely admit it: I'm far less interested in the bells and whistles of the Next Generation Internet than I am in the quality of mind and heart that will bring about the Next Generation Civilization. Net or not, that's the attitude I care about promoting. Inside or out, that's our ticket to ride.

I punch up the radio. Scorpio rising, full moon stereo guitar, and the drummer kicks it.

...she gets rock n roll on a rock n roll station
in a rock n roll dream
she's making movies on location
she don't know what it means
but the music make her wanna be the story
and the story was whatever was the song what it was
rollergirl don't worry...

What they do!
They smile in your face
All the time they want to take your place
The back stabbers (back stabbers)

None of which is to say I'm coming down definitively on one side or another of the latest how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate concerning whether blogs are more like journals, more like diaries, or more like diarrhea. The last option is not my view; just reporting opinions I've heard expressed elsewhere. If I thought that, I would have spent the 35 bucks on Imodium A-D.

Yesterday, Dave Winer pointed me -- then all of Scripting News -- to a piece he wrote in May 1997. There, he says in part:

Programmers have a very precise understanding of truth. You can't lie to a compiler. Try it sometime. Garbage in, garbage out. Booleans, the ones and zeros, trues and falses, make up the world programmers live in. That's all there is!

Valued Readers:

I sing mere anarchy loosed. Of wildness and wilderness. Of a deeper ignorance too long ignored.

We own however much of the world we can embrace, maybe even understand -- not in an analytic way, but by feeling deeper into some magic that is beyond understanding. We create maps and visions, work them out in our heads -- constructs to show each other. Here, do you see? This is a picture of how it works. We begin with bare diagrams, flowcharts, abstract models. See? we say, do you see how this part mates to that? How the pieces fit together?

But not until we are able to populate the streets of these models, see exhausted workers, dreaming lovers, posturing punks and preening fashion plates walking their byways and back alleys, cops on the beat and shifty characters dodging into doorways, proud hookers and disapproving matrons sizing each other up, retired bankers reading the day's news over coffee, girlfriends giggling over you can only wonder what, shopkeepers hawking fruit and fish, children running, calling to each other, dogs sniffing at curbs and hydrants -- not until then does evening fall and the wheel of night begin to slowly turn, the eyes of the statues opening once again. Only then does the bare abstraction open into carnival.

Culture is a palimpsest. We write over it, over and over. It must not be too dear, too untouchable. The smoke from the Alexandrian library is our wealth, our burnt and blinded legacy. More where that came from. Nostalgia for the past is the beginning of the end of heroism. Museums preserve what once was. For those cut off, for those who no longer touch the earth or dirty their hands with the fallingdown world. When everything has a price, nothing is precious.

Homage hidden between the lines, sampled and reworked into something we can recognize, as if for the first time. The civilizations of the Australian dreamtime, of Egypt and Africa, of China, India, Greece, the Aztecs, Incas, Maya, Navaho, Hopi, Sioux. Pyramids, temples, holy roads and rivers, sacred forest spaces, gateways through which the spirit of the people opened into the infinite. All these were created with a fraction of the power we command today -- godlike knowledge, inconceivable wealth, technologies indistinguishable from magic. And what have we created with this power? What monuments have we erected to the imagination of our race? McDonald's, Yahoo, Disney World. Absurd simulacra bought with the ransom of 10,000 kings.

But it is not over. Not some cheap trip down memory lane. We do what we do and will continue. We do what the world asks of us when it gets no answer elsewhere.

Take heart.

Most of the cultural analysis one reads in the weblogging community is uninformed by any broad cultural understanding. This is especially true within that narrow range of blogs that deal with the Internet & computing. You get the impression that the writers have spent their entire lives in front of one kind of CRT or another & that books are a foreign country. The "theory of language" behind most of this writing is positivist/instrumentalist. (As Chris Locke points out regarding Dave Winer's use of language.) The words we have "in our minds" are not arranged at all the way they are, say, in a wordprocessor's dictionary--they are knit together in a web of personal & societal connections unique to each individual. What makes Chris Locke a "good" reader & Dave Winer a "bad" one is Locke's deeper understanding of the social & political nature of discourse.

Just yesterday, I quoted Humpty Dumpty's infamous dictum: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." I thought this a rather devastating counteragument for Dave's revisionist etymology of "meme" -- but now I'm not so sure. Now I'm beginning to think he's really a surrealist in techno-drag, because listen to how he defines "weblog" today:

When I sat down and tried to piece it together, this is what I came up with. It's just the Web, nothing more nothing less. [italics mine]