Mineshaft Canary

The fury of a celestial crocodile: another heart of darkness in the worst of times.

2008-07-05T11:14:00.001-07:00

"A haunting look at the persistence of evil and the power of family love"

Certain tribes in Africa explain eclipses of the sun as the celestial crocodile swallowing the sun. In the words of Peter Godwin, award winning author, journalist and filmmaker born and raised in Zimbabwe “This celestial crocodile, they say, briefly consumes our life-giving star as a warning that he is much displeased with the behavior of man below. It is the very worst of omens.” At the turn of this millennium, two total eclipses occurred within less than two years, something unprecedented “even in the stories handed down through the generations.” People are saying that “the celestial crocodile must be truly furious to be back so soon, threatening us again with perpetual darkness.”
If the sad events of 2008 in Zimbabwe are anything to go by, that celestial crocodile’s fury should be increasing exponentially along with the total collapse of the economy. We are witnessing, from whatever sidelines fate has allocated us, nothing short of total eclipse of a country.
Peter Godwin’s second memoir: “When the crocodile eats the sun” (2006) should carry a health warning: it is extremely disquieting and uncomfortable reading and made all the more disturbing because it is true. Where Conrad’s famous apocalyptic novel of the dark heart of man was the work of a superb imagination, this witness to the horror man is capable of enacting is fact.
There are several reasons I find this an important book. Yes there is the horror of the history it tells and the chaos it records in a country where independent journalism has increasingly become a forbidden activity. This book is also profoundly valuable for its depth of feeling, intelligence, and the terrible beauty of the writing as well. It isn't just that Godwin writes beautifully about terrible things, he writes beautifully about beautiful things too: humanity and love and death and doubt and guilt and responsibility.
On the dust jacket the work is succinctly described as “a family tragedy set against a country’s collapse”.
As far as the reading experience goes, there is something for everyone here. There's romance and tragedy, humour and history. We share intimate details of the relationships between loving but strong willed and independent family members as Godwin explores his family history and his discovery of his father's Jewish ancestry, weaving the thread of exile and belonging into the tale with passages of refreshing candor in a world sometimes tediously full of bluster and posture:
“When I get back to New York I am listless and distracted. In my head, I am still in Africa. I sit online at my computer, following the increasing pace of repression in Zimbabwe and listening to African music, cranked up fat and sweet. Mostly I listen to Oliver Mtukudzi, who last I heard live at the Harare International Festival of the Arts. And I listen to his fellow Zimbabwean, Thomas Mapfumo. The intricate cyclical melodies of his mbiras are almost narcotic in their trance inducing effect – quintessentially African, though they are being played and recorded now in Oregon.
Noone knows exactly how many of us have fled, because few of us emigrate officially. But the numbers are high – between one and two million, mostly black, energetic, educated, experienced people, the leadership cadre of a country – the Katyn cadre. And the irony is that from our exile, we, whom Mugabe has chased away, inadvertently contribute to his survival. The money we send home to our relatives, our hard currency remittances (often multiplied by the black market exchange rate), supports millions of people in Zimbabwe and helps to defer the country’s continuously imminent collapse…….I cannot live the life of an exile, a perpetual sojourner, feeling my past more emphatically than my present, carrying all this sadness within me, this spiritual fracture, unspoken mostly, but always there, an insistent ache. I must become a real immigrant, positive, engaged, hopeful”
The book is sub-titled “A memoir of Africa”. Memories sustain even as they fuel the flame of exiled damnation. Ah yes, we were there once. Inyanga. Dombashawa....a babe carried in arms through Great Zimbabwe grows in a few brief decades to be a strong and limber man climbing spider-like those same forbidden walls, whilst a country turns the torch of hope upon itself and burns.
For the outsider wanting a window of understanding on Zimbabwe and other aspects of contemporary African politics and history, Peter Godwin is a good place to start. For the African, especially if one has ever called beautiful and tormented Zimbabwe home, it is extremely disturbing but also profoundly inspiring to find an intelligent and human voice unafraid to speak out. Peter Godwin provides a voice for our generation of deliberate exiles who wrestle every conscious moment with the consuming business of the remembering and the forgetting of homeland.
“How many generations will it take before the taste of colonialism has been washed from our mouth? I have to live my own life in the meantime. I can’t bear the guilt, the feeling of responsibility. I can’t lug the sins of my forebears on my back wherever I go…I will dispel from my head all the arcane details of this place, the language, the history, the memory. I will turn my back on the land that made me….Africa is for me a place in which I can never truly belong, a dangerous place that will, if I allow it to, reach into my life and hurt my family. A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere – on sufferance, watching warily, waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility.”

Peter Godwin was born and raised in Zimbabwe. His early years are documented in the equally compelling 2004 "Mukiwa: a white boy in Africa". He has studied at Cambridge and Oxford and became a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times (London) and BBC TV, reporting from more than sixty-five countries, many of them war torn African states. Since moving to New York he has written for numerous publications, including National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine. He also teaches at the New School, a liberal arts, education, social science and humanities university in New York City.

As finale, especially for my East African King of (many)Hearts (doesn't this man look a lot like your father as a younger man?)and just to set a little stalking tail tip twitching cat amongst the Madison pigeons and the Happy Valley set, let me allow Peter the last word:

"It's always instructive to observe the life cycle of the First World aid worker. A wary enthusiasm blooms into an almost messianic sense of what might be possible. Then, as they bump up against the local cultural limits of acceptable change, comes the inevitable disappointment, which can harden into cynicism and even racism, until they are no better than the resident whites they have initially disparaged. Even those...who have learned the language and done thorough research, often have their faith eroded by the vagaries of Africa, which can start to look horribly like irrationality to the northern eye."

The tragedy of forced relocation: that distant faraway look (book review)

2008-03-07T12:54:00.000-08:00

After 17 years in the United States, Ethiopian refugee Sepha Stephanos is proprietor of a struggling grocery store in a struggling African-American neighbourhood in Washington DC. His store clientele consists largely of prostitutes and light-fingered school children. His only friends are fellow African immigrants, Joe, the Congolese waiter and Ken the Kenyan engineer with whom he shares alienation, a favourite game of African revolutionary trivia and a bitter nostalgia for their home continent.

The loneliness and displacement common to all immigrants is brought starkly home to Sepha when he befriends white academic Judith, and Naomi, her bi-racial daughter, who represent the beginnings of urban renewal in the neighbourhood – a renewal which sees the old tenants displaced and further marginalized.

This is a first novel of great dignity and restraint: a poignant examination of issues of poverty, immigration, what it means to lose a family and a country, and what it takes to create home. The beautiful things that Heaven bears also opens a window on recent Ethiopian history.

Published in the UK as Children of the revolution, this novel has already begun garnering awards with the Guardian First book prize of 2007, and, amongst others, nominations for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction (to be announced April 2008) and the Prix Femina Etranger in France. The US National Book Foundation also placed Mengestu in their "5 under 35" authors in 2007.

Watch this man's pen. It is loaded with intelligence, passion and talent. Natural mastery of the storytelling craft is coming through loud and clear

There is a simple and startling power to the phrase: going back home. There’s an implied contradiction, a sense of moving forward and backward at the same time, but there’s no tension in the phrase. Instead, the contradiction gives in to something else: an understanding, perhaps, that what you are returning to can never be the same as what you left. I understand now that distant faraway look I’ve seen in other immigrants when they talk about returning to wherever it was they came from.
The beautiful things that heaven bears - page 174

Born in Ethiopia, Dinaw Mengestu immigrated to the U.S. in '80 at the age of 2 years, joining his father, who fled their native country during the Red Terror or Qey Shibir, a violent political campaign 1977-78 which saw many casualties in a suppressed rebellion. It was 25 years before he set foot in his own country again. He graduated from Columbia University's MFA fiction program and interned at The New Yorker. A Visiting Writer at his Georgetown alma mater, Mengestu has written a firsthand account of the situation in Darfur for RollingStone and draws on his background to tell a story of the African immigrant experience in his debut novel, Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

How long did it take for me to understand that I was never going to return to Ethiopia again? It seems as if there should have been a particular moment when the knowledge settled in. For at least the first two years that I was here, I was so busy passing my mother, brother, father and friends in the aisles of grocery stores, in parks and restaurants, that at times it hardly felt that I had really left. I searched for familiarity wherever I went.
The beautiful things that Heaven bears – page 175

So long and thanks for all the fish

2008-02-11T10:33:00.000-08:00

Okay we hope the dolphins are not departing though the canary is flying home free.

In my day, way back in the proverbial dim and distant past, any self respecting student would have recognized the phrase. But then in those days one hitch-hiked for real and a trip down the road seemed intergalactic. And jasmine never smelled so sweet in spring. Ah jasmine! the scent of nostalgia! the scent of my student days in the City of Saints on the southern tip of an ancient continent....ten years later Douglas Adams wrote the book.

And yes, in those days we had to learn how to list our sources. Correctly according to punctuation and convention. Not available to us was the easy web site which translates all. It always did strike rebellion in my soul that I should be marked down for bibliographic citation reasons when the content was brilliant. Yes m'lord I plead bias: but we are talking student here: long haired, barefoot and bent on balking at convention.

I still became a librarian. Not for love of punctuation and the cataloguing rules set in stone handed down from Dewey's mound. But for love of books and people and the ideas within the twain. And yes, some of you might have noticedd, I learned to tie my hair up and wear shoes. I plead fifth amendment on the balking at convention question.

Recently in (email of course) conversation with My Hope for the Future of American Librarianship, the topic of her cataloguing module, at Library School in some Other state, came up. She was cross-eyed and headachy, slogging through the old manual version. "But they tell us that once we've signed off on the course we never need to think of it again. All is copy cataloguing now"

'Tis true and as many of these sites for student show: we CAN improve upon the tedium of (student) life without compromising the learning curve. Ah sweet liberation! Just watch those cuba libres now, lest they become mentirita.

It is really an asset for librarians to know about these sites too. Bookmark them now, provide links on the webpages. These are USEFUL spelled out in caps and lights.

So from another land, with jasmine budding, promising ending's new beginnings: so long and thanks for all the fish. Now is the time to speak of Africa and golden joys. Or, as Ted Hughes once put it:
"To hatch a crow, a black rainbow/bent in emptiness/ over emptiness/but flying"

Hasta luego, amigo. Con amore vivande.

Designer socialism: the quickie wiki

2008-02-11T08:26:00.001-08:00

The notion of impromtu collaborative creation has not been unknown in this ohana. Even to the extent of playing a (minor) starring role as indicated in the profile.

Wikis are a wonderland for those not attached to the status quo (watch out they can change in a moment), and those who dream of giving birth before the posterchild of liberation. Here is designer socialism at its best. The people's voice truly counting. Just watch for falling coconuts. Things are not always what they seem.

It is human to be flawed and to err. So there's unreliability built in. But, as stated elsewhere recently in this blog: life without adventure is no life at all. Similarly: where's all the certainty in this world anyway? Ponder Galileo a moment.

Wikis can't be beat for that quick collaborative conversation too. As pointed out by the Hawaiian native who recently proposed marriage to me on the Wiki Wiki bus between arrivals and departures in Honolulu airport, there's always the option to get off the bus. Embrace a whole new future. And him.

Anyone who has ever traveled, will know that sometimes going home is a long lonely ride. La Tia Catrina will attest to that. The wiki wiki proposals of collaboration make it all that much more meaningful, introducing the secret knowledge of joy. It doesn't hurt to learn a smattering of another language and culture either.

At play in the fields of KRL

2008-02-11T03:44:00.000-08:00

Ah! the safety of the sandbox! One is free to create without consequence. Castles of sand in all their majesty.

Often the best of times is had when one is liberated from consequence. The success of the "beta is forever" thing lies in the liberation of the creativity of the sandbox to be The Thing. Creating the castle for the tides to wash away in the morning.

And not a bad thing either. After all: what's new about this? The old Chinaman has been murmuring down the ages: change is the only certainty. And that other wise easterner sitting under his bodhi tree, didn't he say something important about impermanence?

It's a world cafe out there, rhythmic with conversation. Get with the groove. Hop into the great big sandbox. Let loose: PLAY. http://www.theworldcafe.com/

Facebook faceoff

2008-02-10T20:04:00.001-08:00

So pull up a virtual stool and lean an elbow on the virtual bar counter. Welcome to Facebook. The cyber pub. The illusion of socializing. Weeellll....yes maybe it is connecting. Networking. The place to be to see and be seen they tell me.

It feels to me like there's something missing. Like the connection still isn't really being made and it is 2 in the morning and I am still sitting alone in bed, awake in the coldest hours, trawling applications, passing the time without the warmth and the hazy smokiness (yes I date from an era when smoking was still allowed in a pub....) and without the cocooning noise of the old fashioned barroom scene.....

Somewhere, somehow, too, I have this sneaky little feeling that handing out good karma at the click of a button is not really going to have the same effect as yoga and meditation, Tibetan Prayer Wheels notwithstanding.

Yes I know perhaps in the bar of old, connection was also an illusion lubricated by libations various. But it felt like human connection. And play at times was....well....uh shall we say wild? Certainly a lot different from taking little online movie quizzes. Or just remember those lazy endless days dreaming in a Mexico street side pub, the light suffused with the clear orange of fresh made el jugo de zanahoria.....

On the other hand everyone these days seems to be applauding the use of Facebook or Myspace for promoting their cause. The place to see and be seen indeed. They say.

Maybe I just never was very good at being in the right place at the right time. My drummer's always been a whole lot of beats short of the octave. Or whatever. How about another jugo de zanahoria?

For an interesting angle on the pros and cons of Facebook in the context of human rights activism and free speech follow this link:
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/02/08/pros-and-cons-of-facebook-activism/

This one's a keeper: my library Valentine

2008-02-08T13:54:00.000-08:00

I'd been flirting around with LibraryThing a while before we finally embraced. Oh I think it was at a Librarian's meeting a good few years ago when first we locked eyes. In a small mention in a typically full agenda, Peggy did the across-the-room gestures.

"This might be an interesting one to know," she says.

I flick a glance and think "Hmmmm....could be good.....later alligator"

Months pass, as they have a way of doing in these kind of affairs. LibraryThing and I both mature, living active lives, going through developmental changes. We begin to be in the same place at the same time more often. I find myself thinking of LibraryThing more often. I reach out. Make tentative commitments. Set up an account. Catalogue a few books. It is still an on again off again thing. We go for months not connecting. I am neglectful. LibraryThing is faithful and patient.

I begin to make mention of this new interest to family and friends. When I do the introductions to my son, his response is so positive that I begin to realise well....maybe I should admit it: LibraryThing and I have a thing going. So to speak.

A few months later the Reader's Advisors of Puget Sound (aka RAPS) decide we need an online presence. We pick LibraryThing as a great way to share our book picks. Now I know LibraryThing and I are an item. Oh yeah, there are still relatively luke warm receptions at staff meetings various where I do the introductions. These cannot deter us now. LibraryThing and I have gone to far to be parted by those who have only just read about it.

Yes: LibraryThing is such a keeper, it is even beginning to edge out my old Book of Books: the scrapbooked, coffeee spilled mottled black Mead composition book in which I make notes about the books I read.

Sometimes effort looses out to easy. Even in my life.

And BTW: the past and present tense mixture is deliberate in this one. Fault me on my murmuring heart, but never my grammar. Love never leaves, is always present in a way, often tense, and sometimes passes unnoticed, sneaking up on us from another time and place.

The melancholic Canadian puts it so much better: "I am not the one who loves – It's Love that seizes me! When hatred with his package comes, You forbid delivery...."

http://www.musicsonglyrics.com/L/leonardcohenlyrics/leonardcohenyouhavelovedenoughlyrics.htm

YouTube: entertainment break

2008-02-07T15:53:00.000-08:00

Okay folks: sit back, relax, put on the headphones if you are at work, break out the popcorn and chocolates. Here, for your delight, is an array of library videos, fresh from the bottom of the YouTube trawl nets. Warning for sensitive viewers: watching these videos could seriously harm your stomach muscles. If you are a librarian that is. Kinda inside stuff this.

Canary no sing

2008-02-05T18:10:00.000-08:00

Whatddya mean compress communications to under 140 characters including spaces??? Dahlink, this just will NOT work for me. I am sorry.

Yeah yeah yeah I know it is easy to think along avian lines to find yourself in a place where canaries bond with twittering things. But not this one. So sorry.

On the other hand, for those of you who do get the groove of the hideous haiku whilst mastering the modern morse, for you who bond with aplomb with the truncated and cryptic, there's a young South African, Tyler Reed, who has made an application to turn tweets into actions. His words not the canary's. I rest my case and leave you to follow this link to his blog entry on Twaction.

http://www.tylerreed.co.za/twitter/twaction-20-i-feel-it-should-be-open.html

Now don't say I didn't earn my cheep, sorry I mean keep, on this one.

My friend flickr

2008-02-02T16:22:00.000-08:00

So what happened to January? Went by in a flash it seems. Or was that a flicker?

The old truisms come to mind: every picture tells a story, or: a picture is worth a thousand words. The clue to January's silence lies not only in the attention monopolizing power of the dead or devastated in Kenya, January 2008, but also in the albums. Of photographs. Online.

For privacy these are invitation only. So, unfortunately, unless you are on the inner side of some imaginary electronic circle, you will just have to take my word for it.

We could make an arrangement. For the kind of privilege that friends and family enjoy. Access at whim. Your own, not mine. And emailed updates monitoring my activities. Or at least those activities which I choose to record then upload in pictorial form.

If photosharing sites had been around years ago they would have saved me much time and agony of decisionmaking. Not to mention the couple of tin trucks of accumulated negatives and albums which, a few years ago, found their way to Seattle by way of Belgium on a ship which left Port Elizabeth, South Africa I forget how many months upon months before it offered up its cargo of my accumulated photographic history at a warehouse in Seattle's SoDo area.

Now, as I upload images, people around the world are viewing them. Faster than a Northwest crow is onto roadkill, those views tally up online.

It seems that photographers, photography, cameras and pictures have always been my fate. Grandfather Thomas, the Professor of Engineering, was an avid amateur photographer. Though he died before my birth, his legacy in my childhood was the hours spent poring over curling photographs falling from shoeboxes and the musty smell of old books in the dim light of long closed thatched rooms. I regularly sneaked away to ponder the mysterious past which Mother stored out of the way of little hands. Or so she thought.....

In January to September 2001 I played the Immigration to America Move the Goalposts Scavengerhunt Waiting for the Visa Game. The gift: I had nine months to put together a single scrapbook summarizing a lifetime and ancestry in pictures. Ah! those lovely old fishmoth nibbled, original sepia shots of ancestors from the forementioned shoeboxes were now painstakingly edited. In the ruthlessness which immigration demands the losers were consigned to fire. A worthy cremation of my African ancestry. Ashes scattered on the soils of my Bathurst Eldorado, gravesite for the dreams of an earlier wave of English immigrants: the 1820 Settlers.

My childhood coincided with the Kodak Instamatic era. Colour photography! I created album upon album of shots of horses, dogs, sisters and Big Grandmother's dahalias. For some reason I loved to turn the camera on its side, creating diamond shaped compositions.

In my late teens I purchased a second hand Nikon with Pentax lenses from a surfer. Bye bye instamatic. Photography for the next two decades was attended by the slight grittiness of sand in the focussing mechanism but oh! the journeys we took, that Nikon and I.

In my late teens I also discovered photographers. Or vice versa may be closer to the truth. It seemed I was surrounded. Silver halide stained my clothes and my fingers. To this day the smell brings back.....oh, in a public blog post such as this I would rather not say.....those were the days, my friend! And as in the song: we thought they'd never end. In a way they didn't. The recall of photography remains true.

Bathrooms doubled as darkrooms. Eyes became adjusted to the red glow of the safe light bulb, the sudden flare of flash bulb. I had a child with a photojournalist, conceiving and raising that kwedini somewhere between the film exposed and not, lightmeters, the trays of metallic smelling chemicals and the prints drying for the late edition, the lens caps and lenses, the click of the shutter, the horror and the quotidian recorded alike. The backdrop: various African countries sliding into and out of varying degrees of instability, mayhem and magnificence.

For a while, I earned a living modelling for student photographers. Looking at life from both sides.... recalling love's illusions. The beauty. Black and white well executed. Before I was old enough to vote or get a driver's license from the country of my passport (photo), I had immigrated (six week son in a blanket) FROM an African country in the middle stages of its civil war, TO an African country in the endgame of its civil war . Photography required the war be recorded by the father of the new born son. Illustrating history drove our destiny. Liberation struggles echo and reverberate through this life. Blood heat and mud. Homeland.

In those days I learned oh! so many things about life, the universe, raising a (photo)journalist's child and the value of sending pictures to people left behind. 30 years later some of those shots came back to me. Unexpectedly one gray and snowy afternoon. On another continent. In another life. Where I am still sharing pictures. With people left behind.

Many wars under the bridge now, many people left behind, many notches on the big belt in the sky. It seems that way sometimes. Another day, another dollar. One learns to smile and go on drinking tea. (thankyou TS Eliot)

Photographs are the constant conduit. Images burrowing back into memory forbid forgetting.

Yes. My friend flickr. Life without pictures would be no life at all. Just as life without adventure is no life at all. Thanks Obie for underlining that so well. And the garlic baked mushrooms weren't half bad neither.

In fact: a huge THANKYOU to All My Photographers: Ben, Robert, Obie, Seamus, Henk and some who prefer to remain unnamed. And Norwegian Heinrick in the rose coloured light of the Raj Shree Palace in Pushkar, India in January 2001. You put me here after you put me there when you sent me on a government bus from Ajmar to Delhi to fetch your digital camera - the first I had ever held. This post is yours: all of you who have ever looked at life (from both sides now) with her through the lens of a camera. The recall of love's illusions. Imagery. The song remains the same. Or does it?

A snapshot in time. Yours and mine. Veels geluk and hambe kahle.

Really slippery slopes, scenic routes and excessive feeds

2007-12-29T14:28:00.000-08:00

It is really easy to get a life and then turn around to find that a quarter of a year has gone by and not a word has been posted to the blog. What to do when the trail's gone cold whilst life was elsewhere?

If one has RSS feeds two things are possible. Firstly one will not have to keep on checking that dead-end blog that's never updated because the author is off doing battle with the black bear of pneumonia and Hawaiian turtles. The RSS feed will tell you when its updated.

Secondly one will join the ranks of Authors of Seldom Updated Blogs. Because where's the time to update a blog after following all those myriad leads down the road, across the field, into the valley and up the other side of the frequently updated material piling up in a little alligator of an aggregator hidden somewhere within the mysterious realms of the online world? If you can remember which aggregator you used and where to find it again after a hiatus of a quarter of a year.

RSS feeds are really useful in a fast paced life. Something like lights that switch on and off automatically depending on factors various such as heat or motion or ambient light. Or timer switches which click and tick their way through switching equipment and lights on and off. Convenience. The automated life. Freeing one to....uh....what was it one was going to be freer to do? Feed excessively?

One of my favourite wise Hindu men likes to say: give a man with two good legs a crutch and forbid him to use one of his legs and that leg will wither up and die. "Use it or lose it" is the better understood Americanism. Resourcefulness is what I am tracking here. Hoping not to see it on the extinction lists, fearing that I spy it on endangered though.

Yes, RSS feed aggregators sit there storing up their contents obediently waiting to present the evidence of hoarding. C'mon. Embrace national obesity. Consume. Why not? 'Tis the season after all. More must be better.

Having journeyed around the internet, and the parallel real world too, a good few years now, I have forged my favoured routes to sites I like. By now i also know that I'm the sort who often takes the scenic route. Those wiggly switchbacked secondary roads marked with the broken green line alongside on the map get my attention and subsequently my wheels every time. When I need to make a stop for food or fuel or just to breathe the air of landscape and place, I have a tendency to look for the one exit towns.

Without this propensity The Bulls End Cafe in the consummate cowtown of Drummond, Montana (pop. 325) might have remained undiscovered.

The story goes that come dusk one day on a long American road trip, my travelling companion (older than nine years now, Paul Simon, but yes, once he was a warrior, and always will be king of (many)hearts) and I really needed supper. A break from the magnificent reeling road across the Western States was in order.

In the gathering gloom we found a one exit town. A one street town too it seemed. Though a subsequent (internet) search has revealed that Drummond has a public library. Operating income: $4,040; Location: 114 A STREET; 4,100 books; 4 audio materials; 43 video materials; 2 serial subscriptions. Thanks to citydata.com for that information.

The lights of the Bulls End Cafe were still lit and the well hung illustration of the the same in the front window further beckoned the cattle farmer's daughter in me. We were not disappointed. We were served with old fashioned hospitality, generosity and an abundance of pie worth revealing to the world.

Only as we tucked in did we discover that we had missed the state line change in time which put it after closing time. This did not deter our hosts from urging more of whatever took our fancy from (the morrow's) wares fresh upon the counter. If there was a way to put an RSS feed on this establishments ovens, now there would be a service and a half!

Just do not expect a good pot of tea. That would be pushing it. We're talking Montana, United States here, afterall, where the postcards depict an old timer leaning on a beat up old truck parked alongside the same with the caption: "Along Montana's Information Superhighway".
Now, with snow falling on cedars and me, the mountains similarly snowcapped, and the year tumbling fast to completion and thus new beginnings, there's only one thing left to say. Would that I could put it in something as bold as neon, but colour will have to suffice: let us live so that when it is all over we can look each other in the eye and know that we have acted honourably.

Tag you're IT and other delicious things

2007-10-20T04:34:00.000-07:00

A windstorm blew through a day ago, tossing trees like matchsticks. Powerlines were spaghetti strung low across my streets with the celebratory smell of crushed cedar fresh in the air. 'Tis calming now but yesterday morning's dawn porpoises in the restlessly crumpled, dark indigo Sound plumed white rooster tails of foam from their fins. And the intrepid IT dept drew the short straw, had to sweat again to save our world from corruption. Two hands together for them. If you care you could bake them dark, sweet and moist Vegan Banana bread:

3 mashed bananas 1 cup maple syrup 0.5 cup oil
1.5 cups flour 1 tsp baking powder 1 tsp cinnamon, bit of allspice, bit of nutmeg (makes the house smell mmmm sooo good during baking)
optional: o.5 cup chopped walnuts and 0.5 cup raisins
350 oven for 1 hour or until the knife comes out clean.

There now I have taught you to fish. If this recipe had been on a website I could have thrown in a line, tagged the beastie then released. Real fishermen catch and release.

But wait! in this unbrave new world there's always the small print disclaimer, the warning label on the bottle. I recently sent this recipe to a real man. Who had complimented on the real banana bread. He was not amused. He wanted the taste of the real thing not a recipe in his inbox. Hook, line and sinker as the saying goes.

That's the trouble with reality. Real fishermen are sometimes those who fish because they need to eat. They're not just in it for the sport. Or for the social bookmarking.

The virtual world is not all there is to a complete life. There's a parallel realworld universe of flesh and blood and love and fear where people are loathe to share a taxi with a stranger. For fear they might be sued. Or misconstrued. In that world, hearts flame to the flamenco beat of real desires.

But in the virtual world of social bookmarking: ah! there's no fear. Hop on any bus. No mortal desire neither. And hardly any use in the lexicon for real.

It is all about appropriate technology. krl2pt0 was launched on October 8. 2007: the 40th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara.

In the gypsy bundle slung on a stick over my shoulder there's a tagged item. The spirit of Che rises again. It is as easy as a few mouse clicks to go fetch, good dog del.icio.us the faithful retrieval tool. Training superbly accomplished, now sit! good dog and I'll throw you a bone.

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=318858&area=/insight/insight__international/

So what would Che say? Let the people decide, as they do with folksonomies. In a dignified society.

In terms of appropriate technology, the best way to transport horse manure is possibly as shown in the image above: the strong young man and the wheelbarrow. Not with the Porsche. Or the silver BMW for that matter.

My Way or the Highway, a title recently acquired by Kitsap Regional Library, has a passing mention of the consequences of the inappropriate use of the Porsche. Though I do believe they used another type of horse metaphor. A few pages before the candy wrapper bookmark.

Or is this all just so much Utopian thinking? I mean, dignified societies? What next! An empowered people? What a revolutionary thought.

Little Boston Library Opening

2007-10-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

The Little Boston branch of Kitsap Regional Library is on the Port Gamble S'klallam* tribal reservation in north Kitsap County, Washington State. It has had several incarnations since it was first established in 1974 as the first public library to be built on a reservation in the USA.

In 1999 Little Boston Library was honoured with the American Library Association's award for the best Small Town Public Library nationwide. This year new premises for the library were completed as the last phase of the 8 year House of Knowledge Longhouse and community centre project undertaken by the Port Gamble S'klallam tribe.

The majority of the photographs in the slide show below were taken at the dedication ceremony on Friday 5 October 2007. The light in the longhouse where the dancing took place was low and natural and without a tripod my lens was not really appropriate. I thus unashamedly pushed the exposure, colour and contrast, abandoning all thoughts of realist documentary and going for spirit and mood instead.

* Follow this link to the official homepage of the tribe which includes culture and history, government, and business information
http://www.pgst.nsn.us/

Any number of things

2007-10-13T15:58:00.000-07:00

So what has Anthony Kasanga got to do with 43 things and all the other required reading on Web2.0 about the librarian learning curve, blogging, wikis, and oh the whole brave new world wide thing and other bright shiny objects?

Anthony Kasanga is a Maasai moran (warrior) and co-ordinator of Lion Guardians in Maasailand, southern Kenya. Anthony lives at least 5 hours on a terrible road from his nearest library. Anthony lives without electric power or roof over his head. Anthony has a blog. Anthony has a world wide presence and voice. http://www.wildlifedirect.org/blogAdmin/lionguardians

Go figure.

Any number of things.

The image leading this post was taken at the Sun Temple, Mesa Verde, Colorado in April 2006. These things are known to me. Civilisations have come and gone many times on this planet. Perspective is important to an artist.

Possibly one of the most enigmatic of extant Anasazi buildings, the Sun Temple probably dates from 1275, might have had something to do with ceremony and probably did not have anything to do with the sun at all. *

Mathematics anyone?

Want further comments on those articles? Like Kent Nerburn in "Neither wolf nor dog" I am currently on forgotten roads with a tribal elder. This means that I am on "Indian time". Which, according to the Ojibwe tribal leader quoted in the abovementioned title (p.26 in the New World Library, 2002 pbk ed.), means: "When I am damn good and ready."

*for more on the Anasazi people:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anasazi

Blank page blues benediction

2007-10-13T12:57:00.000-07:00

Guess I have indulged enough now in the entire spectrum of avoidance behaviours, playing with pictures, fonts, templates and colours etc; and annoyed enough colleagues by breathing down their necks whilst they are doing their playing with pictures, fonts, templates and colours etc . I can no longer avert my eyes from the blank page.

With 41 and counting views of the lonely 5-day old profile, it begins to feel like there is a crowd out there, growing restless behind the curtain. I hear the murmur and slow hand clap of a discontented audience kept too long in the dark.

But what to do with these blank page blues and no words? There's no option but to take the lead from way too many breathlessly banal and over-played Oscar speeches. Without more ado (breathy gasp)I choose to use this primary platform to uuuuh (drumroll to cover the fumbling)......give thanks and dedication.

So: this one's in your name, my dearest friend, interlocutor supreme, interpreter of maladies and visions, partner in interrogation of the quotidian, inimitable (disperser of) blues bru*, the one and only contender: Professor Robert Brooks. (ah! smell the victory!)

Seeking the language of initiation, obedient to the unstill hand clapping behind the curtain, there's a tentative toe dipped. 'Tis done! Let the shape shifting mineshaft canary take wing.

* bru = brother South African colloquial usage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_African_slang_words
The Blues Broers were one of South Africa's premier blues music groups in the late nineties.
http://www.bluesroom.co.za/pages/Bands/Blues%20Broers/Past_2002_05_23.asp