miss alice and the mystery of the stealth sharks

you won't git pick

2007-09-23T09:56:00.001-05:00

letters to anyone, self-published

2007-08-26T13:08:00.000-05:00

A couple of letters I may have well have just put up here and saved sending to the Times Magazine, but I have a hard time leaving stuff like this unchallenged, even if I'm just talking to myself for now.

Latest:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/magazine/19Religion-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

Mark Lilla (Aug. 19) represents Muslims as the only true threat to the Great Separation, Americans (people from the United States) instead settling their "potentially explosive religious differences. . . within the bounds of the Constitution." He fails to consider current US Christian fundamentalists' aim to destabilize the Great Separation through a religious network heavily engaged in electoral politics. The army of the Lord has adapted to modern instruments of state, but it has not ceased to be interested in the fate of the material-political world. The fruits of their labor, of course, can be seen in the election of their man, and in the worries of primary candidates who must determine how to relate to faith in a campaign process which has become increasingly a contest about image (of which faith is a part) and not about policies (which can be judged on their merits independently of the religious identification of the author).

Later, maintaining the distance of one "coming upon an ancient inscription written in hieroglyphics" he discusses Muslim renovationists working from within a community of believers to create a renewed faith compatible with the coexistence our diverse world requires for peace. While understanding that they are allies, he presents these people who believe that their faith should guide their actions in the social and political world as inherently inferior and alien to his reader: "Their reasons are not our reasons. But if we cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation. . .The best should not be the enemy of the good."

This is an article written to promote understanding of the so-called "Opposite Shore" which ends up marking Them more strongly than ever as foreign and unknowable and perhaps insults them. It ends with the words of the great Academic Man, bastion of Reason in a world of savages: "All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world where faith still inflames the minds of men." As a young woman who is, perhaps, more intimately familiar with belief, and also committed to rational political organization dedicated to just protection of the well-being of all citizens, I wonder if he might more accurately analyze the religious-political nexus from a nearer place than that of the old anthropologist gazing at the wild men.

And the one before that:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20370

Freeman Dyson’s giddy biotech salvation fantasy demands a response from a human being with a more broadly communitarian vision for the future of our species and others, particularly given then way he couches his piece in the language of community interdependence.

Dyson’s invocation of a glorious evolutionary past, before the “evil day” when a certain one-celled organism stopped sharing and became a species to get ahead, back when horizontal gene transfer made evolution “a communal affair” aims to ally his vision with justice and equality. Similarly, his talk of biotech solutions for “the mainstream of economic development” presents biotech as the way forward to equality through greater production, enough for everyone. Reading it, I was reminded of an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, robots in space laughing at the hilariously naive voiceover man’s thrill about the future of the last green revolution.

His is a paternalistic mission to “ameliorate the human condition all over the earth” without addressing inequality, except with a naïve or calculating claim that because sunlight is more equitably distributed than oil, the benefits of harvesting it will be, too. This claim however founders against all the evidence that at this stage in the game, the physical location of resources in a particular community has little to do with who reaps the rewards from the sale of the energy—that’s why we call mining an extractive industry. The boom in corn production for ethanol isn’t providing the rural poor with enough profits to sustain rural livelihoods because large-scale consumption of energy requires large-scale production and history hasn’t provided the rural poor with democratic access to land and capital. Technological fixes are not meant to fundamentally shift power dynamics, they are meant to preserve them; and yet Dyson giddily suggests that in allowing us to burn more, faster, cleaner (efficiency) biotech will also lift up the rural poor simply because “bio” is a sort of naturally rural prefix. And what on earth makes him think that broad access to “small and domesticated” biotech will not go right alongside corporate control and massive capitalization for the already-rich on all these new products? Or maybe that is not what he meant to imply when he said, “It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations.” For Dyson, given our moment in the awesomely fast cultural evolution (“a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution”!) of our species, profiteering on the production of new life-forms must be nothing more than the natural response of our system to the technological wonders men manage to produce while the housewives are at home with the babies.

He talks democratization and community empowerment, but he’s selling an approach that offers nothing but more and faster play in the same game, the god-game he joyfully recommends to all of our grandchildren (the ones who are already playing with their PCs), the god-game which turns on our exclusion from the global community of organisms (in his world “species other than our own will no longer exist”) to take the seat to the left of Jesus and manage (exploit) the rest right down to their very genetic material in our quest to stay ahead of our limitless needs.

news trip to Bernay's banana republic(s)

2007-08-24T08:59:00.000-05:00

Well the Guatemalan elections are just a couple of weeks away and it looks like there is real danger of Otto "ex"-military "Hard Hand of Justice" Perez Molina winning by the skin of his teeth:

"It was all so different five months ago- Alvaro Colom looked like he was going to walk it. Now with less than a month out from the first round of the Guatemalan elections, it's anyone's guess. Although Otto Pérez Molina is predicted to be at least 10 percentage points off the pace in the first round, it all changes with forecasts for a second round run off between Pérez Molina and Colom. The gap narrows to just 2 percentage points- Colom is first with 41.4 per cent, followed by Pérez Molina with 39.3 per cent." (http://gsn.civiblog.org/blog/_archives/2007/8/18/3166649.html)

There is a serious malnutrition crisis in Zacapa on the front page of Prensa Libre, and while the paper bemoans the sad tight faces, it does not mention what the most recent human rights commission report revealed: that the Constitutional Court recently declared unconstitutional a popular consultation that showed that Zacapa residents oppose a hydroelectric plant on their river; construction is of course set to go forward contrary to the wishes of the people of Zacapa who were asked their opinion through official channels only to be promptly ignored.

It all makes sense when you assume that the people are stupid and that government and media exist to manipulate them to its ends. A little retrospective on Bernays, the originator of PR, in the form of this documentary clip is up on the Guatemala Solidarity Network.

http://gsn.civiblog.org/blog/_archives/2006/10/2/2379575.html

a relevant account today I think for the US and Guatemala both that shows how much our histories are linked. . . should remind us how so many people in power think about citizens.

In slightly better news, the case against genocidal ex-dictator Rios Montt got a boost when a court ruled that a set of leaked documents could not be kept from the trial under a state secrets doctrine because the crime had already been committed and the release of the documents would not compromise national security. "The documents detailing Plan Sofia clearly illustrate an explicit chain of command, with Rios Montt at its head, through which orders of mass extermination were communicated at the height of the conflict" said Catherine Norris, an organizer with the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA) in Washington D.C." (http://gsn.civiblog.org/blog/_archives/2007/8/17/3164102.html)

Now we have only to wait and see what the US Court of Appeals rules in our own parallel case, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. President Bush, regarding warrantless spying on US islamic charity organizations. Bush's Dept. of Justice guy makes the case that letters which were accidentally sent to these organizations revealing the spying program to its targets (woops) are protected as ultra-classified so that the prosecution on behalf of these groups can not even use the memory of these documents during the trial, hence the groups have no proof they were ever spied on, hence there is no case, case dismissed. Will the Court of Appeals uphold the Bush Administration's apparent right to no-oversight based on the State Secrets Doctrine? unclear.

anxiously awaiting September 9th and November 8th.

Wave of the future: vines

2007-08-16T08:27:00.000-05:00

Well looks like I jumped ship on this blog for not too far off a year, and here I'm back with a new project, a whole new time and place so that it feels a little like letting someone see a picture of you in middle school to leave around all those old posts, but hey, onward into the blog of the future. yeah, right! The location has changed, going to be in Philly again at the start of the month, across town, across the Schukyll, in the West just out past where the train goes so that it is a kind of precarious ten blocks to the last major SEPTA outpost, precarious in the sense that it matters which roads you pick to go down on the way. Our neighbors are good, a guy with an artificial heart and occaisional seizures who spends a lot of time on his porch, keeping an eye out and watching the street change over many years, and a couple and their little boy up from the islands, working at the Marriot mostly nights and playing a checkers relative called Draft (or maybe just Draf?) on the porch in the day while we sip peanut punch like they make in Trinidad.

But before I get too comfortable there, I figured I better come back and spend some time in the old home place, and so I'm in Kentucky and reaquainting myself with the youth of Clark County all in their new haunts, watching all of us figure out what the new deal is with parents, because it seems like it's changing again for a lot of friends, some just out of high school, some older, and me with that fancy education from far away kind of late really striking out into the world of jobs and apartments and sink or swim.

So my new project: it's a habitat reclamation project of sorts, letting the termites finish what they started in a little building that has been a lot of things—an early office for the lean beef company for one, now storage for the flotsam of consumer spending and an ex-husband and an old house. I'm going to sell anything saleable on ebay (check stuff under newlifeforoldthings) once I get back to my camera upload cord in Philly, plant vines, salvage the tin roof, pull up the carpet, open the window, give the wisteria a new route up on to the top of the building and let the plants and animals eat the building and the old books that are already full of tunnels. I scavenged some good stuff—records, an old recipe box—already, and am picking up more plants at the garden center here in a few since everything is half-off for the end of the season. Vines are the wave of the future.

The night after Christmas

2006-12-27T01:59:00.000-05:00

It's the night after Christmas and all through the house, not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse. Just me actually. Travelling is interesting and I've been going pretty nonstop. I still haven't been anywhere for more than a couple of days, weeks, in a long while. My flight from Guatemala landed in JFK at around 11 o'clock, clear night. The landing was normal, smooth, but since it was a plane full of Guatemalan grannies coming to the United States to see their families, we were all gripping our armrests and looking out the window, and when the plane touched down everyone sighed and then applauded. That's one thing I feel like this trip did for me, made everything fresh and exciting. Once I get back to Hanover and school, I plan to settle in for what I hope will be a cold snowy winter (afraid that climate change is not on my side) to think and write and hopefully the results will be good enough to share.

divination

2006-12-06T11:21:00.000-05:00

Last night in Antigua I spoke with a fascinating woman who works to find birth mothers for adoptive families who want to establish contact. She works alone, accompanied on her trips by her husband for safety. She has no agency, she doesnt use any institutional contacts, no lawyers, no social workers, nothing. She works, like everyone here does, straight from her gut. She goes to the adress of the woman that is listed on the cedula. She asks around, she gets a feeling, someone tells her that maybe they know the father of that woman and that maybe he is living in a town 30 km away. She goes and there is the mother, she is in the right place, and she intends to talk to the mother, and the husband is there, maybe she can only speak to the husband who speaks to the mother who speaks to the husband who speaks to my friend the finder. A few months ago in the highlands, twelve women had their hair cut off for giving up their children in adoption, Mayan punishment. One of these women has an eight year old son in the United States. The son wanted to know that his mother loved him. He asked for some sign from her. The finder brought pictures of the young boy to his mother in Guatemala. She told the mother that the young boy was looking for a sign from her. The mother had nothing to give. She put the photo of her son against her heart and asked that the finder take a photograph of her, and send it back to the United States where he lives with his family there. The young boy doesnt know yet that his mother was punished for sending him to the United States to live, but he knows that she loves him and maybe his parents in the States will tell him more story in the years that come. He cried and cried, but he said he felt more complete.

Here, people do not talk so much about politics, or about other places, about books they have read. Conversations it seems are much closer to the core of a person-- who are you why are you here what are you doing can i trust you are we on the same team or different-- there is so much to be learned from the tone and tempo of the conversation so that sometimes only this pitch matters and not the words.

Last night I went to a talk (with some folks from Hanover! who are here helping teach english) about the Mayan calendar and the power of day counting for divination. The man sounded foolish, was hawking his book too much. He was white, had learned quiche, had studied this sort of record-keeping and divination for twenty years. He didnt want to really tell us anything, but it came out in the q&A that all three of the shamen who were his major sources of knowledge had been killed in the last four years by people in the town (not mobs, murders) who feared their power. According to this man, and to the people in the town who believe, these men have the power to heal, to enrich a person, to recognize auspicious and inauspicious days for things, and they also have to power to harm the enemies of their "clients" (I did not get him to talk about who were the clients, how the shamen chose which clients to work for, if they had to be able to pay for example). The man giving the talk had obviously feared them even though they were also sweet old men. I wonder if his foolish persona is only for the gringos in Antigua and Panahachel or if he maintains it when he speaks in Quiche, too, as a sort of protection.

The Mayan cosmology seems to be about doggedly maintaining order in the face of chaos. The day you are born, the deity and the day that influence you, is supposed to determine your path, to determine what sort of person you will be-- precise and good with money, an agriculturalist, a warrior. And then the community sets out to make you like the person you are destined to be. Order. Control. Violence. Stability? Peace? Confidence in your role? The man had not thought enough about gender. He said there are very powerful women, and I said I know. He could not say what happens to the young girl born on the day of obsidian blade (precise, good with money and numbers) whose father wouldnt let her go to school or speak to people outside the house-- what is she supposed to become? Maybe I did not ask pointedly enough. And he was afraid to admit how much the possbilities had been limited as families split up, a son or daughter living in the city to bring in a little money to supplement the food they could grow. He was afraid to admit how limited the options had become as fewer people lived by the calendar. He was trying to soften the Mayan cosmology because he had let it get so deep into his life and it is a dark sort of cosmology. He said that Mayans love apocolypse, endings of things, completion, starting over. He said that in his new book (waving it around for us) he had tried to smooth over some of the darkness and make it more positive. Im not sure he has the power to do that.

I went to lake Atitlan on Sunday, and we arrived in time to leave our things and go down to the lake side and sit with some friends of John who he had met in the city, some young guys from there who lived in Panahachel as thousands and thousands of people passed through to see their lake. It was a particularly spectacular sunset. The five of us almost didnt speak at all for a couple of hours. Just sat and looked at that light on that water.

And the next morning we found that some people we knew from the Pension Meza in Guatemala City were staying right below. Circus girls from Spain. And travelling with them was someone who I hadnt seen in four years, four years ago in El Zonte El Salvador. I appears that I am on route.

Tomorrow I have a date at McDonalds in Guatemala City with a group of University students, organized by a young woman who just gave up her first child in adoption. We both want to know what they think, especially about condoms. Im safe and happy and Ill see you all when I see you.

Alice

monday, monday

2006-11-20T13:34:00.000-05:00

What is going on relative to my research project--

Getting settled in here has been really hard, I never really did it last time, but Im feeling hopeful about this trip. I am taking care of myself. I have a good living situation with a family. It is an interesting adoption case actually. The domestic, Marga, got pregnant and the man left her with the baby. Meanwhile her employers who lived a bunch of years in the states-- he was born in Louisiana-- and who are grandparent age decided to let her keep the baby. They don´t pay her much at all but she has plenty to eat and is healthy and works in the house and can stay with her little two year old. It has been good for me to watch as I am thinking about how adoption works for everyone involved because although the boy has not been officially adopted, something like an adoption has happened where the owners of the house deeply love the little boy like his mother loves him, and where they care for him a lot economically as well.

I met with the social worker last week and recorded a great interview with her. This afternoon, she is going to set me up with a long interview time (hopefully) with a woman who is about to give up her third child in adoption, a kind of unique situation. The offices there have been remodeled so the walls are thin and sort of open, but it is MUCH more private than it was when I was down here in May and everything was under construction.

This week is our week together to really do a lot of interviewing at the court house. Then, this weekend, this taxi driver is going to take me to Rabinal and Salama, where he is from. Finding him was very lucky because those are places that I have studied and thought about a lot. It will be an opportunity to think about the forced transition away from subsitance farming that happened during the 80s. The taxi driver really wants to talk about this hydroelectric project that Rios Montt made and hes going to take me to the site of a model village where everyone was to relocate.

I have gotten back in touch with a young woman who works as an assistant to an adoption lawyer. Shes great and Im so lucky to know her both because we can go out together as friends and because she knows so many stories. So, things are shaping up, and that is the word from here.

sunday picture show

2006-11-19T17:20:00.000-05:00

I brought my camera with me for the Anthropology Museum and for the walk down there, but I couldnt take any pictures that would show you anything about what its like to be in gautemala, part because enough people have already taken enough pictures of guatemala that you can find all on the internet and because everyday life is so difficult to photograph and I dont have the cord to transfer the pictures anyway. . . There are some people with a little girl in traje crossing the bridge over the traffic, its sunday and everyone is out with their kids. There is a dog asleep on the sidewalk. There is a no parking sign printed by the local newspaper, I guess for free advertising. There is a man selling flowers by the busy part of the street. . . he made a sale! He is running around the corner to deliver out of the way of the traffic. Above is a cell phone billboard and something about roaming. There is a futbol game across from the museum, which is looking very Colonial with its yellow walls. A young man with his bike watches the game through the iron fence. The grass is kind of long on the field. A couple of guys pass on a motorcycle, and some others in crappy cars from the 80s. Another mom and child wait on the grassy path that goes along beside the airport while the boyfriend or husband comes running across the road. He stops three lanes of traffic to bring his girls some Burger King. Its a clear day, and the clouds have interesting shapes.

And then I met this gay man from Oakland at the museum, well, I didnt know that at first, but once I realized, it was so great—gay people from the Bay area who Ive met always seem so darn well-adjusted. He told me I needed to go eat some fancier food or go to Antigua to relax a while, but even the city was looking like a pretty nice place to be on this temperate Sunday afternoon.

edge of something

2006-11-18T16:07:00.000-05:00

At certain moments, this country holds me fascinated. On the one hand, they have lived with dictators and waves of brutality and war for so long. The taxi driver I rode with yesterday told me how Rios Montt wanted a hydroelectric plant and so he built this model town to put all the displaced people in with tiny little houses and asked them to leave the land that had always fed them and fed their families, their cows and chickens and plots of corn. And when the people didn{t want to move he killed them-- first one at a time and then with bombs and fire and there was a terrible fire and he built the dam and the water rose and now there is nothing left of all that. And so this country is almost mortally wounded, but suddenly, recently, the taxi drivers can talk about it.

On the one hand, the inequality here is staggering. As Daniel Morales in the "Voices on the Street" section of the paper when asked about the economy, "They are bringing us to disaster and ruin because the government confused growth of the GDP with distribution of wealth. They should help small businesses grow." Another said there are two routes right now, things are improving for the rich and we are experiencing an apocolypse for the poor. Another said that the government wouldn{t stop hassling her for taxes, even though almost all the money most people make is in the informal economy and they can{t afford taxes. On the other, the people can really articulate it now and I don{t think they could do that in the same way just a few years ago.

On the one hand, a man can promise a young girl he will marry her and then abuse her and leave her pregnant, but on the other, the father of the girl, illiterate and burned from working in the sun can say, “I love my daughter. My daughter has always been loved in the house, and I will not permit someone from outside to abuse her," and run the guy off and put the baby up for adoption. (side note. I realize that some of you do not know what I am studying here. I am trying to think about adoption of Guatemalan children who come to the United States from a Guatemalan perspective. Particularly I am trying to learn about the perspective of birth mothers, during this trip. And for those of you who are my advisors and that sort of thing, although I am not posting it up on the blog, I am learning a lot.)

So, on the one hand the number of sad stories is completely overwhelming and they are all true, but on the other hand people are starting to tell them and to voice opinions about the way their world might look better. It sometimes feels to me like the beginning of a time of change. Change is so tied up with violence here-- Conquest, Arbenz, "modernization" in the 80s and stuff like Montt{s hydroelectric plant-- but it seems like sometimes the people are trying to say we know our history and we want to be through with violence.

But the sister of the dona of the family I am staying with says she thinks it is getting worse and she may well be right.

bienvenido a guatemala

2006-11-15T18:41:00.000-05:00

I have arrived! after getting lost in Queens and getting to my plane only one hour before departure and being pushed onto the later flight and. . . and I am here and have a good place to stay, and people I recognize and I´m ready to take this all on tomorrow!

So, I want to welcome you to this long blog, a place that´s becoming my history book or something like it.

yesterday I wrote- "This blog is going to parallel the more publically published parts of my Senior Fellowship project." There´s something more to this, something about the way that our private lives and our public/political/published lives are only artificially separated. I´ve been thinking about how forcefully the political world has entered people´s homes and families here, how clear it is to them that there are not two separate worlds, and how that is really true in the United States, too. What we can all imagine wanting and how we can imagine getting it is so tied up with the history and everyday politics of where we live.

I think it will be much harder to focus and write coherently here in the public internet cafe with all the traffic of people and the timer and all the things that I am about to go do instead of write, and I hope you´ll forgive me that, and I hope you enjoy checking up on my adventures here this month.

miss alice

ps--On the personal/political theme I want to recommend a film I just saw called Tout Va Bien about the spirit of Paris, May 1968. Jane Fonda´s character says something like "When you think of me, all you think of is eating, going to the movies, and going to bed. What about when you go to work and shoot advertisements to get paid or when I go to the radio station and they won´t air what I write? Isn´t that also part of our lives together?" and she is also trying to deal with the artificial separation of these worlds. Naomi´s mix CD gets it, too...

If you want the best jam, you got to make your own

2006-11-14T16:05:00.000-05:00

I began my trip to Guatemala yesterday from Shantytown, Hanover, NH, USA yesterday at 10 o’clock in the morning. Marshall made pancakes from scratch (I wonder what “scratch” originally was/meant? Lissa?) and I packed half to take with me in the car.

The first sign that this next month is going to be a real adventure: When I went to put my key into the ignition, I saw it was all twisted up. How did that happen? I guess it was tending a little that way? This time though, when I went to straighten it out, it made a breaking metal sound and creased just where the stem starts. yikes. At least it didn’t break through, and there was a spare key at Panarchy. Ah ha. With special determination I put it in the ignition and turned it (still in one piece) and started the steep gravelly ascent out of the shantytown hollar.

But lo! Up ahead was an enormous yellow truck! with a lift! and feet! And it was sitting right at the mouth of the driveway.

The power company had me blocked in. The young gentleman in the reflective orange vest shook his head mouthing, “I can’t do anything for you.” I parked my car, angled as if to be shot out of a rocket launcher. I spoke to the young man and said, “I am going to Guatemala tomorrow and I need to get on the road.” And he said maybe you can fit through here, motioning, and I thought it looked unlikely and said, “What about here,” motioning between the woods and the mailbox. And he said, “Well I can’t break down the truck, but we’ll be gone in maybe 10 minutes anyway,” and I said, “Oh, just 10 minutes,” and he said, “Yeah but give this a try.” The policeman and the signaler stopped the cars on that side. I drove over the grass and the curb and between the machines and I was free!

Now I had to go to Panarchy and find the spare key. I left the car idling out front (although that didn’t really make sense since I had to turn it off anyway to change the keys) and I was talking on the phone to my dad.

My dad keeps me honest about the important things. Did you check the antifreeze in your car? So now I had this series of car adventure to recount. And, in fact, the nice woman at the co-op gas station checked my antifreeze for free one night. She said the car is good to 12 below and I said thank you have a good night.

I was really happy to see Alyson in the house, and also really happy to see my spare key in my mug full of weird things and rubber bands.

Then I realized that since it was by this time 10:30 AM and not 6:30 AM, I might as well check my mail and see if my credit card had arrived. It had recently been canceled because, according to my credit card company, there was potential of fraud. They called on Wednesday of last week and told me that I needed to cut up the old one and wait for the new one which would be there in 7-10 days, and I said, “I’m leaving the country in fewer days than that, is there some way I can get it sooner,” and she said, “well I’ll express mail it,” but on Saturday my mailbox was still empty, and I thought it would be worth one more try and there was a parking space in front and I put a quarter in the meter (because now I had change for the tolls) and then saw that there had already been 54 minutes and that I gave some free parking to someone. It was like Monopoly except focusing on the free parking instead of the purchasing and hoarding. And I checked my mail and there was a paper notice of my card being cancelled (useless) and a notice to call at the postoffice window for a package and that was when I realized that I keft my ID in shantytown because what good would it do me in Guatemala and I couldn’t get mail without ID, and so I explained this whole large situation to the postman and then he said, “don’t you have a licence?” and of course I did because I was driving, I had just forgotten because we don’t hardly use government ID at Dartmouth. And there was my credit card! Shiny and new for my trip South.

On the way South, I listened to a mix CD that Naomi made me. Naomi, it was fantastic! Here is one note from Naomi’s mix cd. I went back and listened to it again so I could get it all right:

“It’s only in the last 50 years or so that people have started to let TVs and radios do their singing for them. You know. . . we’ve been sittin around for a couple a hundred million years or so, I don’t know how long we’ve been here, but we’ve been sittin around campfires singing songs and before that just regular fires and singing these songs and making up stories and passing on who we are from one generation to the next-- it’s just nice to see that it’s continuing and it’s nice to see that it’s growing and it’s nice to see that it doesn’t belong to any particular group of people or one person but it sort of just belongs to everybody.”

Naomi will you send me the track list and then I’ll put it up here? Or you should give it to someone else, too, because it seems like a lot of other people might appreciate it. I thought the first two songs were one song they fit together so nice.

Then, on the road, I saw a pheasant. He was big and rust colored with pretty green plumes in his tail and a black and white mask. He was just walking down the highway by the median guardrail looking troubled (For those of you who have seen The Falls-- whenever Greenaway does the movie The Johns, I’m sure he will note this encounter as an early sign that I am a victom (victim?) of the VUE). I worried about him and hoped that he made it across sometime, alive, and got away from that highway, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Then I crossed the Connecticut River again, in Connecticut, and I thought about how if you had canoed it from Hanover to the sea before, like some folks have, then you would look at that stretch of river with completely different eyes than mine, me, passing over the river on a bridge.

This blog is going to parallel the more publically published parts of my Senior Fellowship project. I’ll write articles in the Spring about adoption of Guatemalan children and the experience of birth mothers, but meanwhile, as I’m travelling and thinking, I’ll try to put my thoughts up here from time to time. Feel free to write me back through the blog, too, if you want? Maybe that will work.

I also wanted to let you know that because you are so special, and because Guatemala has gotten more dangerous since I was wandering that land five years ago, I have decided to travel less and on more direct buses. Most of the work I need to do is in the city this round, too, and the college will certainly pay for taxis.

So, tonight, to New York City to sleep on an air matress, and TOMORROW at noon that little plane’s wheels will touch down and I’ll pick up my bag at the claim (in the spring, there was a video playing silently above the luggage carosels of cat mishaps, clip after clip of cats falling off tables and trees and getting wet), and I’ll walk out and past all of the taxi drivers offering rides, and say, “No, gracias” and I’ll go past the roundabout and down the hill, and there I’ll be at my hostel to set up for the days that come.

Ledbelly's version of "The Pines"

2006-09-25T23:08:00.000-05:00

Well, I went looking for the liberty bell on my last day in Philly, sort of casually, Independence Hall was behind a barricade manned by a security guard talking on his cell phone so I couldn’t ask him where the bell was. Not in the Hall I think, but somewhere close by. Next time I visit.

I was worried, then, walking down Fifth Street toting a box of eighty fresh-printed, hand-stapled zines, that my urge to publish is too strong, maybe stronger than my creative drive even, which hardly makes sense. I was feeling like a real dork for going to a lot of trouble (well not *that* much, and I did enjoy my time at the local print shop where they figured out pretty quick how to be friendly with this crazy white girl eating a raw green pepper “It smells like a farm in here, and I was wondering what you were eating” and folding and stapling eighty booklets with at least: scraps from the Metro, an obituary from Alabama and a photocopy of a piece of kale) to print my ideas and share them with friends and strangers. I should be funnier or something if I want to print thoughts up. Maybe I should just have more dinner parties, but I really like print media and the physical process of making these things with scissors and the notes I write on the backs of receipts. I’m coming to terms with the dorkiness of it.

The latest back of the envelope note to self brings me to a petit diatribe about the way Westerners eat. It’s really about the tools-- knife and fork vs. chopsticks. I’m imagining ancient Europeans hacking away at whole pieces of meat with knives, stabbing and slicing and then deciding to develop a tool especially for stabbing so that they would only need one knife. Meanwhile, all over Asia, people are leaving the cutting and hacking to whoever prepares the food, so that all the eater is left to do is to pick it up with the wonderfully minimalist and easy to find/make chopsticks. They can drink the soup straight from the bowl and their slim chopsticks are all they need. Of course then, to complicate the eating process so that we can recognize signs of status in people’s eating habits, the Asians simple eating had to be made fantastically complicated with an artistic/social ritual. The Westerners just made more forks.

We are in the last days of the Philly Fringe Fest-- TWO WEEKS of theater and music and general weirdness. It kicks off with a toilet bowl race (toilets mounted on tricycles by some mechanical pair who make it their business to do this every year) which kicks off with a step-dance and parade by some really impressive local middle schoolers (last year decked out in pink camo). So I had two hits and a miss for $45 this year. We Referee was a hit. And I saw Non-sequiters: a Cabaret last night. Fabulous and decadently theatrical show-- gay theater made for straight people, too. I laughed, I cried (really) and I failed to fight the urge to give a standing ovation after the first song. And in between, I saw a sign that standing ovations have not been so hopelessly cheapened as to be mandatory, even when the art is supposed to be about the people dying in the twin towers. Love Unpunished was really shitty “critically acclaimed” “art.” I picked it, purely based on the sort of nebulous brochure (which didn’t even warn me that the thing was about Sept. 11th) which had a cool looking picture and was in a place that I like. Turned out to be something trying to sit at the intersection of dance and theater and failing to do both. Anything that boring can not POSSIBLY get at human emotion. And, when it was all said and done (Frank and I barely made it to the end, only staying because “it can’t be much longer” the applause was as lackluster as the show. Hooray audience! (And then we got a fantastic dinner at the White Dog Cafe which is a place worth eating at for a nice dinner, and which was featured in the Edens Lost and Found program on PBS whose website is worth checking out. Edenslostandfound.org. I think.)

After all the fringe festing, the fringiest theatrical experience for me came on the Broad St. line, northbound to Temple where I realized that an actress from Non-sequiters was in my car, sitting next to someone from the airport steakshop where I worked register for a few days. All I had to say to her was “That was fantastic,” but I got talking to him about a lost-acting crazy who I wanted to make sure got off where he was going, Girard. And Ray, if that’s not the name of the short-order guy it fits him, said he was just juiced up and that’s why he seemed lost and I said no, he’s from Europe his English isn’t too good, and Ray said that he was probably just putting that accent on to talk to me. He said, “You find guys around here all the time saying they from Jamaica with that Jamaican accent-- half of them is Philly born and raised.” I raised my eyebrows because I had been hustled a little by just such a Jamaican, didn’t let it happen to me twice. That’s when Ray gave us the take-home message for today’s blog, and for my time in Philly and the time I’m about to spend back in Guatemala. He said, “The streets is your best teacher. I realized that it don’t matter how smart a person can be.” Weighty pause. “If you don’t got street smarts, you in trouble.” Let’s all figure out how to be smart, but capable of dropping the suspicion, like the good Ray.

Turns out I am going to miss Philadelphia. I cried just a little, as the R7 crossed the Sckulkill on its way to New Jersey and points north. On to the fresh challenges of Hanover.

Ps. Accoring to the Philly historical markers, someone named Maezel invented an automatic chess player who played against Ben Franklin and Napolean. That was a long time ago! I’m going to google that when I get to the internet!

Philadelphia: Everybody is hustlin’

2006-08-22T13:34:00.000-05:00

I went to an electronic and experimental music show tonight, free third Friday of every month at the Rotunda in University City. The first group looked good and dirty, not too hip and clean. They were called Sharks With Wings. They snuck up on me with a quiet something, muffled mallets and gently scraping metal on the guitar. But they were going somewhere, to this fantastic climax. And soon, the speakers sound like they’re exploding and, oh hell, someone’s swallowed a mike and there it is chirping and roaring in his throat; the most percussive of the bunch is now hitting the frame instead of the chimes. He’s just wailing on it, and it’s so raw and sparse and the rest sort of fade out until that guy is just beating the frame for his chimes and the soft mallet head has broken off so there’s this huge Thwak Thwak that in spite of the general lack of anything like a beat in the piece, is such a short-lived sound made from such a huge effort, such a steel driving man kind of swing that it can’t help having a rhythm. The wailing told me they were from Philly, even though they didn’t say.

The next act is a girl called “Bubblyfish.” She is from New York. She is clean and beautiful, smart, successful. She tells us that she is used to playing in clubs, so it makes her nervous that we all sit staring at her as she grooves with her gameboy. We are in a venue that feels at least slightly like a church basement. Her audience is forty folks interested in New Music, mainstream Philly apparently not quite ready for her. I don’t know what club would have her, and her visit here only made the Metro daily newspaper because of the gameboy tie-in.

Outside, I joked with a guy who settled here about a year ago that you wouldn’t confuse the Philly group with the New York one. “Yeah, Philadelphia is a city that runs on misery. At least that’s how it seems sometimes coming from outside. . . I really like it. I’ve got friends here; and it’s not just anywhere that you can see something cool like this [gestures to music spot] five nights a week,” and I can’t resist suggesting, “well, how about New York.” He rightly points out that in New York you couldn’t afford it, or at least you couldn’t afford it if you were me or him, working some shitty service job. Maybe in New York you have to really make it, be a Bubblyfish who can play in the clubs and have a face that glows, or you have to get out, move to Philly. Tough motherfucking Philly.

Until yesterday, I worked in a sandwich shop in the Philadelphia airport, five days a week, from six o’clock in the morning until two in the afternoon. I was the only white worker-bee (the managers were predominantly white), and a college student, but curiously found myself this job primarily peopled by folks from the ghetto or Haiti or both. I got the job like this:

First, I walked Center City every day for a week, filling out applications. Isn’t a 22 year-old woman moving to a city supposed to be a waitress? Isn’t that the fall-back for people who are really trying to make it as artists in the Big City? . . . Forget fall-back, you’ve got to struggle to make your way in the restaurant world before you can even think of struggling to make it in the art world. Working at a restaurant for a couple of months in provincial New Hampshire was apparently not enough experience. And besides, no one was hiring. See, look:

Me: I was wondering if you were hiring.
Busboy Serf: You can fill out an application.
Me: I only want to fill out an application if you actually have openings.
Busboy Serf: Let me go ask the manager.
Manager arrives, I am in the process of giving up and leaving.
Manager: You can fill out an application and we’ll see if we need anyone.
Me: Right, but you would know if you needed anyone, and I have been filling out applications all day, and I don’t feel like filling out applications if they will just sit in a pile until they are thrown in the trash.
I am walking away on this guy. He is disgusted by me. What right have I to question the application system? I am the applicant. I am the supplicant. I should beg, but subtly and with good taste-- I wish I didn't sit through the Bukowski movie Factotum, but he hit being a supplicant dead on when the alcoholic hero related how he got work at a bike factory-- “I had to prostrate myself for that one. I said, ‘My job is like a second home.’” I was too exhausted either to suck up for the nonexistant job, or to stun him with my wit and tell him to go to hell, so I just cut and ran.
“But there’s a process,” he shouted after me. He probably paid $5 an hour. Retail seems to pay even less, and they expect you to treat working there like a career decision.

A friend in the city told me that when he first went looking for work in Center City a girl in a retail place actually laughed at him. UPS wouldn’t hire him either because he had a criminal record for J-walking and trespassing. The hippies in town are apparently living off of drug studies. With participation in multiple studies they apparently make around 20K. This according to a friend who lived with them before she got work in her graduate infectious disease lab for (she calculated) about $8 and hour. She was making $10 during undergrad, before budget cuts to the National Science Foundation. Another guy she met made his living by stealing one nice camera every week or so and selling it on eBay.

So when I walked into a sandwhich place and found the first manager who didn’t treat me like he was doing me an enormous favor by deigning to talk to me, I said I’m your man. He said he couldn’t use me there but they needed me in the airport. Apparently many of the people who come in off the street looking for jobs there have a criminal record, which just won’t do given the security restrictions at the airport. He told me they needed more white girls up there.

So, I paid all the start-up costs for my little operation-- $120 for the train passes (three weeks in July and the monthly pass for August), $60 for fingerprinting and a security badge, $30 for a uniform-- black pants and an enormous black shirt, cap for my inappropriately unruly hair. Then, for seven weeks I got up at 4:30 in the morning and went to work. I got paid $8/hr because I had been to three years of university and I guess they figured I would leave if they paid me less, my bonus for being white and well-enough off to go to college. I was cursed with back pain that didn’t affect me at all when I was on my feet at work, but that practically immobilized me once I got home and sat down. I got caught up in all of the petty squabbling and pulling for status that happens among a group of people who spend most of their waking hours in a 4X20 foot space making sandwiches. A former classmate of mine came through the line and I got to feel ashamed for wasting my time, although he didn’t say anything much, and I could never be sure if the shame was all in my head or if he meant for me to feel that way.

I got to quit though. One co-worker had worked in fast food for twenty years, since he turned sixteen. Another had paid her house off working at McDonald’s (at least it could be done ten years ago; not sure about today, but I suspect that sometimes the big dogs are a little better employers than the struggling middle-type sandwich shops). Some of the recent immigrants were working two jobs like this: sixty hours a week at least and not getting any overtime for it because they had two employers.

For me, the worst of this low-wage service work is the management structure. The white man who seems to run the whole airport concession wants to be “Uncle Don” to us. Right. He’s like family to us-- he provides us with food and shelter and we’re all friends, one big happy family helping America to be great. Sounds like the everyday justification for slavery 150 years ago don’t it?

Meanwhile, the business is structured so that there’s always an overseer who is making not-much-more-money-than-you. This keeps people from getting uppity with the big bosses. The store manager is a nice guy. We don’t really want to put out the nice guy manager, and he doesn’t want to stop being a nice guy. If he has a problem with the way you are doing something “She’s putting too much turkey on the sandwiches; only two slices!” then he doesn’t tell you. He tells the person who is barely superior to you to tell you (the gradations of superiority are many). That way if you’re just on the edge of telling someone to go to hell; you are tired and need to rest your legs and there aren’t any customers anyway and besides you are the one making all the sandwiches and you do it and that’s what they pay you for, right (and of course you would be wrong, because they really pay you to look like you are making food fresh for the customer and not just assembling it); the big boss never has to hear it. The big boss doesn’t even have to speak to you unless he’s being cute, unless you are being one of the Uncle Toms or Aunt Jemimas that keep everything running smooth. That man is no uncle of mine.

The power structure puts everyone on the defensive. Everyone corrects each other all the time trying to pull rank and creating community is an uphill battle. It almost makes standing on the street corner selling water seem like a good alternative, or giving “cab rides” in your car from the corner of Lehigh and Broad. I rode the 5:00 AM train every day to work at the airport, in the company of all the morning shift janitors. They are city employees and maybe have it a little better than the likes of the privately employed sandwich folks. Also, they always sound older and wiser than the rest of us-- when they tell they crew that are headed up to Atlantic City, they add contemplatively “you’ve got to enjoy losing and winning, too, because nobody wins all the time.” But their kids are just hustlin’ on the street like everybody else, or sitting at home playing video games; one man wondered why his son hadn’t found a job, or how he can keep standing out on the street in the sun hassling people to buy water. Sounds like his the young man sold a couple of cases real quick, good and cold, and hasn’t found any formal work available to him that makes working seem like a good deal.

Alan Beggerow recently made the news because he didn’t feel like working anymore in an economy where employers treated workers as disposable; because he decided that he could live on a pension and his savings and a loan against his home if he “lived within his means” and stopped buying stuff. He found that, “my free time means a lot to me.” He quit and then he “threw his hat in the ring” and made his quitting into news. He and his wife are heroes. One of my West African co-workers has bought in to exactly the sort of American dream that Beggerow is rejecting now. She worked two jobs all summer since she’ll have to cut back on work when school starts up again. She’s a sophomore in college. Last week, as the summer was winding down, she bought herself a $300 cell phone-- $700 value, if you believe the advertising. “It didn’t seem worth it to work so much if I didn’t buy something for myself,” she told me as she thrilled about checking her email from the bus. My tastes are less expensive-- a pretty suede wallet at a gallery show and really good groceries is enough to hold me-- but I knew how she felt. Angelina worked 60 hours a week for corporate America, and then to make it feel like it wasn’t insane to spend practically all of her waking time working, she bought herself an electronic toy, the expensive kind of toy that is the capitalist world system’s bread and butter. It’s the American Way.

One day, hungry and with a pretty good stretch of time before my break, I took a piece of burnt toast from the morning breakfast run, scraped off the black and made myself a little half sandwich. I was surrounded by bread, but I hate to waste it. Darlene turned to me and said, “I haven’t seen nobody scrape toast since my Mama died.” I take the heels of bread home, too, sometimes. I’m gonna take my cues from the old black women and the Beggerows and the poor white trash of a certain persuasion and era in Kentucky. I’ll scrape toast any day before I work an hour I don’t have to in a job that I don’t love, and I’ll thank my lucky stars that I can go back to university.

The “Wake Up Your Mind” community college billboards on the SEPTA line are well placed to catch us all coming home after the shift is up, although that’s not necessarily a route to a secure and satisfying job (is that too much to ask these days?). The man in the front, a baggage handler, talks to the train conductor about taking on extra shifts and working days off. He sums up before he gets to his stop, “But we’re workin’ hard, so things should get easier for us, shouldn’t they,” and the conductor responds, “I guess so,” but neither of them sound convinced.

Late update on eastern El Salvador

2006-06-21T11:22:00.000-05:00

Amatitan journal entry

I found a place where the big goals-- food, health, sex, family-- have not been obscured by abundance and abundance of choice. Amatitan has faced war and earthquakes and whatever weather came and went, and has come to the other side of these years feeling something like the garden of Eden reborn and about to get the chance to fall again. Except that it’s less dull because it’s dry and the corn and beans don’t grow by themselves, because here, mostly, food doesn’t grow on trees, and because the people wear clothes so there is washing to take to the river, and so there is always work to do. Way out in Eastern El Salvador, in San Vicente, in the places that only have one road and two trucks, this life exists. And although enough people have family in the United States, and just about everyone has a television, and although the bus driver gets around a little bit, the sign above his bus’ front window reads, “Envy is worse than hunger.”

This is a major base for the FMLN, where the war happened in everyone’s corn field. The stories sound like the ones in war movies except they cut off abrubtly before the triumphant ending, closing special effects and red sunset. Here’s one from Alejandra:

During the war, the army captured five people, all from the same family. They were on a list of leftists that came from the capital. They always had lists. But these people hadn’t really done anything, weren’t really fighting. So all of the women of the area decided to get together and go to the army and ask that they wouldn’t send this family to the capital where they would almost surely be killed. We approached the soldiers where they were keeping the five and the five were all beaten and bloody, their hands and feet were tied, and we made our request. They told us that if we came back again, they would kill all of us. The five people disappeared, one a good friend of Chungo’s. We never saw them again.

I went to a Sunday football game with the men of Amatitan. We travelled in the bed of a big flatbed truck with metal bars to keep us in. The truck's population was approximately 25 young men, mostly players; Elisa, the ten year old neice of one of the players (it was her first away game, a big adventure for her, too); and me, strange white girl from across the sea. The men barked-- at one sort of self-aware moment, they literally just cut to the chase and actually barked rather than yelling and whistling-- at the women on the street, and at the men passing in other truck beds and were shy and curious around me. I was too close to them there in the bed of that same truck; they couldn’t yell and run. In Men of Maize, Miguel Asturias writes of the Indians, “Women far away in the firelight and close by in the shadows, men close by in the firelight and far away in the shadows.” I think I know what he meant.

The pitch was a little uneven, and had a cliff wall along one side so it was smallish, but no one minded much. The fans were drunk or deaf-mute or both and the players would play football anywhere. Amatitan won the JV game and tied the varsity. After the game, one of the footballers sat down next to me at the pupusa restaurant where we were all eating on the way home. He asked me what I thought of the place. He said that Amatitan was happy and peaceful now because the people had been through war and were ready for peace. I felt it, too. I felt it so much that I’ve contemplated moving there for a while after I finish school. Who knows. . .

However happy and peaceful the place was these days though, this young man is ready to take off for the United States to see what else there is to do besides sow corn. And Elisa, well she has a biological dad (long gone) who lives in the States and sends pictures and she wants to go, too. And Anna Ruth who fails a lot of her classes because she can’t read the exams, and who hasn’t learned to read because there aren’t many books showed enough interest in being able to read and write that I sent her a stack of used books. I sent what I could find on the street in San Salvador-- La Hojarasca, Metamorphasis, 1001 Arabian Nights and Jonathan Livingston Seagull among them. I hope they arrive.

There’s so much to say, and it’s still jumbled in my mind. There is also a river with net fishing and ancient ancient carvings in a rock shelter that apparently foreigners come to see sometimes and people camping there in FMLN hats who say in English (they are brothers and their dad was an English teach who named them American names like Jason and George) “The war is over! We’re not guerillas. FMLN is just a party!” when people look sideways at their camo pants and party hats (like FMLN party and not like in Go Dog Go when they say, "Yes, that is a great party hat!") and bed rolls. And there was a chicken that we killed and plucked and carved and ate. The woman of the house, tied its feet together with a broken cell phone charger to hang it upside down and cut it.

Sorry I'm letting the picture of Amatitan get so fuzzy and jumbled, but I am running out of time to write right this minute. I'm hurrying to wrap up and then in my next post, I'm going to throw a big monkey wrench into the cuddled picture called “they are planning to build a gold mine here.” More soon.

Where the bass is loud, the greywater above ground, and the tacuasin waits in the darkness.

2006-06-03T10:30:00.000-05:00

Just home from El Salvador, not so much internet time there and well, here is belated news from those parts.
-------------

Where the bass is loud, the greywater above ground, and the tacuasin waiting in the darkness.

It is 7:00 am between Agua Caliente and La Ceiba, about an hour west of San Salvador. The houses are made of brick and corrugated metal with big metal doors that deadbolt in the night and open early. The light is still grayish, but this whole mudstreet neighborhood is alive with Daddy Yankee and the latest Regueton hits. The bass is almost enough to drown out the roosters.

I’m a little groggy. I have a god child, Tonito, who is five years old. I have a god child? As Wolf put it, “Better an accidental god child than an accidental child.” Anyway, the little tyke kicks and I had his feet in my face all night. Little Katiana just turned up at the door and Enma is messing with the radio. This is why I haven’t written anything since I got to El Salvador. I’m never alone. I’m waiting for her to find the station that plays “The Summer of 69” or the one that plays covers of American songs like “Hotel California” and “Brown Eyed Girl” in Spanish. Three year old Kati kicks the dog.

Later, I want to pass by the house of Tonito’s grandmother who has a store by the main road. She is the mother of my close friend here, Alejandra, and she comes from another time. She makes cheese and has a bucket of milk that she carried down from the Ag school on her head that is on its way to cheese, and she sweeps trash into a pile behind her house and burns it, and she buys raw cacao and makes chocolate. This is how: she toasts the beans over a fire on a big bowl-shaped griddle like they use to make pupusas. Then she grinds it with a stone to separate the hull from the bean. Then, to get rid of all the bits of hull that are mixed in with the beans, she waits for the North Wind to come and she passes the beans from hand to hand while the hull blows away. Then she carries the beans to the next town, where she can pay to use the mill and returns with cocoa powder. And she adds sugar (and oil?) and sells her chocolates for 12 cents each. Any production process that requires waiting for the North Wind is alright by me.

She is also the source of the stories from the time of before. The other night, Alejandra was telling us the witchy stories that scared her when she was a child. This is the story of the Ciguanaba.

Once, this girl and this guy were in love, but her mother didn’t approve of the guy and so the two decided to run off together. They made a plan; he was supposed to come and pick her up on his horse at midnight. Turns out though, that the mother found out about the plan and locked the daughter in the house with her so she couldn’t leave. Well, the guy shows up at the appointed hour and there waiting outside the house is his girl (but it’s not really his girl, it’s the ciguanaba, watch out!) and he pulls her up behind him on the horse and off they go. And he says, why don’t you give me a kiss, and she doesn’t say anything, and he says come on, why don’t you give me a kiss, and she doesn’t say anything, and finally, he turns around and reaches around for the big embrace make out scene and !!!!!!!! She’s this terrifying thing with big scary teeth and enormous breasts. At least this is how it translates, and the guy throws himself off the horse and runs into the hills, and a the next day the horse comes back riderless, and the people go out searching for him, and they find him, and he’s been driven mad forever, and not one of the exorcisms that they try works.

Alejandra tells the story around the dinner table, and it gets the other North Americans who are down visiting telling ghost stories, and we trade ghost stories until Mary Rose who is seven is good and nervous and maybe we all are, and her brother Spencer who is nine says he is going out to the bathroom and suddenly from the window comes a shriek and from Mary Rose comes a shriek and we all gasp and Spencer got us all pretty good.

When I ask Granny Otelia Guadelupe about it, she says that of course these stories are real, but it was before her time, it was in the time of her grandparents, in the time of before. The time of the witches is past she says and I agree that there aren’t any witches left in the United States either and that they have been gone for a real long time. Maybe there is too much business these days to leave room for witches. The witches today are just the ones you see in the newspaper, arrested for selling fake remedies to foolish people.

Next door a young man cuts tall grass with a machete. He’s going to burn it to make the ground more fertile for his plot of maiz. The fresh cut grass is a relief, softens the chlorox smell from doing the dishes, and the smell of piss which I think happens because the man of the house pisses in the shower which runs into the graywater trench that flows from the house to the street where it mostly soaks in.

Kati flips water at a big wolf spider that sits on the edge of the water basin. Although Animal Planet might be playing in the doctors’ offices in the capital, these people ain’t animal lovers and nature? what’s that? Here, animals are either working for you (food) or against you. When the children play by a woodpile in the evening, one of the mothers tells them to get up, evening is coming and some little creature will come out of the woodpile at night and bite them. The last night I slept at Alejandra’s house, I slept under the open window, and as I tucked myself in, she came and asked if I was sure I wanted to leave it open. . . the cat uses it to go in and out. . . and once, I woke up and the Tacuasin was there.

Chungo (her husband) had gone to the toilet (concrete basin over big hole) when he saw the Tacuasin in the window. The Tacuasin eats chickens, so when Chungo saw it, he got up and crept up to it. . . and he GRABBED it BARE HANDED by the scruff of its neck. And it was thrashing and trying to bite him, and he shouted for me to hold the flashlight for him because he had dropped it and so I woke up to all this commotion. . . De puro mano he caught it. And then. . . at this point in the story Alejandra makes the machete to the neck motion.

Like you, at this point I still had no idea what was a Tacuasin and so I asked, and apparently it’s like an armadillo with a long skinny nose and yellow fur. What the hell I said, and I slept with the window open.

Es feo

2006-05-16T14:15:00.000-05:00

Leonel, the Argentinian from my hostel, was in Cuba, and is returning to Cuba and says that although its poor, Cuba look like Paradise next to Guatemala. He says that at least there the people are out dancing, conning the tourists into buying them drinks. He said that there the people dont have the consumption desire as much as they do here, as much as they do in Argentina or in the US. No one is thinking about the newest cell phone there, he tells me. He says of this city, flatly, "I dont like it. Its ugly and mean, es feo."

In the last two weeks, 12 bus drivers in the city have been shot by someone (?) someone who wants to destabilize the country, the paper said. A passer-by with a gun managed to shoot one of the bus driver killers; so they caught one. The country doesnt need any extra help to be uncertain and dangerous.

And corrupt. In Guatemala, "Recover our lost morals" means stop the extortion and bribery and teach University grads ethics to they dont "go out into the world with a voracious apetite to make their fortunes" (and to hell with the rest).

Still, it never occurred to me to look at all of the tradgedy in this place and think, "This place is ugly and mean and I dont like it." Leonel has a point, but I dont much like to say, "This ugly mean place is your problem man, Im out." And so I assume that I like everything, that someone else has no choice but to like it or hate it, since they cant leave, and I find that there are good people all over the world, and there are.

ciudad de los celulares

2006-05-12T08:12:00.000-05:00

I lunch with a lawyer, five feet tall, big belly and little waist, tight belt. We eat with his kind faced friend who doesn´t like violent movies and who works as an engineer digging wells-- oil or water-- in a Chinese Restaurant guarded with big guns. There are so many big guns in this country, why not carry them? Javier spends a significant amount of time demonstrating all of his different cell phone rings. Guys who like gadgets are universal, like Converse All Stars.

We return to his office in his big, middle aged SUV. He is talking about buying a new Jeep Grand Cherokee although gas costs $4.00 a gallon here. I plug small cars, minis are the cool thing now in the US since gas prices are so high. It won´t work, but I have to weigh in anyway.

He is listening to some sort of easy listening station and mostly it´s easy, like instrumental versions of Paul Simon songs until this high-pitched and a little hysterical sounding version of "How Many Roads" comes on. We drive parallel to a chicken bus, a woman in a traditional Mayan dress talking on a cell phone with a baby slung across her back. It´s el dia doble for TIGO cell phone cards, too, and there are people at most big intersections trying to sell minutes to passing cars. There is an ache for modernity.

The soda fountain that I found, bathroom, place out of the exhaust to write a little, is playing classic rock and the Titanic soundtrack.

I have no idea what all of this means. Nothing in particular. Anything.

I am in Guatemala

2006-05-08T08:38:00.000-05:00

Woke this morning to the sound of birds and thousands of boots and a chant that yesterday I first though was the sound of futbol, but which is actually the miltary school down the block.

I am carving a niche in this neighborhood. took a city bus a ew long blocks up to the museums and zoo and took a Sunday stroll back, found dinner in the form of the only place open on the Lord´s day, mother and daughtr stand with good grilled meat, rice, salsa, perfect Guacamole. Joined the kids and families and odd person in a wheelchair from his war wounds playing in the roundabout by the airport. Probably more than half of the time that the kids kicked the futbol it went in the road. A young man, maybe 6th grade approached me and told me the whole flight schedule, asked whic hairline I flew--that one we ca nhear overhead is the TikaJet-- because his dad used to take him to the airport to watch the planes.

Back in the hostel my odd-couple riends are the sixty-year-old traveller dad who got his girlriend in the Phiipines pregnant and took the kid, Claire,now two and speaking some incomprehensible language that is mostly ¨Ahhh¨" and nonsense but that may be a mix of English, Tagalog, Thai and Spanish. She is a great time, but the kind o kid who the friendly receptionist says "has batteries", maybe too many batteries!

At some point a biggish group of guests arrived for the good roos upstairs, one of them good and drunk. I was swinging Claire by the wrists in the courtyard and he had to come down and ask if I was married, if I was her mother, if the old man was my husband; when I said no, he just started over, incredulous with the same set of qustions, so I went to the comedor, close-by and well-lit and a`place where I could be out and safe and have a Gallo.

My friendly hunch was right, owner Eddie from Uruguay used to work in the Southern US restoring antiques and doing hotels, making old things new and then making them look old again. His friend Juan Carlos works in customs at the airport, importing and exporting clothes. They let me join their conversation and before it was over we had talked safety and law and business in the city and talked politics and war-- they say now the military does what a military is supposed to do (not much, be prepared) and they gave me a book about the journalists who disappeared duing the bad years. The widow of Isidoro Zarco wrote in a column memorializing him and promising to take on his work herself,¨"He dreamed with industry and vigor, that which fits with his dynamism and talent, but he wished at the same time that the business would not lose its human flavor and the Christian odor that bread has when it is made by hand." I love the way Spaish sounds. The conversation turned to the politics of today; they said that Berger is "a good man" although not ultiately that powerful, ruled by his cafiz (not in my dictionary, I think it is a more powerful version of our cabinet). "It´s a democracy if I false democracy" he said, more false than ours, less false than it used to be, like ours but much more confusing. Juan Carlos had a Class B liscence to drive a bus for five years before he knew how to work a car at all. "Money makes the world go round" they said and laughed.

Home again

2006-05-06T08:27:00.000-05:00

Back in Kentucky, the barn swallows are starting to nest in the carport. These swallows have been building their nest in that space for the last ten years, and probably for generations before that, but my mom is (notice giant scary-eye-balloon-thing) trying to scare them away because they poop on her car. The swallows glide by scary-eye-balloon-thing with straw in their beaks and build their nest anyway. They probably wonder why they have to start fresh every year instead of coming home to last year's cozy spot, but maybe they like the work, maybe building things is satisfying for birds, too. In any case, this is mostly a note to my mom that says, "THE SWALLOWS WIN AGAIN!" and that we win, too because its nice to have plants and animals at the house, especially bug-eating animals. Hooray! Looks like the car is going to have to take a summer vacation if it wants to stay shiny and black.

This is a hopeful post

2006-05-05T07:17:00.000-05:00

I went to Jazzfest with two old friends of my dad’s who are from here and got to do opening day like a local. I have never used a hugger for my beer, brought a lawn chair to a festival, or eaten crawfish before. I picked a great day to start. J Monque’D is where we began, the place where I first got close to the people who make this festival unlike any other. Here, adults with plastic crawfish on their shoelaces and little tamboreens can listen more or less unbashfully to a song about Monque’D whipping out his whizbang and playing with it at the dinner table-- “this song goes out to all the ladies and to children of all ages”. A woman with a little crazy in her eye and a mardi gras umbrella that looks like a roof after a big storm can lead a parade through the crowd and the crew that follows her is as full of weirdness as she is.

Monque’D said that this year his songs were going out to those who didn’t make it through Katrina; that he was glad to be here, and glad just to be. But, he added, “Every year I have a new reason to play the blues” and he took his last moments to put Darfur in the airwaves. From there, after a good-moving Latin interlude with Vivaz and the lead singer’s shout out to the crowd in heavily accented English, “This is a wonderful day!” we made our way to the Dylan show.

It seems from my short experience and careful observation that as you get older, you get better at relaxing, and maybe it’s a skill that is particularly part of the Beat generations’ growing up. We sat way in the back of the class with a decent angle on the big screen and laughed about Dylan’s entrance music. It sounded like the crowd was being prepared for an army of gladiators. “He’s a common man,” said Michael with a sly chuckle.

He comes out in cowboy gear so bright and clean that I felt like I was watching rodeo on the OLN. It was like a joke, but the joke was on us. He’s told us for years “I have always considered politics just part of the illusion. I don't get involved much in politics. I don't know what the system runs on,” but it’s only since he’s taken his old image apart and taken his old songs apart, only since he’s made the lyrics unintelligble just to scream “SEE! I’m not going to tell you what to do or think!” since he’s stopped making sense that we are forced to really believe him.

Maybe it’s a little sad. On Sunday, Springsteen was still singing “We Shall Overcome” and I sort of wanted to reverently wave a lighter in the air with the clean thirty-somethings in front of me who remembered towards the end of the set that that was something you could do at a concert, but I just couldn’t. Dylan doesn’t say a word about the hurricane, or about New Orleans being a great city (it is), not a word about music shining on like a beacon (it does). But for me, Dylan, more sound than sense, faded memory of an old familiar song just piercing the veil of consciousness--- oh wait he said all along the watchtower-- seems closer to the truth. To me he sings that human nature and the rest of the elements in all of their wild manifestations are not something to be overcome, but something to learn to survive, to joke about, to enjoy as best you can.

Whatever he’s saying, he says it right somehow. Maybe it’s something about his timing, something about putting us in time with him. I ask Michael for some peanuts and he says to me “Help yourself cause FEMA ain’t gonna do shit” and Dylan comes in wailing on the harmonica. We grin. At some point the big screen goes dark so that all we can see are the People and the Acura logo over the stage and Dylan with translator-Michael says, “into each life a little rain must fall” so that I am kept unsure of whether to laugh or cry. . . and I laugh.

And then Dylan turns the stage over to the real New Orleaneans who can love to listen to Dr. John, to Linda dancing with that Big Easy step, waving an alligator walking stick in the air instead of her second line umbrella and taking a moment to feel confident that New Orleans can't resist putting itself back together.

Elysian Fields

2006-04-26T17:13:00.000-05:00

Went to gut a house in New Orleans today. Most of the house was stripped down to the studs, most of the ceilings were out, most of the particle board floors were out. Looked like it was well on it's way. I'll tell you this, the next time I build a house in the land of hurricanes, I'm not going to use that particle board flooring. I'm going to make it a house that is easy to take down. We still haven't finished the finishing work on it.

I estimate that this particular house has seen 180 person hours to punch out both ceilings, pull everything out-- washing machines, refridgerators-- get up that nasty floor and drop ceiling, cart out hundreds of square feet of fluffy insulation. Some houses aren't this labor intensive, some are. And I couldn't help thinking while I was there about how many houses like this there are.

Driving from the railroad tracks to Elysian Fields and back on to I-10, back to the Hands On base in Center City, we passed hundreds of houses. Some of those people have the money to gut them. Some have been sold to the folks advertising quick cash for houses. Some are, I guess, still waiting to be pushed into a hole and buried. Some are being done by volunteers. I feel like a little mouse with those soft little feet scraping away at a big cement wall. The houses blipped by like I was in a moody driving shot in a movie.

Comfortably Numb came on the radio and Chet turned it up. I thought right then that probably the people in our government have no intention of seeing this city put back. US Housing Secretary Alfonso Jackson offers that "only the best residents" should return and he's supposed to be an advocate for the low income housing program. Why haven't the enormous resources of this country managed to make a bigger dent in this disaster in half a year? Why do I feel like it's up to us? Something about today just made me shut myself in a bathroom stall for a short minute and cry, first day in New Orleans slump moment, but I'm back now and soon I'll be carrying on and having a good time with the fresh happy group of volunteers from Boston Cares (YAY FOR THEM) and I'll think encouraging thoughts because New Orleans needs all of us, all the help she can get. Otherwise her people can turn to the "Big Money Blessing" on WILD 13-something AM where they're wild for Jesus (we could only pick up AM stations today at the job site). If she prays hard enough maybe she'll win ten grand on the radio.

I'm looking forward to the weekend. I'll get out of the ghost-neighborhoods and see the live part of New Orleans for Jazz Fest, really really lively.

Woody Guthrie at Hands On, part 2

2006-04-21T10:22:00.000-05:00

A few nights ago, I heard John read “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,” and I wrote “Woody Guthrie” on my hand in blue marker so I would remember it in the morning and tell it to you. When I wrote those words on my hand, I thought that just giving you Dylan’s thoughts might be able to sum it all up. And in the morning, I thought, 'well maybe not.' It gets at the feeling I'm talking about, but I guess the details make the telling.

The story starts with a open mic night that no one signs up for but a brave new Christian, saved from Lortabs and booze and given wisdom, that looks like it will fall to nothingness but is tended and grows and swells up into something that vibrates in the air, that will vibrate in the air far from here in time and space when people remember it, because of talented people, all of their moments contributing to the experience of John, cigarette dangling, red eyed, reading on and on to a rapt audience perched on picnic tables and tailgates, channeling Dylan. Everyone’s moment on that little plywood stage made everyone else’s moment mean something. That’s called community.

Later, the founder of Hands On came into town, set up late into the night with ten of us and a cooler of beer out in the Spin Cycle, the concrete laundry room with a couple of old square tables that look like they came from a church basement (I guess they did) covered in marker graffiti. Founder Dave is looking for the next step for Hands On, and he asks us what we think, and hears from all of us, and listens.

I’m typing this stretched out on the loft floor on my sleeping bag. A grey haired fellow volunteer, a sleep-neighbor just came by and he introduced himself and when I got to my feet, he hugged me instead of shaking hands and within our three minute conversation he said that there was no better place than this for care and respect. And he can use the words “care and respect” and it doesn’t sound heavy handed and it is not tinged with irony. A piece about the Duke rape by a sports columnist for the Birmingham News said this:

"Near the end of a rather long article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about how Duke University is looking for answers to the bigger picture of athletes' behavior, a freshman named Jason Pate is quoted. 'You have to make caring popular, as idealistic and ridiculous as that might sound.' It's too bad that such idealism can sound ridiculous."

Here, that sort of idealism makes sense.

The way I’m writing this reminds me of the evening meeting two nights ago. The rabbi from the congregation who is also sharing this space with the Methodists since the hurricane gave a speech about how good this place was and it went on forever. It went on forever. And every time he would say one thing, it would remind him of something else, and nothing seemed to contribute to whatever his end message was, and people were reminded of their grandfathers, and maybe the reason that it went like that and the reason that my story wanders in the same way is that the end message, the real point that we want to communicate is a feeling and you can’t cut to the chase when you’re talking about love. That meeting was wild, so feel-good that with some mild substance abuse you could really enjoy all two hours of it after dinner. Rose stood up and asked the real grown-ups to plug the place in letters to the AARP magazine because “there is no age gap here.” That’s what she said and what I guess she has experienced. Cool. And so we tell more wandering stories and try to invite more people to discover this spot.

Not that people don’t get tired, not that there aren’t hard words sometimes and hard days and problems that look like they can’t be solved. I wish you had all heard Guillermo (Will Olivos, look for whatever he ends up publishing) reading his black mold soul killing blues last night. Mold is hard to kill, and it's after you.

And sometimes it’s hard to keep 150 people peaceful in a place, but it mostly can be done and the products of this place are well worth the effort. And sometimes the love comes out it kind of dark ways for people who feel the intensity of this disaster and of whatever bit of life preceded their arrival here and some are escaping something when they come here and Sue tells me that in the car to take one of our own to the airport, one who was leaving hard, “all those boys started burning each other and I started just crying because those boys loved each other enough to be burned, putting their cigarettes out on each others' arms. . . " She adds,"now I don’t love any of y’all that much.”

So Dave is looking for the next step, and after discussing the upset win of first-Hands-On-marriage against first-Hands-On-baby and the end of that running bet, we got to the business and Dave said he wants to go to Darfur, and he wants to invite his volunteers to start a core there and he wants to use his MacGeyver plane model over there. Darfur makes him mad as hell and he thinks that this very flexible, passionate and fairly gutsy organization (he landed on the Gulf Coast with no plan and no place to stay and a big chunk of cash and confidence that he could attract volunteers) is the way to make good change there. And we all agree that something is working here, and that there is need and opportunity for Hands On elsewhere, somewhere. And then we get to the Darfur idea and most of us respond that it's completely nuts, but I’ll be damned if Ike didn’t say that he would go, and mean it as sincerely as Dave meant it when he proposed the idea.

Ike is a 47 year old painter, former military, with a grey handlebar mustache, an empty bank account, and a beer in his hand. He half-jokes that he isn’t a good volunteer because he slept-through cooking breakfast and is rowdy and tough and he hollers “Good Morning Vietnam!” when you walk by him with his first morning cigarette and wouldn’t fit in too good at the Salvation Army, but he is a damn fine painter, he has a skill, he can lead, he can seal five houses in a day to stop mold regrowth. And so at Hands On, he is the perfect volunteer just like the rest of us are in our ways. And he would follow this scene to Darfur if it went. He would lead this scene out into that scary unknown. He said to me this morning, “Hell, that guy last night was serious. I haven’t heard anyone talk like that since the sixties. And maybe it wasn’t really just what the sixties sounded like, the semi-corporate lingo about flexibility, the talk centering on gaining media time, but the feeling must have been familiar to Ike, that feeling I keep talking about, the one that Hunter S. Thompson said like this:

"There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave."

If we don't have the universal sense that we are winning, at least we have the sense that what we're doing is right, and that we're doing it as good as anyone has yet. For Dave, it seems like that feeling, and his cash without many strings, is what makes this organization different from any other and what would make us succeed at some as yet unknown goal in an as yet unknown place. He asked us what the residents would think if Haliburton came in and did the work we were doing at the pace we were doing it. He said they would bitch and complain, and he is right. We can do the work and be loved for it because it comes as a gift and not an obligation. People feel the gift in what we do.

Back to the rabbi's thank you speech: If it's not obvious from the rambling tales above, there's no summing this up. Come down here.

And last, in this piece I spent a lot of time talking about this organization and no time talking about Biloxi and you should know that there is still all the work anyone can do down here on the Gulf Coast and of course the government is mostly leaving it to the volunteers, so come work, and I’m going to also post something I wrote about my December trip to Hands On that talks more about the world outside this little tent city off Pass Road.

Biloxi in December

2006-04-21T10:20:00.000-05:00

The New Orleans bus station has stopped serving as the jail. Our writer friend who lives in Marigny just outside the Quarter has hot water and no longer requires special chocolates for “fortifications” (having moved on to beer and Dr. John’s Katrina album). In Biloxi, you can still drive backwards down the highway 90 exit ramp, but you probably can’t drive backwards down highway 90. The Gulf Coast is beginning to rebuild, but if you think three months is a long time when it comes to remaking 150 miles of coastline that went under in Katrina’s storm surge, think again.

What I mean is, in East Biloxi the Thursday before Christmas I spoke to a man sitting on his front porch in work clothes beside a rusted out blue pickup and a neatly gutted house. He said he had been working on his house since a week after the storm hit, steadily, without applying for a trailer or asking for help from anyone because, he said “I didn’t want to get comfortable with an arrangement that I knew I couldn’t stand.” After three months of steady work by this man who framed up this house himself thirty-four years ago, the sheetrock was just going up. Meanwhile, there are plenty of homes all along the Gulf Coast that people have not even entered since the hurricane, that still house wet couches, foul-smelling fridges, pictures on the walls. This is especially true in New Orleans where uncertainty surrounding forced demolition means that people are unwilling to invest emotionally and financially in the process of gutting their homes. Neighborhood after neighborhood persists in an eerie suspended animation, a sort of brown haze over whole blocks, the waterline still visible just short of the eaves of sweet little yellow houses. Many of these families haven’t got the money to hire professionals (remember they just lost everything they owned); the way it looks now. . . thank god for the volunteers.

For many casinos, the rebuilding process has almost finished; at least three in Biloxi just reopened. It’s amazing what money can do. They were missed. Before the storm, 14,000 people worked in Mississippi’s twelve Gulf Coast casinos. Every day that they are closed, the town of Biloxi loses $54,795 in tax revenue and 14,000 Mississippians continue to go without a paycheck. They are part of the fabric of Biloxi as much as any fishing boat or home. Still, there is some fear that they have an appetite for land that threatens community members’ right to live where they do, in a relatively poor community that has managed to keep its place even though it is only blocks from the water, in a country where waterfront property belongs to the rich. With help, the locals can rebuild and maintain their right to live alongside the casinos and hotels.

In Biloxi, Hands On USA has been hard at work, being this help. Working with Hands On, I had the satisfying feeling that people were doing exactly as much as they could do--- putting in eight hour days ripping out drywall and plumbing and nails, scrubbing and vacuuming mold, hauling out trees to clear lots for FEMA trailers, helping people file their paperwork and learning what they lacked, delivering Christmas gifts to families with children who couldn’t afford Santa Claus--- and coming back to base ready to make merry before they started up again the next morning.

I want to interject here to correct what I think is a misconception about the wisdom of rebuilding along the Gulf Coast. When I told a Kentucky friend about the volunteer work in Biloxi, she responded incredulously--- “They’re just rebuilding right where they were before?”--- as though this were a terrible affront to Mother Nature and Good Sense. Yes. Communities are trying to get back on their feet right back on the coast. Some of the houses on the Mississippi Gulf Coast have been there for more than a century. Katrina was unique in those parts because of her enormous storm surge that made the water damage so extensive. People are rebuilding with the hope that Katrina will continue to be remembered as unique. In New Orleans, there will have to be more substantial re-thinking to decide what gets rebuilt where and how the city will drain. Still, it’s worth remembering that if the levees hadn’t failed, Katrina would not have been a catastrophe for New Orleans, and the levees would probably not have failed if it weren’t for a long list of preventable human errors related to pressure to cut costs and a murky chain of command during construction and inadequate annual inspection of the levees thereafter. See The Times-Picayune “Evidence points to man-made disaster” from December 08 for more on this.

The last step before rebuilding is getting out the mold. At Hands On, Mold is what I did. I still dream about demolding houses. January looks like a critical month. The house-gutting work may have peaked already, at least in Biloxi, and Hands On is starting to branch out to other needy communities; mold though, is still a force to be reckoned with there. At Hands On, we reckoned with it in the most labor-intensive gritty tough way you can. We scraped at it with wire brushes, vacuumed spores, wiped with Shockwave and primed with Kilz under the tutelage of a former navy seal, current mold expert and (at least this was the word on the street) shooting coach for the LAPD. He was a tough boss, and we did professional quality work. The trouble is that there are way more houses to rebuild than there are crack teams of volunteers.

Some houses will be demolded the expert way, and it will work some amount; others will be done with power-washers and fans, or with x chemical, and will have some amount less mold. It will be done haphazardly with little regulation--- like commerce in a place that sat underwater just a couple of months ago. The Gulf Coast will rebuild for better or worse with more or less mold. It’s hard to make scientific goals and measurements of success because, as the tree guys at Hands On put it: “the mold always wins.” In any case, there is a breathtaking amount of work and a lot of need for volunteers to be doing the dirty and mostly tedious work of getting out (enough of) the mold.

As much as I love to hate mold, last week I went with a group of volunteers to the St. Rosa de Lima Catholic Church in Bay St. Louis to listen to the gospel sounds and take a morning to not-demold. After the services, on the way to our car, a friendly nod to a gentleman picking up free supplies lead to an hour-long accounting of his family history. It began with the educational careers of 11 brothers and sisters who had been to this prestigious medical school or law school or who did undergrad at Harvard and now head up Peace Corps in West Africa, and... and look, here that brother comes now, look here we all are, coming from this small town, here we still are in this small small town on the Gulf Coast. We drank a glass of water in this brother’s house which was saved by a matter of inches from having water on the first floor. His grandfather had built this yellow frame house miraculously just tall enough and just far enough inland. As we started to depart, the man revealed the moral of his story, made sure we took away what he meant for us to take away. “When you’re working on these humble little houses,” he said, “remember that from these humble houses can come great things.”

His moral also could have been that these Gulf Coast families have deep deep roots in the Gulf Coast soil. Driving along the beach road, this contrast struck me every time. On one hand, you could pass a casino boat looking like a 20 story building, concrete and steel twisted by the uprooting water which left the giant barges a block inland, tossed like toys. And on the other hand were the live oaks, debris tangled in their great branches, holding tight along the coast like they had for hundreds of years. This is me believing that the communities of Louisiana and Mississippi have roots as strong as the live oaks have, and reminding you that these good people can use your help while they reach for the renewal of spring.

Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie

2006-04-21T08:22:00.000-05:00

Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie
by Bob Dylan

When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb
When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb
When yer laggin' behind an' losin' yer pace
In a slow-motion crawl of life's busy race
No matter what yer doing if you start givin' up
If the wine don't come to the top of yer cup
If the wind's got you sideways with with one hand holdin' on
And the other starts slipping and the feeling is gone
And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it
And the wood's easy findin' but yer lazy to fetch it
And yer sidewalk starts curlin' and the street gets too long
And you start walkin' backwards though you know its wrong
And lonesome comes up as down goes the day
And tomorrow's mornin' seems so far away
And you feel the reins from yer pony are slippin'
And yer rope is a-slidin' 'cause yer hands are a-drippin'
And yer sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys
Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys
And yer sky cries water and yer drain pipe's a-pourin'
And the lightnin's a-flashing and the thunder's a-crashin'
And the windows are rattlin' and breakin' and the roof tops a-shakin'
And yer whole world's a-slammin' and bangin'
And yer minutes of sun turn to hours of storm
And to yourself you sometimes say
"I never knew it was gonna be this way
Why didn't they tell me the day I was born"
And you start gettin' chills and yer jumping from sweat
And you're lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet
And yer knee-deep in the dark water with yer hands in the air
And the whole world's a-watchin' with a window peek stare
And yer good gal leaves and she's long gone a-flying
And yer heart feels sick like fish when they're fryin'
And yer jackhammer falls from yer hand to yer feet
And you need it badly but it lays on the street
And yer bell's bangin' loudly but you can't hear its beat
And you think yer ears might a been hurt
Or yer eyes've turned filthy from the sight-blindin' dirt
And you figured you failed in yesterdays rush
When you were faked out an' fooled white facing a four flush
And all the time you were holdin' three queens
And it's makin you mad, it's makin' you mean
Like in the middle of Life magazine
Bouncin' around a pinball machine
And there's something on yer mind you wanna be saying
That somebody someplace oughta be hearin'
But it's trapped on yer tongue and sealed in yer head
And it bothers you badly when your layin' in bed
And no matter how you try you just can't say it
And yer scared to yer soul you just might forget it
And yer eyes get swimmy from the tears in yer head
And yer pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead
And the lion's mouth opens and yer staring at his teeth
And his jaws start closin with you underneath
And yer flat on your belly with yer hands tied behind
And you wish you'd never taken that last detour sign
And you say to yourself just what am I doin'
On this road I'm walkin', on this trail I'm turnin'
On this curve I'm hanging
On this pathway I'm strolling, in the space I'm taking
In this air I'm inhaling
Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard
Why am I walking, where am I running
What am I saying, what am I knowing
On this guitar I'm playing, on this banjo I'm frailin'
On this mandolin I'm strummin', in the song I'm singin'
In the tune I'm hummin', in the words I'm writin'
In the words that I'm thinkin'
In this ocean of hours I'm all the time drinkin'
Who am I helping, what am I breaking
What am I giving, what am I taking
But you try with your whole soul best
Never to think these thoughts and never to let
Them kind of thoughts gain ground
Or make yer heart pound
But then again you know why they're around
Just waiting for a chance to slip and drop down
"Cause sometimes you hear'em when the night times comes creeping
And you fear that they might catch you a-sleeping
And you jump from yer bed, from yer last chapter of dreamin'
And you can't remember for the best of yer thinking
If that was you in the dream that was screaming
And you know that it's something special you're needin'
And you know that there's no drug that'll do for the healin'
And no liquor in the land to stop yer brain from bleeding
And you need something special
Yeah, you need something special all right
You need a fast flyin' train on a tornado track
To shoot you someplace and shoot you back
You need a cyclone wind on a stream engine howler
That's been banging and booming and blowing forever
That knows yer troubles a hundred times over
You need a Greyhound bus that don't bar no race
That won't laugh at yer looks
Your voice or your face
And by any number of bets in the book
Will be rollin' long after the bubblegum craze
You need something to open up a new door
To show you something you seen before
But overlooked a hundred times or more
You need something to open your eyes
You need something to make it known
That it's you and no one else that owns
That spot that yer standing, that space that you're sitting
That the world ain't got you beat
That it ain't got you licked
It can't get you crazy no matter how many
Times you might get kicked
You need something special all right
You need something special to give you hope
But hope's just a word
That maybe you said or maybe you heard
On some windy corner 'round a wide-angled curve

But that's what you need man, and you need it bad
And yer trouble is you know it too good
"Cause you look an' you start getting the chills

"Cause you can't find it on a dollar bill
And it ain't on Macy's window sill
And it ain't on no rich kid's road map
And it ain't in no fat kid's fraternity house
And it ain't made in no Hollywood wheat germ
And it ain't on that dimlit stage
With that half-wit comedian on it
Ranting and raving and taking yer money
And you thinks it's funny
No you can't find it in no night club or no yacht club
And it ain't in the seats of a supper club
And sure as hell you're bound to tell
That no matter how hard you rub
You just ain't a-gonna find it on yer ticket stub
No, and it ain't in the rumors people're tellin' you
And it ain't in the pimple-lotion people are sellin' you
And it ain't in no cardboard-box house
Or down any movie star's blouse
And you can't find it on the golf course
And Uncle Remus can't tell you and neither can Santa Claus
And it ain't in the cream puff hair-do or cotton candy clothes
And it ain't in the dime store dummies or bubblegum goons
And it ain't in the marshmallow noises of the chocolate cake voices
That come knockin' and tappin' in Christmas wrappin'
Sayin' ain't I pretty and ain't I cute and look at my skin
Look at my skin shine, look at my skin glow
Look at my skin laugh, look at my skin cry
When you can't even sense if they got any insides
These people so pretty in their ribbons and bows
No you'll not now or no other day
Find it on the doorsteps made out-a paper mache´
And inside it the people made of molasses
That every other day buy a new pair of sunglasses
And it ain't in the fifty-star generals and flipped-out phonies
Who'd turn yuh in for a tenth of a penny
Who breathe and burp and bend and crack
And before you can count from one to ten
Do it all over again but this time behind yer back
My friend
The ones that wheel and deal and whirl and twirl
And play games with each other in their sand-box world
And you can't find it either in the no-talent fools
That run around gallant
And make all rules for the ones that got talent
And it ain't in the ones that ain't got any talent but think they do
And think they're foolin' you
The ones who jump on the wagon
Just for a while 'cause they know it's in style
To get their kicks, get out of it quick
And make all kinds of money and chicks
And you yell to yourself and you throw down yer hat
Sayin', "Christ do I gotta be like that
Ain't there no one here that knows where I'm at
Ain't there no one here that knows how I feel
Good God Almighty
THAT STUFF AIN'T REAL"

No but that ain't yer game, it ain't even yer race
You can't hear yer name, you can't see yer face
You gotta look some other place
And where do you look for this hope that yer seekin'
Where do you look for this lamp that's a-burnin'
Where do you look for this oil well gushin'
Where do you look for this candle that's glowin'
Where do you look for this hope that you know is there
And out there somewhere
And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads
Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows
Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways
You can touch and twist
And turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You'll find God in the church of your choice
You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital

And though it's only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You'll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown

Forget transitions

2006-04-15T20:18:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I heard writer _____ (hm. have to get frank to remind me of her name) speak and she said that since she’d gotten older, she didn’t have time for transitions-- not “like her brother, she loved sand castles, too” and not “meanwhile across town.” She said that in real life, events just butt up against each other and vie for attention.

So the other night, I was playing guitar in my backyard, and as I tried to get the rhythm right on Aeroplane Over the Sea, the coyotes across the street started up, huge noise, and I was telling Dad about it later and he said, “speaking of the coyotes across the street, have you done your taxes?” and I thought that was a good punchline. I’m full of transitions, I think it’s part of what we do, but she’s on to something, too.

I picked up a guy on the interstate today; an old black man with a broke-down old station wagon waving a gas can. I want to live in a place where people (with some careful eyes to survey a scene mind you) can pick people up and be picked up if they are in trouble stranded on the highway miles from the nearest exit. So I act like the person I want to see out there. His name was Charles. Of course the first thing he said was, “you know God is going to bless you” and I said that that wouldn’t hurt and that was fine and he was glad and I was glad if healthily wary and onward to the gas station. And then he had to start in on how pretty I looked. And I guess the idea might have been to flatter me, but I think it’s usually more about what the guy wants than about kind words. So, look folks, if I give you a ride I don’t want to hear it. It is not polite to want me. If I look pretty, I know it and when strangers say it, it says a lot more about them than it does about me. Oh and I asked Charles how it was living in Oklahoma. He said, “Bad. But there were a lot of Indians.”

I think Dairy Queen would have gone out of business years ago if it hadn’t been for the Blizzard. On Highway 259 in Smith Grove, Kentucky-- at least I think that’s where I was; I went from Western KY to Birmingham today-- I saw one advertising a “Dream a dream pie” Blizzard. Kentucky was a dream a dream pie for the eyes this morning. She has a special way of bringing together burnt orange grass stalks with new green growth starting up below and blue skyline cut diagonal by the hilly horizon, stately red barn standing with its feet a little wide apart on either side of the barn door, a little knock-kneed in its old age, little strip malls each with their storefront churches. “Nothing Fancy Church” sticks with me. I passed three billboards of the ten commandments before I hit Tennessee. I wondered whether they were Really trying to tell me to honor my father and mother, or just trying to warn me that this was God’s country and that I had better repent or keep driving. My friend out in that neck of the woods has become a serious person of faith and an evangelical in a way that perhaps Western Kentucky inspires. I think that maybe being an Evangelical is hard on believers-- when your faith demands that you convert others, you have to translate the silent language of belief and simple faith into all sorts of words, into all sorts of apologies and arguments. You have to speak History and Psychology and Philosophy besides just the Language of the Heart. I thought about it a little as I rolled along in the early morning cool, until I got to one of those vistas that lay out miles of hills and valleys before me and the rose of the new sun, horses grazing quietly, and in that moment, the Language of the Heart, of pure blank belief was all I could feel.

Tennessee and Alabama had things to say, too, although they don’t speak as clear to me as Kentucky does. Tennessee Highway 431 reminded me that it is IMPOSSIBLE to imitate old money houses without OLD TREES. The tottering little cottege that hasn’t been painted in fifty years outshines the new brick stuff on trees alone. And Decatur says that we should build more highway bridges low to the water so folks can fish off of them. And check out the rocket at the Huntsville rest stop. Who in their right mind would believe that that thing could get to outer space. Strange world.

And if you’ve just found this because I said, “Hey guess what I have a blog now,” welcome!

In other news.

2006-04-11T13:30:00.000-05:00

Back to that "black wind" that Glenn Powell mentioned. . . Maybe I'm in this upbeat mood because I'm writing from my room at the farm with the spring breeze blowing in the window and the horses grazing in the field and the leaves peeking out on the ginko tree, BUT I've been finding all kinds of signs of hope in the paper lately.

Reading the sunday Times weeks late, I got to hear about Michelle Bachelet, "a Socialist, pediatrician and former political prisoner and exile" being inaugurated as President of Chile. "In a country where the Roman Catholic Church wields great power, Ms. Bachelet is also openly agnostic, and when she took her oath of office she promised rather than swore to uphold the Chilean Constitution. She has also promised a government that focuses on social equality and respect for human rights. . . Ms. Bachelet has already fulfilled another of her campaign promises: sexual equity in appointments to government posts. She has appointed a cabinet of 10 men and 10 women, and designated the governors of the country's 12 regions on the same basis. . . "I've given clear instructions, and here I take advantage to do a commercial," she said. 'Chile is going to be the first country that will have, in public sector decision making positions, total parity' between men and women."

Below, in "US Rethinks Its Cutoff of Military Aid to Latin American Nations" is the satisfying image of Condaleeza Rice strumming a guitar decorated with coca leaves. Check it out:
"The newly installed Bolivian leader [Evo Morales, onetime head of Bolivia's coca growers' union] favors the legal cultivation of coca, the plant used to manufacture cocaine, but says he opposes cocaine and has agreed to let American antidrug officials remain in the country.
In a friendly but pointed gesture, he gave Ms. Rice a small guitar decorated on the front with real leaves from a coca plant in laquer. Ms. Rice, perhaps not realizing that the decoration was from the plant that the United States sought to eradicate, then smiled and strummed the guitar for television cameras."

Meanwhile, "A Sharp Debate Erupts in China Over Ideologies: capitalist path disputed, rising income gap raises concerns about a law on property rights."
The origins of the critique of capitalism? Well a big piece of it came from a professor who "accused the legal experts who wrote the draft [of the pro-capitalist property rights legislation] of 'copying capitalist civil law like slaves' and offering equal protection to 'a rich man's car and a beggar man's stick.'" Even some from the pro-market camp over there are willing to admit (as our own leaders will not) "A widening gap between rich and poor is not the fault of market reforms, it's the natural result of them, which is neither good nor bad, but quite predictable."

Also front page: "Bush Troubles Weigh Heavily As Party Meets" and an expose of a huge price increase for a cancer drug that has nothing to do with production costs and everything to do with drug company profits.

And today, when Chirac backed down on the new labor law, the young French folks were presented not as lazy nut-balls who were attached to their job stability because they were unwilling to work, but as people who have been "resisting economic reform," in multiple instances-- "In France, an Economic Bullet Goes Unbitten"-- refusing to bite a bullet, because who would want to bite a bullet anyway?

pro-immigrant rallies

2006-04-11T13:18:00.000-05:00

Here is the report on the one that happened here at home--http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/14313651.htm-- and it is so exciting to see them happening all across the country. What a heady day yesterday!

On Saturday, Glen Powell from Winchester wrote to the Herald-Leader regarding the immigration debate,

"There's a black wind blowing through America, politically, economically and socially.
When will it end?"

Perhaps the wind is changing some. Not that there weren't pages of negative redneck responses to the rally. One web post in response to the article covering it read, "heres an idea, put an electrical wire in the rio grande. when they try to cross....sizzle and fry." stupid SOB.

Here is my letter (hopefully published in tomorrow's paper!) to the editor:

The anti-immigrant position fails on both humanitarian and economic grounds. Negative responses to the rally downtown have been filled with fear and hate towards millions of people just because they are foreign and willing to work for low wages. Additionally, the send-‘em-home position fails to recognize that cheap labor is a necessary part of our economic system; it is the only way to produce the cheap consumer goods that we buy every day. We vote for underpaid immigrant labor here in the USA-- and for low-cost overseas production that exploits these people in their home countries and drives them here seeking a better life-- with our shopping dollars. There is no closing our borders to a flow of people from the South without fundamentally restructuring the entire global economic system.

Instead of struggling without success to close the borders, we should protect the health and dignity of all people in the USA by granting citizenship to immigrants. Some argue that, as non-citizens, immigrants are in no position to make demands on our government. The purpose of a civil rights movement is to demand an equal right to live and have a say in government, in spite of powerful forces who believe you do not deserve it.

Alice Johnston
Winchester, KY

I think this is a big deal that is just going to get bigger. Peace and dignity, folks.

Virtual Tour of 119 West Virginia

2006-04-08T11:19:00.000-05:00

"If you don't have an oil or gas well, Get One!" --Waco Oil and Gas, Glenville, WV

Our report begins when I turned off of I-79 and onto state highway 119 near Weston. Soon I was far from the simple straight-shot of interstate and was reminded that West Virginia a'int Kansas anymore, and is especially not New York or Connecticut. You'd have to enter some sort of fourth dimentional space for the road to get any more twisted up in the steep hills, and it seemed that most of the people I passed were large men in tiny teal Geos slowly falling to pieces, on their way home to trailers and fighting cocks or out to Good Time Charlies aka Susie's backyard bar. Otherwise, it was me and the thirty wild turkeys camped out between Pickle Street Unincorporated and Burnt House (incorporated?). The far out-ness of this place was really driven home when I got to the Welcome to Clay County sign, "Home of the Golden Delicious Apple" and to a lone sixteen year old in a Nickleback shirt walking down the road with nothing to do probably but drugs and TV (wait. drugs and TV. this is familiar. click your heels three times saying "there's no place like home," spark up a bowl and there you are, whereever you are?) Anyhow, Golden Delicious is not enough to keep this character occupied from birth until he gets out or gets married. (There was that rusty suit of armour and all the metal and bus parts and lamps and implements at that one house, but the chain across his driveway said KEEP OUT, well maybe locals can ring the bell with the pull-cord with the sign with the finger pointing to it to announce themselves and then they can play in his sweet metal collection, but it definately was KEEP OUT to me, but. . . ) What really topped off the trip though were the sights in Glenville. Part one: Giant Gas Money Mansion. This guy sort of has a predicament. He has obviously made a shit-ton of money in oil and natural gas. His neighbors obviously have not. He can a) move out of the county and be absentee boss to everyone b) display his sort of hideous ostentatious taste right next door to his crews, a house trailer on either side of his property. In any case, I just looked this guy up-- I know he is IL Morris because it is emblazoned in giant letters on his barn-- and it looks like he's a pretty stand-up guy:

"Morris serves both the College and Gilmer County communities through his active support and financial gifts. As the owner of Waco Oil & Gas Co., Inc., Morris employs over 50 area residents. Through hard work and dedication for over 40 years, he has built a successful business.
In addition to his many gifts to Glenville State College, Morris serves on the Board of Directors of United National Bank in Glenville, is a former Board member of Alliance Petroleum Corp. in Canton, Ohio, the West Virginia Oil and Gas Commission, is past president of the Glenville Golf Club and is a member of the First Baptist Church of Glenville. He has been honored as the 1994 West Virginia Oil & Gas Man of the Year and, most recently, has been named as the Honorary Italian Man of the Year for the 25th Annual West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival to be held in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Morris serves as a Partner in Education with Gilmer County High School, contributes to various other educational and philanthropic endeavors and, in 2001, provided the funds for the installation of artificial turf at the Glenville State College football stadium, now named Morris Stadium. His unselfish service and dedication to Glenville State College and his commitment and perseverance have significantly improved education and intercollegiate athletics and services to our students."

When I passed the Waco Oil and Gas sign about 5 or 6 miles down from his place "If you don't have an oil or gas well on your place, Get one!" I knew that that was where the money came from and sure enough he owns it. Anyhow, there was an ambulance at his place, hope he's doing alright.

Meanwhile, the West Virginia Highlands Forum informs me that ol' Morris was seeking a permit to strip mine the top off of Browns Mountain, on a parcel of land near the Monongahela Forest and the Devil's Backbone arch-- "They plan to remove at least three hundred feet of rock from the east side of the mountain to obtain the Tuscarora Sandstone (or White Medina Sandstone), which is used as a non-skid aggregate in road construction." According to the preservation guys, "What they are proposing is the equivalent of mountain top removal in an area with no coal and no other mining. The water gap formed by Knapps Creek as it cuts through Browns Mountain is one of the most scenic areas in West Virginia. Knapps Creek, a tributary of the Greenbrier, is stocked with trout by the DNR. Strip mining in this location would create a permanent scar on the landscape and probably destroy the creek for trout fishing downstream of the quarry."

At some point on this drive, I was at least 45 minutes from the Interstate no matter how you cut it. It was the kind of trip where you sort of wish you could hurry up the coming back part, but there's only one road and you can't rush it and you just have to wait it out to get back to familiar territory. When I got back on 79, I tried to shake off the feeling that I had just spent a big chunk of time driving without getting much closer to my destination with Sub and Basement Jaxx and some faster driving, but West Virginia just doesn't stand for it. I put on some Ricki Lee Jones instead until the sun set and the road was anonymous enough for techno.

Hopefully on my way back up north, I'll pass through on a Friday or Saturday night-- a couple of spots in this 50 mile stretch advertised live bluegrass jams on weekend nights-- It would be a strange place to be an outsider maybe, but probably worth hearing what these people have to sing. If you're ever in Glenville or Chloe (down at the community park), keep your eyes (ears?) peeled.

Last but not least, as of 2003, the sandstone quarry for Browns Mountain had failed to get its permit thanks to some uproar from the West Virginia Environmental Council and citizens of Pocahontas County. "The names Hamilton, Heinlein, Hemple, Henritz, Hogbin, Johns, McCarty, Pomerantz, Rose, Rice, Stump, Wagner, and Young who helped pave the way, were but a very few who sought protections during the 2000 lawmaking effort - protections that now have been effectively applied by DEP and Pocahontas Countians. . . Hats off to the many citizens of Pocahontas County who stood up, used the 2000 quarry law, and demonstrated how communities can protect their future interests." A slightly rosier note for you.

Alice

PS-- Honorary Italian of the Year?

a species considered to be among the planet's smartest

2006-04-06T23:18:00.000-05:00

Armed marine life trained for attack-and-kill missions really do not take up that much of my brain space, but I thought that this pair of articles really gets at. . . something. . . one of those great mystery type things.

Armed and dangerous - Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina

Mark Townsend in Houston
Sunday September 25, 2005
The Observer

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.
Experts who have studied the US navy's cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying 'toxic dart' guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet's smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.

Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea. But those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the US defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly.

Leo Sheridan, 72, a respected accident investigator who has worked for government and industry, said he had received intelligence from sources close to the US government's marine fisheries service confirming dolphins had escaped.

'My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,' he said. 'The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?'

Usually dolphins were controlled via signals transmitted through a neck harness. 'The question is, were these dolphins made secure before Katrina struck?' said Sheridan.

The mystery surfaced when a separate group of dolphins was washed from a commercial oceanarium on the Mississippi coast during Katrina. Eight were found with the navy's help, but the dolphins were not returned until US navy scientists had examined them.

Sheridan is convinced the scientists were keen to ensure the dolphins were not the navy's, understood to be kept in training ponds in a sound in Louisiana, close to Lake Pontchartrain, whose waters devastated New Orleans.

The navy launched the classified Cetacean Intelligence Mission in San Diego in 1989, where dolphins, fitted with harnesses and small electrodes planted under their skin, were taught to patrol and protect Trident submarines in harbour and stationary warships at sea.

Criticism from animal rights groups ensured the use of dolphins became more secretive. But the project gained impetus after the Yemen terror attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Dolphins have also been used to detect mines near an Iraqi port.

stealth sharks and killer dolphins: beginnings

2006-04-06T22:52:00.000-05:00

"We believe we are the first to record neural activity from a monkey doing a somersault," (Mavoori says).
-----The New Scientist; March 1, 2006
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg18925416.300.html

"IMAGINE getting inside the mind of a shark: swimming silently through the ocean, sensing faint electrical fields, homing in on the trace of a scent, and navigating through the featureless depths for hour after hour.

We may soon be able to do just that via electrical probes in the shark's brain. Engineers funded by the US military have created a neural implant designed to enable a shark's brain signals to be manipulated remotely, controlling the animal's movements, and perhaps even decoding what it is feeling.

That team is among a number of groups around the world that have gained ethical approval to develop implants that can monitor and influence the behaviour of animals, from sharks and tuna to rats and monkeys. . . More controversially, the Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails. By remotely guiding the sharks' movements, they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted. . . the team's next step will be to implant the device into blue sharks and release them into the ocean off the coast of Florida."

THE WORLD IS A STRANGE PLACE
KEEP YOUR EYES PEELED