Perfect swish

One of the ways you can tell I am a geek is that I watch science programs on TV. This week I was glued to the screen watching to see if NASA's Phoenix lander would beat the odds and reach the polar Martian surface in one piece, then phone home. Nice trick--sort of like throwing a perfect swish from mid-court in Montana through a basket located in the Canton High School gym. It takes a certain cast of mind. A few years ago I took the Boeing factory tour and was impressed by the fanatic level of organization. The tool cart area was marked out on the assembly floor with precise grid lines, and each rectangular cart was aligned in the center of its grid area, square to the lines. The tools on each cart were likewise perfectly aligned with the sides of the cart. All down the third of a mile long production line, there was not one thing out of place.

Amoeba greets Phoenix lander.

I shared this techno-utopian vision with my biologist friend David in a little New York taqueria. He said, "That's the difference between technology and life. Living things are always right on the edge of falling apart. Biology is like a Marx Brothers movie." I asked him why we couldn't build a simple single-celled creature from scratch, once we had the entire genome decoded. "Information is not the same as knowledge;" he said, "only a cell knows how to make another cell." I guess it's like the difference between having the script to A Night at the Opera and living inside Groucho's head. It comforts me to think that out there in some underground "clean room," greater geeks than I are grinding their teeth in frustration at the genius of the amoeba.

Audio archaeology

Kevin Irwin has been camped in the back of the web office for the last few weeks with a resurrected reel-to-reel tape deck hooked into a computer. Tape is like a Twinkie--leave it in a dusty box for a couple of decades and it will eventually go bad. So beside Kevin is a piece of ad-hoc tech cobbled by Radio Bob out of plywood, tin foil, light bulbs, and a thermostat pried out of an old CPU. Inspired equally by a toy Easy Bake oven and a Clarkson engineering degree, it is used to cook the tapes, stabilizing them just long enough for one last good playback.

String band sketch by Matt Gordon from their 1980 LP Backroad Breakdown.

Some at the station view this exercise in audio archaeology with trepidation. Radio is meant to play, then go away. And given the quality of much that has come to light from the somewhat random library that survived the move to the new station offices more than a decade ago, one could agree. But now and then, the midden heap disgorges a gem--intermittent reinforcement to keep the digger keen to his task. One such for me is a recording from around 1975 of the St. Regis River Valley String Band.

Back in the day, band founders David and Linda Danks lived around the corner from me in Sanfordville, in a farmhouse on Pickle Street. This was a golden time for live music in the area; another band lived downstairs from me, and yet another down the road in the opposite direction. I recall the largest member of the Danks family was a massive and ugly specimen of swine named Captain Gonad. The band limped from gig to gig in a crapulous and ancient GMC school bus, renamed The Fool Bus. The prime venues of the day were bars, beer blasts and Legion halls. Hearing the band today, the sweet old-time tunes are inextricably bound up in my mind with the din of table talk, the clamor of pinball machines, and the pungent funk of half-dried beer, tobacco, and woodstove-scented flannel shirts.

Nosing around

The North Country is pretty easy on the eyes these days: lilacs, apple blossoms, trillium, new leaves, tender grass, lots of sun. We take the world in first through the eyes, so much so that the interrogative "See?" is synonymous with "Do you understand?" Nature may have shorted humans in other ways, but a big chunk of our big brain is dedicated to sight. If we were dogs, we'd be gaze hounds. But the brain is an onion--peel away the primate and find the mammal, peel away that and find the reptile, deep within the secret core of us. That part of the brain is only interested in the eyes if they show a fast-moving object, prompting us to hotfoot across the intersection, or shriek at the 3D horror movie dagger. The lambent pastels of spring are wasted on it.

The ancient brain "sees" instead through the nose, which wraps mysteriously around the limbic chemical pumps of our emotions, triggering cascades of long lost memory and association. Compare the impact of watching someone outside the window mow the lawn with the experience of walking out into the sharp-scented grassy air. It recalls to mind every warm day since you were a child. Last weekend, I had the happy occasion to be in the rare book room of the Strand Bookstore in New York City with my daughter Elena. She turned to me and said "It smells like your Dad." I took a deep breath to "see" what she meant and there it was: all the generations the old books in the stacks had steeped in pipe smoke in the libraries of bookish men, still seeping back out decades later into the environmentally-regulated air. His dimming face comes sharp in the mind's eye once more. I see him turning the pages even now. The smell of aftershave.

"Friend me" not

While I have been fascinated to follow the development of social networks on the web, I have never warmed up to them in practice. The very name sounds oxymoronic--social sounds, well--sociable--and network sounds like work. So I might visit a FaceBook page for information, but I have not built one of my own, and rarely interact with the pages of others. My cell phone is not web connected and sits mostly idle--a text message has never passed its tiny little keypad. For a while I tracked old running buddies via Classmates, but with both ends needing to be paying customers to actually communicate, my skinflint genes kicked in and I let it lapse. The alternate reality site Second Life now moves on without me. I tried to create an avatar there that looked like me, but everything came out way more young and buff than sad reality, and I had no desire to present myself as a blue punk vampire with a face full of steel, or to build a zero-gravity domicile constructed entirely of virtual cornflakes.

So my social life operates in a way a cave man would recognize. I go to where people live and sit within earshot of quiet conversation. I share food, news, blarney and opinion in kitchens and coffeeshops. I like my music live and will pay for the privilege. I embrace my inner throwback. There is no end to the axes I enjoy the grinding of, and I guess social networking is one. Don't friend me, I'll friend you.

Until telepathy

Poetry Month has come and gone again, and while I rarely take time out to talk like a pirate on National Talk Like A Pirate Day, I have taken time in the last month to give a few poetry readings and to attend a few readings, to buy and to sell a few books of poetry--and to read them--as opposed to stacking them on my nightstand. It's a curious business, much out of fashion, an eccentricity in myself that I rarely examine.

So it was with great interest that I listened to Jeffrey Brown's interview with poet Robert Hass on last night's PBS News Hour. His collection Time and Materials won this year's poetry Pulitzer--yes, there actually is one. The great lit major bull session questions--Why poetry? What is it good for?--are things he has examined in some depth. There is a line in his poem "The Problem of Describing Trees:"

There are limits to saying, in language, what the tree did.

This prompted Brown to question: "Why the need to describe trees?" Hass parried with a quote from environmentalist Ed Wilson: "Every species lives within its own sensory world." We can't say what the tree actually did; we can only say what we saw. The exercise is not to describe the tree, but to record "our memory of the gift of life," to say "here is what it was like for me to be alive." Or to quote another poet, Brett Duffany, "Until telepathy, poetry."