it's a vain pursuit but it helps me to sleep

04:54 pm - Link salad

Highlights from my twitterings of late, for those of you who don't follow me there:

• Interesting Google / Grameen / MTN SMS-Q&A service in Uganda. Pricey by African-income standards, but interesting.
  
• For colubra, lyricagent, whythawk and zipties_revenge among others, Hari Kunzru recommends wacky books about London
  
• Courtesy james_nicoll, The Atlantic warns about the perils of fighting climate change
  
• A research study shows, surprisingly, that while men in the theatre world rate male and female playwrights exactly alike, women discriminate against female playwrights.
  
• A long, thoughtful, and intelligent article about how and where Wolfram Alpha failed.
  
• The greatest political candidate interviews of all time. If you click on only one of these links, make it this one. Especially if you live in the Bay Area.
  
• You, too, can learn to echolocate.
  

10:45 am - I only rap about the po-ta-to

Courtesy of mashuta, a guy who deserves to be the Web's latest sensation: ToTs, a Syracuse-based rapper who raps about ... um ... well, in his own words:

How many other MCs do you know
Who only rap about the potato?

He's actually good, too. Twice Baked is the most professionally produced, and the choir-backed Tater Haters is entertaining, but I think my favourite is the homemade ad-libbed Boil 'Em, mostly because of the hilarious visual stylings of his Fry-Girl girlfriend.

Seriously, this guy oughta go viral like some kinda blight.

( embedded videos )

11:40 am - Well, it's about freaking time

News from last week that I missed until today: the Harper government has agreed to abide by the court decision that they must allow Abousfian Abdelrazik to return to Canada, ending his six-year exile.

This is one of those blood-boiling flagrant-injustice cases. Abdelrazik is a Canadian citizen who has been camped out in the embassy in Khartoum for more than a year, because the government of Canada would not allow him to return to his country. First he flew to visit family members in the Sudan, was arrested, jailed for a year, and interrogated. (I leave you to imagine what those interrogations were like.) Then, when he was released a year later, his passport had expired, and Canada refused to reissue it. Then, when it was pointed out that they were required to give him temporary travel papers, they refused on the grounds that he was on the international commercial-flight "no-fly" list. Then the government of Sudan offered to pay for a private flight for him; and Canada still refused to let him come home, until the court decision this month compelled them to do so.

(The full story is even worse than that summary; click the links above for details.)

Why did all this happen? Because Abdelrazik was accused of Al-Qaeda links. Note accused. Even if this were true - and he's since been cleared of those accusations by the RCMP, CSIS, and the Sudanese government - he should have every right to return to his country, face charges, and defend himself in court. Except that he has never actually been charged with anything by anyone. But because the stain of that hearsay accusation was upon him, this Canadian citizen has spent the last six years exiled from Canada in egregious violation of the law.

(And if you're tempted to blame the Harper administration, note that it was a Liberal government who exiled him in the first place.)

I am always suspicious of the "this would never have happened to a person of [a different ethnic group |nationality | gender]" arguments, they're usually undisprovable and frequently specious. And in fact I can imagine it happening to, say, a white Moldovan named Oleg Petrov. But it is very hard indeed to imagine it happening to an Aaron Jones. And the subtext of oh, Abdelrazik isn't really Canadian, that's just a paperwork technicality that has hung over this case from the beginning just makes me furious.

I suppose it's better to see justice done at last than never. Go the courts. Six years in jail and exile because of War-on-Terror theatre as illegally performed by incompetent, racist bureaucrats. I hope he sues them for everything they've got.

12:28 am - and while I'm at it...

...I don't think I've mentioned, but I've been blogging semi-regularly about all the coding I've been doing over at Pronoid Android.

Be advised, though, that if you're not a professional software developer, you probably won't get much out of clicking that link.

08:33 pm - Iran

Not to get all political on you, but:

You know the storyline in Iran, right? Authoritarian government stages an election, is horrified by the results, overrides them and steals the presidency. Jackbooted thugs arrest students and politicians while Tehran's streets seethe with huge rallies and savage violence. The Iranian people, robbed of their democratic voice, swarm out into the streets to protest, communicating by Twitter¹, who have postponed their maintenance tonight so as to support the Iranian protestors. Internet-fuelled power to the Persian people! Can these plucky high-tech underdogs standing shoulder to shoulder bring down Ahmadinejad's draconian government and replace it with the true elected leader Mousavi?

It's a great story. Fits beautifully into Hollywood's classic three-act structure. Trouble is, reality has this nasty way of being both much more complicated and considerably less pleasant than Syd Field. Stolen election? Not so fast. The only apparently credible source out there - the only people with, you know, actual data, as opposed to opinions - report that:

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin – greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.

While western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

03:24 pm - It is with heavy heart that I admit that this terrible time has come

I have brooded, of late. I have lain awake and pondered. I have constructed lists of pros and cons. I have considered my past and my future. I have wondered what I stand for, what I believe, what it all means.

And I have come to a momentous decision. The same decision that many of my friends have made, over the years. Again and again I chose not to follow them: but it seems clear to me now that the long-dreaded time has finally come.

Some may see my choice as elitist, a clear signal that I am no longer one with the people¹. Some may even take it as a personal betrayal. But that's a risk I must run. I would like it to be known that I will understand if you choose to turn away from me in response to what I now must do. No hard feelings. I won't judge. Indeed, part of me will even sympathize.

Some may wonder what I will do with my right middle finger, and the outer edge of my right thumb. I must admit that it is this which weighs most heavily on my mind. Once, when I followed the old ways, those were very nearly my instruments of choice. Now I fear they may languish all but unused, save for *, 8, I, K, the comma, and the spacebar. For as I understand it the new one-button regime will not require their special services.

Yes, it's true.
I'm gonna go Mac.
Will I ever go back?


¹Don't look at me like that. I was totally one with the people. Ask any of 'em. No, not that guy. Someone else. Well, maybe not her. Look, some of my best friends are people!

07:15 pm - Motherless Brooklyn

I've been slowly reading Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn on the TTC, lingering over and savouring its many delights, and finally finished it today. It's a terrific noir told by a protagonist with an extreme case of Tourette's syndrome, full of fascinating characters, explosive wordplay, sly humour and utterly convincing New York colour. Two thumbs up. I recommend it to everyone.

This despite the fact that there seems to be a massive and gaping plot hole.

( spoilers spoilers spoilers, but if you've read it, can you explain? )

Fortunately, the actual plot is pretty secondary, and hey, The Big Sleep famously has a massive and gaping plot hole too. (But I'm pretty sure this aspect of MB is not a homage to that.) Still, if anyone else who's read it can make sense of it, I'd appreciate it.

12:53 am

As part of that Flickr noodling I mentioned earlier, I've gone and created a highly idiosyncratic Top 10 list of my own pictures. ('Cause really, I can't expect anyone to go through my 76 supercool shots, much less the 300+ prettycool ones.)

Small versions:

( Large versions, with captions, cut to spare your friendspage. )

08:26 pm - "...when this man drove, people _prayed_."

I like New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof a lot, despite (to date unverified) reports from a friend that he implicitly endorsed GWB in the 2004 presidential election, but I take some issue with today's column, which is largely about how to avoid theft, kidnapping, battery and murder while travelling in Africa and Asia. Not because his tips are invalid, but because too many non-travellers already think that the developing world is a hive of lawless anarchy full of desperate starving people who will treat you as if your clothes were made of hundred-dollar bills.

It ain't remotely so. OK, I've been mugged in Mexico City, pickpocketed in St. Petersburg, and had my bag stolen in Bolivia - but I've also spent more than a year of my life travelling in Africa and Asia, including a fair number of some theoretically very dubious places, mostly on my own and on local public transit, without once being robbed or feeling like I was in genuine danger. (I did witness a money-changing scam in Zambia once; not the same thing.) As for the risk statistics, I went to a great talk by Redmond O'Hanlon once, where he outlined the most common causes of death for Western travellers overcome by mortality while travelling in Africa. They went something like this:

( beware! beware! his floating gears, his flashing wheel! )

In vaguely related news, I've been going through my Flickr pictures, and they're making me feel old. It was eleven years ago that I first travelled through Africa. I mean, not too old, as I'm in far better physical condition now than I was then. But I still made it up Mount Cameroon in a single day, running on sheer youthful energy - certainly not strength, as I was refugee-skinny at the time -



- holy crap look at the alarming slash of that belt in the first shot, and those twiglike limbs (puffed out slightly by adrenalin in the second shot, which was taken immediately after plummeting off of a 111-metre-high bridge.) In fact, jeez, I arguably looked older then than I do nowadays:



So, yeah, um, never mind. Also, it is probably fair to say that I have grown into my looks. But I probably am going to start feeling old in 2011. Right now I can look back to ten years ago and think "wow, I'm so much more physically capable now than I was then." But as of then I'll look back and think "holy crap, back then I was doing yoga, boxing, running, and weights 3x/week each, that's two workout sessions a day, I'd freakin' die if I tried that now." Oh well. Two years of trompe l'oeil youth to go yet. Could be worse.

11:30 am - pretty pix

I've finally ganked the two Lago Torres photostitches girl_on_a_stick put together from my Patagonia pictures back in February (thanks again!) to mine own Flickr account:


Best viewed original size (click on picture through to Flickr and select "All Sizes.") No, really.

( larger (but not original-size!) versions, cut lest I break your friendspage )

Also, I have a new World Fast Forward post up at The Walrus: How Google Unconquered The World (and Apple Squandered It, Again).

10:53 pm - The wit and wisdom of Johnson, II

Went for a long-for-me run yesterday, in honour of my sister running a marathon across the province, and gutted my way through 40 hot-and-hilly minutes. All that yoga and running I've been doing are beginning to take effect; I can feel my muscles growing more taut, my stamina increasing, my breaths deepening, my joints opening up a little. I'm not back in excellent shape yet, but I'm slowly getting there, and I can recommend the feeling.

eta: I just got news that over the weekend an acquaintance of mine was killed in a houseboat fire. "Life is very short and very uncertain," indeed.

Anyway. Where were we? Oh yes. Boswell.

• I cannot too frequently request of my readers, while they peruse my account of Johnson's conversation, to endeavour to keep in mind his deliberate and strong utterance. His mode of speaking was indeed very impressive; and I wish it could be preserved as musick is written, according to the very ingenious method of Mr. Steele, who has shewn how the recitation of Mr. Garrick, and other eminent speakers, might be transmitted to posterity IN SCORE.
  
  
• He, I know not why, shewed upon all occasions an aversion to go to Ireland, where I proposed to him that we should make a tour. JOHNSON. 'It is the last place where I should wish to travel.' BOSWELL. 'Should you not like to see Dublin, Sir?' JOHNSON. 'No, Sir! Dublin is only a worse capital.' BOSWELL. 'Is not the Giant's-Causeway worth seeing?' JOHNSON. 'Worth seeing? yes; but not worth going to see.'
  
  
• A man, he observed, should begin to write soon; for if he waits till his judgment has matured, his inability, through want of practice to express his conceptions, will make the disproportion so great between what he sees, and what he can attain, that he will probably be discouraged from writing at all.
  
  
• 'I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: "Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."'
  
  ( more, more, more )
  
  
• As he opened a note which his servant brought to him, he said, ' An odd thought strikes me: we shall receive no letters in the grave.'
  

03:27 pm - admit it, you secretly love these posts

I have just spoken the Nine Magic Words¹ which mean that I am finally ready to send Swarm off to my agents. Go me. I'll probably give it one more read-through tonight first, though, just to (hopefully) catch anything embarrassingly overlooked.

In the interim, 'cause the very last thing I want to do right now is open that file again:

Selections from the first half of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson²

• He seemed to learn by intuition; for though indolence and procrastination were inherent in his constitution, whenever he made an exertion he did more than any one else. His favourites used to receive very liberal assistance from him; and such was the submission and deference with which he was treated, such the desire to obtain his regard, that three of the boys, of whom Mr. Hector was sometimes one, used to come in the morning as his humble attendants, and carry him to school. One in the middle stooped, while he sat upon his back, and one on each side supported him; and thus he was borne triumphant. Such a proof of the early predominance of intellectual vigour is very remarkable, and does honour to human nature.
  
  
• He discovered a great ambition to excel, which roused him to counteract his indolence. He was uncommonly inquisitive; and his memory was so tenacious, that he never forgot any thing that he either heard or read. Mr. Hector remembers having recited to him eighteen verses, which, after a little pause, he repeated verbatim, varying only one epithet, by which he improved the line.
  
  
• The 'morbid melancholy,' which was lurking in his constitution, and to which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular life, which, at a very early period, marked his character, gathered such strength in his twentieth year, as to afflict him in a dreadful manner. [ed.note: my God, what a sentence.] While he was at Lichfield, in the college vacation of the year 1729, he felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved; and all his labours, and all his enjoyments, were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence. He told Mr. Paradise that he was sometimes so languid and inefficient, that he could not distinguish the hour upon the town-clock.
  
  
• It is melancholy to reflect, that Johnson and Savage were sometimes in such extreme indigence, that they could not pay for a lodging; so that they have wandered together whole nights in the streets. Yet in these almost incredible scenes of distress, we may suppose that Savage mentioned many of the anecdotes with which Johnson afterwards enriched the life of his unhappy companion, and those of other Poets.
  
  
• Dr. Adams found him one day busy at his Dictionary, when the following dialogue ensued. 'ADAMS. This is a great work, Sir. How are you to get all the etymologies? JOHNSON. Why, Sir, here is a shelf with Junius, and Skinner, and others; and there is a Welch gentleman who has published a collection of Welch proverbs, who will help me with the Welch. ADAMS. But, Sir, how can you do this in three years? JOHNSON. Sir, I have no doubt that I can do it in three years. ADAMS. But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary. JOHNSON. Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.'
  
  
• Many of these excellent essays were written as hastily as an ordinary letter. Mr. Langton remembers Johnson, when on a visit at Oxford, asking him one evening how long it was till the post went out; and on being told about half an hour, he exclaimed, 'then we shall do very well.' He upon this instantly sat down and finished an Idler, which it was necessary should be in London the next day. Mr. Langton having signified a wish to read it, 'Sir, (said he) you shall not do more than I have done myself.' He then folded it up and sent it off.
  
  ( cut to save you from too much 18th century verbiage on your friendspage )
  

11:43 am - armchair sociology

This NYT article Women Bullying Women at Work strikes a chord, in that I have frequently had female friends tell me "I'd rather work for a man than a woman." Which I've always found kind of bizarre. And then there's the equally weird "frenemy" thing: not gender-specific, but, well, I know no man who talks unironically about frenemies, and I know plenty of women. (The obvious selection-bias problems here are noted. Whaddaya want, stringent science?)

I wonder if childhood socialization is a factor. Specifically, I wonder if women socialized with, let's say, a traditional female gender role, don't get the same early lessons on how to befriend their competitors. Boys learn, from pretty much the first day of play, from countless games and contests, both organized and not - sports, video games, math contests, roughhousing, cards, name it, every day, relentlessly - how to compete intensely (even viciously) against other boys, and be good friends with them, at the same time. Granted, it's easy to overstate the whole "child is the father of the man" thing, but still. As far as I've noticed, traditional girl socialization doesn't really include that implicit lesson; other women are either friends or competitors, not both.

Stop me if I'm wrong.

06:40 pm - parispix, final edition

The Panthéon in the golden hour.

( the last pictures from paris, with bits of London and Calais )


Sunset over the Seine.

eta: here's the whole set.

Au revoir.

04:23 pm - While I still don't really understand the motivation, if any, for switching...

...for the record, I have namesquatted "rezendi" on Dreamwidth. I don't really expect to use it, but I suppose if everyone else jumps off the Eiffel Tower, I will too. I'm all stridently independent like that.

Also, this book I am writing? It may not suck. I mean, who can tell? Certainly not me. But the possibility exists. This third draft is going slower than I'd like, but also - so far - better than I expected, which is a tradeoff I'll take any day, even though I told my agents it'd be in their inboxes by mid-May. I still might even make that self-imposed deadline.

Also, did anyone else see El Clásico yesterday? Holy crap was that a great game.

Later tonight I cease my dog-, cat- and orchid-sitting, and move to my new home across from High Park. I hardly know the park (Toronto's largest) and am lookin' forward to exploring it at both high and low speeds over the summer. (The weird knee and ankle twinges I was feeling in Paris have ceased, knock on wood.) And I'm gonna try to get into a yoga-every-other-day habit, too. Conveniently there's an ashtanga studio just blocks away.

eta: Have moved in. New place has Internet, albeit wonky. (note to wealhtheow and lapsedmodernist: not as wonky as Paris.) Let the summer begin.

03:06 pm - Some angsty angst with a side of angst and a bottle of Château d'Angst to wash it down, svp

Almost finished with the second draft of Swarm. Its word count, somewhat ironically, is going to be almost identical to that of the first draft, but look, they're better words, OK? I swear. It actually works as a book now, instead of an incoherent mess.

I'm not saying it works as a good book. A third draft is definitely required. I dunno. I'm at that point where I'm so close to it, and have read its words so many times, that I can't really judge whether it's good. Parts of it seem to gleam with that burnished crystalline elegance of publishably good prose, and fit together seamlessly and smoothly. Parts ... do not.

There will be another draft, and I fear it needs more than just polish. I've broken a few motivations while fixing the plot, but far more seriously than that, the characters just need to be more compelling. Sounds so easy to say, doesn't it? (hollow laugh)

I also think the climax is hideously implausible and ridiculously over-the-top. But then I always think that of my thrillers, and believe it or not, no one but me has ever complained about any of them yet. I dunno. I guess people like big booms.

Incidentally, this is totally a science fiction novel. Told in thriller mode, and sufficiently near-future that "technothriller" is the most likely marketing niche, but it's really out-and-out SF.

Other things:

• I am intrigued by Dreamwidth. Anybody got a spare invite?
  
• Some unused numerical goodies from the UK, found in the corner of my wallet:
  • An hour's worth at that Internet cafe in the corner shop along the exterior of the east side of Leicester Square - Internet City Ltd at 11 Charing Cross Road, according to the receipt - via time code XNES3, good for another day or two.
    
  • A prepaid UK Talk Direct phonecard, payphone access 00800 55 00 55 11, freephone 0800 376 4827, london 0207 075 3391, PIN 6347071885, good for another 3.5 weeks or so.
• I am finally going to fly Lufthansa, for the first time ever, back to Canada on Sunday. I look forward to their ruthless Teutonic efficiency.
  
• This may just be a side effect of lots of writing, but I think I am growing bored of the Internet.
  
• Also, with a similar side-effect caveat, I am beginning to wonder, perhaps heretically, if we collectively don't spend just a little too much time reading about / observing / thinking about made-up worlds and fictional characters. Or maybe even considerably more than just a little too much. Story, I'm beginning to think, is like fat or sugar; some is necessary, and it tastes great, but too much is ultimately bad for you.
  

10:35 am - When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro

Selections from the second half of John Higgs's I Have America Surrounded: The Life Of Timothy Leary:

• The local authorities initiated a zero-tolerance policy with the 'long-hairs'. Scores of arrests followed, as did many allegations of beatings and police brutality. People were arrested for jaywalking. Laws against riding skateboards were introduced and enforced. A 'Gay Squad' was created to entrap homosexuals. According to Rolling Stone [ed. note: in an article by Joe Eszterhas, who would go on to script Basic Instinct and Showgirls], other measures to defeat the menace that were raised at council meetings included permanent police barricades on both of the roads into town, the dynamiting of the caves in Laguna Canyon where the hippies were believed to hang out, and the mandatory removal of vocal cords of all resident dogs at birth to prevent the hippies from using guard dogs to alert them to police presence. A local columnist even went as far as to argue for conditional use of permits for the building of sandcastles. "No sandcastle may be built if the shape deviates from the established norm of sandcastle construction," he proposed. "A copy of the norm is on file with the chief of police."
  
• It was announced that [Leary] now had a $5 million price tag on his head. The figure referred to what the bail would be if he were captured, but many people misinterpreted this as a bounty. The district attorney of Orange County, Cecil Hicks, justified this astronomical figure, the highest bail in American history at that point, by claiming that "Leary is personally responsible for destroying more lives than any other human being."
  
• On the third day they were visited by a nephew of the Afghan king, who had been educated at Berkeley, where he had followed Tim's guidance to create a spiritually guided LSD trip. He was honoured to meet Tim and vowed to do all he could do to help. He brought some opium and a tape recorder, and offered to do an interview that he could use to influence important people.
  
  With the tape rolling, Tim gave an accurate overview of the events that had led them to Afghanistan. He then explained that his capture at the request of America was "an insult to the independence of Afghanistan." He said that he considered it an honour to be "one of the first American exiles" and that he would not live "as a prisoner in that country of slavery." [...] "I say this to the American government," he said. "If they try to take me back by force they will take a free spirit but a dead body. I will die before I go back to America!"
  
• The press seemed more concerned about what Joanna's aristocratic English family would think about her association with the despicable Dr. Leary. Tim's plea to immigration officials for asylum was referred to the Home Office and quickly refused. After only an hour and a half in London they were back in the plane and heading for Los Angeles.
  
• She announced that she was Mrs. Joanna Leary and that she would be speaking for her 'husband.' In her exhausted state she was less than coherent, and the press described her as a "dishevelled acid freak." To Joanna this was an outrageous slur. How dare they call her 'dishevelled'?
  
• Tim took the stand in a suit that had been borrowed from Joanna's previous husband. He gave his name and announced that his occupation was 'neurologician'. Both the judge, Richard F. Harris, and the jury must have known that they were in for an interesting day when Tim went on to explain that this was a word he had made up himself.
  
  That admission would come to look positively normal by the time Tim had finished. He went on to explain that the reason he had compared himself to people such as Socrates and Jesus Christ in his escape note was because his escape was the result of eternal patterns that repeat throughout history. From this perspective, his escape had been unpreventable and he couldn't really be held responsible for it. As a result of "12 years of deliberate and disciplined research with drugs and different forms of yoga," he explained, "my nervous system travels through historical times and to become Timothy Leary is like getting into a car and turning a key. I'm not Timothy Leary most of the time. I'm not in the twentieth century. None of us are." [...]
  
  It was, it is fair to say, an unusual defence [...] But it is worth remembering that what Tim said in court was no crazier than his conversations throughout his exile.
  
• He was sent to the infamous Folsom Prison, the last stop for lifers, the unrepentant, and those the system has given up on [...] The only company he had during that period was a voice that drifted in from the other side of his cell's brick wall. And that was the voice of Charles Manson. [...] When the light and dark icons of psychedelia talked for the first time, in the lowest and most brutal hole in America's prison system, the subject of brainwashing was quickly raised. [...] Manson realized that if Leary was not going to impose his will on the young, there was no reason he could not take that role himself. Indeed, Manson's strange hold over his generation continues to this day, to the extent that he has reportedly received more mail than any other person in the US prison system.
  
• It was during his stay in Folsom that Tim would truly cement his reputation as a brain-fried casualty [...] the concept of "panspermia," which argues that life originated not on Earth, but somewhere in the vast interstellar space beyond, soon became an important part of Leary's philosophy.
  
• If we were to plot how crazy Tim appeared throughout his life on a chart, we would now be looking at its highest peak. This was the Timothy Leary who heard about the approach of the comet Kahoutek. It was a signal from an intergalactic intelligence, he egotistically believed, to mark the change in human consciousness that he had brought about. It was coming for him. It was coming to free him.
  
• Joanna continued to try and sell Tim's ideas to the world, and sent them to research labs and universities that studied astronomy and space flight. The admirably polite and restrained reaction from the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University was perhaps typical. "I read [Leary's manuscript] with interest," they wrote, "but still cannot distinguish what is intended as fact from what is intended as metaphor..."
  
• Their ideas had become increasingly far-fetched and desperate. At one point Joanna had been approached by a hippie from the Midwest who believed that he could build a flying saucer. Joanna's plan was to equip this saucer with bright flashing lights and speakers that blared out "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" by Procol Harum. The saucer would then land in the prison exercise yard and Tim could jump aboard. Inside he would find Joanna, naked apart from a pair of long white gloves and a shotgun, and together they would fly off into the future. The guards, according to the plan, would be so stunned that they would drop their weapons and forget to shoot.
  
• Tim had repeatedly refused to inform, but eventually, by April 1974, he had a change of heart. All his other options had been exhausted by this point, and he faced a straight choice between remaining in jail and becoming a snitch. He chose the latter.
  
• The underground was overcome with panic and horror. Paranoia reached hysterical levels, for it was believed that Leary was ratting on anyone who had ever shared a spliff with him. Within a week of Tim taking a stand, the activist Jerry Rubin and the writer Ken Kesey had formed an organization called PILL, for People Investigating Leary's Lies. [...] They arranged a press conference in an elegant Georgian room at the St. Francis Hotel [...] Rubin spoke first. He denounced Leary as a "traitor." His condemnation, however, was interrupted by the appearance of a man in a kangaroo suit who burst into the room and attempted to hit Rubin the face with a custard pie.
  
• There was now little that the FBI could gain from Tim's continued collaboration. More importantly, the political pressure to keep him locked up had now ended following the post-Watergate administration changes. It was a combination of these factors that explains why, on 21 April 1976, Timothy Leary was given his freedom.
  
• He would later add in an apologetic introduction to Neuropolitique, "The first version of Neuropolitics was written in the years 1973-76 ... I must confess that at the time I was alienated, a bit daft and given to fits of irritation ... I hope those at whom I railed from jail will understand. I particularly regret my whining comments about Bob Dylan." It also did not help that Leary was preoccupied by science fiction during this period and frequently disguised real people and events under B-movie identities. He would refer to himself as Commodore Leri of the Galactic Intelligence Committee, for example. Eldridge Cleaver would become the 'Master of Space', while he was the 'Time Traveller'. None of this helped rescue his reputation as a great thinker.
  
• [...]a travelling debate with his old Millbrook nemesis G. Gordon Liddy, who had since served his time for his role in Watergate. The subject was duty versus freedom. It was a big hit on the college circuit [...] Behind the scenes they grew first respectful, and then friendly towards one another. Of course, neither could persuade the other to alter his opinions. Liddy had famously forced himself to eat a rat as a test of his will, so Leary offered to do the same if Liddy would try marijuana. Tempting as this deal might have been, Liddy refused on the grounds that he would not break the law.
  
• His attempt at scientific credibility was doomed to fail, partly because he was the infamous Timothy Leary and his reputation would always tower over him, but mostly because it simply isn't good science to create a theoretical model and claim that it represents different things at the same time. This thinking was, essentially, occult or mystical, and would never be taken seriously by the establishment. Those who took the trouble to study his model, such as the writer Robert Anton Wilson, would come away declaring it one of the greatest achievements of the later twentieth century. [ed. note: and if you can't trust Robert Anton Wilson in matters of scientific veracity, who can you trust?]
  
• By the mid-1980s, Leary had become increasingly fascinated by computers. [...] He wrote articles for computer magazines, declaring that individuals had to reclaim the computer culture from corporations. His house became full of young, intelligent people, and his garage full of equipment. In 1992 they built one of the first personal websites for him. [ed. note: leary.com was the first site I ever saw advertised, on bus shelters in NYC in 1995.] [...] The PC was, Tim would claim, the greatest thing since acid.
  
• In his role as 'stand-up philosoper' on lecture tours, Tim argued that philosophy, like baseball, was a numbers game. It was okay, and even necessary, to be wildly wrong on occasions.
  
• "I'm Timothy Leary and I'm seventy-five years old, and as a matter of fact I believe that I have just now died. It was a wonderful experience. Awesome. It's exciting, it's the most important decision you make in your life, as to how and when and with whom and why you die."
  

05:58 pm - also, winona ryder was his goddaughter

Selections from the first half of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, by John Higgs:

• Chino, a maximum security prison, was where convicts were evaluated and assigned to the most suitable prison to serve their time. On his third day at Chino he was sent for the mandatory psychological assessment and presented with a set of tests. A significant part of those, he was shocked to realize, had been written by himself, 14 years earlier, when he had been one of America's leading psychologists [...] The completed tests clearly showed, to the surprise of anyone who had read newspapers during the previous decade, that Dr. Timothy Leary was docile, conformist and meek. He was, the paperwork insisted, in no way an escape risk, and no one was prepared to argue with the paperwork.
  
• The idea of magic mushrooms had become known to mainstream society only a couple of years earlier, following an article by R. Gordon Wasson in the May 1957 issue of Life magazine. Wasson, an ex-vice-president of J.P. Morgan and Company, had the unlikely hobby of ethnomycology, the study of mushrooms in human society.
  
• Leary put together a study proposal entitled A Study Of Clinical Reactions to Psilocybin Administered in Supportive Environments [...] The proposal did raise a few eyebrows, for ultimately it was a licence for a bunch of academics to hang out in nice places, take as many drugs as they wanted and learn to have a really wonderful time. But academic freedom was an important principle in the culture of Harvard, and the department approved the proposal.
  
• As luck would have it, Aldous Huxley was at the time a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a short distance from Harvard. Tim wrote to him and asked for his advice in setting up his Psychedelic Research Program, and they met for lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. The soup of the day was mushroom. They both ordered it.
  
• Huxley introduced Tim to Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the British psychologist who had coined the word 'psychedelic' [...] who later said to Huxley, "But don't you think he's just a little bit square?" Osmond would later describe this impression as "a monumental ill judgement."
  
• "Why are you scared of me?" the convict asked.
  "Because you're a criminal. Why are you afraid of me?"
  "Because you're a fucking mad scientist."
  They both laughed, a connection was made and the atmosphere started to improve.
  
• Later experiments also confirmed that the number of people who reported a religious revelation after taking a psychedelic drug was as high as 90 per cent when the drug was administered in religious circumstances. Indeed, when the volunteers were tracked down 30 years later, they still made the same claims for the profound nature of what they had experienced that day.
  
• Time published a favourable article about the research and its implications, but it was met with a wave of disapproval and criticism. (Time and Life were run by Henry Luce. Luce and his wife were early users of LSD and had a number of positive trips together.)
  
• [The CIA] would ultimately spend many millions of dollars researching LSD. Initial reports, greeted with much excitement, claimed it acted as a truth drug. Later reports declared that it was utterly useless as a truth drug, and went so far as recommending that agents be equipped with a dose that they could self-administer if they were captured and interrogated. This would prevent them from being able to reveal secrets, or indeed, say anything coherent at all.
  
• Alarmed by the idea that enemy agents might spike CIA operatives with the drug, the Agency started administering it to their own agents in order to train them to recognize the effects. Initially this was done in controlled circumstances, but eventually it was felt that it would be more valuable to spike operatives without their knowledge. Clearly on a roll now, this scheme was eventually broadened so that it covered not just the unit involved in the research, but the entire Agency, and for a while surprise hallucinations and incapacity became something of an occupational hazard. The scheme was eventually stopped after a plan to spike the punch bowl at the CIA office party was discovered.
  
• Drug-addicted prostitutes in San Francisco were hired to pick up men and bring them back to a CIA safe house that was operating as a brothel. Here the prostitutes would administer the drug in drinks so that the CIA could observe the results.
  
• Leary believed that LSD was more important than Harvard, and he wanted everyone to know it.
  
• In Washington he was approached by Mary Pinchot Meyer, who had recently divorced Carl Meyer, an influential CIA agent. She explained that she intended to organize LSD sessions for a group of "very powerful men" and their wives and mistresses. A mistress of JFK, she was shot dead by an unknown assailant on a canal towpath in October 1964. It was Meyer, Leary claimed, who convinced John F. Kennedy to try acid while in the White House.
  
• "LSD is so powerful," Tim remarked, "that one administered dose can start a thousand rumours."
  
• Parents were becoming concerned. They were paying a lot of money for a Harvard education because they expected their children to become future leaders of American society. They had not expected telephone calls from their sons and daughters announcing that they had found God. They were not happy when they decided to drop out in order to study yoga by the Ganges.
  
• The pair began to fight during a group acid trip. "There were, like, 14 people sitting around us in a circle," Alpert recalled, "and Tim felt that what we were really fighting about was sexual in nature and so he took off all his clothes and offered himself to me, really. So we rolled around on the floor and then worked it out and we all went swimming the next morning. There wasn't any real sex between us; not that time or ever. Tim was threatened by homosexuality. I think he'd had some unpleasant episodes in his life that he wanted to forget."
  
• Only slowly did stories about the lifestyle within start to circulate, and the realization that the new "lords of the manor" were devoted to strange drugs, group sex and the most un-Christian interpretation of religion imaginable. It did not help matters that the grounds backed onto those of Bennett College, a private girls' school.
  
• Guests paid $60 a head for a weekend, and would find themselves meditating alone in empty rooms while cards containing written instructions were occasionally slipped under the door. Guests had to dress in togas and eat meals together in total silence. For full-time residents of Millbrook, who gobbled endless LSD tables and giggled away in the background, the whole thing was completely ludicrous.
  
• And so became a strange regime of "deconditioning" behaviour patterns. It owed a lot to the Armenian mystic and writer Georges I. Gurdjieff, who attempted to bring his followers to enlightenment through tools such as shock or mind-numbing exertion, such as cutting a lawn with a pair of scissors. At Millbrook, food would be dyed strange colours to confuse the senses. Communal parenting was introduced, much to the dismay of non-parents, who suddenly found themselves with the responsibilities of unpaid nannies. [...] Sexual hang-ups and jealousy are a big part of our conditioning, so they clearly had to go. The third floor was designated as an "anything goes" area, and all beds were open to all comers. Initial enthusiasm for the idea gradually declined, however, and it was grudgingly accepted that the plan was causing more tension than it relieved.
  
• Like Leary's Harvard position, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest helped to lend a certain legitimacy to the LSD experience.
  
• The original LSD was a semi-synthetic compound manufactured from natural ergot. Street acid was made from a synthetic substitute called ergotamine tartrate and, according to Michael Hollingshead, "the subjective effects were really quite different from those reported at Harvard." [ed. note; I am particularly skeptical of this bit.]
  
• There is nothing like an impending 30-year jail sentence, it seems, to focus your attention away from religious studies and on to more practical matters.
  
• The Millbrook estate was raided by local police. They were led by G. Gordon Liddy, who would shortly become the local district attorney [...] Liddy would then, of course, go on to help organize the burglary of the Watergate Hotel that brought down the Nixon administration.
  
• [While testifying to the US Senate] "If I was to give you an IQ test," Kleps declared, "and during the administration one of the walls of the room opened up giving you the vision of the blazing glories of the central galactic suns, and at the same time your childhood began to unravel before your inner eye like a three-dimensional colour movie, you would not do well on the intelligence test."
  
• It is hard to find an iconic event of the 1960s at which Tim and Rosemary were not present. They were at John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 'Bed-In', and sang on the recorded version of 'Give Peace A Chance.' They were even name-checked in the last verse. Tim was in the helicopter with Mick Jagger when it flew into Altamont, and sitting at the side of the stage when a member of the audience was killed by the Hell's Angels. He was involved in the formation of the Youth International Party, or 'Yippies', and he testified at the Chicago Seven trial.
  
• Timothy Leary was not a modest man. By now he saw himself as part of a lineage of great thinkers, such as Socrates and Galileo, whose ideas fundamentally overturned the existing model of reality. As he would later write, "It was my duty to escape." And by duty, he meant his duty to history.
  
• Tim realized he was now in the hands of a radical terrorist group who were perhaps the only people more hunted by the FBI than he was [...] The following day he was driven up into the mountains to be handed over to the leaders of the Weather Underground. [...] Out stepped two "turret-jawed heroes" and a "beautiful girl": Bill Ayers [ed. note: yes, the "palling around with terrorists" guy], Jeff Jones and Bernardine Dohrn.
  
• It was a statement of support for violent uprising. "There is the day for laughing Krishna and the day of grim Shiva," it began. "The conflict that we have sought to avoid is upon us [...] This is a war of survival [...] There is no choice left but to defend life against the genocidal machine [...] Blow the mechanical mind with Holy Acid ... Dose them ... Dose them [...] Aim for life. Shoot to live."
  
• Some people refused to believe it [...] Even Charles Manson was critical, in an open letter to "General Tim Leary" from his jail cell.
  
• He stood by it. He made this crystal clear to journalists who tracked him down in Algiers. "Every policeman is an armed, fascist, bully murderer," Leary told Donn Pearce, the screenwriter of Cool Hand Luke. "If he is not he should take off his uniform and quit. No one can be friendly with a pig, any more than you can be friendly with a Nazi. It is war. It is 'our nation' against the US Government [...] I would not urge or tell anyone to off a pig. But I would support, defend and glorify such an act on the part of someone else."
  
• "On January the 9th of 1971", Eldridge Cleaver narrated, "I issued an order to Field Marshal DC, who works in our Intercommunal Section here in Algiers, to go to Leary's apartment and take Leary and his wife, Rosemary to another location and to confine them there until further notice." Cleaver's notice to the psychedelic community was stark. "Your God is dead," he said, "and your High Priest is crazy."
  
• A year after their trip in Bou Saada, Tim and Brian discovered that in 1909 the occultist Aleister Crowley and the poet Victor Neuberg conducted a magical ceremony at exactly the same riverbed in the dunes outside Bou Saada [...] Mescaline was used, as was sexual magic, with Neuberg at one point buggering Crowley at an altar in a makeshift stone circle and dedicating the act to the god Pan [...] [They later claimed that] The entity that possessed Crowley's body rushed at Neuberg and "flung him to the earth and tried to tear out his throat with froth-covered fangs." Fortunately, Neuberg had been armed with a consecrated magic dagger and managed to fend the beast off.
  
• Leary started to think of himself as a 'continuation' of Crowley, as opposed to a 'reincarnation' as it is normally understood.
  
• [The arms dealer Michel Hauchard] took them to the finest restaurants and gave them lifts in his limousine. There were parties on speedboats and endless champagne. It was a lifestyle that agreed with Tim immensely.
  
• For a psychedelic historian like Horowitz, the experience of Hofmann recounting the experience of the first LSD trip to Timothy Leary whilst they drove the same route was about as good as it gets.
  
• Tim visited William Burroughs, who was staying in Valais, and who gave him a vial of speed and an autographed picture.
  
• The arrival of so many new, young people was, of course, a good excuse for an orgy. Tim's notes about the event are somewhat vague. "Tuesday," he wrote in his diary, "orgy." It was initiated by Brian Barritt, who is at least a little more forthcoming. "I remember that there were a lot of legs," he says.
  
• "Wrote three rock songs (lyrics and tunes) in one six-hour session. Solve et coagula!!!" [Tim] wrote the following week. "Turns out I have a pop star rock vocalist somewhere inside, and it was awesome to listen to the tapes of this strange Jagger-Hendrix voice shouting out the lyrics to 'Velvet Genes', 'Right Hand Lover', 'Power Drive', etc."
  

11:13 am - It seems I am doomed to never see the white cliffs of Dover.

I am in Calais. I am not supposed to be in Calais, I am supposed to be in a ferry en route to Dover, but the French fishermen chose today to go on strike. No, that's not right; a strike would be if they stopped fishing. They chose today to go on blockade. Basically they're stopping all sea traffic between England and France.

So I am in Calais. And frankly I saw enough of Calais last night. It's a grim little town. Tasty pastries, though. Also, crowds of refugees hoping to get to England, and an unusual number of heavily-armed soldiers in my hotel, dozens of 'em, toting assault rifles all over the place.

Well, as phrawzty says, you have to take the bad of living in France with the good. I'm down with strikes. Strikes are cool. But blockades? For the right to further overfish the world's already-hugely-depleted cod stocks? C'mon, fisherpeople. Way uncool.

The people at the ferry information desk said they thought the blockade might be resolved today. The media, however, report that there might be a meeting in Paris, possibly tomorrow, between the government and the fishermen. Kinda hard to see the armada heading home before that. Also, the last time this happened, the blockade lasted nine months.

There is a tunnel. There is a Eurostar station here. Tickets are available. But a ticket would cost me way more than I had budgeted for this trip. On the gripping hand, unexpected disasters cause unexpected expenditures, c'est la vie. Hmm, he said, hmm.

On a clear day you can see England from here. Today is not a clear day.

09:07 pm - parispix

From the last week or so:


From the Musée Curie. I bet you didn't know radium was good for your skin. Neither did Pierre or Marie - "Dr. Alfred" was no relation.

( et plus )


Stop massacring the English! (A bad picture, for which I apologize, but one I am grateful to have captured at all; I've been hunting this ad since first I saw it.)

Not bad, generally, but I expect lapsedmodernist's to be much better. No pressure.