Talking Tom Wolfe

Since my last few posts have been on poetry and the theater, it strikes me as appropriate, or at least not altogether inappropriate, to continue with a literary theme. And yes, I know that technically there is a world of difference between the literature and performance, but they do tie together as art forms that are based, more or less, on the word. And anyway, I'm just looking for an excuse, after all, to get this post off the ground.

So, I want to take this opportunity to share another New York Society for General Semantics program that was held on June 27th of 2018. The program was devoted to discussing Tom Wolfe, who had passed away the previous month. And I want to note here that I had the opportunity to meet Tom Wolfe for the first time in 1999, when he gave a Marshall McLuhan Lecture at Fordham University, preceded the evening before by a special dinner at the Canadian Consulate. We also corresponded and spoke on the phone on several occasions, and he generously allowed us to include his poems inspired by McLuhan in the anthology I co-edited with Adeena Karasick, The Medium Is the Muse [Channeling Marshall McLuhan].

It was, therefore, sad news indeed to learn of Wolfe's passing, and it seemed altogether appropriate to organize a program paying tribute to him. The session, entitled, Tom Wolfe, Man of Letters, Man of Words, had the following write-up on the NYSGS website:

On May 14th, the world lost one of its most celebrated, talented, and accomplished authors, Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr., best known simply as Tom Wolfe. Wolfe earned his PhD in American Studies from Yale University in 1957, and worked as a newspaper reporter for a decade, writing for periodicals such as the Washington Post and the New York Herald-Tribune, as well as New York magazine and Esquire.

Wolfe pioneered the use of a personal, literary style in news reporting and feature writing that became known as the New Journalism. A best selling author, his nonfiction works include The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965); The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968); The Pump House Gang (1968); Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970); and Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976). His examination and critique of the contemporary American art scene, The Painted Word (1975), proved to be extremely controversial. His history of the early space program The Right Stuff (1979), was adapted as a feature film by Phillip Kaufman in 1983.

His book, In Our Time (1980), featured his own artwork, while From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), as a follow-up to The Painted Word, took on the topic of American architecture. Wolfe turned novelist with the publication of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), which was followed by A Man in Full (1998), I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), and Back to Blood (2012). Hooking Up (2001) collected several works of his short fiction coupled with several of his essays.

Tom Wolfe was an early promoter of media ecology scholar Marshall McLuhan, famously posing the question, "What if he's right?" in a 1965 essay published in New York magazine, and comparing McLuhan to the likes of Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov. Wolfe's last book, The Kingdom of Speech (2016), a critique of Noam Chomsky's approach to linguistics, was awarded the Institute of General Semantics's S. I. Hayakawa Book Prize at last year's [2017] annual Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, which was co-sponsored by the NYSGS.

I am going to interrupt the quote here to state that it was truly a privilege to have Tom Wolfe with us at the 2017 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture. And his brief acceptance speech upon receiving the Hayakawa Book Prize was itself quite memorable, and fortunately preserved on video:





And now, let me return to the NYSGS program description:

Wolfe is credited with coining a number of terms, including the right stuff, radical chic, the Me Decade, good ol' boy, and statusphere. As an author and journalist, he was truly a man of letters, to invoke an old fashioned phrase that fits well with the famous man in a white suit, as he was known. And as a student and scholar of language, art, media, and communication, as well as a writer, interviewer, and raconteur, he most certainly was also a man of words.

On June 27th, 2018, the New York Society for General Semantics honored his contributions, creative and intellectual, and celebrated his achievements with a special panel discussion on select aspects of his career and publications.

The participants on this program were:

Thom Gencarelli, Professor and Chair of the Communication Department at Manhattan College, member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of General Semantics, and the Board of Directors of the NYSGS, and the new editor of ETC: A Review of General Semantics.

Martin Levinson, author of several books on general semantics including a forthcoming new edition of Practical Fairy Tales for Everyday Living, President of the Institute of General Semantics and Treasurer of the New York Society for General Semantics.

Lance Strate, author of several books including the award-winning Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition, Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, Trustee of the Institute of General Semantics, and President of the New York Society for General Semantics.

The program was moderated by Jacqueline Rudig, Treasurer of the Institute of General Semantics, and member of the Board of Directors of the New York Society for General Semantics.

It was a thoughtful and belletristic discussion!

And here now is the recording of the program:






And I have to say that, in my opinion, this was one of the best programs we've had since I've been organizing them for the society. Don't you agree?

Fear and Hope on the Fourth of July

Just in time for our Independence Day, I thought I'd share my latest op-ed for the Jewish Standard. The title as it originally appeared in the June 30th issue, is Fear and Mostly Hope on the Fourth of July (the "mostly" having been added by the editor to give my piece a more positive spin). So anyway, here it is, fireworks (metaphorically speaking) and all:

It was the summer of 1974, I had just graduated high school and was looking forward to starting my first year of college in the fall, and I had been accepted into a special summer program called Torah Corps, sponsored by what was then known as the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, now the Union for Reform Judaism. It was an intensive learning experience for a small group of students, all of whom had just completed 10th, 11th, or 12th grade. Most of us were from the United States, but the group also included several students from Canada.

The program was held at a lodge in Littleton, New Hampshire, and I well recall how we all gathered around the lone television set available to us on the night of August 8 to watch President Richard Nixon deliver a speech to the nation. We knew that he was in trouble over the Watergate scandal, but it still came as a tremendous shock when he uttered the words, “I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.” We vocalized our sense of dismay at this unprecedented development collectively, through gasps and cries and the like. At least those of us who were Americans did so, in response to what we perceived to be a somber and tragic event. But in a somewhat irreverent manner, one of the Canadians started to say, “Yitgadal v’yitkadash…”

Reciting the first few words of our Mourner’s Kaddish did succeed in breaking some of the tension of the situation and injecting a note of humor. But many of us were not amused. There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, and this was a time to shed a tear, not for Nixon himself but for the way in which he had tarnished the institution of the presidency and tried to undermine the democratic process.

And yet, somehow, we survived Watergate and moved forward as a nation. Just as we had survived the assassination of John F. Kennedy 11 years earlier. Apart from the loss of idealism and proliferation of conspiracy theories, some commentators started to point to historical parallels between the United States, characterized at that time by the intensifying social and political unrest of the 1960s, and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This especially was the case after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 at the hands of a Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Sirhan, just two months after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, James Earl Ray.

The decades that followed certainly were not free from scandal. Ronald Reagan gave us Iran-Contra and Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about the Monica Lewinsky affair, narrowly avoiding a conviction and removal from office. But neither event seemed to threaten the viability of the American republic as a whole, and in between we witnessed the sudden collapse of the Communist bloc, first in Eastern Europe and culminating with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The end of European Communism came about so quickly that it seemed almost unbelievable. We celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming of freedom and democracy to Russia, and presumably to the other former Soviet republics (prematurely in some cases). Some wondered what would happen to the United States without its one-time adversary serving as a foil and contrast. And some even wondered if the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union might be followed by an equally sudden collapse of the West at a later date.

But for the most part, we emitted a collective sigh of relief at what some philosophers referred to as the end of history, that is, the triumph of liberal democracy.

But we also live with a historical consciousness that has been rare in human history. As the late Elizabeth Eisenstein explained, the ready availability of books, pamphlets, and periodicals, made possible by the printing revolution that began in the 15th century, eventually resulted in widespread awareness of the chronology of calendar time. (Calendars also were produced by printing.) Especially starting in the 19th century, more and more people came to recognize and understand their place in world history. As limited as the historical knowledge of the average American may be, everyone learns about the years 1492 and 1776. And we study history in grade school, and learn about our Civil War, and other events such as the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the scandals associated with the Ulysses S. Grant administration, and the Teapot Dome scandal during Warren G. Harding’s presidency.

At a time when we are witnessing an unprecedented number of scandals and improprieties associated with the White House, and the election of Donald J. Trump has been described by some as an extinction level event for American democracy, history may offer some solace by reminding us that our republic has weathered many storms in the past. And on this Fourth of July, at a time when many of us fear for the future of our country, I think it only fitting to recall the fact that we have survived the legal, moral, and ethical failings of more than a few of our elected officials, and that we have done so while expanding civil liberties, human rights, and the rule of law.

Taking the long view of American history gives us cause to be optimistic. At the same time, taking the much longer view of Jewish history can provide a somewhat different perspective, as we have seen the great nations and empires of the past come and go over the millennia. We, the Jewish people, have seen the rise and fall of great powers, and from that deep historical consciousness we know that nothing in the temporal realm lasts forever, not even the American republic that we love so much. And so, we cannot so easily dismiss the possibility that the end is nigh. Or the understanding that we just don’t know when the end might come, or if it might come as suddenly as it did for the Communist bloc and the USSR.

Once, long ago, I attended a lecture given by a major scholar and intellectual, and during the question and answer session, he was asked if he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future. His answer stuck with me, because it expresses my own sense of ambivalence. He said that on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays he was an optimist, and on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays he was a pessimist. Or was it the other way around?

Either way, for this Fourth of July, I think it only fitting to be an optimist, and to underscore the resilience of our republic. We have seen dark times in the past, and survived, and if we the people are willing and able, and with the help of divine providence, our great Enlightenment experiment will continue for generations to come.

May it be so.

Time Metaphors

It seems only fitting here on Blog Time Passing that I take up the concept of time, at least from time to time. And time being an abstract and intangible phenomenon, we tend to relate to it through more concrete and familiar metaphors. And one of the most common, at least in western cultures, is the metaphor, time is money.

There is a significant discussion of this metaphor in the important book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, which was required reading back in the good old days in Neil Postman's media ecology doctoral program.





I added for good measure Ray Gozzi's masterful meditation on the media ecology of metaphor, The Power of Metaphor in the Age of Electronic Media, one of the first books to be published in the media ecology book series I edited for Hampton Press. That series is no longer active, since Hampton no longer accepts new books for publication, but the future of media ecology book publishing is a topic for another post.

Getting back to the time is money metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson note that it, like many of our most important metaphors, is so deeply embedded in our language that we no longer recognize it as a metaphor. The fact that the metaphor is imperceptible is what gives it such enormous power over the way that we experience reality, or at least that portion of reality that the metaphor covers. In this case, that's time.

For example, without thinking much about it, we say that we can spend time, save time, lend time, spare time (brother, can you spare a time?), borrow time, invest time, budget time, and spend your time profitably, not to mention ask if it's worth your while or how much time will it cost you? More generally, you can give time, take time, waste time, use time, lose time, put aside time, run out of time, have time, have enough time, have time left, etc.

Lakoff and Johnson note that there are two basic metaphors that underline time is money: that time is a valuable commodity and that time is a limited resource. To this, I would add that there is a more basic metaphor at the root of this, that time is a thing, rather than, say, a process or event. 

This brings to mind Alfred Korzybski's critique against treating concepts as things, one of the key elements informing his discipline of general semantics. It also brings to mind Benjamin Lee Whorf's investigations into linguistic relativism, and his observation that while western languages are noun-oriented, which goes along with treating phenomena as things, Hopi and Navajo languages are verb-oriented, therefore providing a worldview in which phenomena tend to be experienced as events rather than than objects. Whorf makes the point that this view is more consistent with our understanding of reality following Einstein's paradigm shift in physics than is the western worldview. Of course, our mistaken view of reality has led us to try to capture and control reality, which is the basis of our science and technology.





Viewing time as a thing in turn leads to the idea that time can be measured, and this begins with calendars, a point that Harold Innis makes in passing in his discussion of the development of ancient civilizations. But what cements the notion of time as a quantity is the invention of the mechanical clock in 13th century Europe, which also sets us on a course towards increasing mechanization in general, leading to the printing press with movable type, and eventually the industrial revolution, as Lewis Mumford makes clear.





So, we can see the trajectory of western civilization has driven us towards the objectification of time, experiencing time as an object that can be measured, captured, and manipulated. And this leads to a very nervous, almost frantic relationship with time, as opposed to more traditional understandings, which include the sense that it will happen in time, in its own good time, a nicely environmental, dare I say media ecological metaphor, not to mention the realization that all things must pass, that to everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven as Ecclesiastes states, and Henry David Thoreau's lovely quote, time is but the stream I go a'fishing in.

So it comes as no surprise that a couple of years ago two University of Toronto scholars concluded that the time is money metaphor is not the key to living a more satisfying life. In a news brief entitled, Time=Money=Less Happiness, Rotman study finds, subtitled "Putting a monetary value on your time isn't the route to happiness," we are informed of the following conclusion:

A new study shows people who put a price on their time are more likely to feel impatient when they're not using it to earn money. And that hurts their ability to derive happiness during leisure activities.

Treating time as money can actually undermine your well-being," said Sanford DeVoe, one of two researchers at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management who carried out the study.

Now, it is significant that this comes from a management school, aka a business school. Much of what management is about is making money. More importantly, the study of management may be said to begin with Frederick Winslow Taylor, and the development of scientific management in the late 19th century. Scientific management is all about the quantification of time in the pursuit of ever greater efficiencies. Indeed, scientific management is the beginning of what came to be known as efficiency experts. No wonder that Neil Postman identified Taylor and Taylorism as the turning point in transforming American culture from a technocracy to a technopoly. This of course builds on Jacques Ellul's pioneering analysis of technique in modern societies.





Not that the contemporary field of management studies is all about scientific management and efficiency, as there has come to be increasing emphasis on human relations, systems approaches to organizations, leadership, and much more, a good deal of it pioneered by Peter Drucker, who is considered the true founder of management scholarship, and a media ecologist to boot!





Anyway, here's a little more from the University of Toronto press release:

Professor DeVoe and PhD student Julian House based their conclusions on three experiments. In each, a sub-group of participants was primed, through survey questions, to think about their time in terms of money. This group subsequently showed greater impatience and lower satisfaction during leisure activities introduced during the experiments. However, they also reported more enjoyment and less impatience when they were paid during one of those activities, which was listening to music.

The experiments' results demonstrate that thinking about time in terms of money "changes the way you actually experience time," said DeVoe. "Two people may experience the same thing, over the same amount of time, yet react to it very differently."

With growth over the last several decades in jobs paid by the hour, it's important for people to be "mindful," of the impact this can have on their leisure enjoyment, he says, and allow themselves "to really smell the roses."

I can't argue with their conclusions. I can only wonder if the study was the best use of their own time? Or was it just another example of behavioral science research yielding trivial results that simply confirm what we already know? Feel free to let me know what you think, that is, if you have the time...

Robert Priest, Dr. Poetry, and the Viral Verbal Vortex

 So, here's something else that I'd like to call you attention to.  A while back, I was asked if I'd write something about the Canadian poet, songwriter, musician, and writer, Robert Priest, for the online poetry and creative writing journal/magazine, Big Bridge.   And I was very happy to do so, because I like his work a great deal, and I also consider Robert to be a friend.

So, my essay was included as part of a feature on Robert Priest, and that link will take you to the main page, with links to his books, and to my own and three other essays and reviews of Robert's work.  I recommend reading them all, and especially "Robert Priest: Poet/Minstrel in Utter Space" by Sheree Fitch. her piece is great, especially for those of us with an academic orientation!  

There are also links to his viral video, One Crumb,





and to a 2007 public reading of some of his lyrics in the Ontario legislature,





And there's also a link to his bio entry on Big Bridge, where it states

Son of a navy officer and a member of the Wrens, Robert Priest was born in Walton-on-Thames England on July 10 1951 and emigrated to Toronto Canada at the age of 4. Growing up in Scarborough, Priest developed his love of literature from the fanciful stories his mother often told him before bedtime. By the age of 8, Priest had already begun to dream of becoming a writer. In 1970, he entered the University of Waterloo to study mathematics but soon dropped out so that he could put all his energies towards poetry. He released his first book of poetry in 1979 entitled The Visible Man. He has since published 9 more books of poetry, four plays, a children's novel, and a hit song. He is also a rock singer of note, having released several albums and videos which came to prominence in the l980's and 90's. He has also performed his children's songs for Sesame Street. Currently he is preparing his second young-adult fantasy novel The Paper Sword for publication in 2014 by Dundurn Press. A new book of children's poems: Rosa Rose is scheduled for a 2013 publication date with Wolsak & Wynn. He has just released his fourth CD of songs: Feeling the Pinch. He lives in Toronto with Marsha Kirzner and is a regular contributor to Toronto's weekly magazine Now.

The author of ten books of poetry, he won the Milton Acorn Memorial People's Poetry Award for The Mad Hand (1988). In his alias as Dr. Poetry he wrote and performed thirteen segments for CBC radio's spoken-word show Wordbeat. As a songwriter, he co-wrote the SOCAN airplay award-winning number one hit, "Song Instead of a Kiss" for Alannah Myles. His aphorisms have already appeared in The Farmer's Almanac and Colombo's Canadian Quotations. He is the author of four plays, including The Coming, which was co-written with Leon Rooke. Priest's musical play Minibugs and Microchips received a Chalmer's Award. His novel, Knights of the Endless Day (1993) received an Our Choice Award from the Canadian Children's Book Centre. And as for his children's poetry, Daysongs Nightsongs and The Secret Invasion of Bananas and Other Poems (2002) are on the CBC's recommended reading list.

And in case you were wondering, there's a bio entry for me as well, which I won't reproduced here because, well, after all, you know me.  But I will note that it contains a link to Blog Time Passing, of course, of course.  And you can see my essay in all of its natural born glory over on Big Bridge via the following link:  "Robert Priest, Dr. Poetry, and the Viral Verbal Vortex" by Lance Strate.  But I might as well share it with you here—you knew I would, didn't you?

So, here we go:

Robert Priest, Dr. Poetry, and the Viral Verbal Vortex

Robert Priest is also known as Dr. Poetry, which begs the question, if a medical doctor cures diseases of the body, what does a poetical doctor cure? The answer comes readily to mind: He heals the maladies of the word. The symptoms of such sickness include dull and lifeless language, eminently forgettable phraseology, swollen tongues and feverishly belabored sentences that no human ear was ever meant to hear. In response, the good doctor provides medication to counteract the sclerotic hardening of the categories, loosening linguistic arteries so that the verbal flow may bring much needed oxygen to the brain. His poetry is credited with halting an epidemic of influency, and it serves as vaccination against the spread of many orally communicated ailments afflicting creativity. Indeed, it is rumored that Dr. Poetry has discovered nothing less than the cure for the common prose.

I will return to the topic of contagion in due course, but in the interests of full disclosure let me note that I first encountered Robert Priest online, on MySpace back when it was the social network and Facebook was still a gated campus community. My first impression of Robert was that he captured a unique mix of Elvis and the Beatles, with a touch of Monty Python, and a bit of the shaman thrown in for good measure. I should add that his MySpace profile and blog pages were modest, and his interactions with others congenial, in contrast to the heavy self-promotion, competitiveness, and conflicts that characterized many others in this online writing community, amateur and accomplished poet alike. His approach was consistent with Canadian culture, as distinct from that of us noisy, nosy, nervy Americans. But I don't want to discount the individual, personal qualities of a poet who is confident in his ability, content with his success, and convivial in his outlook. Simply put, Robert is a mensch. I would also add that I consider him a friend, by which I mean much more than someone who accepted an online friend request. And we did eventually get to meet offline, when he came down to New York City to participate in a conference I had organized, and his poetry reading met with an extremely enthusiastic response from a gathering of media ecologists.

My first impression, upon encountering Robert's work online, is that he was engaged in the kind of wordplay that would have delighted Marshall McLuhan. In addition to being a media guru and Canada's intellectual comet, McLuhan was a master of the aphorism, with sayings such as, invention is the mother of necessities, the future of the book is the blurb, art is anything you can get away with, and of course, his famous maxim, the medium is the message. McLuhan no doubt would have appreciated Robert Priest's pithy and poetic aphorisms, some of which are collected in Time Release Poems (Ekstasis Editions, 1997), including

Sometimes it is the book that opens you.

Too much time is wasted in the making of clocks.

The teacher is the lesson.

These sayings are excellent examples of formal causality, as discussed in the recently published McLuhan collection, Media and Formal Cause (NeoPoiesis Press, 2011). Robert's ability to reverse figure and ground serves to create new perspectives and understandings for the reader, illustrating McLuhan's argument that poesis can function as an organ of perception. Moreover, one of McLuhan's laws of media is that of reversal, that anything pushed to its extreme will flip into its opposite. Robert's experiments with reversal, published as Reading the Bible Backwards (ECW Press, 2008) were very much in keeping with this principle. In general, his work exhibits a sensitivity to the fact that time and space are relative, human beings can only exist in relationship to one another, and everything exists in the context of interdependent systems or ecologies. Consider, for example, several more of his aphorisms:

Good lovers come in pairs.

If you would see a parent, look in the eyes of a child.

If you change either, you change the other.

Robert's method is entertaining, aesthetically pleasing, and intellectually stimulating, but it also provides keen insights into the human condition. One aphorism that I find especially moving is: People begin as dreams and end as memories. These profound metaphors for infancy and old age can be taken to mean that we begin as inspiration, and end as poetry. Before Freud introduced the notion of the unconscious mind, dreams were believed to come from outside of us, i.e., a supernatural source, and inspiration is very much about breathing life into inert material. And in ancient Greece, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the muses, and the source of all eloquence. Poetry was understood to be the art of memorable speech, of thinking memorable thoughts to use Walter Ong's happy phrase, and I would suggest that it remains a viable way to define (and evaluate) poetry to this day. From this point of view, Robert Priest is truly favored by Mnemosyne and her daughters.

In the ancient world, aphorisms were part of a continuum that, on the far end, included epic poetry, the classic example being the Iliad and the Odyssey, otherwise known as the songs of Homer because they were, in fact, folk songs; by the same token, poets like Homer were known as singers of tales. It is not surprising, then, that in ancient Greece, the term they used to describe someone as educated and cultured was not literate or urbane, but musical. And in this sense, Robert Priest is truly musical, as a singer of tales, a writer of lyrics, a musician and recording artist. His poetry resonates, it strikes a responsive chord, it echoes throughout the inner landscape of the mind, while tickling the tongue and dancing across the page.

Glimpses of the old, oral tradition can be found in the culture of children, who have yet to have their senses and sensibilities altered by literacy, and the musical quality of language is most readily apparent in children's poems. The mark of a complete poet, I would suggest, is the ability to compose poems and songs for children, and here too Robert Priest distinguishes himself. For example, the poetry published in The Secret Invasion of Bananas (Ekstasis Editions, 2002) invites the reader to sing along. Consider the first stanza and chorus of "Space Spaghetti":

From Aldabran came noodle man
In a saucer on a trip
He went to boiling water
And there he took a dip.
He married noodle lady
In parmesan confetti—
They had a hundred noodle kids
And called them space spaghetti.

Space spaghetti space spaghetti
Look up in the sky
Space spaghetti, space spaghetti,
You'll see some fly by.

There is the requisite fun with food, nature, and science fiction and fantasy themes in this volume, as well as some play with popular culture, such as the poem, "Darth Orange", as you can see from the second stanza:

Darth orange, darth orange
He was such a bad fruit
He came here to conquer
In his orange space suit
But when he saw luke banana
He knew it was no use
Now there's no more darth orange
Just darth orange juice

There is more to Robert's poems for kids then just silliness, however, as he also summons images of beauty and mystery, for example in this last stanza of "Stargirl":

There was no beginning
There will be no end
To other lands
This message send
There is nothing
That can bring delight
Like a silvery ship
That can ride on light

And there is also a conscience in evidence in this collection, in poems like, "In the Next War" which begins

In the next war don't drop the bomb
drop the excess wheat
Drop the sacks of grain and powdered milk
we have too much of
Send our best men over in daring flights
their bombers full
of fish eggs huge cheeses
and birthday cake icings

In medieval Europe, theologians argued that God communicated to humanity through two different books, the book of scripture and the book of nature. This view is wonderfully expressed by the author of Reading the Bible Backwards in a poem entitled "Wild Books":

A dove book it came down
and landed in my hand
and there it sang its song to me
at last upon the sand

A fish book it swam by
I saw upon its scales
memories of treasures
from long forgotten tales

The water book its waves they roared
and carried vessels high
It lifted oars from shore to shore
and fell down from the sky

The sand book it came to me
I turned its many pages
The wind blew and the desert moved
my mind across the ages

I opened up the book of souls
it sang in my hand like thunder
I looked at last in the book of stars
and I stared all night in wonder

Dr. Poetry is quite the pediatrician, but he is also on the cutting edge when it comes to working with viral infections. The metaphor of going viral on the internet is a popularization of a neologism introduced by the biologist Richard Dawkins, and widely adopted within cyberculture, the meme. Dawkins had argued that genes, as self-replicating bits of DNA, are the true units of evolution, and that organisms are just devices genes use to reproduce themselves—talk about reversals! Dawkins also speculated that ideas, phrases, and the like are also self-replicators, using human brains to propagate, and he called these basic units memes. This notion did not get much attention until the popularization of the internet in the 90s, when people could actually see the spread and reproduction of messages through email, bulletin boards, and social media such as MySpace. Doug Rushkoff gave the term meme a more familiar nickname in his popular book, Media Virus! (Ballantine, 1994), and our Dr. Poetry has been working on a series of innoculations that he calls meme switches, and that will be made available in published form in the near future with the title of Splice Mix. This includes, under the heading of "The Spice/Splice Meme Splice" sequences such as

The splice of life
The splice garden
The splice trade
Herbs and splices
Sugar and splice
A splice box of earth
Splice girls
Old splice
Splice it up a little

Some recombinations are quite incisive, as can be seen in this excerpt from his critique of organized religion via the "God/Gold Meme Splice":

There is no gold but gold
Gold is perfect
Jews Muslims and Christians
All worship the same gold
The church is the house of gold

Other memetic edits are delightfully ribald, for example these first few lines from the "Arts/Arse meme splice":

Of late we have seen a decline of the arse
If we as a society cannot support our arse then we are in grave danger
People need arse
A thriving arse scene is a measure of a country's soul

I am a master of the dark arse
I got a fine arse award
I love the arse
I dedicated my life to the arse

These manipulations have an uncanny way of uncovering hidden truths, as when Robert reveals, in "Big Bother is Watching You" that, "all men are bothers, in the eyes of god" or, in his "Iron/Irony Meme Splice" that, "the hull of the titanic was made of solid irony."

I have not emphasized the fact that his switches are reciprocal, so that he gives us "The Poetry/Poverty Meme Splice" that includes "epic poverty," "slam poverty," and the observation that "performance poverty is very popular these days," and also a reversal in the form of "The Poverty/Poetry Meme Splice" that includes remarks like, "as long as there is poetry in the world, I will not rest," and references to "the rising poetry rate amongst people of colour." Clearly if a new goddess has joined the pantheon in recent years, one called Memesyne, then she too favors Robert like no other.

It has been a great pleasure to get to know Robert Priest over the past several years, to interact with him, trade quips, and provide feedback. As a doctor of the poetic, he has cured me of the blues and the doldrums on many occasions, and for that I am grateful. But I must be honest here, and warn you that his medications are quite habit-forming, resulting in an addiction that is almost impossible to shake. And as for his recombinant wordplay, reversals of sequence and meme splicing, they are downright contagious. Robert Priest's poetry represents the kind of epidemic the world could really use. Catch it, if you can.

 And there you have it.  I'm looking forward to listening to his latest feeling the pinch CD, which I'm told is somewhere in transit between Toronto and New York City.  In the meantime, one of his new songs can be heard online, it's got a great, Beatlesish sound to it, but I do have to warn you that it makes liberal use of a four-letter word, in case you are offended by such language.  If not, check it out.

McLuhan Intersections

So, this past November I was in Toronto for the big Marshall McLuhan Centenary conference and celebration, McLuhan100 Then/Now/Next (see my previous post, McLuhan Then/Now/Next Soon), and one of the many events that took place was the McLuhan Piazza, hosted by the Italian Consulate in Toronto, and organized by University of Bologna's Elena Lamberti.  It was a bit of fun, a bit of a throwback to the 60s with drummers and extemporaneous talks, and I was very pleased to be a part of it, having been asked to be one of the participants, talking about McLuhan's context in the sixties, and also about the future.

So, one of the individuals present was the artist, Panchal Mansaram, a friend of Marshall McLuhan's, and he did some videotaping of the event, and that footage was in turn edited and turned into a short YouTube video that's worth sharing with you here on Blog Time Passing, if for no other reason than the fact that I'm a part of it, especially at the end.  It's called McLuhan Piazza - then/now/next, and here it is:

And here's the write-up on the video's YouTube page:

1st International
 Conference on McLuhan

CSI Spadina, Toronto, 
November 9, 2011

featuring: 
Katherine Adams, Marco Adria, Costis Dallas, 
Derrick de Kerchove, Paolo Granata, Stephen Kovatch, 
Elena Lamberti, Robert K. Logan, 
Cristina Miranda de Almeida, Peppino Ortoleva, 
Lance Strate, Dominique Scheffel Dunand, 
Yoni Van Den Eede, Eduardo Andrés Vizer
Voice of Marshall McLuhan

Video by P. Mansaram (pmansaram@yahoo.ca)

 I should also note that Panchal has an art show up in Canada starting tomorrow, it's called Intersection—Mansaram & McLuhan, and here is the very cool poster for it:

I am told that there will also be a show in New York City later this summer, and I'll be sure to let you know about that.  In the meantime, here is the write-up from the Ed Video Gallery:

Ed Video Gallery

Collages, paintings, and media art by P. Mansaram inspired by and in collaboration with Marshall McLuhan from 1966 to 2012
 

June 4-29, 2012 with Reception on Friday, June 8 at 7pm


Soon after P. Mansaram immigrated to Canada in 1966, he became friends with the influential media theorist Marshall McLuhan. A productive working relationship developed, leading to numerous collaborations on several projects. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Mansaram’s work inspired and created with McLuhan was exhibited at the Picture Loan Gallery, and he organized happenings at the eminent Isaacs Gallery in Toronto. The Rear View Mirror series of collages, collaborative paintings, films, and audio were exhibited, and later toured the Atlantic provinces and India.  This same work, along with recent projects, will be featured at Ed Video Gallery at Intersection 40 years later.

Featured will be the Rear View Mirror series of collages created between 1966 and 1972. The collection combines elements from both Eastern and Western culture, a central theme of Mansaram’s work and McLuhan’s theories.  Parallels are drawn between the hyper-vivid and frenetic culture of India and McLuhan’s ideas about the complexity and influence of mass media. Intersection also features films and videos, covers he designed for McLuhan’s books, and displays of correspondence documenting their friendship. A surround sound audio installation created from an interview Mansaram conducted with McLuhan in 1967 is the audio backdrop for the exhibition. McLuhan discusses the prevalent ideas of that time - the East’s influence on the West, the hippie movement, the psychedelic experience, and how electronic communications change our perception of time and space.  Mansaram's work captures elements of McLuhan’s prophetic ideas that continue to define and clarify our media-saturated world.

 This sounds downright amazing, as does Panchal's biography:

Panchal Mansaram - Bio and Chronology
 
CITIZENSHIP- Canadian
BORN- I was born in Mount Abu. This scenic part of Rajasthan, India, is where
Maharajas built summer palaces during Colonial rule. This is also famous for special Rock Formations, and for tenth/twelfth century Delwara Jain Temples, which some think to be more beautiful than the Taj Mahal.
EDUCATION- Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, India 1954-59
1963-64, at the State Academy of Fine Arts, Amsterdam, Netherlands on a Dutch
Government Fellowship.
PRACTICE- My art practice has gone through various phases, and varieties of media, currently working in mixed-media, a special blend which I have termed as Mansa-media
1959- I created ‘Impressions from Nepal’ series (tempera on paper) shown at Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay, for which I won first prize at the prestigious Bombay State Art Exhibition
1960- ‘Calcutta by Night’ series (oil on masonite) shown at the Artistry House in Calcutta
1966- Immigrated to Canada, where I met Marshall McLuhan and Av Isaacs
1967- Created ‘East West Intersect’, a multimedia concert at the Isaacs Gallery with
encouragement from McLuhan. I also made a five minute long 16mm film featuring Marshall McLuhan for this event
1970’s- Created a mixed media series of paintings, titled ‘Rear View Mirror’ (title
borrowed from McLuhan), including a collaborative art work with Marshall McLuhan.  This series of works were shown at the Picture Loan Gallery in Toronto in 1974, where Marshall McLuhan was the chief guest. In 1971/72, the exhibition traveled to seven galleries in the Eastern Provinces of Canada, and then to India at the Dhoomimal Art Gallery in New Delhi and Jehangir Art gallery in Mumbai in 1975
1970’s- I started working with fabric as collage medium. This eventually became mixed
media using xerography transfer, serigraph, blue prints, etc. These works were shown at the Taj Art Gallery in Mumbai, India House in New York, and Burlington Art Center, Burlington.  During this period I did pioneering work in Xerography, using black and white and colour Xerox and Blue Prints. I became member of International Society of Copier Arts in New York and contributed to their quarterly, featuring member’s creations in Xerography and bookwork.
1975- I had a collaborative exhibition titled ‘Duet’ with American artist Jim Ridlon of mixed-media blue prints on fabric and paper shown at the Art Gallery of Hamilton
1980’s- I did large format lasergraphic works, inspired by my immediate environment such as my backyard and school. I created works such as ‘Moving Landscape’ and ‘At the School Lockers’, a lasergraphic installation, and a series of works titled ‘New York-New York’ shown at the Piramal gallery in Mumbai, India. 
1992- Air India Commission- Air India commissioned me to do a series of images
on India Destinations, to be used for a series of lasergraphic art posters.
1997-2007 - ‘Art on the Rocks’, a sight specific mixed media art on rock formations in Mount Abu, India.
2006- Retrospective at the Print Studio, Hamilton
1999-2008– created images in mansa-media of Indian cities, Pushkar, Delhi, Mumbai.
Banarasan exhibition was held at the Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant, and South Asian Gallery of Art in Oakville
2008/09- Created a series on Diversity in Ontario
2009- Created a series on Udaipurto shown at Bougainvillaea Gallery in Udaipur, India
2010/11- ‘Mahal Maharaja and Mansaram’ at Art Square Gallery, Toronto and at South Asian Gallery of Art, Oakville
2012- ‘Intersection, Mansaram & McLuhan’ at Ed Video Gallery featuring video, audio, mixed media works.  Also preparing for future exhibition of collages at JM Gallery in New York City
 
Art in the collection of: Royal Ontario Museum, Air India, Marshall McLuhan estate, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Government of Ontario Art Collection, National Gallery of Canada, Modern Art New Delhi, and numerous private collections.
Member of: CARFAC, SAVAC, Royal Ontario Museum, Hamilton Artists Inc.,
Colour and Form Society (life Member), Bombay Art Society (Life member), Gallery 44, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Arts Hamilton, The Print Studio

And just in case anyone is harboring any doubts or suspicions, Panchal was kind enough to include a scan of the following letter from the media guru himself:

Truly a living embodiment of media intersections (aka piazzas), the in-between quality of gaps and intervals and all-pervading invisible environments that so fascinated McLuhan, Panchal provides us with an outstanding example of media ecology praxis, putting theory into artistic practice.   I'm looking forward to his Manhattan exhibition in July and August.  It'll be just the cool medium we'll need for a hot New York summer!

Short Takes on Media Ecology and McLuhan Studies

So, this past November, at the big McLuhan Centenary blowout in Toronto (see my October post about it, McLuhan Then/Now/Next Soon), I met with Emanuela Patti and Matteo Ciastellardi, two European scholars who have recently started up a new journal, the International Journal of McLuhan Studies.  I've provided the link to the journal's website, although there's nothing to see there right now, but I believe there will be something up there soon.

Anyway, they showed me their first issue, which was actually quite colorful and attractive.  Here's their logo, which is pretty cool in its own right:

So, Emanuela and Matteo asked me to join the editorial board of the journal, which I was happy to do, and they also asked it they could interview me on video, which I agreed to as well.  

We wound up doing the interview in a lounge at our hotel after returning one night from that evening's activities, a poetry reading that I had been asked to MC, with open bar, at an art gallery.  When we got back, I was a bit disheveled, tired, slightly inebriated, etc. but I said, let's do it, we may not have a chance later, and I can always find the energy to talk about media ecology, at just about any time.

So, we did the interview, and recently they uploaded four short segments of it to their YouTube channel, Canale di mcluhanstudies, so I figured I'd share them with you here:


Each segment consists of my answer to a question.  The first is What is Media Ecology?:





The second is a question about the relationship between Marshall McLuhan and Media Ecology:





The third is a response to the question, What kind of discipline is Media Ecology?:

And the fourth addresses the question of, What is distinctive about the North American intellectual tradition?: 




So there you have it, a four-part Q&A, fittingly enough, given that McLuhan's final work on the laws of media is famously referred to as the tetrad.  

So, if these videos enhance your understanding of media ecology at all, or maybe your curiosity about the subject, then perhaps they have also obsolesced a bit of misunderstanding, or confusion, and I would certainly be thrilled if they in any way retrieved a spirit of inquiry, and finally, given that they are videos, it would be truly outstanding if their effects included a flip or reversal into learning more about media ecology by reading what's been written on the subject, by McLuhan, and Postman, and others (maybe even me).

Outage Outrage

So, you may have heard about the 4-day BlackBerry outage that began in the UK, and spread to Europe, the Middle East, India, Africa, and finally North America, home of the Canadian-based company that makes that cellphone, Research in Motion.  Not for nothing those phones have been nicknamed, CrackBerry, for the addicting quality of the email service that they provided  before the iPhone and Android got into the mobile internet game.

So, this was no short-term, system is down phenomenon, this was a major communications BlackOut, and BlackEye, for BlackBerry.  And as it turns out, I was interviewed by Roger Cheng for a piece he posted on the major tech site, c|net, described as "the premier destination for tech product reviews, news, price comparisons, free software downloads, daily videos, and podcasts."  

The article appeared on October 17, with the title, Hey, RIM! Time to step it up with better BlackBerry freebies, followed by the line, "Research in Motion, is that really all you've got?"

Roger begins by noting the following:

After a critical outage that left some BlackBerry users without e-mail for as many as three days, RIM is offering customers $100 worth of premium apps for free. Enterprise customers also get a month's worth of technical support.

The problem is, the BlackBerry faithful stick with you for primarily one reason: your excellent e-mail service. If they wanted games, media apps and other whiz-bang features, they would have fled to an iPhone or Android smartphone already. You lose your e-mail, even for one day, and you lose your best reason for keeping a BlackBerry.

Okay, so here's where I come in:

"(RIM) has to do something really substantial, something that makes people go wow," said Lance Strate, a professor of communications and media studies for Fordham University.

Now, of course, I said a great deal more in the interview, and it's always the case that only a small bit of what's been said is actually quoted, but here's how Roger continues:

So here's a modest proposal: work with your retail and carrier partners to get your customers early upgrades to new BlackBerrys. For some of your best customers, hand them out for free. Already own a new BlackBerry? Throw in a Bluetooth handset or other accessory.

Interesting idea, right?  Good advice, you might say, or at least provocative, right?  I'm glad you think so, because that's what I said in the interview.   I said that offering $100 of apps won't impress most customers, they probably have all or most of the apps they want already, and anyway they're not substantial, they don't feel like you're getting anything much.  As for free technical support for a month, that's something most customers probably won't even need!  But hardware, now that would make a difference.  A free upgrade, or at least a really good Bluetooth accessory.   That's what I said. 

Let me be clear, though, that I offered the idea free of charge, and felt no special ownership of it, not that anyone can really claim to own ideas anyway. Especially as an academic, I'm used to giving ideas out freely.  So, it just strikes me as funny to see it appear without attribution, but this is not exactly journalism, is it?  It's commentary.  Anyway, the important thing is to get quoted and get your name out there, that's what the publicity game is all about. The medium is, you know, the message.

So, let's go on with the article:

Sure, giving away phones sounds like sacrilege at a company that generates the bulk of its revenue from hardware, but bear with me. Such a program would buy a massive amount of goodwill from peeved customers. You could even snatch away the spotlight from Apple's latest iPhone launch.

RIM's BlackBerry DevCon conference starts tomorrow. Just think how different the atmosphere would be if attendees were buzzing about the new BlackBerry program instead of grousing about the outage.

There are longer-term advantages, too. You can lock in customers that may have been tempted by the new iPhone or the latest wave of Android smartphone. You're so proud of the latest BlackBerry operating system? Here's a great way to get more users to try it out.

Yes, your margins would take a hit. But right now, the smartphone business is all about market share, and you're on the losing end. Keeping existing customers--particularly loyal ones--in the fold with new BlackBerrys is one way to preserve your base.

So yeah, I said some of these things too, about creating goodwill, and keeping your customers, preserving your base, locking people in.  But Roger has put his personal spin on it, no question there, and he does a good job of it, as he continues:

Unlike other analysts and bloggers who think the outage sounds the death knell for RIM, I think there's still time to repair your image. While customers may be angry, service contracts, business ties and other impediments keep most people from leaving right away.


A stepped-up giveaway program is another way to get some of your other BlackBerrys out in the wild. While the BlackBerry Bold flagship smartphone is performing well, the rest of the lineup has fared poorly.

"(RIM's) other BlackBerries, namely its aging Curve line and new models including the pure touchscreen Torch 9850 appear below plan," Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said in a recent research note.

If they aren't selling well anyway, why not create incentives to get some of these devices into your customers' hands?

Hey, you're already giving away PlayBooks to developers at DevCon. Why not expand that program to some of your best customers? When the iPhone 4 launched, AT&T allowed customers to upgrade their phone after just one year. You could work with the carrier partners and provide incentives to them to enable similar early upgrades.

For now, the apps and the promise of a month of technical support--which leaves your non-enterprise customers out in the cold--just don't cut it.

And now, back to me:

"It's definitely too little, too late," Strate said. "I think they're really not recognizing the magnitude of disconnecting people at a time when we have come to expect connectivity 24-7."

And that is really the key point here, the fact that we are accustomed to being online all the time, constantly connected, dependent on that sense of electronic contact and the presence of a digital safety net, addicted to it, some would say.  To be disconnected, then, is traumatic, and that's what RIM has failed to recognize, the psychological trauma that BlackBerry users experienced. 

And so, Roger returns to the theme of the inadequate response:

Are BlackBerry customers really going to be satisfied with a free copy of puzzle game "Bejeweled" or shooter "N.O.V.A."? These are trinkets that many would have never downloaded in the first place.

"We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience," RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said in a statement today. "We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again."

But you can't guarantee that customers will be safe from another outage. Despite your claims of superior reliability and security, your network has suffered from its share of problems, including a previous e-mail and messenger outage just last month.

Your customers will be a lot more understanding if they're using a new BlackBerry. RIM, it's time to step up your game.

Great way to conclude, with strong words and a dramatic challenge.  And this piece did quite well, as it was also picked up by Scientific American's website, where it appears under the same title, Hey, RIM! Time to step it up with better BlackBerry freebies.  But Scientific American, hey, that is very cool!  

And there is an entirely strange, weird, alternate reality version appearing on dflix.net, under the mutated title of Hey, RIM! Time to step it up with improved BlackBerry freebies – CNET News, with the piece reading like someone made strange minor alterations throughout.  To give just one example, my first quote in the article is rendered thusly:

“(RIM) has to do something unequivocally substantial, something which creates people go wow,” pronounced Lance Strate, a highbrow of communications as good as media studies for Fordham University.

 I'm not sure if this was some program that randomly substituted synonyms for some words, or if it was sent through Google translate into another language and then was translated back into English.  But hey, a "highbrow of communications," I kind of like that title. Please use it from now on, okay?

Anyway, the piece was picked up by quite a few aggregators out there, including the following:

Dallas Newss.com, October 17^th, 2011

http://topics.dallasnews.com/article/0ejt3JTgzy82x?q=iPhone

Daily Me, October 17^th, 2011

http://dailyme.com/story/2011101700003287

Tech News AM, October 17^th, 2011

http://technews.am/conversations/cnet-news/hey_rim_time_to_step_it_up_with_better_blackberry_freebies

Text Telephone, October 17^th, 2011

http://texttelephone.com/?p=4809

Phone Prize.com, October 17^th, 2011

http://phoneprize.com/b/2011/10/18/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies/

View Headlines.com, October 17^th, 2011

http://www.viewheadlines.com/Technology/Article.aspx?i=362523&t=Hey-RIM!-Time-to-step-it-up-with-better-BlackBerry-freebies

Mobile Phones.co, October 17^th, 2011

http://www.mobile-phones.co.za/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies/

Common4u.com, October 17^th, 2011

http://www.common4u.com/2011/10/17/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies/

Donald Schwartz, October 17^th, 2011

http://donald-schwartz.com/2011/10/17/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies/

Breaking News Now, October 17^th, 2011

http://www.breakinnewsnow.com/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies-cnet/79748

Capecod.com, October 17^th, 2011

http://topics.capecod.com/article/01QyePW0nJbaq?q=retirement

Thunderfeeds, October 17^th, 2011

http://thunderfeeds.com/reader/news/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies

Technology Feed Today, October 17^th, 2011

http://technologyfeedtoday.com/2011/10/17/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies-cnet/

Popular Gaming, October 17^th, 2011

http://populargaming.com/7-mobile-gaming/android/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies-cnet/

Bourne Computer Centre, October 17^th, 2011

http://www.bournecomputercentre.co.uk/hey-rim-time-to-step-it-up-with-better-blackberry-freebies/

Life While, October 17^th, 2011

http://topics.lifewhile.com/article/02FWbROgAr0SH?q=iPhone

Xydo, October 17^th, 2011

http://www.xydo.com/articles/35274001-rim_needs_to_step_it_up_with_blackberry_freebies

Zicos.com, October 17^th, 2011

http://en.zicos.com/tech/i26203833-RIM-offers-free-apps-to-make-up-for-BlackBerry-outage.html

Buzz Tracker News, October 17^th, 2011

http://www.buzztracker.com/category/rim

Feeds on Floor, October 17^th, 2011

http://www.feedsfloor.com/telecommunication-wireless/hey-rim-time-step-it-better-blackberry-freebies

Techno Tree, October 18^th, 2011

http://www.technotree.org/blackberry-maker-tries-to-soothe-angry-customers-businessweek/

Augusta.com, October 18^th, 2011

http://augustaga.com/blog/rim-might-compensate-operators-inquirer/

Kcsi.com, October 18^th, 2011

http://www.kcsitv.com/cnet.php?SessionID=7e37075f4e9c92091203e

Brad Potts.net, October 18^th, 2011

http://bradpotts.net/2011/10/htc-loses-patent-case-against-apple-san-francisco-chronicle.html

The list was compiled by some interested PR folks, not me, in case you're wondering how I'd have the time to find all of these links, or why I'd care to.  I include them here because this is all of interest from a media point of view, cell phones and connectivity, journalism and commentary, publicity and diffusion.

So, to return to the topic with which this post began, is this the death knell for the BlackBerry?  Unless they suddenly take my advice, I think it is the beginning of the end, and they'll soon go the way of the PalmPilot.  And me, I've had an Android, and now I have an iPhone, and there simply is no comparison, it's the iPhone hands down, it's superiority is crystal clear.  Android is the cheap alternative to the iPhone, and I don't think there's much room in the market for a third party line.

But, as to the larger point, in the end, I do think we won't be satisfied with anything less than complete and continual connection, for better or for worse, and system failures and outages will become increasingly less tolerable, more traumatic, for all of us. 

And you can quote me on that!