Unreliable internet: an essay.

Be it resolved that reliable internet is a basic human right, like oxygen, water, and an accessible Target. Be it doubly resolved that, when one must spend the night in an unfamiliar place, without one's own pillow and dog, reliable internet is even more critical and necessary and without-which-one-simply-cannot. Footnote to the double resolution: it is right out of bounds that the internet should work before one goes to one's four hour board retreat, but then should be coy and wishy washy and oh-I-don't-know after the four hour board retreat.

People have promises to keep that require reliable internet. Emails to answer and Facebook to check and, you know, a thing on eBay that they're watching. And promises to keep!

In conclusion, quaint hotels-stroke-resorts without reliable internet are like wolves in sheep's clothing. Or, really, more like malaise-in-fresh-air's-clothing. Your quaint is nothing to me, hotel-stroke-resort, unless you have razor sharp blazing fast internet.

That is all.

Dear the Internet,

A visualization of routing paths through a
portion of the Internet. (Wikipedia)

I tried so hard to find you.

In West Yellowstone, you were not to be found in coffee shops, nor bookstores, nor brewpubs, nor restaurants, nor in the streets.

In Yellowstone National Park, not that I'm complaining, you were nowhere.

In my hotel, the threshold to you--a tiny little wireless signal--diminished and disappeared as I walked down the hall to my room, in the door...and poof  you were gone.

The internet in this town was
scarce indeed.

Do not ask me, the Internet, why I cannot do without you. I did without you, so it isn't a matter of cannot. But at this point in time--in history--the Internet is like oxygen. It is like oxygen, bonded with hydrogen. It is like a molecule of water, joined with other molecules of water in a heedless flow of information, like a river. Like one of the many rivers we walked beside in Yellowstone, where, it goes without saying, you, the Internet, were nowhere to be found.

In the end, we went in the tiny, tidy little library of West Yellowstone. The librarian looked at me. He know without my even saying.

"Do you by chance have wireless?" I asked, weary and pathetic.

He held out a slip of paper with the network and password.

The Internet, thank God for libraries. And librarians.


next time, don't be such a stranger,

htms

Open letters to my fancy hotel room.

Dear my fancy hotel room,

I enjoy many things about you: the quiet way you wait for me when I am not here. Your wooden hangers.  The bathroom made just for me. How I can double-lock your door for an extra-safe feeling. How your heavy curtain can entirely shut out sunlight, or, in contrast, can be pulled to the side and the city lights can shine through the sheer.

So many charming things: you are right downtown, and are sited among historic buildings, and your lobby is large and gleaming. I like you. I do. Quite a lot, actually.

What I do not care for, my fancy hotel room, is your very expensive wireless internet that I pay for, a bonus $12.95 per day, on a day-by-day basis. I do not care for how your expensive wireless internet displays its ever-diminishing duration right under the Chrome toolbar. I do not care, my fancy hotel room, for how you also ask me to consider, moment by moment, upgrading to the extra turbo-charged Executive Business Wireless Internet of the Gods, for $16.95 per day. This seems insulting and, quite frankly, elitist.

And most of all, my fancy hotel room, I do not care for how your internet is so expensive and yet it is also so very slow. Balky. Recalcitrant. Like drying glue, viscous and sticky. Without speed or alacrity or ease.

May I suggest to you, my fancy hotel room, that despite all the things I enjoy about you, the dollars I'm paying for your unsatisfactory internet should be included in the fancy price I'm already paying?

Please consider it,

htms.

***

Dear my fancy hotel room,

I did not appreciate the way your key-card reader, which allows me to enter my room if it so chooses to flash its tiny green light of approbation, signalled me with a hinky little red and yellow ambiguity upon my return after a brief foray to the gift shop for a much-needed ice cream bar purchase.

My fancy hotel room: when I am trying to enter a room that is far away from home, indeed is my home away from home, that is not a good time to be coy. Let me in. I am paying for you to let me in.

I'm in no mood,

htms.

***

On the other hand,

My fancy hotel room, I did enjoy the fact that the guest shop downstairs did have a fancy ice cream bar available for purchase.

Well-played,

htms.

My so-called TV life.

What's that?--you want to know what I watch, week to week, on television? I thought so. Well, I am happy to oblige.

I feel like I'm maybe the only person in the world who still watches TV, as opposed to watching television shows via the internet, and likes it. This makes me feel a little like an old person, but the habit of regular TV watching can be explained: I believe it is due (a) to having come of age when watching TV was your only option, as there was no interweb, and (b) to liking the rhythm of a week being paced, in part, by the show that's on each night, if there is one. (I can feel your horror radiating all the way over here, through the tubes and onto my screen, because of how much TV you surmise I must watch. Well, horror away. I do watch that much TV. And I like it.)

So this means that, if the world is good, there's a show on most nights of the week that I like to watch. This is especially important for week nights. The world is most in balance if I can get through my working day on a Monday, for instance, and there's an episode of The Closer awaiting me at its appointed hour. That episode redeems whatever drudgery or difficulty or simply the long hours of the day that preceded it. On Tuesday, The Good Wife; on Wednesday, Modern Family; and on Thursday, the glory that is the NBC lineup, but especially Parks & Recreation. And 30 Rock.

Well, I have just named the television shows that are my mainstays at the moment. Like every other thinking person, I am awaiting the new season of Mad Men. I have several little DVD things lined up, because I either didn't have HBO, or I wasn't able to finish the series in real time (The Wire/In Treatment and Saving Grace, respectively). And I am about to go into mourning because The Closer is winding up its current stint, which will lead us inexorably into its very last episodes ever.

This summer, I started to watch Criminal Minds with my daughter, who is a huge fan of the show. I myself love a police procedural, and I came to appreciate the show. I am looking forward to the new season, which I will have to DVR so I can watch it later, as it is up against Modern Family, and the historian and I watch that one together. The DVR is hooked up to the downstairs TV. Currently, running son is residing in the downstairs lair, so it's possible that there may be a whole slew of Criminal Minds for me to watch sometime, when I don't feel I will be intruding on the whole lair-ness happening down there. Who can say.

I would like to have a bunch of new awesome shows to watch. I wish I had started Breaking Bad when it started. Ditto Men of a Certain Age and other stuff, like House. I guess. I guess I should have watched Downton Abbey, so maybe I'll try to catch up on the first season before new episodes start.

But I need to get this whole project organized. The television routine is part of what keeps everything else in its proper place, and I need that, the people. I need it, or everything else, and I, will feel crazy. Or maybe I might have to, what? do something else, like something productive. Write, or read.

But I don't want to get ahead of myself. I will be checking out a few things in the new season. And if you have something you think I should watch, something that's still broadcasting in the real world, in real time--on television, and not on my DVR--please let me know. I will consider it an act of generosity, and a kindness, which I shall never forget.

(thanks to Amelia, who pointed out this post on every day I write the book)

What is "Joshua Clover"?

I bought The Totality for Kids at that great poetry bookstore in Seattle, and just yesterday, settled in to read it. I'm enjoying it quite a bit--it's witty, sharp, interesting, possibly a little narcissistic in its avant-gardeiosity, but still. Here are some lines that I especially liked from "The Other Atelier":

History and capital had been Astaire and Rogers but are now Clark Kent and Superman

Taking advantage of the exchange rate I have acquired a certain afternoon in 1953

Though it meant selling the rights to the word peignoir

And the neighborhood where you first heard it

* * *
Also, I heard him speak on a panel at AWP about the American vernacular, where he talked entertainingly if a teensy bit bafflingly about Paris Hilton and, if I'm remembering correctly, Donald Rumsfeld? Where he said, "Apparently, the members of this panel are employing the classic strategy for setting people at their ease by citing Heidegger. Well, I'm not taking that lying down--I'm starting with Heidegger." And where he ended by saying, "Should not the poets who want to write in the language of the unacknowledged legislators of the world first become the acknowledged legislators of the wolrd? then all poetry would be truly hot."

So, I went on the World Wide Web--you know, the Internet--to find out some more about this guy. Here's what I found:

1. He was born in Berkeley in 1962.

2. He has two books of poetry, the above cited Totality and Madonna anno domini, which in 1997 won the Walt Whitman Award (chosen by Jorie Graham, who at that time was teaching at the Iowa Workshop, where Clover got his MFA. Hmm. Not that there's anything wrong with that.).

3. He teaches at U.C. Davis. He has a blog called "jane dark's sugarhigh!" that's pretty cool.

4. He writes as a critic for the Village Voice and The New York Times.

5. He wrote a book about The Matrix (the movie) for the Modern Classics series, published by the British Film Institute.

6. He hasn't been interested in the self since 1989. I guess I wonder what that means. I guess.

Here's an essay on LANGUAGE poetry. Here's an article about the iPod Shuffle, which is hilarious. Here's a reading, so you can see him in action.