Pretty women…
Fascinating…
Sipping coffee,

Dancing… pretty women.

Pretty women

Are a wonder.

Pretty women!

Sitting in the window or

Standing on the stair

Something in them cheers the air.

Pretty women

Silhouetted…

Stay within you,

Glancing… stay forever,

Breathing lightly…

Pretty women,

Pretty women!

Blowing out their candles or

Combing out their hair,

Even when they leave

They still are there.

They’re there.
—Stephen Sondheim, from “Sweeney Todd”

It’s always been my fortune in the latter part of my life to find myself caught up with women who others cannot help but love. They drew affection naturally, draw it, rather, as the luck continues. There is something in each of them, or was, that brought out a sense of affinity, a sweetness, a joy, a natural allure. I cannot speak of physical appeal, not objectively, because to me—and not only to me, but that’s not the point—they were and are beautiful. But I don’t think attraction of a carnal sort is a necessary component of this common response, this spontaneous response. For one, it has always been both women and men who were drawn to these women who were, and are, oh so important to me in my life.

I had some premonition of this as a younger man, but my own interests were more strictly passionate, more singularly objective. And the goal was always bound up in a natural tendency in myself to devotion, specifically to uxoriousness. I sought a mate, always. And my tender efforts, mixed up, confused no doubt and entangled, with more hormonal derivations of my attractions, always ended up in bad judgment, for reason had little part in it. As much as I am by nature analytical, observing, perceiving, processing, ruminating and digesting through the great maw of my intellect (likely itself a very small thing), reason always came last in making my choices, if it came at all. I do not mean to suggest that I am some brilliant philosopher or that I was precocious in any kind of wisdom, though, in retrospect I always showed glimpses at least of a kind of prescience. In the case of women, however, in my youth there was no sign of the reliability of my intuitions. These instinctual habits of mind, upon which I have come so much to depend for my judgment for several decades at least, and reliably so, had they not developed fully, if they had developed at all.

I made mistakes in my choices, as did my partners. And we came to grief. The rupture of any bond, especially those meant, from the first moment one is conscious of being bound in intention, to be long-lasting, dare I say life-long, is overwhelming in its initial shock. Recovery is sometimes hard won in time, if not in emotional stress and in the diminishment of one’s capacity for engagement with life in general. The rupture of the bond of marriage raises the outcome of such breaks, and their collateral effects, to a higher power. I have been married three times so far. Twice, youthful couples that we were, these marriages ended in divorce. The immediate cause each time was a discovered infidelity, neither of them (or any, to be mathematically accurate) mine, but I came to discover this was irrelevant. There are those who would also say that, indeed, the infidelity or its discovery was not an immediate cause at all, given that in each case, my wife decided to take the long walk out the door to our home together. Alone. And I must add: if only momentarily so.

But this is not a narrative about what life they found for themselves with others, after our separation and divorce. Indeed, it’s not even a narrative necessarily about me, and my misadventures. The point is, at least twice in my life I entered into an agreement, a formal joining based on trust, bound by a mutual avowal of that trust, and it was sundered. I take nothing away from these women, as they were themselves lovable in the way I describe in my opening. Were they not, at the very least, there would not have been the one additional set of arms willing to enfold them in loving, trusting embrace that was in each case waiting to do so.

No. I’d say, much as I cannot deny there was a sundering of that trust, a betrayal, the blame, which is the better thing to ruminate upon, lay with both of us. Anyone reading this may infer what they like, but I learned the hard way what to set my thinking upon. And it was necessary to do so, if I had any hope for what remained of my life after the second divorce, never to experience such a sundering again. After the passing of what has been as many years, and more, as an adult since that second split, I can say, I’ve managed not to. There has been another marriage, and another end to it, but that resulted from a far more irrevocable, and undeniably the proximate, cause. In that sovereign state called marriage, I am sorry to differ with the Reverend Dr. John Donne, but death does have dominion, without question as a matter of terminating the earthly condition of it, no matter how loving and strong the bond.

And it has been more in reflection on my years together with my third wife, than through any active contemplation as we lived them, that I came to understand the depth of her innate, her absolute, lovability. I mean that quality as I mean to have you contemplate that quality in others, at least in women, when and if you should come upon it. Since her death, I have had the fortune of meeting other women, some of them more quickly and consciously identifiable to me as possessing that quality. Not with any allure or attraction beyond admiration and a wish for friendship, as differentiated from other kinds of desire, but with the difference that I could, for a change, substantiate any spontaneous draw I might feel, or not, with a conscious awareness of each of them as a person, wholly separate, with an inviolable integrity, which included this quality I am calling lovability. I mean of course a personality and a character intertwined possessed of what could be a long string of associated qualities that constitute them. Qualities like those already alluded to, of sweetness and joy, but also gentleness, and modesty, of guilelessness at bottom. However, such a listing might end up being endless, without enhancing or clarifying the point if I have been at all successful in making it.

I began by speaking of my good fortune, and, I do so despite death and the disaster it wreaked upon my life, that is, the destruction of the very everydayness of my life being the worst part. I say this, because grief does subside. There is nothing equivocal about death, sudden or expected. In its wake, you learn the meaning of absolute, of being definitive, of an end to all that. And you learn to submit to that grief, and you learn to let it overcome you, and then to let it leave by leaching away, bit by bit. As much as there is such a thing as a slow death, there is such a thing, too, as a slow resurrection, an exquisite incremental return to life.

One lesson in this should be enough for any lifetime, but as the healing occurred for me, I had the continuing fortune to meet another, it seemed, of these lovable women I speak of, I hope it is clear, with adoration. I was only beginning to get to know her, however intensely we permitted ourselves to be with one another. In terms of temporal commitments to be together, in terms of openness of consciousness, in terms of being confessional. I speak for myself of course, because, in a way I had not expected, one result of my experience of my first, impossibly (or so it seemed) glorious re-flowering of a life that had begun to emerge from a long winter of losses and killing frosts, was that I felt free. That freedom was a new experience, for all my experiences, generally, and specifically in my eternal commerce with women over a life growing ever longer. It was a freeing sensation, rather, existential, more than a notional abstraction of the sort we speak of when we speak of politics or public discourse. What was freed within me was my self, my sense of who I was, and of what I could permit myself to be or to say. Without, in fact, granting a conscious reflexive act of permission, however unspoken.

There was a lesson in this too, which I could not learn in full until later in this very late period of the history of my own life. And it was death that once again was the agency of delaying my full mindfulness of what I was experiencing even as I lived it. For death made another visitation upon someone I had come to love, whether for her lovability, which seemed amply proved by the reverence and affection displayed by all who knew her—my newest set of friends—or because I simply had met another woman in the course of my sojourn on the earth with whom, and for whom, I felt such things. I will never learn whether there was a chance for the sort of permanence I have sought since I was reasonably old enough to think about such a conjunction. You’d think I could tell, given my knowing at least that it is in my nature, de rerum natura, truly, or at least insofar as the “thing” whose nature was to be known was myself. But I could not. We learn about the permanence of things, I now believe, by living them, all the way through. And, as I’ve already noted, the only definitive end, the probative finish to a matter of permanence and whether something has truly endured to that end, is death. And so death provided some definition, but not of the sort I, or anyone sane and loving, would wish.

My second lesson (among many, I am sure, but these will require more reflection, and hence, more opportunities to speak and write of them separately, with the focus each deserves), occasioned by a death, by my bearing witness to it, and the suffering of another soul within its grip, was this. I learned, with greater force, what I thought I had already learned long since in my struggle to understand how to live with another human being, my counterpart, my equal, but given my preferences and disposition, differentiated nonetheless by secondary and apposite manifestations of gender. I learned, once again, there are boundaries, and they define not only where one ends and another begins, but where, and under what circumstances, and within what terms I may exercise that freedom to be myself I thought I had finally discovered. I am sure whatever other lock there is in my being, that binds me by turns, or keeps me out of places I have a right to go, but have never before ventured—whether from fear or ignorance I still cannot say—has its key in this quality of being lovable. It’s a theory that posits in such a quality being inherent in the other, in women, because, much as I have a love for friends who are men, it is a different kind of love and satisfies a different instinct. I cannot even say that such men as I know who are true friends, and reciprocate my friendship and love unquestioned (and I am, I am sure, if only by dint of some of my behavior, disposed not to make it easy—not at first efforts) possess the lovability of which I write here.

I am sure of that quality, so sure that I can write of it, as I never have before. There are no instant revelations here. No epiphanies at all, least of all good news, as if these insights had occurred just yesterday. In fact, even as I write this, I must note that I began this essay more than two months ago, and have learned that much more in the interim. This is undoubtedly why I could finish it. What has happened is another stroke of luck, not a mere single stroke, but a painting full of them, I have a sense of possibly a gallery of luck. I have met another who is, in fact, the purest embodiment of that lovability I have ever met. I am sure that one reason for my life is that I might live it, willy nilly as I might and did live it, so I could in fact be ready at this time—more or less—to meet such a one, so pure a one and appreciate her and have the chance, once again, to live it right, to be free, but only so free, to let her be free, in all her gentleness, and sweetness, and modesty, and, yes, vulnerability, and to know how to honor these qualities and cherish them, and avert any risk of sundering what I would prefer never again to have sundered. And also, yes, of course, to love her, as a sign, if of nothing else, that I recognize that capacity in her.

by

The U.S. stock markets have been in a state of wobbly uncertainty for so long, it seems masochistic even to think, never mind worry about it. Today, they look like they collectively are looking for the momentum to sink another 3%. The problem is, what strategies the remaining investors seem to have are all simply predicated on wanting a sure thing. They’re pessimistic today because the “super committee” of Congress has forecast dismal failure at coming up with a “plan” for cuts and whatever else. An idiot could have predicted that when President O did what he had to in the summer and caved on the brilliant tactic of automatic cuts demanded by what is now comically called the Teanderthals in order to keep the U.S. and the world from a worse fate. The consequences of default were obvious to the same idiots cited above.

What investors don’t want to do is look at things the way the management of the companies in whose shares they speculate do—look a bit further down the road, that is, look at a picture a bit larger than the one on the tiny LCD of the next eight hours. With no “plan” the automatic cuts will occur. Nothing drastic (Medicare and SSI for now are spared), but the effects of cuts in government funding will occur in enough areas of the daily lives of ordinary Americans—OK, I can go along with calling them the 99%—that, if they’re hurting and some of them are pissed now, things should get really ugly in the months ahead.

One can only hope they will get ugly enough that there will be revulsion and rejection even from the bone-head constituents of the demented right-wing Congressmen and Senators who have survived so far by feeding those folks back home a steady diet of idiotic conceits and outright lies in an unremitting stream, and all with a singular goal. To keep Obama from gaining a second term. The underlying reasons why are too ugly to contemplate; the stated reasons are the basis for a new definition of the usual louche and despicable motives of the epithet “politician.” If the solution, short and medium term to our economic woes, is the elimination of tax cuts that were instituted by the Moron in Chief, George W. Bush, so be it. Our immediate problems stem from his having rammed two unfunded wars down our throats, with the aid of those assassins of rationality called the Republican Party: cuts insufficient in amounts to send the whole nation immediately and irretrievably down the river, but sufficient nonetheless to prevent those desperate to keep the creaky raft of state from heading to the white waters ahead, because just beyond those rapids are the precipitous cascades of utter ruin. All this was done while also persuading the American public that tax cuts for all, but which mainly benefited the rich—OK, I’ll go along with calling them the 1%—was a wise thing to do, while we continued to spend like the indulgences of our rich Chinese uncles, always ready to lend us another trillion or so, would last forever.

We’ll have to wait and see, of course, how the public reacts this time around, as things they’re used to (at government expense) begin to dry up: roads will deteriorate further, and won’t get fixed. People will get restive and there will be more protests, and more crime, and police departments will be forced to cut back on hours and personnel. Teacher contracts will not be renewed, and no new teachers will be hired. Slowly, inexorably, all of the “investment” categories of our national budget: mainly education, research, housing assistance, transportation… which are our hedge against a worse future for ourselves and ensuing generations, will wither and disappear. Even the densest minds, possessed by the most fear-paralyzed xenophobes of our populace will see it, and feel it. But what they might do, and who they will blame remains to be seen.

We do have a history of the public rising up, miraculously, with a re-birth of reason and clear thinking, however brief the resurrection. It’s usually sufficiently long in duration that the electorate manages to do “the right thing” (in scare quotes because the right thing gets harder and harder to define), and we are set back on the road to recovery. This time, of course, the road will have a lot of detours because of literal and figurative washed-out bridges, crumbling pavement, pot-holes, and the occasional fearsome sinkhole, and recovery will take longer. And once we arrive at that place called Recovery we may be dismayed to discover that the rosy glow we remember was actually pink filters on the klieg lights of political rhetoric and easy money, “spend now, and pay it later…maybe.” This time, if they do rise up, it will be, in some ways a far easier task than the painful one of voting in reforms the consequences of which fully half of the public has spent enormous energy slamming, without expending one joule of mental energy thinking about what they are saying, for over a decade now. They learned the lines from their directors and coaches, the politicians who facilitated the means of their own ends, through faulty loans and easy personal debt accumulation at extortionate rates of interest, and those same mentors are still acting as prompters, though to steadily decreasing effect. The approval rating of Congress now rivals the alleged level of unemployment…the former continuing to go down even as the other apparently rises in real world terms. And the politicians act baffled by this clear inverse function.

I do have a hope, today, anyway, though I try to look further than that, so ingrained still is the way of thinking I wish I could impose on those stock investors, so ready to sell at the first cries from Chicken Little (and yet, sickeningly, bizarrely, in some vertiginous habit derived from the cheap thrills of a carnival roller-coaster—what comes to mind most are the old-fashioned rides, the steepest of all, which always contrived to weave the word “death” into its name—just as willing to buy at the least projection, on any given day, of a hopeful sign from the world’s leaders that they have miraculously recovered their sanity sufficient to overcome their vanity). I have the hope that derives from understanding there is strategic value in having the super committee fail at its appointed task. If they fail, and the automatic cuts are triggered, that trend of politicians managing to accomplish nothing even while burning billions of Kilocalaries of hostile energies keeping one another in check will spill over into next month. For next month, the infamous Bush tax cuts will expire on their own, and like it or not (I mean the 1%) the rich will once again have to start forking over money to the government, badly needed to pay for all the things we elected to buy ourselves without virtue of having any of the necessary ready in our pockets to keep those purchases from putting us further into debt.

Of course, the headlines are already appearing, two days before the inevitable admission of Congressional failure (with no chance of an 11th hour compromise—especially that new kind of 21st century compromise that is uniquely American, but apparently compelling to our European cousins, because they have copied us stroke for stroke, and measure for measure: the compromise that truly satisfies no one, and accomplishes nothing but a worsening of the conditions that define the stalemate to begin with). The headlines are suggesting that Congress will pull some more legislative tricks out of their bottomless bag, and forestall, if not eliminate these cuts altogether. And if they do, it will be another Jack & Jill Expedition back to square one, another pull of the roller coaster car to the very peak of the lift hill of the ride, just another in the fun park called 21st Century America, called the stock market.

I have to wonder once again if I can withstand the involuntary trip, seeing the operator so far below me on the ground, he looks like he’s unreachable, never mind controllable, without this time packing a nausea bag.

by

Freedom, of course, is restricted to no sovereignty or boundary. I might say, if I were in a particularly lofty mood, that freedom itself has dominion. In itself and of itself. We can look for it, somewhat paradoxically, in any location.

No doubt, one of the greatest instances I personally witnessed of a sense of freedom occurred in France. It was on the deuxiême étage, the third floor under the eaves, of my house in a village in Provence. It was my late wife Linda who marveled at, and reveled in, actually, that freedom. It was late at night for us, and we were up, and up there in that aerie, because that meant it was only the late afternoon or evening in the United States.

Linda worked for IBM, that giant of information technology. We were quick to learn after they acquired, for the then staggering amount of 3.5 billion dollars, the more cuddly modest software giant called Lotus, for whom she was a global program manager. She oversaw the efforts the company made to find ways to turn a profit on having third parties teach programmers and information specialists of all sorts how to exploit the deep functionality of a product called “Notes.” Notes did what we all take for granted these days, even the lowliest and most technologically challenged of us, at least if we have spent any time at all on that latter-day phenomenon called Facebook. It, as does Facebook, defined and facilitated the means of collaboration and sharing of information in a self-defined community. Whatever the cause of connection—including the somehow too broadly inclusive, if somehow sweet (cloying, anyone?), “like” of Facebook land—affinities, shared objectives, ideologies, loves, hates, pleasures, or agonies, sharing leads to productive ends, in the most expansive interpretation—Notes was the means of managing the substance of the connection. And,as a result, Notes was better than anything else at the time at enabling the enterprise to achieve goals that required continual improvement in productivity from all workers, based on the collaborative model. At that time, as it does now still, IBM had over 300 thousand employees all over the globe, including its most remote or sequestered corners and niches.

If it had wanted to do nothing else, IBM could have done worse than to acquire Notes and its developer for its own uses internally. However, knowing a bargain when it saw one, IBM was also buying the significant market for the product that Lotus had established, with plans of expanding that market to a size the begetter of Notes could only dream about. To do so required that companies licensing the product learn how to customize it to their particular needs and applications. Like so many proprietary technologies at the time, Notes required knowledge and mastery of what I’ll call its own language. Only specialists in “speaking” Notes had the capability, ultimately, of creating the form of the product that, put in the hands of every worker within an organization, improved their efforts. To ensure that Notes specialists, usually people trained as software engineers, or at least conversant with the skills of programming any sort of computer code beyond a rudimentary level, had the requisite capability to make a Notes license a justified corporate expense, for it was not a cheap product, and it did not come in a shrink-wrapped box from Staples, the office supplier, Lotus would “certify” that a person who studied the particular and singular methods and terminologies of the product had mastered it.

And so, in short, Linda was manager of the department that certified users to various levels of mastery. IBM learned it was more profitable to allow third party companies, specializing in teaching a variety of computer skills, from the most elementary to the most advanced, to do the teaching, and to do the testing, using certification materials that only IBM developed and owned. This meant that Linda had to ride herd not only over the highly driven technocrats who shaped, sold, and managed the certification program in the field, and dealt with the day-to-day relations with the third party training companies, but she had to manage relations with those third parties, who were a bridge to the corporations that licensed Notes directly from IBM. What may sound stressful enough was always kicked into higher quanta of anxiety, because it was a world-wide program, split into markets more or less defined by the classic list of the populated continents of the earth, and Linda’s “little” sub-division had to show a profit doing what it did. The profit was usually set at goals that were percentages in double-digits of tens of millions of dollars in licensing fees, plus the net costs of testing materials, scoring and certifying the subjects. She was a people manager: overseeing a diverse group that included software product managers and sales people, to experts in test metrics, PhD holders who wrote the actual instruments that measured one’s expertise in Notes mastery. She was also a business manager: with bottom-line responsibility for producing money that had to be generated in every-increasing amounts, and all in a competitive setting. Notes defined and established a viable market. This is America. No one is going to allow a monopoly where there’s money to be made by simply putting up a fight. And so there was competition (not to mention keeping an eye on the sales and marketing efforts of the third-party training companies, a restive bunch that paid for the privilege of being certified by IBM to certify others in the use and mastery of IBM products—this meant keeping yet a fourth constituency happy). Finally, and most naturally, if this weren’t enough, all of this herding and managing (which included much hand-holding, cajolery, flattery, compromise, and an iron will masked in a soft and, if I may say, endearing if not motherly demeanor), but it had to be done in a myriad of languages. Not literally. Linda was quite adept in English, for sure, and knew a smattering of Spanish, and understood more than she could speak in French. But that was it. Rather, I mean that Linda was responsible for the toeing the line of all streams of revenue, that is, all sub-groups based in all other places on the planet, and nominally, outside the U.S., under the aegis of the heads of IBM-Europe, IBM-Pacific Rim, IBM-Asia, etc. So there was a fifth constituency, if you include her necessary and ongoing ties to the upper management of these subsidiary organizations. Talk about the need for productive collaboration.

Because of its size and history, IBM is a company marked by a remarkable seeming contradiction in management philosophy. It is, structurally, highly traditional, adhering to essentially conservative forms for the organization: hierarchical, intensive perpetual assessment via regular and frequent measurement, reporting and meetings—in groups, sub-groups, and sub-sub-groups. To effect efficacious management company-wide, every means of communications was adapted and exploited (including not a small list of innovations created by IBM itself—a longtime first-place holder in number of corporate global patents issued annually and, as they were a company specializing in making things to make companies operate more efficiently and profitably, disposed to eating their own dog food, which, odious as it sounds, is not a bad thing: if it doesn’t work for you, why even try to sell it to someone else?).

This propensity to stay not only connected, but in touch, includes, as modalities, telephones of course, teleconferencing technologies, visualization for mass audiences (IBM had flat screen plasma monitors in the very early 80s), etc., and naturally, the full exploitation of every species of computing, from the mainframe, which ran the largest enterprises in the world, to mini-computers, which ran just about every other kind of business, to personal computers, which the world seems continually to forget IBM made viable for business. That was after small companies, like Apple, for one, made them merely enviable toys for geeks and technical thrill seekers. It’s a testament to the pervasiveness, and incredible rapidity, with which IBM could create (or invade) a market and make it its own, that the famous “1984” commercial for the Macintosh positioned what everyone knew to be IBM as an unassailable, irresistible totalitarian dominator. It was shown on television, the one time the commercial was paid for by Apple, in January 1984. The IBM PC had been introduced barely 29 months before.

The other dimension of that contradiction in IBM I averted to, that strange, and, if you ask me, marvelous duality, was its willingness always to be flexible, wherever you looked in the corporate structure. You don’t otherwise get to be as big as IBM has been for years and years. They were so big the government targeted them, as they had, successfully, targeted, and broken apart, AT&T, at one time the only technology company that IBM rivaled for size and domination of the business environment. The difference is, even the government could not break IBM. It’s taken IBM to do that. It has slowly and steadily divested itself of multi-billion dollar divisions of itself, while it remains one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. It is certainly the world’s largest transformer, because its divestitures were driven by the realization and placid acceptance that better opportunities lay in newer ways of doing business in newer technologies. In more mundane ways, IBM has demonstrated its flexibility, demonstrably to its employees, if however quietly (if not in utter silence) with regard to the world at large.

They were one of the first companies (and one must always include the qualification, while at the same time, always, one of the biggest) to adopt the principle of flex-time, putting in your hours as you saw fit. As well, at IBM, we learned, workers above a certain pay grade were accorded the confidence and the privilege to take what time the company owed them for themselves, even while they paid them for that time, also when the worker saw fit. I am talking about what less forward-thinking, less mindful companies refer to as vacations, holidays, ‘personal’ time, “leaves,” etc., except within the scope of what state and federal laws might have demanded of them. In the case of IBM, the company always far exceeded the statutory times allotted for such time away. There simply are not, in practical terms, such things as holidays, or vacations in IBM land. Meet or exceed your objectives, and make yourself available as needed, through those means and media and channels provided and sanctioned, and you could do your job in the middle of the night, if you preferred, or from the back porch of your camp on a lake in Maine.

Something else illustrative of what I am calling this liberal degree of flexibility lies in what IBM has done over the course of the past 15 or 20 years. It has more or less steadily employed over three hundred thousand people for decades. Indeed, it is now estimated to employ well over 400,000, in 200 countries. At the same time, IBM has whittled away its commitment to maintaining corporate infrastructure to accommodate all those employees with a place to work. In the fullness of time, at least since the 90s, IBM has slowly devolved in physical capacity such that there are offices specifically dedicated to the exclusive use of somewhere, I am guessing, between only two-thirds to three-quarters of those people. And those without a desk to call their own not only may expect, at best, to be able to say they share a “floating” workstation with anonymous others, and more often than you’d expect, to say they have no set place to work in corporate quarters at all. IBM has thus been a pioneer in “telecommuting.”

All of this advancement in employee relations was in full play when Linda became, de facto, an IBM employee. Her business card still said Lotus for a year or two, until the employees of all such acquisitions—IBM did not necessarily want to bring all of the entities it acquired into the corporate hive; some were kept at arm’s length, with the preservation of their original identities for some years—had acquired some familiarity and comfort with the differences in corporate “culture.” Eventually, however, she was a full-fledged crew member of the mothership. By the time of our own acquisition, rustic, domestic, and minuscule as it was, in rural France, flex-time and telecommuting were fully operative policies of her employer. Coincidentally—a rare happy coincidence—a digital connection to our remote, medieval (literally; the core of the house being built in the early 15th century) maison de village was not only possible, but was readily available and so, starting in early 2002, we could “jack in” to the internet, using that venerable telephonic technology called ISDN (unknown to Americans, unless they worked for a business that required connectivity in the earliest days of adopting computers for regular use). It was snail-like in speed, compared to what we are used to now, but it saved us from thinking we had made an investment in foreign real estate that we might make productive use of at best for perhaps two or three weeks a year (the time Linda felt comfortable allotting herself in one lump).

As a consequence, she could stay in touch, and in sync (one of the foremost features of Notes was the ability to “replicate” the vast database of mail messages, files, and whatever else was shared within a work group, or distributed even to the entirety of the organization; every night, your computer would sync its files and folders with the master database located god knew where on the earth) even as we otherwise vacated and temporized in our retreat in La France Profonde. Further, the French, being long since adept at unceremoniously rigging out even the most remote hamlet with modern accoutrements and conveniences, burying water and sewer mains, electrical lines, television cable and telephone wires underground, leaving an undisturbed vista more or less as it had been, though with your usual complement of internally combusted vehiclesadded, for hundreds of years since. Hence we were offered modern telephone service, of course (indeed, as a necessary requirement to getting that precious ISDN line).

So, in a quite literal way, even in quaint, bucolic, placid Fox-Amphoux, Linda was in business. And we could plan multiple visits in the course of a year, each of somewhat more open-ended duration. Further, as manager of a global program, Linda was not subject to the vagaries of what otherwise was a U.S. hegemony in terms of priority of schedules to determine when “business hours” would occur on a world-wide basis. The rest of the IBM organization, in this case, did not dance to U.S. standard time. Rather meetings were scheduled to accommodate the local host, in the case of in-person visits. Linda traveled a great deal, as a global manager, and this meant a lot of jet lag. However, increasingly, her presence in other far-flung markets were reduced in number (as a cost savings for one; as a mode of increased productivity for two) even as the number increased of plenary teleconferences, which tied in representatives of all the major markets to a single “meeting” in the ether.

The newest technology to be deployed in what was, by 2002, a mature set of Notes product features, was the ability to “text” (or “IM”, i.e., instant-message, in real time over computer lines, even as participants spoke to one another through an audio-only connection by phone. College students take for granted now the ability to continuously engage in the mischief of telling one another in remote corners of a lecture hall what each is really thinking of the lecturer droning away in the pit. So, conference participants could share untraceable confidences about someone sitting in a room thousands of miles away from each of the texting mischief-makers. All this only by way of demonstrating the ease and comfort workers felt increasingly even as they did more and more business with one another for longer and longer business “days” in a wholly disembodied way.

The old wisdom, no longer true in these days of privacy invasion by way of cookies and tracking cookies and data trails, that “on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog” was already, just ten years ago, becoming, “on the Internet, nobody knows where you really are.” Freedom, of a sort. But freedom. In 2002, Linda worked as hard for her pay, but no longer tethered to a desk in a corner office on First Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

She tasted that freedom for the first time, as I indicated at the start of this essay, on that evening some time ago up on the top floor of our small stone house in the south of France. During a teleconference, which had gone unusually well, one of Linda’s colleagues, in an office in the Midwest, and planning a trip to the east coast for a real time live meeting in person in the “home” office, was also wrapping up for the day (though it was 11 o’clock at night for us, and only five in the afternoon for her), and making her goodbyes by phone to the others now ringing off. She enthusiastically sent a text note to Linda, asking if they couldn’t schedule lunch for a day or two hence, and Linda informed her this was not possible as she would continue to be away. “Why, where are you going?” she was asked. And she admitted she was not going anywhere for at least another week and a half, but that she would not be there. “But, where are you then?” “In France.” The response was an exclamation of stunned surprise, as the reality in which they were all already well-immersed sunk in. More real for us perhaps, but real.

The occasion for this rumination of mine about some now quite old, and not very engaging, if thrilling at the time, benefits of the uses of technology is a revelation—yet another one, equally unsurprising—from Facebook. Facebook, that new behemoth that sprang up and grew even more quickly than the lumbering technology elders of IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, et al., has admitted, just a day or two ago [see here: http://bit.ly/uvwG1T] that not only are they tracking you as you zip here and there from your Wall to those of friends, to photo albums, to apps, to Pages, from “likes” to “shares” to endless posts, and notes, and notifications. They also have built-in to every site you visit away from Facebook the ability to track those movements of yours… even if you have logged out of Facebook. Combine this with the ready knowledge, of which you should be ashamed of yourself if you are ignorant, that this same data can be localized insofar as the machine you are browsing on is concerned. So they know where you are, assuming it is you who logged in to Facebook, to pick up the bit of software that gets implanted on the computer you are using, which allows them to keep tracking you while on that same computer, and they know what you look at on the Internet, as long as any page of any website you visit has that familiar “friendly” Facebook “like” or “share” or “recommend” widget visible on the page. France, Kalamazoo, Tuscaloosa, or Tuscarora, they’ll know where you are, and that you were taking a look at Lady Gaga’s latest video, or where to buy Mrs. Renfro’s Jalapeño Nacho Slices.

As the invisible world in which we conduct ourselves, even as we think, unconsciously and unknowingly, that we are simply carrying on the same quotidian tasks in the same haunts that we have made part of our usual neighborhood circuits and circumambulations, grows smaller, down to the size of the keyboard under your fingers, in so exquisitely and precisely engineered a manner. The consequence is that you can be located as to time and place, without any extra effort on your part. There are those of you, including many among people of my acquaintance, who, unequal to the task of letting others do the work, are dedicated to the proposition that others: loved ones, friends, acquaintances, nodding buddies, vaguely familiar faces, strangers… should know where you just headed out to stock up on pizza, or have already landed, waiting expectantly for your next round of kava, and so announce it deliberately, using special apps and widgets and gizmos to pinpoint your every move.

Well, shapers of the zeitgeist, count me out. I unrepentantly deny the proposition and the opportunity to infringe on my freedom in this way. Long a believer in that old British value of wanting simply to be let alone, I believe as well that the best way to ensure that others cannot impose on me in any way, is if they can’t find me in the first place, they can’t help but let me alone. So, I’ll decide when I want to be located. I’ll decide who I’ll tell where I am.

I made my living in part for a long time at the exertions required to market and advertise clients’ products successfully. Part of whatever art there was, and obviously still is, though it is now clearly less art than mere science and technology (which I guess is part of the point of all these words), to doing so was making astute, usually semi-informed judgments (when they weren’t outright guesses) as to where to find the people to whom we wanted to deliver the message.

For the clients of Facebook (because, face it, the clients of Facebook are not the ones, the 900 million and soon to be the big B of us, who are online everyday to the tune of 500 million Facebook engagements a day; we are the product Facebook is selling to their clients) it’s a lot easier, and a great deal more precise. Facebook can tell them where you are, and who you are, and what you look at, and can make a very well-informed inference as to what you want to buy and what you’re willing to spend to do so. And much as I love to do so, I am not singling out Facebook, because there is nothing singular about these efforts. Google is at the same game. Amazon… You name them.

And that game has gotten that much more complicated, because key to it is the technology for locating you, and the ultimate advantage is in owning the means of using that technology. And the new gorilla in this ever overcrowded living room is the beloved Apple. Why? Because guess what? As you can see here: http://cnet.co/rZDfaa Apple, the immaculate, has bought the keys and the lock to the gateway between you and the freedom of knowing no one can find you.

Apples, pork bellies, coffee beans, crude oil, cocoa, and now you—commodities. Ever wonder if a pig feels free? You may begin to become aware of what if feels like. If you’ve a mind to know. Me? If anyone asks, I’m in France. Maybe.

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What a strange race we humans are: on a micro basis, disaster strikes—anywhere, no questions asked, heaven and earth are moved: miners trapped 2 miles down… we rescue them. On a macro basis, with disastrous global implications foretold, economic or climatic, and we dither, argue, bitch, cry, but do nothing remedial…countries or banks in debt? Screw them! Beats the shit out of me.

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I have been opining for a few weeks now in the confines of Facebook. This means only 156 of my self-defined nearest and dearest (who else, then, could one call a “friend;” Facebook, as a kind of postmodern egalitarianism allows no other designation) get to see these pearls.

I mean them to be entertaining at best, I suppose, and thought-provoking if they are to satisfy even my very few deepest desires. Instead I get a concatenation of bad readings, and, hence, I am taken to task for having said what someone else read—and not for what I actually wrote.

But this is not yet another lament merely about the degradation of good writing, and the even more rapid deterioration of comprehension attributable to poor attention and atrophied reading skills. I won’t completely insult my readers who simply don’t get it by suggesting, as well, that perhaps they have lost a step or two in the department of being able to think while doing something else, like reading. Contemplation is becoming a lost human capability.

Whatever the causes, I am sure that at least one of them is the general deterioration of the communication skills of those who, increasingly, are assuming the reins of trying to shape public opinion and individual judgment and perceptions. Writers and opinion makers (not to mention the marvelous talking machines who appear in various live action media, both in real time and by delayed transmission, whether over the airwaves through television channels, or through the larger pipe of the Internet on the multitudinous and multiplying sites that offer streaming versions of video and film, and even broader distribution of screeds prepared in various print and online media, and then re-transmitted or cross-linked or distributed by whatever means via the vast inner web of social networks) have become an industry, and words—more or less all they’ve got besides hacked phone conversations and doctored and staged videos—are the same sort of commodity as U.S. cattle and pork, bloated on the antibiotics and hormones that render them harmless, even as they are deployed and distributed for the significant task of providing sustenance, not of our physical bodies, but the body politic. Unfortunately, like the run of most American red meat, poultry, fresh water and ocean fish and crustaceans, words are the commodities of a monster industry that has long since forsaken quality, nutritional value, and wholesomeness, dare I say purity?, for pure volume, to feed the widening craw of the public, demanding more and more, like vast seas of krill and plankton devoured by the disappearing herds and pods of whales. We’ll never run short of words, I’m sure, but they will have long since lost their value as food (if this has not happened already) by the time we whales have ourselves become extinct even as we feed on them.

I recently encountered one such zealous young buck of a proselytizer, full of zeal and righteous indignation, and a raft-load of platitudes, stock phrases and what I used to teach my classes in Freshman Communication some 42 years ago was the propaganda tactic of “glittering generalities.”

Don’t look for substance in the prose of young Mr. Carl Gibson, 24, and “of Lexington, Kentucky, [and who] is a spokesman and organizer for US Uncut, a nonviolent, creative direct-action movement to stop budget cuts by getting corporations to pay their fair share of taxes.” I’m not picking on Mr. Gibson for any particularly good reason other than that he is the latest individual with a rant to make a point he fails to prove whose online excrescence was pointed out to me by “Reader Suppported News,” an organization constantly begging for money so they can send more and more such links to more and more such long-suffering sorts as myself who gave in to the weakness of donating at one time or another to what seemed like a worthy cause and a good idea at the time. It was mainly a way of paying for the privilege of having the touch put on me periodically (at shorter and shorter intervals) on the pretext that I wait breathlessly for the political ejaculations and expostulations of the likes of Mr. Gibson.

In all fairness to him, RSN also features the stringent, when not scolding, astringent, when not altogether sour, tendentious, when not totally condescending pronouncements of the failed candidate for governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and perpetual Washington outsider, though he did serve, exhibiting the same endearing qualities above elucidated, on the cabinet of President Clinton, for one term as Secretary of Labor, a great deal of which time he spent clarifying the myriad ways in which they (not him, but “they”) were getting it wrong. I will grant you, he knows how to make a career of it, first retiring his post to take on a university professorship at the esteemed Brandeis University and the decamping, when, no doubt, he saw there was little chance for political ascendancy to the gold-domed State House on Beacon Hill in Boston as chief executive officer of the commonwealth, to another university on the west coast. And Mr. Reich, of course, is far more polished, far more suave rhetorically speaking, and far more ready with numbers and data that seem to subscribe to the support and propagation of meaningful information. So, he’s usually a tad more convincing than the likes of Mr. Gibson. But for every Mr. Reich, there are legions of Mr. Gibsons, and his female counterparts, and they do as little justice to their cause in persuading the American public at large to the wisdom of progressive ideology and liberal political philosophy in general as the Republicans, however tainted by whatever the latest strain of virulence (in the present case a virus that apparently is found in tea), are effective in persuading the followers: acolytes and rabble alike, who avidly follow the liberal press and media. There is, in the end, enormous mutual reinforcement of increasingly antagonistic positions. And not the least of the problem is that, I have to admit, fools like me are wasting time and their breath pointing to the shifting rhetorical sands on which both bodies—with their opposing positions—stand; sands which erode with every passing gust of hot wind, the source of which shifts itself from right to left, from east to west, from north to south, and which seems to be inexhaustible.

In any event, I mean to present the smallest sliver of evidence, and counter evidence by way of observation and direct citation of commonly accessible sources of data and information, of the faults in the foundation of the protestations and exhortations of the Mr. Gibsons. If nothing else, this explains the frustrations and the inevitable shutting down, nearing the depths of despair, in which I find myself when viewing the world outside the confines of my cozy ken of familiarity, trust, and home comforts.

Here’s just one paragraph from his RSN essay, entitled, “Austerity, the Wrong Prescription,” which appeared today, 2011 August 9, on the RSN website [http://bit.ly/mSUR6j]. It’s the sixth paragraph into the piece, which opens with a bit of ham-handed, exploitative melodrama about the plight of some imagined patient whose doctor threatens to cut off the patient’s blood supply, meals, therapy and, if that’s not enough, pain medicine… but it only gets worse, and the metaphor gets stuck in one’s gorge, so the real threat is asphyxiation on one’s own vomit if your were entirely to swallow this prose (all of which appears beneeath a captioned photo of a mother and her daughter embracing next to all their household goods, having been evicted from their foreclosed home… no facts, no explanation, just sheer gut-wrenching pulling of your heart strings and any other organs that the thin fingers of Mr. Gibson—I assume they’re thin; I can’t imagine a young man with his agenda, or his subject: “Austerity” being a candidate for an anti-obesity clinic—can grasp and pull with all his incompetent might).

Republicans like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell continue to give our teachers, cops, firefighters and other public services the axe, all to protect these failed “trickle-down” policies that have blown holes in our budget since the Reagan years. Their adherence to such flawed policy ignores reality – the economy has tripled since 1973, but median income has actually gone down since then. Something is trickling down, but it certainly isn’t wealth.

Without saying I agree or disagree with what I assume is some point buried in there somewhere—fact is, I’m not sure what the point is, and I will say I think John Boehner is a bonehead and a politician (of which there is no greater insult at present to hurl in the direction of a public figure) and Mitch McConnell, about whom the worst I can say is, he’s a Republican Senator and, of course, a politician. As the old lady who never voted said, “why encourage them?” Mr. Gibson speaks of “reality,” but then does not even give a muzzy picture of that reality.

Here’s my rebuttal to but this one paragraph, early in the essay, and after which he lost me, so I don’t know what he had to say, if he ever did, in fact, get around to saying anything that I haven’t seen or heard or read already some time in the past 30 years:

Whatever the merits of what Gibson says escape me) because at the start lack of definition and the manipulation of numbers undermine any substantive point he wants to make. He says the “economy” has “tripled” since 1973. definition of economy, or the metric used. Yet, the median income has “gone down” in that time.
1973 (July): U.S. population was 211+ million. 2010 (April): 308+ million. In that same time the gross national product (GNP) rose from a little over $5.5 trillion to nearly $59.5 trillion. The economy didn’t increase 3-fold, but 10-fold. However, on a per capita basis, the increase per citizen was a factor of 730%. This means nothing unless we factor in inflation, which amounted in 37 years to 391+%. In constant dollars, the actual difference in the size of the economy per capita was just shy of 187%, not quite twice.
All else being equal, and not factoring in all other phenomena (e.g., an increase in purchasing power, irrespective of income fluctuations; many goods are far cheaper because we put almost all consumer product production off-shore), the average citizen should be seeing an economic benefit commensurate with a rise in the “size” of the economy of almost twice the benefit when Nixon was still President.
Is this a fair assessment? I don’t know. I do know this kind of thinking is muzzy and misleading. And hardly a cogent argument.

Until the right forsakes the childish, racist, and irrational obdurate stubbornness of the Tea Party, and begins to accept the reality of the need for not only cutting out what can be cut in government with minimal injury to the great preponderance of the American public, while accepting that this will still not leave us in a financially balanced condition, and until the left accepts that the President can not create jobs, or make stones bleed (never mind give forth money), and until both sides agree to sit down to hammer out a common understanding of and definition of “fairness” to all strata of what is, in fact, a stratified society—while avoiding incendiary language of class and privilege and power, we will stew in our own juices, braising and braising until not only all sinew and fat, but the meat and bones of our being all disintegrate into a noxious fluid that can no longer sustain us as a nation.

And we won’t be able to do any of that until everyone agrees to look truth in the face, and however ugly or gut-wrenching the facts may be, never mind the conclusions one must draw from those facts. And once we look truth in the face, and accept it as this thing called reality (and reality is not the fantasy drawn by Mr. Reich, or Mr. Gibson (as an avatar of a far greater number of inarticulate zealots), no more than by Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Kristol), then maybe we will be able to deal effectively with that reality.

Things are, of course, neither as bad nor as good as the last person you heard from made out. If they painted a picture of rosiness or gloom, mistrust it. It’s wrong. The rhetoric is bad, I guarantee it. And you must go back to the only things we have: the true meaning of words, and the irrefutable facts embedded in numbers that anyone can verify.

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An outdoor table at a café somewhere deep in the heart of Provence. Morning of market day.

Perhaps it's that I haven't been here with my full consciousness intact during the warmer seasons in some time. Six months ago, it was winter, and hardly anyone sat out of doors, even in full sun, with the thermometer hovering in the 50s in daylight. A year ago I was preoccupied with the health and well-being of a loved one, also here, on a valedictory trip, for whom I ended up still grieving six months ago. I was not disposed to take note, as is my usual wont, of the behavior of my fellow humans here in La France Profonde—winter or summer.

This summer, thank goodness for lack of a better to thank, such preoccupations have waned, if not been eclipsed. I am free once again to take note both of the good or bad going on around me.

One thing is certain, and it has more to do with mores and the prevailing statutory winds 3500 miles away in Cambridge, MA, the place I still tenuously call home. It is certain that, if for no other reason than that it is forbidden by law to smoke tobacco products virtually anywhere, I am breathing more freely when back home. The difference between breathing freely in an urban environment, including the out of doors, and otherwise is subtle, that is, until you are otherwise.

I had forgotten somehow that France, both in the urban milieu and in any communal aggregation, such as a town square in even the smallest hamlet, is otherwise for an American. You do not breathe freely. Or let me put it this way, the air is perpetually fragrant with the smell of cigarette tobacco smoldering. Usually it's no further away than your nearest neighbor.

Europeans cling to their habits, and no wonder. Taxed to the hilt—bitch all you want about the United States and the Tea Party nuts notwithstanding, it remains a fact that the marginal tax rate in the U.S. is a mere 27% on average, and topping out at 35% for high income individuals—the French worker pays a marginal tax of 40% of income, as much as 50% if you fall (or have been born or stumbled) into a "high income" category. On top of that they pay a 19.6% sales tax (they call it "value added tax;" which requires a sufficiently whimsical disposition of mind to accept having virtually every consumer article sold made more valuable by the privilege of having its price increased by nearly a fifth). The price of cigarettes and gas may be appalling to us Yanks, but in France, a liter of diesel fuel (the cheapest you can use; which explains the repugnant savor of diesel fumes pervading the air not polluted already by cigarette smoke) now costs about one euro, thirty cents (this computes to $7.14 a gallon. The other day, while waiting to purchase my copy of the local daily paper, I watched a woman write a check for 14 packs of Gauloises Filtre (that would be cigarettes made of two of the most aromatic yet paradoxically milder tobaccos in the world… Turkish and Syrian; it's still tobacco, however, and Gauloises produce the smell and smoke that constitute the ur-experience of sucking in second-hand byproducts): total cost 64 euros. That's a cost per pack of $6.63… not bad you might say, given that the cost of a pack in Massachusetts was recently pegged at $7.04 (by contrast it's $5.46 in "tax-free" New Hampshire; and it's $5.51 on average across the U.S.). However, remember the nominal marginal income tax rate in France, and the significantly lower average individual income per year. Tobacco is, in a more pronounced way, a legal drug here in La Belle France, with that many more financial reasons to need one for relief of one's troubles.

Hence in a small farming community, of the sort which any one of the villages surrounding mine constitutes, where there is a larger aggregate number of retirees, and the rest of the people are tradespeople, blue collar workers, farmers or farm workers, there is a much greater number of smokers. And they are still free from the encumbrance of no-smoking laws as long as they are sitting (standing, kneeling, squatting, hunched over or lying) outside. Go to any café and the air is redolent (if that's the word) with cigarette scent, but worse, with the smoke itself. If there is air, it is the unconscious air of a race that is used to, long since, living in close quarters to their fellow creatures, with the accompanying blatant disregard of that which many an American is so zealous to protect: personal space. So cigarettes dangle from fingers and lips in any number of angles and precarious states of balance kept unconsciously and insouciant by the smoker. I've watched smokers, at home and abroad, and what dwindling number of smokers I see in the U.S., who suck down their poison in public view, are far more avid and frequent puffers. The French, equally indolent by contrast in this habit as in so many other behaviors, puff far less often, and allow the smoke to circulate far more generously—I've always seconded the view that, despite the apprehensions of American tourists, the French are a warm and generous people at heart. At bottom, they clearly pay little heed to where the smoke they've paid dearly for drifts and swirls, eventually finding its way into the lungs of every nearby individual, citizen and visitor alike.

But the purpose of this late assortment of peevish observances on the specific, if not hoary, subject of smokers' abuse of others' rights, however slender is the sanction by law, is to observe one more thing.

Again, this is purely by observation and anecdotal personal data collection, but it seems in the 23 years I have been visiting and part-time inhabiting these climes, I have seen what I would call a wanton increase in a brand's market share among these people who are otherwise among the most chauvinistic I have ever viewed. It's not Gauloise, a brand the smoking of which was well-nigh patriotic and a duty during World War II (still the Big One for the French, despite their own misadventures in what they call Indo-China, and despite the misfortunes of an embarrassing set of protracted repressive exertions—of which the present ugliness in Libya, for all its ghastly excesses, is only a mere reminiscence—in France's last colonial hurrah: Algeria).

It's Marlboro, still flagship and pride of the fleet formerly known as Philip Morris, and now designated by the innocuous, meaningless, and virtually pseudonymous Altria Group. It means not very much, if anything at all, to the French who suck down the smoke of that cancer-plagued throwback, the Marlboro Man, and irrespective of gender or age (virtually; it's still difficult to purchase tobacco products in France if you look anywhere close to 16 years of age… though I've seen butts alight in the hands of children), who tap tap tap the filtered end to tamp down the tobacco, in a gesture that is only one of so many symphonic gestures that somehow romanticize an act that amounts, after all, to an act of excruciatingly slow self-immolation.

Full Disclosure: I used to smoke cigarettes, including Gauloises and even Marlboros, which were the brand I favored if only to assist in my last gasps, as I forcibly quit cold turkey at the age of 24. I will never, I am sure, forgive myself.

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In an article that appeared in the NYTimes today, 2011 June 26, Jon Pareles, the chief popular music critic of the paper (according to Wikipedia), speaks of the transition of recorded music collections to the so-called “cloud,” that is, the creation of virtual storage of our personal recordings on Internet servers elsewhere than our physical whereabouts and accessible using computers for playback at will, and all perfectly legally. In the process, the writer reports on a forthcoming project of the Icelandic musician/celebrity, the mononymous Björk. The patronymic, for those of you who care, among the dozen or so people who have never heard of this eccentric individual, is Guðmundsdóttir. She seems to me to attract more attention than her musical exertions warrant (with bizarre makeup worn in public, the wearing of masks, and offbeat clothing, albeit a voice with a range of three octaves and the accolades of various award-granting bodies and a very much smaller number of professional musicians; I do note that she has covered far more songs of others than she, apparently, has been covered… decidedly a unique, if not an acquired, taste). Her followers tend to be fanatical, devoted, inarticulate, but passionate in their advocacy of the “genius” of her compositions and performances, and yet they are well-distributed globally, if not legion. It’s safe to grant her, if nothing else, the legitimacy of being designated avant garde (Charles Baudelaire, André Breton and, well, take your pick, dance a slow gavotte to this one wherever they find themselves at this time).

I’m not one, despite my reputation and my occasional tone, to disparage anyone and anything out of hand. I prefer to take it as it comes. Some things come, frankly, and I’d just as soon they keep on going until they’re out of sight on a far horizon. Fortunately entertainment figures, even those of undeniable cultural impact, have a manageable presence in my life, especially insofar as I take certain fundamental precautions. As much as possible my Facebook pages and profile are under lockdown, an enclave in cyberspace reserved as much as I can control it that is reserved for friends (by my definition); and as for friends who allow their enthusiasm in public to exceed their prudence, I can always exclude this or that pronouncement. I don’t watch television, and, indeed, given my cable subscription would only see about 22 stations (apparently; I haven’t checked) for the paltry sum I pay each month for the privilege. I listen to NPR, or I don’t listen to the radio, and I turn it off if what I’m hearing doesn’t interest me. Don’t get me started on local on-air presences in Boston the likes of Emily Rooney who manages to surpass her father in being irritating sometimes to a loathsome overload of that quality.

I avoid crowds, and have cut way back on phone conversations. In short I pick my friends, and control the time I spend with other people. My life is my business, and I like it that way. I’ve had some major distractions in my life of the kind that, had I the choice, I would have avoided altogether, but I didn’t have the choice… and, let’s just say I’m still recovering, and have chosen my own means and methods.

One result is I have a great deal more time to indulge in activity that has apparently become a luxury for the preponderance of the rest of the world, especially that preponderance within the locus of my ken. One activity is actually to take note of what is going on around me, to think about it, to examine its details, not only to smell the roses, but to see the bugs on the petals, and the variations in color, to perceive the inalterable cycle of their lives, and the lives of so many other living things, flora and fauna alike. I have time to ponder the excrescences of other creatures, including my fellow creatures (not just male, but female: men and women, boys and girls alike).

Another result is the ratification of some truths I had long since felt I had detected, and assured myself were worth the effort of testing their verity. In short, I actually pay attention to what people say, or write (though there is so much less and less of what is written at length that warrants the time it takes to see if it’s worth taking the time—a new corollary to Catch-22), or tweet, or text, or chirp, or grunt (listen… you’d be surprised, so much of human utterances fall into these two categories).

As for Björk, who from the distance at which I prefer to observe her, when she floats into my consciousness like the evanescent being she seems to want to project that she is (though she occupies no more and no less space, as far as I can tell, that a human of her size should; though she apparently lives and breathes and procreates—I note that she is now a mother with her partner, another professional eccentric and recognized, in some circles, as yet another avant-garde “genius,” Matt Barney), I will acknowledge her fame. I’d call it notoriety, if not infamy (not to put too fine an edge on it—but that’s only because she has elected somewhere along the line to communicate in English, as opposed to, say, exclusively in Icelandic), but then there are those who still seem to think I’m a curmudgeon, and I’d rather not encourage them.

Here is what Pareles elected to quote of what I can only infer was an exchange he elicited on the subject of her latest project, if not specifically on the subject at hand… his assignment for this Sunday’s Times:

“I’m excited to embrace a different handshake between the object and sound,” Bjork said in an e-mail. “It seems like every couple of decades this takes a somersault, and I enjoy the fresh point of view, like the honeymoon of the new format where you can really have an effect on the overall direction, and things like enjoyment, love and freedom matter again.”

She added, “I definitely wanted the songs to be a spatial experience, where you can play with lightning or a crystal or the full moon and the song changes. I would like to feel the apps are equal to the song in the same way I have always aimed for the music video to be equal to the song: the 1+1 is 3 thing. Not that it works every time, but you have to aim for it.”

Of course, I am capable of perfectly well understanding what she’s saying here. Even her sentences parse, though not as well as her more direct opining on the subject of sexual gender preference, as she is quoted, somewhat in the way of non sequitur, if not altogether incongruously, not to mention utterly gratuitously, in her entry on Wikipedia, which struggles and mainly succeeds in not being sycophantic and breathless.

However I am hard put to understand what the hell she is talking about, especially as it regards her nominal expertise… matters of music, if not more specifically song composition.

The question I am left with for her, if not more pertinently for Mr. Pareles, is whatever happened to listening to music for the ineffable pleasures it affords as a sensory and emotional experience as restricted necessarily to the sense organs with which we have been endowed? That is, our ears and the rest of the apparatus in our heads that connect these organs with the hearing centers of the brain. As long as most of us, as far as I understand it, are not endowed with the capability of synesthesia, as it’s called, and though I would never testify to an understanding of what Ms. Björk is saying here I am pretty certain she is not talking about synesthesia, either for herself or for the masses.

We’ve long since left the dock and the shore is no longer in sight of that great ship that is taking us to some foreign land where we will, I gather, hear with our finger tips rhapsodically or whimsically stroking the touch sensitive screens of personal sensory devices. No one has as yet persuaded me that a small slab composed of mainly synthetic, mostly toxic materials, comprising highly advanced technological devices which compromise, all at once and every time we use them, the higher order, if fundamental, senses of hearing and sight.

Rather than walk at a respectable and health-enhancing, if still unhurried, pace, down a country road and take in the sights nature still provides once we’ve abandoned our vehicles, and take in the sounds of our fellow creatures, never mind the wind, say, ruffling through several acres of mature grains of wheat as they rustle on their stalks in the meadow, here’s what we do. We press painful stubs of listening devices into our ears, if we are not actually trying to isolate from the booming chaos about us the sounds being reproduced, distortion-laden and truncated as to the range of tones to which the ears are susceptible with great subtlety. Simultaneously, we squint at screens that show us comical simulacra of humans cavorting or emoting in close-up—images otherwise meant to be viewed at life-size or nearly so in some projection that naturally allows us to view them selectively and without distraction.

If I understand Ms. Bjork correctly, she is thrilled to imagine that somehow the experiences we have enjoyed for several thousand years (and cultural anthropologists may somehow date our first efforts at making music even further back) no longer suffice, but require the manipulation that I am only guessing she means to imply by the use of imbecilic tropes: lightning, full moons, and crystals… the stuff of fantasy and fairy tales and wondrous, as any child will tell you, in and of themselves. And the “1+1 is 3 thing”? That only reminds me of a joke I recall from junior high school wherein simple definitions of serious disorders could be expressed arithmetically. I seem to recall that believing 1 + 1 = 3 defined psychotic.

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Early today it looked like the bad weather had its back broken for good, and yesterday’s warm dry air that induced shutters to open wide and flies to come out of their torpor to buzz at closed windows would stay. The temperature creaked its way just barely into the sixties, Fahrenheit. Today started as a repeat of the first day of the new year, but then surrendered to what cannot be denied. It’s winter. A ceiling of clouds dropped in the early afternoon, meaning it darkened sooner than the actual sunset, invisible behind Mont Ste.-Victoire in the distant haze.

It’s turned into an early day for me. I ate my dinner and was done by seven, the soonest I’ve dined in the evening, I believe, in several years. Afterward, I had the choice of turning in, or taking one quick turn around the village in what should have been twilight, but was pitch darkness all around our hill.

The village is even darker than usual in spots, because in one of those commonly bizarre occurrences of rural French life there are no more lights lining the parking lot that abuts the village at its entrance. The lights not only illuminated the chief parking area for buses and visiting vehicles, they marked the edge of the embankment it sits on before dropping just on the other side of a log fence, about knee high, onto the tops of trees whose trunks emerge from the ground about 50 feet below. One day this past fall, the villagers awoke to discover a tangle of wires emerging from the earth in each of the four spots where, the night before, had stood the streetlights. No one has said when they will be replaced.

There’s a re-alignment of the pools of cool intense blue-white light that spill from the leading edge bulbs they use so incongruously in this little enclave first settled in this form in the twelfth century. There are more than vestiges of how it must have looked then, even as we slowly capitulate to the advance of time, and the allure of modern niceties. Besides the streetlights, it is in recent memory, for example, that the place, the town square overseen by the huge elm in front of the chapel at the head of the houses that ring the square, had its packed earth and sand paved over with asphalt. Soon after that, the mayor at the time decided to bow to the wishes of certain villagers who wanted the parking, usually done willy nilly and as one found space, demarcated with paint, permanently. Aside from the incongruity, this flies in the face of the freedom the French feel as an entitlement to park wherever they please, as long as they leave the barest amount of room for any other vehicle to pass, going in or leaving. Not so strangely, no car or small truck is ever out of place, every space taken up in summer, and civilly ensconced between the painted lines. I chalk this up to the village being largely occupied by foreigners, like me. I am one of the only Americans in the entire village, and the only one with a house that looks out on the square. There are Swiss, Germans, Scots, British, the Austrian innkeeper and his French wife, and a Parisian or two, who in some regards are also considered foreigners—unlike the Marseillaise. And we all of us, northern Europeans and a Yank, are from orderly, constipated, society, where civility demands we not draw attention to ourselves by parking outside the lines.

There is room, all told, for about 15 cars or small vans and trucks.

Tonight, as I stepped out, and as has been true every night for the past two weeks, there were perhaps six vehicles in all in the place. I walked slowly down the hill toward the parking lot. As I walked, and behind me, I heard the slam of shutters. As I turned to look, I saw the last movement of thin tall decrepit louvered shutters, as they were pulled to, on what had been the home of Frieda, the doyenne of the village. She now resides in a nursing home in another town nearby, slowly sinking into senility. My not quite so elderly neighbors drove out at the beginning of last week to visit her and bring her champagne for her 97th birthday. She had occupied the house for likely 50 or 60 years, and always declared to me, when I greeted her on one of my infrequent visits of late, before she was moved out as too feeble, that she was Swiss, and that she was 93, and that she didn’t speak French so well. Maybe so, but better than I. The house was sold by her family to finance the move and more luxurious quarters in her retirement home.

I turned back to proceed, and a little further on, at the foot of the village, a door opened and from the lit interior of a miniature dwelling someone emerged, barely out of the door, and stooped to put down a box, between the glass-paned inner door and the shutter/doors, that remained open, even in the chill air. I walked past the tiny house—some of the houses in the village are as small as 30 or 40 square meters, about ten times that number in square feet. The shutters of the single window on the ground floor also were thrown back, and light shone out filtered and softened by what I knew were curtains that let on the kitchen. I did not peer in as I walked past, though it’s customary, I’ve noticed, to do so. At least the tourists do it.

I lit a forbidden cigarillo, ignoring the huge black lettering, “Fumer Tue” on the lid of the box. It was a little difficult in a bare, but persistent breeze to keep the Bic lit, until I turned my back on the wind. When I turned again to continue walking, a dog approached, followed by its owner, his head down as he walked around the bend in the road into the village. “-nsoir!” I heard, as I said “Bonsoir” myself only partly in response. We otherwise paid no attention to one another

I traversed the narrow parking lot, across the width of it. The lot affords room for perhaps another dozen and-a-half, or two, cars, plus the spaces established on the asphalt deck with the same trim precision as the place for two buses. There is a regular traffic of huge tourist buses in the summer. They come for a stay of perhaps 15 minutes. We are a minuscule, but important, local destination despite the absence of any significant remaining edifices. For one, we have been the birthplace of the man who, in effect, put an end to the Reign of Terror, by putting an end to Robespierre. If that wasn’t enough of a gift to the motherland, he proceeded to spearhead making Napoleon general of the armies. The little guy knew what to do from there. There’s also a tower, a salvage job on the ancient donjon of the old castle, now otherwise completely gone. From the top of the tower is an uninterrupted vista of the entire countryside, as we are the highest point for about 20 miles in any direction. My little town.

I noticed for the first time, no doubt because of the absence of the night glow of the former streetlights, that the lights of Tavernes, and farther away, only a little smaller, a much greater concentration of lights: Barjols. The visibiilty indicates the cloud cover is hanging very high. The lights of Tavernes lay under a smear of the remnant of the sunset, probably by refraction, through a tear in the clouds at the horizon, a faint salmon-pink and orange smear. Down on the plan, the plain below us, I could trace the road only by the distinct pairs of headlights of four cars in caravan, speeding toward Salernes. They disappeared as the road turned around the base of our hill.

I turned back up the hill and walked back the way I came. I looked at the wee Christmas tree, festooned with twinkling lights, with presents hanging from it, wrapped in red mirror mylar wrap and gold ribbon and bows. This, courtesy of the town’s Department of Public Works. Pathetic. I continued past my house, to go further up the hill, to the rear of the village, where I knew more lights were visible in the distance. As I walked I heard a vehicle driven hard, probably in second gear. One must drive carefully as the passage is narrow between the stone houses lining both sides of the street in an unbroken assemblage, one house to the next, as snug as townhouses on any cross street in any major city, only these are at least seven centuries old.

One must be careful, but this is France. It doesn’t mean one must be slow. I scurried out of his path, to the only thing that resembled a lay-by, a place where the street pavement bloomed into a small open area in front of the old town hall, and the tower. Sure enough, the vehicle appeared, another cheap Japanese clone of a Land Rover, possibly a Suzuki, a Toyota, or something more exotic. They’re indistinguishable especially in the almost non-existent light in an antique microscopic village in the middle of nulle part, nowhere. Naturally this mec pops out from between the house of the Foves and the ruin opposite, and heads directly at me. I was standing in his intended parking space. No lines here though. He gave me the five seconds I needed to scurry back out. He pulled into the space and sat there. I didn’t wait, but continued my walk.

A mangy cat, that was somehow well-fed, but with patchy fur, squatted in the middle of the street, his head holding malevolent eyes pivoting around as I walked past him. He just sat there. I walked to the edge of the hill to see past the trees, and there were the lights of Regusse, and beyond that village, Moissac-de-Bellevue, which sits overlooking the national forest that has its backside in Fox-Amphoux, on the road to Aups. Aups, the market town, sits in a declevity further northeast than Moissac, and its lights can’t be seen. I finished the cigarillo, and flicked it in the direction of the cat, too far away to even get close. He continued to squat.

As I walked back down, past the cat, the silent empty houses, I heard another vehicle, and yet another car starting up. Just down the hill, practically at chez moi, a pair of headlights appeared, hesitated, and then this new fellow stopped completely and proceeded in reverse back in the same direction. The imitation Land Rover had re-started his ignition, backed up slightly in my direction, and proceeded forward down the hill after the other car. A tiny mystery inside another one.

I got to the front door. I stuck the large skeleton key in the lock, and let myself in. I could be in bed by eight.

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Perhaps it’s my mood. Perhaps it’s that I have been here it will be two weeks tomorrow. It has been sunny for two of those days. At least overcast the rest. Today is a corker. But before I get to today, let me do a quick review.

There seem to be three kinds of overcast here: a sort of uniform dun color, cloudless and without variation. Or there are variations, a sort of mottling of the grey, from a deep shade to one that is almost white. And finally, there are discernible clouds, at their best with breaks that allow the sun to peek through. When and if the sun does appear on such days, it is never for long. Rarely is there precipitation in its usual forms, rain or snow. However it has rained I’d say for about six days out of the 11 that have been overcast; one day it poured all day. On that day, the one before Christmas Eve, Yann informs me that the water in his pool in Aups rose about 2-1/2 inches. Other days it rained on and off, usually lightly, and one day, it snowed in the late afternoon for perhaps three-quarters of an hour. I took a photo of the light blanket of snow in the village square in front of my house—the one with a tree that is variably 225 to almost 600 years old, depending on the historian and tree expert who is making the assessment. I posted the photo on Facebook and put in what was then a mirthful and sarcastic caption, aimed at my friends in the Northeast of the U.S., who were braced for a blizzard that dumped anywhere from a foot to a foot and-a-half of the white stuff. It had snowed, and I was being generous, perhaps an inch-and-a-half here. The following day, the sun made one of its rare appearances. The temperature rose into the high 40s. And all the snow had disappeared at about the same time it started to snow 24 hours previously.

Aside from the overcast, the temperature ranges within a narrow band on such days between 33 or 34 degrees fahrenheit to barely 41. Most days it has been within a narrower range, of 37-43 degrees, not quite enough for snow. For years and years snow was rare. More recently, the natives can expect to see snow every year at least once or twice. It predictably will snow every year that the towns and villages have apportioned a part of one year’s budget to acquiring a snow plow. They are assiduous enough that the snow is gone from all the local roads within less than a day of the end of a snowfall.

My mood, which seems in sync with the weather, is tempered by at least one recollection of this time of year, and actually several, which themselves are linked together. My late wife and I first came to Fox-Amphoux in the dead of winter in the year 2000. We had decided tentatively to purchase a house in the south of France. We thought the prudent thing to do was to visit at other times of year than the optimal high seasons of warm weather, late spring to early summer, and fall through October. These had been the only times we had previously traveled to our beloved Provence. The discovery that our nearby market town, Aups, was also a significant truffle market in the late fall through early spring seemed to be promising, and the further discovery that the truffle harvest hit a high note with the fêtes des truffes which occurred traditionally on the fourth sunday of January, which in that coming year would occur virtually on my birthday… an augury if there ever was one. We booked rooms at the Inn in old Fox, the inn that is now across the square from my front door. As it turned out, that visit was a clincher, more or less. The weather was ideal almost throughout, with the singular irony that only on the day of the truffle celebration did it turn bitterly cold and overcast. “Cold” is of course a relative term. The Foxois and the Aupsois assured us it was cold. It was just freezing, what we came to learn was a typical temperature in winter, at least at the start of the day.

Further recollections of past sojourns at this time of year are more and more dark. Linda was diagnosed at the beginning of January in 2003 with the cancer to which she would eventually succumb. It was only the first winter here she would miss, though she was to have a chance to return. She would from time to time insist I visit chez nous, alone if need be, in order to have some respite, though she would always say over my protestations that it was important that we use the house, and check on it, regularly. I won’t belabor this account with remembrances of the several visits I made, sometimes by myself, and sometimes with friends, until she died, and then again the same year. That had been my last visit until now.

Last year, of course, my new, but once again late, beloved Jody and I were on the eve of leaving for Fox, for her long anticipated trip with me for the holidays. It would have been our first chance to return after the magical summer we spent together in 2009. This was not to be. That day, the good doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital found the tumor, which would lead to her demise, a scant two months ago tomorrow. And I cancelled our flight and our trip that night.

My present sojourn is my first chance to return since another much briefer, also magical, journey for Jody last July. It was perhaps the last time as well that she enjoyed anything that resembled a break from her almost unceasing ordeal since the previous January.

I am the wrong person to suggest that the weather, in fact, is in sync with my mood. I neither have the ego, nor the credulity. It is not bad here. It is fitting. And once again, I try to assure myself that this environment is the one most likely to induce a more rapid process of recovery for me. The time alone, if not total isolation, seems anodyne, if difficult to swallow, like necessary medicine.

The weather this visit that I’ve described is a first for me. It has induced a sense of claustrophobia about the house, which I’ve never experienced before. Today is a culmination of that feeling. The precipitation is truly that. There is nothing visible in the air, unless one looks into the middle distance, or any close surface, where the fine mist, almost a miasma, makes itself evident in the tiniest droplets of water imaginable. It shrouds windows and windshields, glasses and the screens of digital cameras. At speed in a vehicle, and only at speed, does it behave properly as precipitation. Otherwise it is more accurately a coalescence. Looking into the distance, toward familiar landmarks, only reveals what resembles flying through clouds. One can see only as far as what could be traversed in a minute or two on foot. The near foothills of the Alps have vanished. Greyness pervades, tempering everything, squeezing out all color but the most funereal of tints.

There is, I will admit, a somber beauty here even to what I describe. Like pieces of music in a minor key. Like paintings by Whistler or Eakins, umbral and vague.

The weatherman has predicted this weather will break, and we’ll see a return to the usual sunshine, clarity and crispness. Temperatures will climb into the 50s during the day, and barely reach freezing at night. That will happen with the coming of the new year.

I very much hope so.

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The lowest level person working for the TSA that you are likely to encounter at an airport security checkpoint is what they call a TSO. Here is the job description, which appears under the rubric “Find Your Dream Job” on the TSA website:

Transportation Security Officer [TSO]

Duties and Responsibilities: Implements security-screening procedures that are central to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) objectives and that will serve to protect the traveling public by preventing any deadly or dangerous objects from being transported onto an aircraft. Assists in conducting screening of passengers, baggage and cargo. May be required to conduct screening at any airport that provides commercial services to the public. Assists in monitoring the flow of passengers through the screening checkpoint to facilitate the orderly and efficient processing of passengers. Maintains close communication with supervisors regarding any issues that might reveal a weakness or vulnerable area of security screening that is discovered in the course of screening duties. Participates in information briefings concerning security-sensitive or classified information.

Key Skills

* Ability to learn the theories, dynamics, and factors underlying the aviation screening process to enable authoritative and independent handling of screening functions.
* Ability to learn to operate basic security equipment such as X-ray machines and hand wands at screening checkpoints
* Ability to work with persons of diverse backgrounds
* Ability to communicate non-technical information effectively to others

A TSO is paid a base salary in band D on the TSA wage scale. This pay does not include extra compensation, which is localized by assignment (location, hazard, etc.)

Now Band D runs from minimum to maximum thus:

D         $25,518         $38,277

I did the math, and the pay per hour, before taxes, for this basic salary scale is $12.27 minimum, and $18.40 maximum.

The minimum Federal wage per hour is $7.25, as it has been since 2009.

The TSA is actively recruiting.

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