Awaiting the invention of the laser plow

NOTE: I wrote this humor column in 1990 and it appeared in 12/5/90 issue of a now defunct weekly newspaper in North Conway, New Hampshire. It was on my website, the METAPHORatorium for many years as well in several locations. It seems seasonal so here it is again.  I've changed the uncle's name several times also. Originally it was Henry. The graph about my father is true.

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My Uncle Henry reported having an incredible dream this week. It was a revelation so simple, so ingenious, he said, that once somebody invented it, the world would change. And nobody would ever go to Florida for the winter again.

My Aunt May had a different opinion. "What you had was indigestion , you old fool," she said. Aunt May, after 37 years of marriage, says that Uncle Henry is a mostly good man of few words, except when he's been drinking brandy and then he is a man of a few too many words.

My uncle affected a hurt pose for second, rolling his brown eyes pitifully. After a moment he cleared his throat .

"As I was sayin' - I was awakened in the snow by a heavenly blue light,'' he said quietly. "The snow kept comin' down all around and the light got brighter and brighter." He paused with a faraway look in his eye, then glanced at me sideways to see how I was taking all this.

"Is this a Christmas story or a flying saucer story," I asked suspiciously.

"No it ain't. Now listen. That blue light kept coming closer and closer and I knew in my deepest heart it was going to roll right over me - right through me even. And it began making a fearful noise roaring like the great god-awful fires of hell. That's sorta like DeSoto engine all outa oil and damn near throwin' a rod," he explained. "When that light was almost on topa me, suddenly a horn was blastin' and I heard a voice and the voice was saying HENRY! HENRY, GET OUT OF THE WAY!"

By now he was breathless, his voice rising. Uncle Henry was possessed. He was pure unsalted ham baking at around 450 degrees. "As it rolled over me in my dream, I saw the snow was melting away before that blue light and at that very moment I KNEW EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS. It was a laser snow plow..." he concluded in hushed tones still obviously amazed by his own idea.

Well, Buck Rogers move on over. "No rocksalt needed, no knockin down mail boxes, no diggin up the tar, no knickin the trees, no filing' down the blade. I figure a smaller model could replace snow shovels for about $24.99. It'd be kinda like a weed wacker only with light beams."

Uncle Henry comes from a long line of nutty inventors - Yankee ingenuity carried to its final insane extreme. My father suffered from these same fits of madness all his life but he was especially obsessed with the little everyday problems - like birds that hog the birdfeeder. You know the ones I mean. Like blue jays - they sit and eat and eat until a whole line of chickadees backs up on the clothes line behind them waiting patiently for dinner.

My father couldn't stand that sort of injustice. Once morning during breakfast, just after he filled the bird feeder, he called me over to the window. A purple finch was hogging the perch. When pop figured its time was about up - he pressed a little red button. All of a sudden an arm came up and swept out over the perch pushing the startled bird in to the air. "I call it a 'Bird-get-off' he announced with a triumphant grin.

I'm afraid there hasn't been much market for this invention. The laser snow plow might do a lot better, Henry says. On a straightaway you could melt a mile of snow at once. Of course, tulips by the road side might bloom out of season and wild animals might wander in front of the plow to their deaths just trying to get warm.

Mere glitches Henry says.

Standards, formats, codes - how do new solutions arise..

this is a column I wrote for a newspaper in another state (it's long since closed), appeared in a 1990 edition of that paper. The editor then used to yell out that he had a hole on the editorial page, how large the hole was and how much time I had to write a column to fill it.. What a rush... 

Codes,  jingles and new solutions

Drive anywhere in the continental United States and the radio jingles sound just like the ones at home. It's the same with building codes.

"What? Who's building radio codes? The Government?" asks my Uncle Henry who has placed the 20-odd parts of an old electric fan motor on a clean cardboard on the floor in front of him. They're arranged in meticulous arching rows, like a movie audience with Henry perched on a concrete block in the middle, all knees and elbows pointing a square can of three-in-oil at them like a gun.

"The government gets into everything these days, except balancing its budget," he says, polishing a bearing ring on his green coveralls, and re-adjusting his orange cap askew.

Radio jingles are kind of like building codes, I repeat. Henry squints at me quizzically.

I tell him it's the format. Format radio: they only place certain songs over and over again -- only cuts from proven hit-makers. The station guarantees the play list; the advertisers guarantee the money. They buy their little jingles on tap -- same notes different call letters all over the country.

The only problem is that new or off-beat music doesn't get played because it doesn't fit the format. It's only heard on college stations or on PBS or maybe on WMWV which has its own tossed salad format. (Or did back in 1990)

"Uncle Henry," I say, "Did you ever stop and consider that tucked away inside walls all over the country, are two-by-four studs, and they're all exactly the same distance apart wherever you go?"
My uncle scratches his chin, looking gravely concerned. He's not one for offbeat music, but he read this statement about two-by-fours to me out of a newspaper a while back, and he considers it his side of the argument.

One of his favorite themes is how the government, the world at large and TV in particular are trying to make us all the same. Not in a big way, but by tellings us what to do in a million little ways -- sneaky-like, they conspire to drain that spark of creativity right out of us.

I guess I 've been listening to Uncle Henry too long. Yes, there's plenty to be said for standardization, cheap goods, mix and match replacement parts. It makes things easier and often safer. There's even the comfit of that familiar jingle 1,000 miles from homes.

But when one way of doing things becomes an accepted standardm or even worse, a legal code, what happens to innovators? Innovators are a valuable natural resource, like lake shores or national forests.

Town codes are important and they may protect Uncle Henry from himself, but the may also deprive the world of some outstanding or novel or just place cheap and serviceable building technique that he might have invented. Maybe it's unlikey but who knows?

Hey, even the town of Conway plants its feet and refuses to follow some standards handed down from "above." We don't take state bridge money, according to the town engineer because if we did, we'd have to overbuild our bridges in a very expensive way.

He didn't just accept a given. He looked at the facts and really thought about them.

It's codified engineering, as opposed to creative engineering, that says tertiary level sewage treatment has to cost a lot when Ken Kimball of the AMC suggests letting silage corn do the nutrient removal for free. No technological wonders, no fancy chemicals. Just some plants growing in the sun. I like it.  It's not in the engineering books, but it makes sense.

What about those people in Colorado who've been building houses from old tires? And the guy in Arizona who used empty glass bottles filled with sand instead of bricks to build his home. When the dessert wind blows over the mouths of the bottles, the whole house must howl softly - a jug band lullaby.
You might not want that, but it's a sample of the marvelous diversity and imagination of our kind. He hasn't got a neighbor for miles, so he's a little nuts - so why not?

If an unconventional structure meets setback requirements, is screened from the neighbors and has an engineering calculation or two to prove it won't collapse on its owner (and isn't to godawful noisy) why shouldn't a man be able to build it?

Now don't misunderstand me. Much as it pains Henry to hear me say it, there's a long-range benefit in all these codes - but FLEXIBILITY is the thing that can keep them useful -- and keep open the possibility of new solutions.

We are a foolish lot, we humans. We clear cut and dig up and mow down and dam up everything in sight. We even built a strip in North Conway in the lap of some of the prettiest mountains anywhere.
But the Zone Board of Adjustment is asking the Planning Board for changes  to non-conforming zoning rules that will give it some flexibility.

Can that same kind of consideration go into building codes so we can make allowances for Yankee eccentrics and innovators and for poverty that sometimes mandates a shortcut or two?

Building codes like three-acre zoning can be used as a form of social engineering to exclude the poor. In Connecticut I heard of a family whose home was condemned and they had to move out because it didn't have plumbing. It didn't matter that they had nowhere else to go or that they had to go on welfare once they were separated from their garden and ther chickens.

Maybe that's not likely to happen in Conway, but it's important to know it does happen. I guess that's why the planning department fights so hard about the wording of its regulations.

Uncle Henry takes off his hat and shakes his saggy head. "You got to fight it," he says.  He gets out his trusty Stanley measuring tape - the kind that disappears with a clatter when you press the button on the side. "measure those," says my ornery uncle pointing to the studs inside the garage wall.

Well, the rest of the world may building 16 includes on center, but needless to say Uncles Henry is a little off, by exactly the same small measure every time on purpose. That's the way he is...

Gertrude Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

A Cubist Memoir

 A response to Gertrude Stein's book "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

Gertrude Stein is a cubist name dropper! After introducing herself to readers as one of only three true geniuses in her acquaintance, she, as Alice B. Toklas, drops the name Gertrude Stein one to fives times on nearly all of the 252 pages in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. While it is autobiographical, it is most certainly not about Alice B. Toklas, who 'sits with the wives of geniuses.' Instead it is Stein's own extremely self-reflexive cubist memoir which comments on itself, calls attention to its own materials and production processes, is obsessed with surface, is cyclic rather than linear and offers simultaneous views over time of both its own structure and its autobiographical vignettes. A genus? Yes, indeed.

As Stein clearly states, she is interested in surface versus interior, the outside of things as differing from the inside.  "She always was, she always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal," she says of herself on page 119. So with a wink, she writes, with the name and voice of her companion, her own story, dotes on herself as her lover and companion would and tabulates her own talent's progress in the voice of her mate.

Besides surfaces of name, there is also the narrative's surface - what was done and what was said, told with "the refusal of the use of the subconscious," and without emotiveness.  In this way she allows readers to make intellectual conclusions about the emotional nature of the narrative rather than offering a directed vicarious experience of it, so that experience of her life in print is essentially intellectual and analytical rather than emotional. Of writing this way she says "...that listening to the rhythm of his (the dog's) water-drinking made her recognize the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that paragraphs are emotional and the sentences are not."  --- In order for this to be so, one must detach from immediately experienceable emotion in any one sentence, so that the emotion becomes apparent only after the whole of the paragraph is perceived in the mind.

Stein's narrative is not linear but cyclic and gives one the feeling of moving ahead and at the same time going back. Stein was a friend of Picasso and Juan Gris and notes Marcel Ducamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase: on page 113.  It was not surprising to see it mentioned, as it had already come to mind by the second or third time the dinner where the painters sat opposite their paintings was described. This odd familiarity caused a hasty look back to see if I'd lost my place and was rereading the same paragraphs. The same thing happened in other places: the incident where Maitisse gets fried eggs rather than an omelet, the description of William Cook driving a taxi and of Gertrude Stein driving a car for the American Fund for the French Wounded, and the many returns to Paris. Each mention seemed familiar, out just a little off from the last time, with sometimes more and sometimes less of the incident visible, like one of the iterations of the figure's limbs as it descends the stars and seems to move, in Ducamp's painting.

Stein hints at her fascination with lulling repetition and the glint of surface: "It was this summer that Gertrude Stein, delighting int he movement of the  tiny waves on the Antibes shore, wrote the Completed Portrait of Picasso."  In the end, the tide of surfaces recedes and leaves a bit of truth dry on the shore. Stein admits many had badgered her to write an autobiography. In turn she badgered Alice B. Toklas to write one instead.

"About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it." (pg. 252)

 Of course, like Defoe's work, it is about a stranded traveler and his companion. Yet it is about quite another thing than it purports to be and it glides along tongue in cheek, a surface cleverly concealing and revealing simultaneously.

--- Mad Mar Walker

Original date: Sept. 2003

the home landfill

I have been cultivating a landfill in the front room, an archeologic wonder, fully stratified. This construction is not as threatening as say, the Collier brother's looming magazine stacks, but it certainly is confusing. (This concept comes fully recommended and tested by the cartoon bird/journalist Shoe, who has one, quite similar to mine, covering his his desk. )

This has happened to me, or more correctly - I have created this sort of problem, many times over the years. Usually I move and in the process I box or toss the stuff. Wherever i set up shop, eventually new strata deepen around me. The paper is endless - unopened junk mail, multiple copies of poems that were marked up by workshop participants or printed out for readings, article clips, old newspapers, magazines, instructions for various devices or software, sales slips, drawings, notes. Then there is the actual stuff - the collection of odd items that are saved because someday I might glue them together in a 3D collage. (My level of delusion is fairly high, though I occasionally do make one....)

Periodically I can't stand it - usually just before a big project. Or to avoid beginning a new project I choose to dig, shift, toss and codify rather than start what must be done.

This is a short note. I am making progress on a project and it will be out by the Jan 13 deadline now posted on the site. I am making progress on the landfill too. Everything in its time.

Process: Visual metaphor, psychological metaphor

This work is from the Maine years, most specifically from the year I lived in Brownfield, Maine. The face here belongs to a first cousin once removed, or my rendition of her. She is a beautiful woman, not that you can see that here. The wide open mouth pictured belongs to her mother, and I am not sure what the hell I meant by any of it. Seat of the pants metaphor, I guess. Nor do I recall exactly what I was thinking at the time. Except that the child was the  quiet one and the mom was very  talkative (though not particularly teary.) It is my probably mistaken impression of something hidden in them....

As to the content:

Unfortunately, this is one of those works where people look at me and offer their condolences on my suffering or inquire about possible substance abuse. Understand - I am always stone cold straight and sober when working, (and 99% of other times too) and I am NEVER suffering when I am making a picture. While picture making, I am totally unselfconsciously absorbed in what color should go where, if something is needed to balance something, how the eye travels around etc etc etc. This is also true of writing a poem, or an essay. Music and acting however, are more problematic for me psychologically. They cost something very personal to produce.

The medium here is oil pastel and watercolor on 18 x 24 inch paper. The combination is interesting because, the oil pastel will not absorb the watercolor, and the watercolors can be drawn over with the oil pastels.

- Mar  Walker

The Mysterious Arranger - eccentricity and aging

At the far end of the hospital room, an 85-year-old waif paces in slow motion.

“Someone is making decisions about me everyday, and I'd like to know who it is," she says in an anxious voice, eyes lowered. She has outlived several sets of associates and two careers. She's a PhD, a shrink, now with only passers-by to analyze, an eccentric former opera singer, without an audience.

"Sit down here and talk to me," she says tapping on the chair seat with her cane. "You know I am a trained professional," she adds. I vaguely wonder if it’s true that those in the psychiatric profession undertake their calling to understand their own complexities.

I am visiting a relative who is ill, who happens to occupy the other bed in this hospital room, not here for an hour's advice in trade for $90.

"You know four people in that bed have died in this room while I have been here", she confides, pointing to the bed where my mother sleeps. Oh swell, now there is something else to worry about. Is this frail woman delusional or homicidal or has she been here that long?

Later she complains that the hospital has held her against her will for six weeks while her relatives try to close-up her house. They say she is a little odd, artistic, musical, academic - lives in piles of papers in creative disarray.

I think of my desk, which bears a striking resemblance to a landfill. I think of my collection of broken glass and mirror bits (each with an interesting shape) which someday might get glued together as oddball sculpture. I think of piles of things that often develop on the floor which seem to persist for months. I am 55 and still able to throw out unwelcome busybodies. But what about when I am 80?

There is a tyranny to the housekeeping expectations of relatives and social workers. The unconventional elderly who have lived full, intelligent lives as eccentrics, can be as easily harmed as helped by their efforts. The system itself has no understanding of lives dedicated to the practice of art, to nature, or to some other all-encompassing purpose, or lives that have for decades been happily, well, messy.

Life began in a messy puddle that might have been prematurely wiped up if some authority were running the show. The human race spread over the face of the globe entirely without indoor plumbing so who are these folks trying to kid...

The mysterious arranger is a case worker with a rule book. May the fates shield us from her gaze...

---- Mar Walker