cary head this whole Fredric Jameson/high modern/depth model thing ...
cary head Like, you know what I mean?
What I mean is, I do as well as I can living in this alien technical universe, but sometimes it feels like, for a high modernist like me, it feels like, my old clanking depth-model self full of the ballast of 60s idealism is like being buzzed by digital drones and I want more than anything in the world to get a letter from my grandma in the mailbox. I want to get some sealing wax and a quill pen and write me a letter. A letter to my grandma. And for her to write back.

But that has nothing at all to do with Fredric Jameson. I don't think you're ever going to get to Fredric jameson. I don't think you even know who he is.
But I remember my grandma. She was sweet.
The thing is of course she's been dead for 30 years, but I'm reading my family correspondence, I've got like 170 pounds of old family letters and stuff, and pardon me for being old enough to remember it but I do definitely miss the old linear letter-writing world, and I miss the silence of not having a phone with me in the car and on the train and while walking, and I miss those long glorious bouts of sheer absence when if you went away you actually were gone, and if you left you weren't there, in any form, and if a friend was not present in the room then you weren't getting messages from that friend unless that friend dialed a telephone.
Remember dialing a telephone? Remember how some adults would use a pencil to dial a telephone? Did you see that piece in the New York times a week or two ago, nice essay about how it used to be talking on the phone? Remember analog talking, how you'd hear the other person? What's with cellphones being not duplex? Or is it that they are duplex and used to be simplex? Isn't simplex a bicycle gear?
But here's the one thing I pledge: As much as possible, I'm going to ride this thing. I'm not going to be one of those codgers saying In My Day You Knew Where You Stood
I don't think we ever really knew where we stood, no matter what the technological situation or the relationship of self to other or self to group.
cary head Russians in the sauna
The Russians in the sauna at the Y they're all like "I've lived under communism, and this Obama, I don't want to live under communism" and I'm thinking like what kind of communism was it, my friend, that you lived under, that in any way resembled what's happening in the USA in 2010? Man, why is it that we seem to get all the cranks from Russia? Where are all the wonderful, brilliant, passionate, intelligent, artistic Russians, lovers of poetry and drunkenness? Why don't they come to the sauna at the Y? Why do we just get these Limbaugh Russians? What happened?National healthcare is not a Stalinist plot, is it? Am I missing something?
And besides, I just want to sit quietly in the sauna.

Is it just because it's the sauna at the Y in the Sunset District?
That must be what it is. Is this what I get for not living in the Mission? Is this what I get for wanting to live in a house instead of a flat? For living on the West Side with the retired cops and firemen and housepainters ... and Limbaugh Russians?
cary head OK, that's enough for today. Calm down. Move along.
cary head where is that reading again?
Oh yeah, it's at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 333 Caledonia Street, a block off of Bridgeway between Litho and Locust, kinda near the Sausalito Library, at 7 p.m. Thursday Nov. 11th, part of the Why There Are Words series.