Rod Amis - Unbound

NEW ORLEANS - 24 October, 2002: During this last two weeks, I have a taken what I've come to think of as my "Day of Nonexistence." It is a day during which, as far as the outside world is concerned, I am simply no longer there. The practice is a self-indulgence that I have missed over the past year and half since returning from Europe. It is my little slice of time alone with my silence and my thoughts.

I don't read e-mail or answer a telephone. As far as functionally possible, I do not see or speak to anyone. I enjoyed this luxury so much last week, that I decided this morning to take it again.

I began the day reading the latest Harper's magazine, kindly lent me by my friend Scott. I'm finding Scott a bit of an enigma, of late, because the course of his conversations - even beyond that jocular and gravelly voice that I've said makes him sound profound (even when he is not) - belie the types of material I know him to ingest. As an example of what I mean, I'll share with you this one marvelous mot from Lewis Lapham (Harper's editor's) latest essay:

... the future comes and goes as quickly as yesterday's headlines, before anybody has time to remember what it was supposed to be about, and the news appears as such a familiar montage - the same footage, the same words, the same official spokesmen --- that we know that what was said last week will be said again this week, and then next week, and once again six weeks from now. Only the camera angles change, and the solo voices of uncomfortable thought sink into the chorus of a collective and corporate consciousness, which, as McLuhan well knew, doesn't "postulate consciousness of anything in particular."

I found the essay breathtakingly well done. I found Lapham's take on the unshakeable sameness of things - as opposed to "how everything has changed" - evidenced by the 9/11 ceremonies in New York City a vindication of my own take on how nothing has changed, presented in this space, a kind of vindication of my analytical ability.

So I had two uncomfortable impulses. The first was that enigma about my friend Scott: as my friend, he knows what love I have for concise and beautiful writing, why are so few of our conversations centered around such things?

The second uncomfortable impulse was about myself. Lapham, after all, has the income and time to sit in Manhattan from his august perch at the pinnacle of what might uncharitably be called the Olympus of "limousine liberals" and make such observations. He has neither to worry about his next meal or that his pronouncement will be seriously challenged by anyone in his chosen set.

Further, what he has written and I have admired is exactly what his audience expects. There is nothing daring about any of it. His words are comforting for Ivy League-educated leftists (like myself) who tend to cast a jaundiced eye on so much of what passes for a public life in Britney Spear's America - or George Dubya's. That's what made me uncomfortable about myself. I take no comfort in orthodoxy, even if it's an orthodoxy of my own stripe. In fact, any comfort to be had in orthodoxy should make any of us suspect if we also claim to be critical and independent thinkers.

The highest compliment I remember ever receiving was from our alumnus Kevin Carey, who described this endeavor as "heterodox."

That stance, at least editorially, is what I've been after here. It's when we wander from that stance and become predictable, in my view, that this magazine has something to worry about. I'll take that as the first sign that I'm getting too old to keep this chair.

THEREIN YOU'LL FIND THE JUSTIFICATION for taking the diarist form with these essays of my own. I am acutely conscious of the fact that I am writing for one. That self-consciousness seems to dictate that I write to you about the changes in one person's life in a voice appropriate to how you receive me - one person at a time.

Though I would certainly like as large a readership as possible, I don't have the goal of changing a group - as though you were in a stadium, a television audience or a convention hall. This is the most intimate of mediums since the book, I feel. We are alone together each week. So I can only expect to change the world, if at all, one person at a time.

---

MY FRIEND IAN SAID SOMETHING to me this week that gave me pause. "Rod, forget about all that other shite. You can lose any of your jobs in a second.

"It's your writing that's important. Focus on the writing, because everything else is just scenery."

Good Lord! I thought to myself. Has it come to the point that someone else has to tell me to hold onto my only lifeline?"

That off-handed criticism of his was enough to shake my shoulders and make the commitment to actively start marketing my work again. I haven't tried to sell a single piece since doing my article on Milan Pantic. That was immediately after returning from Belgrade. Since then I've prioritized material survival over the survival of my work - and we both see where that has gotten me.

The Binj had to ask me to do the piece for his new magazine. I should have thought of that myself!

Now that I have a few weeks where I know I can be alone again, I'll get back on the horse. I have an article in my mind for the World Press Institute that I should have started on months ago.

---

I'VE BEEN WORKING with lots of new writers lately. Not that I mind the change in focus or voice, but it's a much more labor-intensive activity for me. As I mentioned last week, there's a lot more back and forth. The contributors who've been with me a few years, even a few months, have come to know what I expect and what to expect from me; that makes it easier to present their work and calls for less hand-holding.

Each time new players come to the little jazz band, the bandleader has adjustments of his own to make.

Over the years, I've had to explain the philosophy behind the cover ("homepage" in geek-speak) a hundred times if I've had to explain it once. I begin to feel like a broken record - or should I say a scratched CD?

---

25 October, 2002: IAN HAS ALSO BEEN ON MY CASE about my choices in women and the energy I put into my on-going act of non-pursuit. In short, he thinks I'm doing too much to cultivate the wrong woman.

Nothing surprising about that, is there, Loyal Reader?

Ian believes the woman I'm putting my (admittedly meagre) effort toward is "fashionable", by which he means "shallow". (Can you say, "Bimbo"?) That I am ignoring a perfectly attractive woman of substance right under my nose.

I say, "Sod off!"

I don't feel like explaining that I don't get involved enough to ignore anyone, since I take the position of the fly rather than the spider. It's impossible to explain my (non-) method of courtship to anyone other than myself.

Just between you and me, I did put a considerable amount of my (overly subtle) effort into Ian's woman-of-substance for a few weeks. She was all I ever talked about or thought about. I actually made many more "adjustments" to my normal habits in deference to her than I'd ever make for the much maligned Bim. I tried to be "available" rather than reclusive, even as the rest of my life was in turmoil - the sturm and drang described a few Glass Houses back.

RESULT: I learned a lot about other guys she was dating. I became a shoulder. Why do you think I have so many women friends? I'm easy to ignore.

Part of it has to do with my Confession Booth mode, I believe. I listen. It's easy for people to tell me about their problems. I provide encouragement and absolution and they walk away not suspecting that I might want some other role.

The intricate mantle of guilt around which I have rendered the latter part of my life seems to have transmogrified itself into a habit.

---

DURING THE BUSH-DUKAKIS PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, I was honored to be asked to act as a "political expert" on a broadcast at KCBS radio in San Francisco as part of their pre-election night coverage. Like most media outlets, the station was in need of a talking head who could give authority to the responses given to listeners who bothered to call the show as well as to provide sound-bites in their discussions with political operatives from both campaigns.

I had developed a reputation, in certain circles, for being highly quotable. So the talkjock on the station asked me if I'd be able to sit in.

Any hotdog vendor on the street could have predicted the result of that election, but the media likes to find someone they can call an "expert." That someone happened to be me because of fundraising chores I'd done for San Francisco political figures and the fact that I then had teeth and wore a suit.

That was the first time that I presented my public argument that the major political parties were in the process of discouraging people from voting. I quoted demographic facts about the number of the electorate who were functionally illiterate due to the educational cutbacks of the Reagan-Bush years, the percentages of new voters for whom English was a (poor) second language and the general nasty tenure of most campaigns. These were all factors, in my view, of the effort being made to make political campaigns more about money and less about issues or the civic involvement of the population at large.

It was actually quite a fun time that I have not thought back to in a few years. I remember being in the studio with one of my pals who coached me to slow down my delivery a bit to drive some of the facts I was spouting home to the listeners.

I think about that episode of mine as a "political expert" because it drives home for me now how far I have fallen. That was over a decade ago now.

Two years ago, one of the publications I was writing for here on the Web - the only one that was also featured in print throughout the United States - was so enamored of my writing and my reputation as a "Web expert" that they were willing to pay a dollar for every word I wrote.

" ... See how the mighty have fallen ... "

---

THE BEAUTY OF THE LAST FEW DAYS has been that I have been able to spend time with the quiet, gentle man who enjoys simple pleasures like the tangy taste of a good cup of coffee in the morning accompanied by that special nutty, smoky taste of the first cigarette. He likes domestic chores like cooking his own meals. He wraps himself in a silence so utter as to almost be crystalline. A silence where you can distinguish the difference in the drone of the engines of individual cars as they pass along the street, differentiate between the trill of separate birds or appreciate the demanding and insistence in the cry of the newborn in the next apartment at two in the morning.

It is a silence I have missed too long.

It is a silence marred only by the sound of fingers pecking keys, ones own breathing, the sound of ones footfalls as one paces composing sentences out of thin air.

I am working on a plan to go to Mexico for a drug reform conference next year. If I accomplish my goal, the quiet man will be pleased, I think. There is a bit of irony in this plan. Over twenty years ago, the last time I was this far in the South of the United States, the plan was to save a little nest-egg and move to a beach in Oaxaca, into a little shack, and write the book. But I fell in love and dragged him off to California, instead. I have since inflicted my hunger for love, for adventure, for excitement upon him in too many cities and too many countries. I am hoping that we have gone full circle now and that I have not made him live too hard and too fast, old before his time, to fulfil his little dream.

If and when we make our trip to Mexico, I plan to stop off in the mountains of Guerrero, near Lowry's Cuernavaca, in the hope that he can regain his silence there. And his book.

But for now, I must betray him one more time. He will not like it when I must transform him into the bartender again tomorrow.

What I Want This Week

1. A promising romantic prospect.

2. The time to create a "comfort meal".

3. Mo' Money.

---

Thanks for coming back this week.

"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching..."
Rod

Search www.g21.net [ ] Our Link Partners the Web for

---

ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was also a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

This year he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. (Think: The Boy.) Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. Right now our Resident Philosopher has joined the pantheon of New Orleans bartenders, works construction when he can find the right fit and still doesn't know when he'll have a "permanent residence" that he likes.. In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

Rod lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. This town is eroding his normal sense of driven purpose. He wants to live somewhere civilized when he grows up. Wish him Luck.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

---

| HOME | THE PREVIOUS GLASS HOUSE | THE NEXT GLASS HOUSE |

CREDITS || AWARDS || SEARCH ENGINES || LINKS ||
VOX POPULI is YOUR PAGE to talk back to us. I'm glad you're not bashful. Keep those cards and e-mails comin', Kids!

Search our Site:

sitemap

RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE

---

Our Editor does listen!

© 2002, GENERATOR 21.

E-mail your comments. We always like to hear from you. Send your kudos, brickbats and suggestions to rod@g21.net.