Paul Vitols's Blog, page 26

solving world problems, one blog post at a time

It’s a new year and I’d like to start it by solving some world problems. So let’s get to it.

A couple of days ago a headline appeared on Google News that Argentina is again demanding that the U.K. cede the Falkland Islands to them. In 1982 a similar demand led to a war in which 907 people were killed and 1,657 wounded, according to Wikipedia, and a great deal of money was spent by both sides. Net result: status quo ante, or, in Spanish, nada.

This territorial dispute has led to actual armed conflict in recent memory (I was in London when Britain was mobilizing for war), but there are many other simmering territorial tussles going on worldwide. I know that the Spratly Islands, and many other islands, in the South China Sea are claimed by the surrounding countries (China, Philippines, Vietnam, et al.), all of whom are ready to fight for them. China and Japan have a similar beef about a different set of islands. And I read recently in The Economist that Colombia is unhappy with a ruling by the International Court of Justice on territorial waters that has favored Nicaragua.

So the methods for trying to resolve these territorial disputes include threats, military occupation, war, and court actions. The cost in blood and money has been high, and the parties involved mostly do not regard these matters as settled, which means that these disputes, with their attendant costs, will continue. In short, the existing approaches are not working. But I think I can fix this.

Here’s how. Territorial disputes should be settled not by fighting, but by purchase. The parties involved, instead of entering into a shooting war for the property, enter into a bidding war for it. Whoever is willing to pay the most for the disputed territory, pays that sum to the the other party in exchange for a formal acknowledgment of the purchaser’s perpetual sovereignty over the land and territorial waters. The agreement would be recorded at the United Nations or wherever else might support its validity and acceptance, and everyone’s maps would be updated accordingly. There, done.

But what if one of the countries is poor and the other one is rich? Well, the poor one can borrow, just like the new home-buyer. Chances are the poor country will have rich allies and friends who are willing to help out. And what would payment be settled in? I would suggest gold, but it could be anything agreed upon by the parties involved.

But why should you have to pay if you know you’re in the right? Well, it seems that everyone knows he’s in the right. You’re actually paying to settle the matter, and have everyone formally acknowledge that it is settled. And, as noted above, fighting for territory is costly anyway. Even filing an international lawsuit is costly, I bet.

And this is another point. The experience of Colombia with the International Court of Justice shows that appealing to a third-party referee is no guarantee of satisfaction on all sides or in their perception of fairness. A strength of the commercial approach is that the parties reach their own agreement face to face.

It might work something like this. The two parties, having agreed to use this approach, then agree on a neutral third party to act as arbiter and host. They draw up the documents describing exactly what is at issue—territory, waters, mineral rights, citizenship of residents, government property, and so on—and what the mode of payment will be. Then they get dickering. Perhaps as the result of a coin-toss, one side makes the first offer. If the other side accepts, they’re done. Otherwise, the second side must make a counteroffer. If I were designing this process, I’d let the parties themselves work out how the bidding happens—how many bidding rounds to have, minimum increments, extensions of the process, and so on—but there would need to be a limit. There would come a point when a final bid must be made.

The final bid should be a sealed bid by each side, submitted simultaneously to the arbiter. At that point the high bid wins and the auction is over. The low bidder collects payment and the paperwork is executed. The facts on the ground are then sorted out by a prearranged scheme.

Land that is bought seems to remain relatively uncontested—I think of the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska in the United States. And while emotions can run high during an auction, this process would be set up to minimize this; it would proceed over months, perhaps, and not by open outcry. Therefore the players’ minds could remain cool and calm, when the best decisions are made—the antithesis of war, which generates the strongest and worst of emotions.

I offer this as a sane, practical, cost-effective method of resolving territorial disputes. I believe that the calm, mature, cooler heads in the world would welcome it. And I believe that if we could ask those 907 people killed during the last Falklands dust-up, they would welcome it too.

Happy New Year.

my vacation reading

As I type these words it’s 8:40 a.m. in North Vancouver on this last day of 2012. Outside it’s 1° C, and still twilight. It’s a working day, but I hear no traffic. In my book Truth of the Python I use the phrase “that sense of domestic hibernation between Christmas and New Year”, and that is what prevails here.

I’m on vacation. I recognized this belatedly after Christmas when I didn’t feel like reading the books I had going in my stack: Shakespeare, Aristotle, A Study of History, and so on. No, I realized I wanted some vacation reading.

What counts as vacation reading for me? People used to talk about “beach books”, fat bestsellers that you take to the beach on your summer vacation to pass the time. In my old blog I described how I have lost the ability to read potboilers for pleasure. But now I realize that I do need a break from my regular “work-related” reading after all. So what do I fill my break with?

I asked myself, What kind of thing do you feel like reading? I wanted to read something journalistic. But on what topic? Politics? Science?

The first book to pop into my head was The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, a paperback I bought in October 2008, when it had become fairly famous, praised by Time magazine and Scientific American, as I recall. The premise is alluring: a sustained thought-experiment to imagine what would happen on Earth if the human race were suddenly to vanish. Interesting though I found this idea, I only made it to page 102 when I bought the book before I discovered that I was no longer reading it and shelved it. Now I thought it might fit the bill for vacation reading, so I pulled it from the science shelves here in my office wall bookcase, and dove back in.

I’d chosen well. Even though the author spends a lot of time talking about things other than just what the world will look like minus Homo sapiens, I enjoy his vivid, fast-moving journalistic style. Just flipping back now to find the last passage I highlighted. It’s from page 194, in chapter 11, “The World Without Farms”:

in a rural landscape rushing to meet the dietary demands of a rapidly growing urban industrial society, farmers no longer had the luxury of raising enough dairy cows and pigs to produce the requisite tons of organic manure. Throughout 19th-century Europe, farmers desperately sought food for their grain and vegetables. South Pacific islands were stripped of centuries of accumulated guano; stables were scoured for droppings. According to von Liebig, both horse and human bones from the Battle of Waterloo were ground and applied to crops.

(Passage slightly compressed due to my highlights.)

It’s a good example of how Weisman treats his subject: by preparing for glimpses of a posthuman future by delving into the details of our human past. I like his actual writing, and there are not too many writers I can say that about. So I’m pleased to sail on with it for my vacation.

But since my reading attention-span is not very long, I need more than one book to fill up my reading block each day. What else could I add to my vacation stack? I prowled my shelves for more. I felt that I was open to reading even more science, a subject area I used to read all the time.

This time I chose Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane, a paperback I picked up in June. It was an impulse purchase that I made while buying another book online. The Amazon trick of presenting you with other books during the checkout process worked this time. I’m interested in cellular biology and have long been curious about the organelles called mitochondria—the power-plants of our bodies. Here was a highly rated book on them, so I clicked to add it to my cart.

I bought it, but I didn’t read it. With so many other books on the go, I just couldn’t fit it into my schedule, not even to try the first few pages, so I shelved it in the “library” (three Ikea Billy bookshelves standing in the storage room by our deep-freeze). Now, vacation-time, was a chance to give this thing a try. So brought it upstairs and dove in.

And so far, so good. Lane has that quality that I’ve noted in some scientists I’ve known of having an eagerness for his topic that manifests in a desire to make you understand it clearly. He’s excited by the connections that he thinks mitochondria have to questions about evolution, the origins of life and consciousness, and the existence of intelligent life in the universe. It’s a technical subject but Lane explains things clearly and does his best to impart vividness with similes and analogies.

A sampler? My latest highlights, again compressed, from pages 41–42:

More than a thousand species of primitive eukaryotes do not possess mitochondria. To generate energy, most of these cells depend on fermentations in the same way as yeast. While a few of them tolerate oxygen, most grow best at very low levels or even in the complete absence of the gas. Cavalier-Smith named this hypothetical group the “archezoa” in deference to their ancient roots and their animal-like, scavenging mode of living, as well as their similarities to the archaea. Four groups of primitive-looking eukaryotes, which not only lacked mitochondria but also most other organelles, were confirmed by genetic analysis to be amongst the oldest of the eukaryotes.

(For the curious: a eukaryote is a cell that possesses a nucleus: the kind of cell from which all multicellular living things, plant and animal, are made.)

No regrets here either. I’ll keep reading.

My reading period still not filled, I hunted out another book. This time I chose The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk, a massive (1368 pages) memoir of the journalist’s career covering the Middle East. Here again is brisk journalistic writing, this time offering an eyewitness account of key events in this sensitive geopolitical trouble spot. I bought this book in June 2008, having spotted it on the shelves at Chapters-Indigo at Park Royal. I made it 158 pages in before my interest had moved on and I was obliged to shelve it. Now I’m ready to pick it up again.

I’m in chapter 5, “The Path to War”, about Iraq. Fisk is talking about the history leading up to the most recent Iraq wars. And here is my last highlight, from page 179:

Lawrence remarked in a 1920 letter to the Observer that “these risings take a regular course. There is a preliminary Arab success, then British reinforcements go out as a punitive force. They fight their way (our losses are slight, the Arab losses heavy) to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery, aeroplanes, or gunboats.” This same description entirely fits American military operations in Iraq in 2004, once the occupying powers and their puppet governments lost control of most of Iraq.

(The Lawrence mentioned here is T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia.)

So there you have it: my vacation reading as I sit each evening by the fireside, sipping my green tea and later red wine, the little Christmas tree lit beside me. May you enjoy such pleasures in your life.

And an excellent 2013 to you.

how should I vote?

Ten years ago, when my temporary ordination as a Buddhist monk at Gampo Abbey was cut short by a ruptured Achilles tendon, and I was being driven to the bus stop by my abbey friend Geoff, he asked me, “Do you regard yourself as a small-c conservative?”

We had been talking about politics and social issues off and on during the five-plus months we had been there (Geoff had arrived the day before I did). I had brought a copy of The Economist to the abbey and had sometimes got into discussions or even arguments with younger residents (I was 43) about things like racism or philanthropy or capitalism. Monks aren’t supposed to make friends (the ideal is to extend the same good will and friendliness toward everyone), but I had become close to Geoff, who was a rock guitarist and sometime street person from Edmonton. He was about 10 years younger than I was, and was a lay resident (he wore street clothes and did not observe the full monastic discipline of the ordained residents). His politics were not exactly socialist, because many of his opinions were pragmatic and even tough, as one might expect from an Albertan; but at the same time there was an activist streak in him that wanted to push back against big, greedy corporations.

My answer to Geoff was no, I did not see myself as a small-c conservative. “I think real conservatives would shoot me for some of my positions,” I said.

“Like what?” said Geoff.

“Well, I’m against capital punishment for one thing. I believe in gun control. I’m antiwar and believe in solving problems through negotiation and treaties. I’m an environmentalist. Oh: and I’d completely legalize drugs and prostitution. So how conservative is that?”

“Not very conservative,” said Geoff, chuckling.

“On the other hand, leftists would probably shoot me too. I’m a capitalist and I think the government should stay out of the economy. I would privatize a lot of what government does, including health care. I don’t believe in government deficits. I’m opposed to multiculturalism and other government-funded efforts at social engineering.”

“Not very left-wing,” Geoff acknowledged.

Here in Canada the four main federal political parties are the ruling Conservatives, the “social-democratic” New Democratic Party, the long-dominant but now flagging Liberals, and the decimated regional sovereigntists the Bloc Quebecois, with the Green Party showing growing support. I feel that none of these parties represents my beliefs or my interests. I have developed a revulsion for the governing party, so I will vote against them at the earliest opportunity. But who is there to vote for?

My political beliefs are still not fully formed, but they have been taking shape over the past few years as I have investigated economics and, now, liberal philosophy based on my effort to acquire a liberal education. The word liberal derives from the Latin liberalis, meaning “suitable for a free man”. The initial and core idea of liberalism is that of individual freedom, and this I can say I wholeheartedly support. We all should have the maximum freedom that is consistent with the same freedom being enjoyed by everyone else.

No party subscribes to this idea except, I suppose, the tiny Libertarian Party, but they seem just a bit too “ideological” for me. To me, the environment is the most important issue globally and locally, but the Libertarian solution to environmental problems—private ownership of all resources—would need to be explained to me more clearly. How will this alleviate or prevent climate change, for instance? I note that their website does not include the environment as a heading on its list of “positions”—only “pollution” under the heading “social concerns”. They come across as too doctrinaire, too academic, too robotic. And if they have trouble luring me in, they’ll have more trouble luring most other people.

If the environment is my concern, surely the Green Party is my natural home. It’s true that I have voted for the Green Party in the past, but only halfheartedly. Why? Because the Green Party is basically a left-wing party, probably even left of the New Democrats. They support big government, high taxes, organized labor, minimum wages, and other socialist policies. Their strength is that they “get” the importance of the environment as an issue—but that is their only strength (other than the personal appeal and integrity of their party leader, Elizabeth May).

So where does this leave me? Politically, in Canada, nowhere. It feels like my options are to lodge a protest vote with an idealistic splinter party (the Libertarians) that has no realistic prospect of winning even a single seat, or to vote for a party (the Greens) that represents my key issue, but only as one plank of a platform that I otherwise deplore.

I think of my situation this way: if there were a small-l liberal party, I’d vote for it. Failing that, if there were a small-c conservative party, I’d vote for that. Failing either of those, I’m left with my aversion to the current ruling party, which inclines me to vote for whatever candidate seems most able to unseat my local incumbent. That would mean voting either Liberal or NDP.

So I have become a voter-against instead of a voter-for. In this I suspect that I am like many of my fellow citizens—which is too bad.

My path forward? I will continue to work on my own philosophical, economic, and political education and ideas, and seek to share them with other like-minded people. Maybe one of these decrepit, backward-looking parties can be repurposed to the needs of the 21st century and its disaffected occupants.

the walking dead

A couple of weeks ago Kimmie and I watched season 1 of the HBO series The Walking Dead about a zombie apocalypse. The show had been recommended to me; otherwise I would not have tried it, having been so disappointed with the 1978 movie Dawn of the Dead, which we saw as part of our History of Cinema Festival. The movie, which is rated 8.0 out of 10 on IMDb, I could give only a 3—possibly my lowest rating yet in the 4 years of our festival. We didn’t finish watching it.

The deficiencies of the 1978 movie are absent from the new TV series. The throngs of ineffectual zombies that I found merely comic in the movie have become frightening and horrible in the TV series. The few human survivors of what appears to be a global pandemic have serious problems on their hands. People who don’t know each other and don’t particularly like each other must band together for survival against the implacable cannibalistic menace. Not everyone makes it. Perhaps no one will make it.

So I’ve put season 2 on hold at the local library. But yesterday, sometime after I completed my prose sketch while on break from Christmas shopping at Park Royal mall, a new thought came to me. In my sketch I had written this fragment:

A sense of alienation: people becoming gradually more and more mutually irritating animals, each intent on his own purpose, cutting in front of each other, making no eye contact, resentfully buying gifts.

And my thought was this: my god, these are the walking dead.

The phrase mutually irritating animals was my effort to allude to a passage from Joseph Campbell’s Creative Mythology, in which he is describing our modern alienation:

The sense of desolation is experienced on two levels: first the social, in a loss of identification with any spiritually compelling, structuring group; and, beyond that, the metaphysical, in a loss of any sense either of identity or of relationship with a dimension of experience, being, and rapture any more awesome than that provided by an empirically classifiable conglomerate of self-enclosed, separate, mutually irritating organisms held together only by lust (crude or sublimated) and fear (of pain and death or of boredom).

This condition of spiritual deracination is the hallmark of the Waste Land, the terrain of the modern soul.

That is, if we have a soul. In The Walking Dead, a clinical explanation is eventually given that zombie-ism is a syndrome created by a virus that is able to reanimate the human brain-stem and some other nearby structures. The only way of putting a zombie out of action is by destroying the brain of the reanimated corpse. Until that happens, it will continue to try to feed itself, preferably on fresh human flesh. It would seem that if the human had a soul, it would have flown away upon death, and the zombie is only the machinery of the body, now acting purposively but unconsciously, kind of like a riding-mower that’s got away from its operator.

But in the Waste Land the very existence of the soul is in doubt, is it not? C. S. Lewis said “I don’t have a soul. I am a soul. I have a body.” But most of us aren’t so sure. The existence of the soul, especially if it survives physical death, seems to point necessarily to a spiritual dimension. The idea that the sentient part of us is separable from the body and has a separate destiny from the that of the body makes the question of that destiny important. The Waste Land then is the world of experience without soul; it is the zombie world, the world of the walking dead. It is our world.

A zombie is a mindless human—just like us. You say we don’t eat each other? No, not literally, not usually (although sometimes we do). But we do slaughter each other, and we do so mainly without thought or feeling. We leave each other to suffer and die, propelled by physiological drives that we mainly don’t reflect on, and don’t want to reflect on. Stretched between habit and impulse, we live in a state of suppressed misery, vaguely aware that something is wrong.

A couple of posts ago I reviewed Mortimer J. Adler’s book Intellect: Mind over Matter. In the final chapter of his book Adler addresses the neglect of the intellect, which is his definition of sloth. He describes the behavior of those who persistently avoid using the uniquely human endowment of their intellects:

Those who do not lead intellectual lives deploy their intellectual powers in the work-a-day world of earning a living for the sake of getting ahead in that world. If they were not compelled to use their intellects for that purpose, they wouuld not be inclined to do so. When they are not immersed in the economic rat race, they resort to various forms of play and entertainment for the sake of recreation from the fatigues of toil or in order to kill the time that lies heavy on their hands. It seldom occurs to them to use free time for the exacting pursuits of leisure instead of for recreation or the pleasures of play.

Adler is describing what he regards as a moral failing, not a spiritual one, but it feels like the same point.

It’s interesting that the zombie-ism of The Walking Dead is caused by a virus. There is no consensus, as far as I know, on whether viruses are living things or not. I believe that most biologists regard them as too simple to be “alive”. They don’t eat, excrete, or metabolize, and they have no natural lifespan. They inject their RNA into host cells and thus cause themselves to be reproduced. They are zombielike.

I don’t know whether viruses are alive or not. I’m inclined to say yes. But in any case they are another door opening onto the mystery of being. They act according to their nature, as do the zombies, and as do we. The viruses and the zombies are not in a position to question their own nature, but we are. The question is: do we?

As long as we don’t, then we really are the walking dead.

prose sketch: a break in Christmas shopping

Thu 20 Dec 2012 ca. 12:45 p.m. Park Royal South

Triumphal chords of a horn arrangement of “Little Drummer Boy”: a kitschy march behind the thrum of Christmas retailing. A sense of alienation: people becoming gradually more and more mutually irritating animals, each intent on his own purpose, cutting in front of each other, making no eye contact, resentfully buying gifts.

A dull, low-wattage sky is visible through distant bands of clerestory windows high above the mall. Cold rain falls heavily from the dense, low overcast. Inside, a certain impersonal vitality: we’re all here for a purpose. The squeak of soles on these bone tiles, the mechanical tremble of the escalators, and so many different kinds and sources of weak light: bright incandescent stars in the boutique opposite; the backlit freestanding sign like an altar at the head of my little rest area—Chatters salon; 6 massive letters of the Future Shop sign on the level below, glowing like stove burners; milky pies of fluorescent light hanging from the arched ceiling of this arm of the mall. Now: a marimba solo in a big-band tune. A vocalist giving his all: the reign of professionalism.

It’s a great echoing grotto.

prose sketch: decorating Christmas cookies

Sun 16 Dec 2012 1:30 p.m. my kitchen

The kitchen table in its windowed bay has become Kimmie’s atelier. The artisan sits in “my” chair, a green Christmas-themed apron draped down her front and back, bent over a yellow star cookie, piping further yellow decoration onto it. Now she peppers it with yellow sprinkles, tapping lightly. And back to piping, gripping the icing-bag in her right hand like the teat of a cow, and directing its steel tip back and forth with her left index finger.

The round table is almost completely covered with things: magazines lying stacked and open this way and that, showing the example images; wax paper with the complete stars accumulating on it; two stacks of Christmas CD boxes; a big can of completed gingerbread cookies; a transparent bag of toasted Chex-’n'-Cheerios snack mix, made by Robin; a vase from which branches of holly lean, gathered from the lawn of a nearby house where the owners thoughtfully prune their berry-laden tree each year at Christmas and leave the trimmings with a “free holly” sign; Kimmie’s big Ikea water-stein; the clay fruit-bowl, pushed to the edge of the table, with its lone mandarin orange; last month’s National Geographic magazine; and a stack of flyers and things mostly hidden behind the vase. All the chairs now bear cargo as well, and the tight space of the floor: a plastic garbage-can of flour; the two stages of Kimmie’s big, professional cake-decorating kit.

I stand at the kitchen counter, a little bamboo cutting-board for my desk. The counter too is cluttered with decorating paraphernalia: paintbrushes, nozzle tips, icing sugar, toothpicks dyed with colors. No Christmas music on just now: a gap. Even the fridge has shut off, leaving only the crackle of the icing-bag in Kimmie’s hand, the jingling of the chimes outside the front door, and the purr of traffic rolling by.

The artisan bends patiently over her work, squeezing, squeezing.

Intellect: Mind over Matter by Mortimer J. Adler

Intellect: Mind over Matter by Mortimer Jerome Adler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This small volume (205 pages, including index) presents a forceful case for the existence of a distinct human nature that makes us fundamentally different from any other kind of animal.

Intellect was published in 1990, when its author was 87. It represents the views of someone who had spent a long life learning, thinking, teaching, and writing. Adler, a maverick of 20th-century philosophy who stopped trying to get the attention of his academic colleagues in 1977 and decided to write only for the general reader, draws on the tradition of thought that stems from Aristotle. Against all the modern and postmodern philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, neurologists, and artificial-intelligence researchers, who mainly hold that, since our experience and mental powers arise from the brain, there is no basic difference between humans and other animals, Adler asserts that the human intellect is unique on Earth, and that, although the brain is necessary in order for the intellect to manifest, it is not sufficient. The intellect, which gives us our powers of conception, judgment, and free choice, is immaterial and not a mere product of brain activity, as, say, our sense of hearing is.

Moving quickly over the terrain, the author describes what the intellect is, discusses what he regards as the errors of philosophy and science in losing a grasp of this classical concept, enumerates the special powers of the intellect, and finishes with a short section on virtue and vice, or the proper and improper use of the intellect.

So what is the intellect? It is the mental power to form and use general concepts: the power of abstraction. It allows us to reason deductively and to create and use language with which to communicate. Adler is at pains to demonstrate that animals do not possess these abilities in even the most rudimentary degree. He maintains that rats, for instance, that can recognize triangular shapes in order to press a button for food, are making use only of perceptual abstraction. In other words, the rat recognizes triangular shapes as similar, but has no notion of “triangularity” as such. No rat will ever know what a triangle is. No rat will ever be able to define triangle or to read Euclid.

When I reached the final part where Adler shows how intellect gives rise to the virtues and vices, and allows us, because of its fundamental freedom, to lead lives of virtue (if we so choose) and thus of dignity as human beings, I was excited and inspired. Among other things, it’s not easy to find such a short, cogent, clear, and authoritative account of virtue and vice, and in my opinion this part of the book alone is worth its purchase price.

Do I buy the author’s argument? I’m not sure. His breadth of learning and depth of thought and experience in this area are vastly greater than mine. My own philosophical training, such as it is, has been mainly Buddhist. In the Buddhist view, all sentient beings have fundamentally the same mind. It is this that allows reincarnation as different kinds of beings in different lives. All sentient beings want to be happy and to avoid suffering. Different beings have different aptitudes and powers, but in the nature of things there cannot be any categorical difference between them.

Adler’s view, which he expressed in his earlier book Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, is that if we lack a clear understanding of the difference between human and animal, then we can never have any principled reason to treat humans differently than we treat other animals. If we round up and slaughter cattle because it suits us, there is no fundamental reason why we shouldn’t round up and slaughter people if it suits us. The morality of it is the same.

There’s no easy answer to this. I think the Buddhist reply might be that instead of transferring our cruelty from animals to humans, we might think about transferring some of our human kindness toward animals.

But Intellect provides plenty of food for thought. Indeed, it’s a workout for the intellect, which, for many of us, has become as flabby as our bodies. If you want to read about something that matters, give this a go.

View all my reviews

prose sketch: the quiet living room

Sun 9 Dec 2012 1:05 p.m. my living room

The place is quiet and empty: Kimmie and Robin are out shopping. Quiet but not silent, for there is the ever-present wash of traffic in front of the house, the soft ticking of the battery-powered clock over the entertainment unit, and the sporadic, grating caws of crows outside.

And not quite empty, for I am here. No lights are on: just the dull gray light falling through the venetian blinds, gleaming on the smooth hulks of our leather furniture. The little cone of Kimmie’s Christmas tree stands on the table by my chair, festooned with iridescent charms and garlands of pearls. A long flaccid bough of artificial fir lies along the mantelpiece, with green candles standing at intervals in it. All the lights are switched off. The decorations wait in suspended daytime animation to radiate their electric cheer when their mistress returns. The black grotto of the fireplace is loaded pregnantly with dry wood. The wide coffee table is scattered with DVD boxes, woven coasters, remotes, and my old hardback Webster’s, red and worn.

It’s like a store or a business on Sunday: abandoned. The action has moved elsewhere, it swirls around outside, involved with other things. To be the only consciousness in a place, the last to leave, brings a unique feeling of solitude, a yearning, a loneliness in the floor of the pelvis. They’ve moved on, and now there is only me to bear witness.

prose sketch: front porch in the rain

Wed 5 Dec 2012 ca. 1:45 p.m. my front porch

A cold day, with the pattering of rain. A feeling of shrinking into oneself, a craving for inertia, to wait it out. Let the somber cold grayness pass like the loud cars groaning up the street one after another. The rumbling acceleration of each one. The yellow stars of the sweet-gum leaves are no longer fresh on the road where they were blown in the night: they lie flat and faded, pasted to the wet asphalt as though pressed below a sheet of waxed paper. On the boulevard and behind the town houses opposite, the trees are all bare: nude and branched as dark coral, skeletal arms upraised to the ink-stained sky. No light on in any neighbor’s place: all is domestic darkness, a winter-daytime vacancy. People are in their cars, surging forward with determination and noise.

But the raindrops fall: like being in a cold tent looking out on a wet forbidding world.

hey Google—want my money? come and get it!

Some years ago I made Google News my browser’s home page, feeling fed up with CNN, which had been my home page before that. I was excited by the idea of receiving news stories from many different sources, and by being able to customize the page to my location and interests. It seemed like a great idea, and it was free.

Now I’m bored of Google News. When I open Firefox each morning I’ll see the same news stories that were there three days ago, and which I haven’t read because I’m not interested. There are some aspects of the page that are customizable, but Google has not granted me any of the powers over it that I really want. The reason, I believe, is that it’s a free service; they’re not directly earning any money from me. If they make Google News more useful to me, what’s in it for them? Instead they focus their effort on sending me e-mail solicitations to use their AdWords service.

Well, I have news for you, Google: I’m willing to pay you. You can charge me for news. More specifically, you can charge me for a news interface that I like. Instead of scheming indirect ways to siphon money from my wallet, why don’t you just let me give it to you?

Here’s how. Your news page might be laid out much as it is now, but with some important additions. Aside from obvious things like refreshing the content more often and drawing from a wider variety of sources, you will offer each story with seven elements:

a headline
a graphic
a short abstract or preview of the content
the author
the publisher
the word count or page size
a price

That’s right: a price. That price will be set by the publisher. When I click on a story, my account will be debited that amount. Your cut will be whatever you negotiate with the content providers, but let’s say 5%. Providers can offer stories for free if they want, but otherwise, they can charge whatever they think they can get.

In exchange for my money, you’ll offer me much more powerful customization features than you do now. I’ll be able to tell you who my preferred publishers and writers are, what my preferred topics are, what mix of stories I want to see on the page, and so on. You’ll let me rate stories, authors, and publishers so you can fetch better stuff for me and for other users. In addition, I’ll be able to dismiss stories from the page with a click, and block certain writers, publishers, or topics from showing up on my page.

What would I be willing to pay for a news story? That depends. But if a newspaper costs about $1.50 now, and I read 10 stories in it, that implies an average price of $0.15. For a long investigative piece by, say, Seymour Hersh, I might pay $1.00 or more, depending on what it’s about. For high-quality, relevant stories that interest me I’d be willing to spend a few dollars a day.

I don’t think it would be difficult to talk content providers into doing this. It solves the thorny problem of how to monetize their content online. If 1,000 people download a 10-cent story, that’s $100—better than nothing. A lot better. If you manage to sell it to 20,000 people, that’s $2,000. And your cut, Google, is $100. Not bad for one story.

Content providers worry about competing with all the free content online. Well, a lot of that is not worth anything more. And if a pay facility like this existed, content providers could stop putting their stuff up for free.

In sum, what I want is a non-feed-based news aggregator which functions as a vending machine powered by microtransactions, over which I have godlike powers of customization.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be you, Google. It probably won’t be. Someone else could implement this idea. I know that some people in Silicon Valley read my blog (thank you!)—maybe one of you could run with this ball. I know that if I were an Internet entrepreneur, instead of an author with a lone website, I would.