Len Edgerly

Over the past few days, I’ve been listening to a talk given in February at Cornell by Sergio Fajardo, who was mayor of Medellin, Columbia Colombia, from 2004 to 2007 and is now campaigning for president of Colombia in next year’s election.  This guy is amazing, and I highly recommend his presentation, which you can listen to by clicking here for the audio and here for the page at UChannel podcasts, an excellent Princeton series of lectures from all over the world. To download a QuickTime video of his talk, click here and then click on the video-tube icon that has the letters “UC” on it.

When I hear the name “Medellin” I think of drug lords and death.  I had no idea that a reform coalition headed by a charismatic mathematician, Sergio Fajardo, won the mayor’s race in Medellin in 2004 with the intention of solving the city’s two huge and interrelated problems of violence and inequality.

I was pleased to hear Fajardo in his orienting of the Cornell audience explain that Medellin is “a mile high, a little less than Denver, 50 meters below Denver.”  This made me think he might be a natural participant in Denver’s exciting Biennial of the Americas scheduled for next year.  His mixture of creativity and pragmatism reminds me of Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, and if they have not already met I feel confident they would find themselves very at home in each other’s company.

“Since I am a mathematician, I like to address issues the way a mathematician would do,” Fajardo told his audience at Cornell, “to say, ‘What problems are we going to solve here?”  The first problem his team chose to address was inequality.  “Latin America is the most unequal region in the world, and within that most unequal region in the world, Colombia is one of the most unequal countries, and Medellin is part of Colombia, so we have a very unequal society,” he said.

The second problem this mathematician attacked is violence, which came into Medellin in full force at the beginning of the 1980s with the rise of narco-traffic. “That was a bomb that was thrown at our society, and that bomb has shaken the foundations of our city and the foundations of Colombia,” Fajardo stated, in his calm and resonant cadence.  To watch him on the video and hear his voice, you’d think this is a poet or a scientist at quiet work far from the hurly burly of urban and national politics.  His centered presence and equanimity remind me of another unlikely leader who has similarly promised to change not only policies, but the way politics are conducted in the U.S.

The story Fajardo told in the hour-long talk unfolded like a novel, or the account of a team of scientists hunting the cure for a killer virus.  They decided they could not address violence and inequality at the same time, because the roots of those two trees were too strong.  So they tackled violence first, beefing up the police force, and then they built library parks in the poorest neighborhoods of the city.  Fajardo did not sugarcoat the pain involved and the mistakes made.  But at each crisis or challenge, he simply looked at the next action that would make an improvement, and he never stopped.

As I listened to the podcast while working out on the cross-trainer, I tried to imagine how passionate conservatives like my parents would hear the story.  I liked to think it would not be easy to dismiss this man as simply one more Latin American Leftist bent on diminishing personal freedoms under the guise of equality.  He never mentioned taxes in his talk, and when someone asked how he had paid for all the good projects in the poor neighborhoods, he said that yes, they had raised land taxes.  This apparently was accepted by the wealthy who I’m sure paid the lion’s share of the increases, perhaps because of these two promises the new mayor’s team made:

Every single peso that you give us, we will translate into something like this: “Here are your taxes .” We had that statement in all the places we went to. So we managed to tell people that they were giving us the money and what they gave us we translated into something very good for everyone.  … And then, something very simple — we didn’t steal a single peso.

By the time of Denver’s Biennial of the Americas, this mathematician turned mayor might be the President of Colombia. This would be a great time for us to issue him an invitation to be a keynote speaker!

With help from wizard Kindle formatter Joshua Tallent, I now have a new title available at Amazon’s Kindle Store.  It’s A Poet’s Progress at Bennington – Vol. 1. It comprises the work I did during my first semester in the Bennington College Writing Seminars MFA program, a mix of commentary on poets and my own original poems. My teacher that semester was David Lehman, editor for the highly successful Best American Poetry Series.  David was a terrific teacher and a great wit.  The way it worked was that I would send him a packet once a month during the semester, responding to his suggested readings and assignments, so this first volume contains four packets.  Then we all gathered on the classic New England campus of Bennington in southern Vermont for a 10-day orgy of workshops, special lectures, and nonstop conversations and arguments among fellow students.

I wasn’t the oldest student in my class, which graduated in January of 2003.  The low-residency MFA writing programs are terrific for people who have pursued other careers, like mine as a journalist and corporate executive, and finally decide to try their hand at serious writing.  I loved every minute of the program, even the ones which involved painful realizations about the inadequacy of my own work.  I always felt I was moving toward something those two years of the Bennington MFA. When I came across the saved files of my packets for David Lehman, I decided to edit them lightly and publish them using Amazon’s Digital Text Publishing platform.  I set the price at the lowest one possible, a dollar, and that usually means Amazon will discount it to 80 cents.

I left Bennington eager to take my place in the literary world, and I worked hard to complete a booklength poem titled Downsizing the Heart, excerpts of which appear in this new Kindle volume.  But along the way, new passions arose, triggered by a conference I attended in Banff named Blogs ‘n’ Dogs, where I first saw someone making a podcast. That was in December, 2005, and I’ve been podcasting and experimenting with audio and video on the net ever since.

I still write poems occasionally, and I dutifully pack my big leather notebook of works in progress whenever I travel, in case the muse lures me from GarageBand and iMovie to pen and paper.  Having my work from eight years ago available on my Kindle may spark renewed interest in poetry.  And I bought a paper book of poems several days ago, W.S. Merwin’s latest, The Shadow of Sirius, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry this year, his second.  I’ve been fascinated by the insights and observations that my new Kindlesphere friend Andrys Basten has emailed me in the past two days, as she has taken the time for a very close reading of A Poet’s Progress – Vol. 1. It’s wonderful to have readers, and to hear from them.  We all know the Kindle and eBooks in general are making a new world of reading possible.  What’s not clear is how this emerging platform will revolutionize creative writing.  I’m enjoying my own small experiment as a way to find out.

Here is my description of Vol. 1 as it appears on Amazon:

This volume’s commentary comprises considerations of The Best American Poetry 2000, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T.S. Eliot, nine short stories by Henry James, The Mooring of Starting Out by John Ashbery, The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, Douglas Hofstadter’s translation of Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, The Sea and the Mirror by W. H. Auden, The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill, Sphere by A.R. Ammons, Garbage by A.R. Ammons, and The One Day by Donald Hall. Edgerly’s original poetry takes as its subject literary satire, travel in New Zealand, a villanelle on marriage, poetry. Also included are excerpts of a book-length poetry manuscript loosely drawn from the author’s experience as an executive at a gas company.

All that for a buck, and of course there’s the free sample available if you’d like a taste of the work first…

SmartMoney editor Tom Weber has written one of the smartest pieces about the Amazon Kindle that I’ve seen in a long time.  His thesis is that the Kindle makes it difficult to wander off in the middle of a book or article, and that’s why we’re willing actually to pay for content such as newspapers and magazines that we otherwise expect to be free on the web.  He compares the phenomenon to the Starbucks strategy of creating comfy environments for drinking coffee, part of the reason we were willing (in the old days, more so) to pay ridiculous amounts of money for a cup of java.  Here is an excerpt from Weber’s article, which appears in PaidContent, with emphasis added:

Over a few weeks, I rediscovered my ability to simply read the book or article I had punched up in the first place. (Just like—gasp!—old-fashioned printed matter.) It’s particularly enjoyable when reading a newspaper or magazine—enough so that I’ve been routinely purchasing some of these publications when I could have grabbed my laptop and read them for free on the web. In effect, I’m paying for the lack of distraction.

Exactly! In my own experience with the Kindle, which dates back to the early days of the orginal Kindle in late 2007, this same pleasure in what Weber calls “unitasking” explains why I prefer reading on the Kindle to reading on paper. Oddly, the new technology of the Kindle offers fewer distractions for my mind than a traditional book, in which I’m always able to see a page other than the one I’m reading, and it’s easy to flip ahead, to see how far I am from the end of a chapter.  Some new Kindle readers report feeling hemmed in by this limited view of the text, but once they submit to it, I would argue, the limited view is exactly what gives us the sense that reading, which we’ve always loved, has become even more of a delight.

I am grateful to Jeff Bezos and company for resisting the temptation to add distractions to this Zen-like attention which the Kindle encourages. As the e Ink technology advances, there will be temptations for video and who knows what else.  But each advance will have to be tested against Weber’s insight into the genius of the Kindle.

I want to thank Alex Ferreyra, editorial producer of ContentNext Media, for emailing Weber’s article to me.  In the near future, I hope to arrange a telephone interview with the author for an upcoming episode of my weekly Kindle Chronicles podcast.

My friend Mary Anderson is 83 years old, and I had occasion to drive her and a another friend, Nancy, from Denver to the Limon Correctional Facility yesterday evening to participate in a program for offenders.  In Limon, we had time for a quick supper at Denny’s before heading over to the prison, and this gave me a chance to demonstrate Twitter to Mary on my iPhone.  To say she was skeptical is to  exaggerate her openness to the whole thing.

I began in the usual way, Twittering the following message:

Showing my 83-year-old friend Mary how Twitter works at Denny’s. Please say Hi…

Before our grilled cheese sandwich, shrimp salad, and meatloaf had arrived, the replies began showing up in Tweetie on my iPhone. Teeg was first up, with a simple “Hi Mary! ” Then came a chorus of tweets, a sample of which I read to Mary in our booth:

goldiekatsu – Say hi to Mary for me.

mjmontagne – Hello Mary and welcome to Twitter! My name is Matt and I’m “Tweeting” from my home here in Menlo Park, CA.

atlas100 – Hi Mary. This is fun huh?

RickWolff – Hello to Mary! Denny’s, eh? Avoid any food with the word “slam” in the name.

Jim_OConnell Hi Mary! Order the onion rings!

hollyhock100 – Hi Mary! After you’ve mastered Twitter get yourself a Facebook page. If my 85-year-old Mum can do it-so can you!

Otir – Hi Mary! It works very easily

abrahamlloyd – Hey Mary — welcome to the Twittersphere. Can you put up a picture of you and @lenedgerly ?

I thought Abraham had a great idea, and Nancy took the above photo with my iPhone 3GS.  Once it was up via Twitpic, the tweets just kept on coming:

mjmontagne – after you get her going on Twitter, what’s next?? Perhaps a Kindle DX for Mary? Great photo!

roxannedarling – Not only Hi to Mary, but Aloha too!

JBMONCO – Nice pic. Maroon color is good on Mary

jimhill – Hi Mary. Skip the Grand Salm at Denny’s!

CathleenRitt – Is the picture of and Mary at Denny’s in support of @ChrisBrogan taking his kids to McDonald’s? It’s a great pic either way

abrahamlloyd – You two look great!

stevegarfield – Say to Mary for me and have her read my mom’s blog. @milliegarfield

I didn’t make a Twitter convert of Mary, but she said she’d been following Twitter’s role in the Iran protests, and she really liked the compliment directed at her maroon sweatshirt.  She was humoring me.  We were having a great time.  But soon it was time to pay the check and drive to the edge of town where a partial rainbow had formed over the stark, squat buildings of the state prison.  Once past the security desk, wearing our red visitor badges, we passed through high gates and rolls of concertina wire and were met with the incongruous sight of little brown bunnies hopping along the grass on the walkway to the visitors’ area.

Mary has been driving the 90 miles to and from Limon to help put on programs for offenders ever since the prison opened in 1992.  The regular group of six men showed up for the meeting, and we all had a chance to participate.  When it was Mary’s turn to speak, I watched the faces of the guys, young and old, lifers and who knows?  They sat across a table from a very small woman with snow-white hair and a smile that came from inside.  I wish you could have seen the depth of their listening to her, and how she listened back.

I’m well into the book my friend Tom recommended in Casper, and I’ve begun daily 45-minute workouts as prescribed. Another piece of the book’s thesis is to commit, to engage, to participate in the lives of others.  Mary Anderson is Exhibits A through Z on the benefits of this kind of commitment.  She talks of the offenders she’s come to know over the years as if they’re family.  She gets angry when things go poorly, and she can’t understand why more people don’t volunteer for the programs which Colorado’s Department of Corrections enable to come into the prisons.

As I sat at the table listening to Mary during the meeting, I tried to imagine myself 25 years hence and hoped I’d see a little old guy with a head of snow-white hair, toting the latest pocket tech gizmo and caring about something strongly enough to fight for it and to drive for hours to make it happen.

Mary doesn’t need Twitter to connect. She was a good sport, putting up with a dollop of Twitter attention. I want to thank my Twitter friends who responded with such warmth to my invitation.  I had a ball.

We return to Denver this morning after three days visiting Casper, Wyoming, where my wife and I met 27 years ago and lived till moving to the city in 2000.  I’ve never really enjoyed the outdoors, to tell you the truth, so city life suits me fine.  But being back here in Wyoming and reconnecting with old friends seem to have updated my operating system.  I’ll see if I can explain what’s new in this version.

The issue of physical health kept butting into my consciousness yesterday as I did the rounds.  One old friend’s body has been ravaged by stroke, lung condition, and a fall down a flight of stairs.  I had not seen him for nearly 10 years before lunch yesterday at the Casper Petroleum Club, one of my old haunts.  He was on oxygen, and his left arm was bruised and taped.  He’s in his early 80s, just as full of piss and fire as in the old days, when he was a state senator, and my job was often to lobby for things he opposed and to kill things he held dear.  It was an odd setting in which to form a friendship, but that’s what happened.  I enjoyed my dealings with Tom more than my encounters with so-called allies, because he was fierce,  principled, and irreverent.  He was always a one-man lightning bolt with thunder, and he still is. I saw it in his eyes yesterday as he clawed at his sandwich and laughed at our reliving of the old battles.

Another friend, about the same age as Tom, just returned from a trip to Israel and is planning trips this year to Denali Park in Alaska and the Galapagos Islands.  He plays two rounds of golf each week and goes to the nursing home each noon to feed his wife, who has advanced Alzheimer’s.  I don’t remember Jack working out or eating tofu, but for some reason he’s reached his early 80s relatively intact.  He’s cranky as ever, in a playful way that always makes me smile.

As if I were being led around Casper by a cosmic tour guide, my visit with a friend who at 57 is a year younger than I am included a moment in his office when he nearly leaped out of his chair, he was so excited to recommend a book he’s reading.  It’s Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You’re 80 and Beyond (click here for Kindle edition) by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge, M.D. The thesis is that you can, by exercise and sensible diet, dramatically improve your chances of good health in your eighties by getting ready in your 50s.  My friend said the diet boils down to “don’t eat crap.”  That and 45 minutes a day, six days a week, of aerobics and core strength exercises are, the book, claims, the Rx for an old age barely worth surviving for.

Last night I was a warmly welcomed visitor to the men’s group that I helped organize in 1990, inspired by Robert Bly and the then sure-to-change-the-world Men’s Movement.   Well, not so much.  But this particular group of men has been meeting uninterruptedly for nearly 19 years.  My old drum was still there in the upstairs meeting room, along with the talking stick I decorated with feathers and leather.  There were seven us there last night, and a couple of things had changed: not as much hugging, and no junk food.  Had they read the book?  Back in the day, each of us would bring a bag of something crunchy and harmful, and there were lots of back-slapping hugs that always felt a little awkward, but okay.  Since I’ve been gone, the awkwardness seems to have prevailed, and the hugless greetings last night seemed more natural.

The drumming was fantastic.  It went on for a good 15 minutes, a din of rhythmic energy and thrumming mind.  “I guess you can’t do that in your condo,” one of the guys said afterward.  At Men’s Group, whoever holds the stick talks, and the rest of us listen.  It’s a brilliant mode of conversation. As the stick made its circle a few times before being passed in silence for a full rotation, I kept hearing about the body, and the land.

One guy is gearing up for yet another commitment to work out regularly.  But on his first day of jogging, he pulled a muscle.  This provoked an instant roar of knowing laughter.  Another guy’s work with concrete countertops provides him days of physical effort that leave him happily spent.  Another is enjoying an orgy of healthy outdoor activities during his summer break from a job at a high school – biking, hiking, and hockey.  He glowed with physical well-being.  I heard stories of elk hunting, rodeos, and trespassing on a local landowner’s ranch spread outside of town.  The latter came with a question about whether to ask the owner’s permission.  “I recommend against it,” one of us said. “If he says no, you’ll probably need to avoid his place, and if he says yes, it won’t be as much fun to go there.”

At one point, after I’d asserted my preference for life indoors and online, William did not mock or contradict me when the stick arrived in his grasp, but his passionate recounting of the joys of being oudoors in sun, blizzard, rain, and all other conditions almost convinced me I’m missing something.

I do plan to read this book, and I do plan to get serious about whatever might help me arrive in my 80s as healthy as Jack, or as my father, for that matter, who at 82 strides a mile to his office each day in Cambridge, Mass., frequently whistling a happy tune.  I don’t have to love exercise to embrace its obvious benefits.  The land here in Wyoming does know something.  It is relentless, and the people who come and stay here are originals.  Even those who live here for a decade or two and then return to the city, leave changed.  It was good to be reminded of that during this visit to Casper.

Evernote wants to be my external brain, and I could use one.

I’ve been experimenting with this hot organizing program, mainly as a way to store web pages that I use for my weekly Kindle Chronicles podcast.  I’ve also created an Evernote notebook to hold information related to my work as board president for our condo association.  I have used Evernote enough to understand that it is a potent tool for keeping all sorts of information in one place, and finding just the pieces I need, when I need them, whether I’m at a computer or out and about with my iPhone.

The problem is, it takes a while to move into a new program, so that it becomes second nature.  I’m in the phase of clumsy eagerness to use the tool before I know how.

For example, about an hour ago I had the idea that I’d like to save an email from Hanna, the woman heading our condo’s Green Committee.  I thought there was a simple menu button or other easy integration between Evernote and Apple Mail on my computer.  If there is, I can’t find it.  I can copy and paste the text of Hanna’s email about solar options for our high-rise as a new note, but I’m not sure which notebook to put it in, or which tags to use.  My Evernote system is a mess.  I need David Allen to come over and help me organize it the way his Getting Things Done approach brought  order to my physical information system.

The Evernote gang are on a roll.  They just passed 1 million registered users, and they released a new version that works with the iPhone 3.0 operating system.  They also started a pretty good audio podcast, featuring a tech guy, a marketing guy, and the CEO.  I’m sure the CEO is a brilliant fellow to have shepherded his startup this far, but he needs to forget he’s the CEO on the podcast and take his cues from the marketing guy, who is really effective in the podcast and in videos he creates to explain Evernote.  The podcast trio will work it out, and in the meantime they’re providing a way for me to get more familiar with the program by listening to their conversation as I’m driving in my car.  They all need to remember that I don’t really care about them as people, or how their voice sounds, or any other that other personality stuff.  The only reason I’ve added the show to my iPhone podcasts is that I want to learn how to use the program.  I don’t need any new personalities in my life.

It also bugs me that they are calling it a “blogcast” instead of a podcast, and they don’t have what’s referred to as a “show notes page” just about the podcast, where each episode is listed with some related information and a player button to play the episode. Instead, they sprinkle the podcast episodes in amongst the rest of the blog entries.   They do have an iTunes listing, so I can subscribe and download the new episodes.  And mainly I appreciate the effort it takes to get a podcast started.

So I’m in for the Evernote ride.  I’m going to spend time being awkward with it until it really does become my external brain.  That was the promise of David Allen’s GTD system, and he took me a long way there.  The idea was you had a system for all the “stuff” in your life, and you trusted it and maintained it, so you didn’t use your poor little human for storing and retreiving information.  The payoff is huge.  You get to use your brain for thinking, or writing poems, or letting go on a zafu during zazen.  Sweet.

I could use a new brain.  Or else I could use fewer projects and priorities to juggle.  Some combination of saying Yes to Evernote and No to new initiatives and responsibilities holds the promise of Len 3.0 – an update of my operating system that’s elegant, fun, and effective.   Like if Steve Jobs and co. had a chance to reinvent ME.  Wait, they already did, with MobileMe.  Nevermind.

If you’ve got any Evernote tales, please feel free to add a comment or send me a Tweet.

UPDATE: While I was writing this post, I received three answers to my Tweet for help with Evernote’s email connection.  It’s simple.  It turns out I have an Evernote email address, so from my Inbox I can forward any email to it, and the email is captured in my Evernote inbox as a new note.  This is good.  Thanks to Alex Hung, Mark Stout, and Wayne MacPhail for the help.  Between Twitter and Evernote, I don’t need a brain!

Photo by the second guy in line, Vassilis Siomos

I arrived at the AT&T store on Denver’s 16th Street Mall at 4:40 a.m., and–whaddya know?–I was first in line.  I cased the joint yesterday, when a guy at the store assured me that if I arrived at 6 a.m. that would be plenty of time.  The problem is that I woke up just before 4 a.m. and knew there was no hope of getting back to sleep.  Since I live two blocks from the store, and I could see lines forming across the country via Twitter, I figured I might as well amble over here with my lawn chair and briefcase full of gear.

I’m sitting across from the Paradise Bakery & Cafe, where a single worker is talking and singing to himself as he prepares coffee cakes and muffins for the day.  “Do it right, do it right,” he was chanting to himself earlier as he moved at a manic pace while listening to something in white earbuds.

This iPhone launch will clearly be a far cry from the circus of the original iPhone debut on June 29, 2007.  I was first in line that day at the Cambridgeside Apple Store in Cambridge, Mass., arriving at 3:30 a.m. and waiting until evening for the store to open.  Now that was fun! The second guy arrived just a few minutes after I did, and the line grew all day long, covered by media and buzzing with a geek-party vibe.  When the cops finally raised the grate to the store, I strolled in like a conqueror, cheered and applauded by Apple employees including one kid who was literally jumping up and down with excitement.  I made this video to immortalize the event.

I knew last year’s iPhone 3G launch was not going to match the original, but I showed up at Cambridgeside early enough to be third in line.  There were massive server problems, so I couldn’t even get my phone to work until later that afternoon.

The second guy in line showed up at 5:10 a.m. He’s just moved from Chicago to Denver for a six-year surgical residency.  This will be his first iPhone. He’s in for a treat.

It’s beginning to dawn on my how tired I am, so I’ll save the ruminations on why I do this sort of thing for later.  The short story is that it’s fun, and that I love the crackling spirit of innovation which Apple keeps serving up to its fanboys.  There is a nap in my future, and this week’s episode 48 of The Kindle Chronicles podcast.  I brought both my Kindle 2 and the DX in case I have time to do some reading.

I was up till 12:30 a.m. watching events in Iran via Twitter and my Google Reader feed.  Here are some thoughts:

Robert Fisk of The Independent has emerged as a hero journalist, a reporter’s reporter, following crowds of protesters after his visa has run out, moving between opposing camps in the streets.  He’s also a terrific writer.   I’ll be looking for his work throughout the rest of this crisis, and afterward.

I saw an item attributed to Fisk which confirmed a nagging question I’ve had: What if Ahmadinejad actually won the election?  Fisk’s suggestion was that it’s possible that this was the case but that the greedy and arrogant authorities cooked the ballot boxes to make it look as if he had won in a landslide.  Clumsy overkill, such as the claim that Ahmadinejad won Mir Hussein Mousavi’s home town, has led most observers to assume the election was stolen.  It probably was. But we don’t know.  Maybe it was just close, like, say the U.S. election in 2000.  Here is what Fisk has to say:

My suspicion is that [Ahmadinejad] might have actually won the election but more like 52 or 53 per cent. It’s possible that Mousavi got closer to 38 per cent.

But I think the Islamic republic’s regime here wanted to humiliate the opponent and so fiddle the figures, even if Ahmadinejad had won.

The problem with that is they’re now going to claim they’re going to need a recount. If the recount is to actually give Mousavi the presidency, someone is going to have to pay the price for such an extraordinary fraud of claiming Ahmadinejad won 30, 40, 50 per cent more than he should have done.

You’ve got to remember as well, on the election night, if the count was correct it meant that they would have had to have counted five million votes in two hours.

Twitter, which in the early hours after the election brought forth a mesmerizing stream of real citizen reports from Iran, soon became its own battlefield.  The security forces apparently set up usernames to spread misinformation, such as repeated warnings yesterday in exactly the same words that the army was coming to clear out the protesters. (The Twitter news today is more hopeful, reporting that the police are wearing green and the Army have mostly returned home.) Twitterers from Iran have reportedly been tracked down based on their Tweets, for arrest.  So we rag-tag distant cyber-allies are trying to be smart, following plausible advice to help the cause of the reformers.  I’ve greenified my Twitter icon, and I changed my location and time zone to Tehran, to maybe make it difficult for the bad guys to isolate real Iranian Twitterers.  This militarization of Twitter is a fascinating development, but it makes the Twitter stream problematic.  You have to figure out on the fly which Tweets have anything to do with reality and which ones are totally fabricated–either by dark security forces or perhaps a 15-year-old in Philly, Twittering from his basement, pretending to be a student under attack in a Tehran dorm.

The deluge of citizen-uploaded photo and video images has forever changed what comes to my mind when I think of Iran.  The iconic photo I’ve put at the top of this post is an example–a man with a briefcase and newspaper who has picked up a rock to throw.  My ill-informed stereotype of women in Iran had been one of cowed, subservient victims in nun-like black veils.  That’s now replaced by images of fierce and colorfully veiled women in the streets of Tehran, challenging security forces.  In the fleeting glimpses I have of faces in the crowds, I see people more similar to me than different.  I always knew that this was true intellectually, of course, but the reality is now embedded in my consciousness through hours of following this drama on my computer screens, looking at real people instead of nattering TV pundits.

As history unfolds today a half a world away, I’ll be going over construction contracts for a project here at our condo association, preparing to interview Will DeLamater for this week’s Kindle Chronicles podcast, and getting ready for our trip this weekend to Casper, Wyoming, to visit friends from our 20 years living there, mostly on Casper Mountain.  Tonight we have tickets to see A Bronx Tale at Denver’s handsome Ellie Caulkins Opera House. At any point during this ordinary day here in Denver, I will be able to dial up Tweets and news from Iran on my iPhone or computers.  It’s generally a good idea to live in one place at a time, and one day at a time.  But in times like these, I’m glad to have digital tools at my disposal which enable me to more fully experience how connected this one world truly is.

Since walking  back home from a Colorado Rockies baseball game tonight, I’ve been transfixed by words and images tumbling forth from Tehran in the aftermath of what is beginning to look more and more like a stolen election.  Twitter’s #iranelection trending topic is producing a torrent of reports and links to videos of protesters marching in the streets of Tehran, throwing rocks at riot police, and wearing green.   In each of the videos I’ve seen, everyone in the crowd seems to be holding their own camera high, taking their own photos or videos.  Each time a new video appears as a link in Twitter, you can see the chaos from a different angle, the camera jittery with movement and running away from danger.

Flowing alongside the #iranelection trending topic is #CNNFail , a torrent of criticism of CNN for NOT covering the events in Tehran adequately.  A Twitterer named TeacupTina 10 seconds ago wrote, “There’s riots over #Mousavi and the #Iranelection and their top story is about people not getting cable. Major #CNNfail”

It’s all boggling to someone trying to make sense of these events half-way around the world, here in downtown Denver past midnight.  I look out my window at the peaceful 16th Street Mall and wonder what thousands of protesters/rioters would look and feel like down there.  I would no doubt be one of the observers taking video and posting it on the web, with Tweet-links to sound the alarm.

It seems like a week ago that I was in a great seat at Coors Field, cheering the local baseball team on to its 10th win in a row.  I hope to get some sleep now.  Tomorrow I will wear something green.

The trick here is not to get overly involved in writing.  It’s 2:30 a.m., a normal time for me to wake up and be sure there is no sense lying in bed hoping for sleep to return.  So begins a well-known dance of mine.  Rule One is Don’t Get On the Computer.  So I’ve already broken that one.  The computer offers too many stimulating distractions, too many prairie dog holes to explore.  The most reliable formula for resuming sleep is to read a novel, perhaps with some tea or, in the case of this week’s chest cold, a vitamin C packet in water.  Rule Two is Don’t Read the Newspapers.  They like to arrive early in the morning on my Kindle, though not this early.  The digital paper boy is still asleep.  But if I’d awoken at, say, 3:30 a.m. instead of 2:30, there would be the Financial Times to avoid on the Kindle.  And there is always a copy of The New Yorker to set aside. Rule Three is Don’t Write Anything.  It simply goes without saying that the process of watching my words arrive on a screen or even a piece of lined paper is too energizing, too stimulating to accept the lulling back to bed and a few more hours of restful oblivion.

So I’m breaking all the rules here tonight, except that I’ll go fetch some of that Vitamin C drink…. It’s called Emergen-C Immune Defense, and this time I went with Ruby Lemon Honey flavor.  The only concession I’ve made to the rules so far is that I don’t have a plan for a theme or some clever turn of the writing toward something Worthwhile. I’m just enjoying the feel of the MacBook Air’s keys beneath the pads of my fingers.  The one-week typing course I took at Wayland High School one summer during high school was the most valuable single week of my education.

The truth is I miss writing. I used to set aside several hours each morning to work on preparing my packets for teachers while I was toiling for my master’s degree in poetry at Bennington.  Now those hours are vaguely classified as creative, even if I’m working on the condo Board’s decision in a Pet Policy fine hearing.  When I’m putting together a podcast the gap doesn’t seem so far, from the level of creativity I used to insist on each morning and how my mornings go now.  I blame Twitter, mostly.  But I’m not going to tumble all the way into daylight-level mind energy by putting up a coherent statement on that topic.  I love, Twitter, too.  Rule Four is If You Violate Rule One, There’s Still Hope if You Don’t Check “Just One or Two Tweets.”

So I’ll stop there, and I won’t hunt for a photo or graphic to adorn this night notes. I’ll move to a chair in the living room and settle into the final pages of The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling.  You might think it’s a bad choice, with it’s dismal sci fi view of the world in 2060.  But it’s a novel, a world that’s other than the one that awaits me when morning officially comes.  I’ll unsleep the Kindle and read it slowly until my eyes close for a moment, then a few moments, until I’m sleeping more than I’m reading and I can sleepwalk back to bed for the rest of the evening.   That’s how it usually goes, even when I’m breaking most of the rules.

Rule Five: If you break Rules One and Rule Three, DO NOT REVIEW AND EDIT.  Send the night notes into the night as if you dreamed them….