Len Edgerly

Our Yorkie Claire goes most everywhere we do. Just a few weeks after she was born seven years ago, Darlene bought BROUGHT a black carrying bag to the breeder. Our tiny puppy, who could fit in my shoe, began sleeping in the bag even before she began living with us. So her bag must feel like the womb. She hops into it happily and is content to curl up in it for an entire flight from Denver to Boston. You can see her through the mesh ends of the bag if you look hard enough. If a dog walks by, the bag starts barking, which is embarrassing in a restaurant.

Naturally Claire traveled with us last week to Casper, where we stayed with our friends Tom and Tish. They have a sunny spot they call the Wyoming Room where you can look out at Casper Mountain, where we lived before Claire came into the world. Our dogs were collies then, Ginger and Chester, big dogs suitable for chasing deer right up to the line of the Invisible Fence.

One afternoon in Casper, Claire took a perch on the couch to see what was happening outside. Wind, mainly. But it had her complete attention, long enough for me to snap a series of photos with my iPhone. This one is my favorite.

The view from my desk at 6 a.m.

As for resolutions, one might be to tend this outpost on the net more regularly. But I’ll just mention that as a possibility. Higher up the list of intentions is eating well, which I define as eating a fruit or a vegetable every day except Sunday, when I shall consume only Ritz Crackers and Cheez Whiz. I will resume my daily huff-and-puff workouts on the cross trainer, enhanced this year by content on my Kindle Fire. Currently playing are The Wire, Arrested Development, and a black-and-white 1960 classic film, “Never on Sunday” starring Melina Mercouri.

It’s good to be back in downtown Denver, but part of me is always in 02138, staying abreast of the family doings medical and otherwise. It’s all accessible two time zones away via phone, Skype, e-mail, and prayer. But where you are matters, and far away makes a difference. Some part of me gets renewed out here in the West. I like to imagine standing by the banks of the Charles River and looking up a mile to see a high rise condo in the sky. That’s where I am now, way up here where the air is thin and dry, closer to the sun. Something inside me awakens and knows it is home.

But after a paltry ZQ score of 45 I’m not fit to dive deeply into philosophical probings of The West. I’ll be napping before noon to recharge and reboot. And I’ll be winding this up now in order to fulfill today’s dose of another resolution, to press ahead five days a week on research for my book project. Thus, to Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy to make more notes in Evernote. The stakes will be higher this week, because I will talk with the media savant’s son, Dr. Eric McLuhan, on Wednesday for this week’s Kindle Chronicles interview. I want to know what he thinks of the e-book revolution and if he can intuit with a son’s empathy what his famous father might have seen in the modest gray screen of the Kindle.

I realized recently that my grandson James is as old as I was when I began remembering my life.

When I was five years old, we moved to Pampa, Texas.  I remember the stone house, the ponies we rode, the sound of the locusts, the vast open sky, and the soft fur of the rabbits that my sister and I kept in cages in the backyard. I remember not wanting to move back to Massachusetts in the middle of first grade. In Pampa, I was the only kid in my class who had ever seen an ocean.

Over a slice of pizza yesterday at a place on Huron Street, James talked about kindergarten. He pretty much likes it. Some of the girls have formed a club that he can’t join. He and my daughter wave discreetly at each other in the hallway on the days when her teaching job brings her to his school. His Grampa (me) had arrived at the pizza joint on a bicycle, wearing a blue helmet and a glow-in-the-dark yellow jacket. Will James remember any of this in 50 years? Perhaps. This possibility makes me especially mindful when I’m with him.

I remember my two grandfathers with great fondness and appreciation. My Dad’s father taught English at M.I.T. I remember him as reserved, kind, quiet, and musical. I knew he loved books, because there was a ton of them at their home on a hill in Sudbury, Mass. I have a few of his books here in my studio in Cambridge, Mass. When Grampa Edgerly finished a book, or perhaps when he bought it, he wrote his name and the year on a corner of the flyleaf.  So my volume of Keats’s Complete Poetical Works and Letters has his signature from 1930, twenty years before I was born.  My mother’s father owned and operated a sand and gravel business in Sudbury. I remember riding in his big dump truck and sitting in the cab of his clattering steam shovel. Grampa Stiles was a mischievous, playful, wiry-haired man who played poker and pulled quarters out of my ears. I am named after both of these men, and grateful that I can remember them.

My grandson is not a kid to be messed with. I see him making his way in the world with bold imagination and strong will. He was in motion the entire hour my daughter and I sat on a stone at the playground and visited. He journeyed to London at one point, first checking with us to find out whether you have to go through security when you travel by ocean liner. I said I didn’t think so, and then he was off, mixing reality with fantasy in a promising way.

Soon after James was born, I reserved an Internet domain name for him on GoDaddy. Assuming there will still be blogs 50 years from now, I like to imagine his future ruminations as a man of 61. What will he remember? That he was surrounded by love, I hope. And a grandfather who always seemed to be amazed and captivated by everything he did.

When I find myself wide awake in the middle of the night, I leave bed as quietly as I can and go to a collection of books on my Kindle titled “Inspiration.” So last night here in Iowa City, on our drive west from Boston to Denver, I found myself in the company of author and oarsman Craig Lambert. At page 125 of
Mind Over Water: Lessons on Life from the Art of Rowing, I found this:

“The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: speed sings in its lines and nature. Our job is simply to work with the shell, to shop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster. Trying too hard sabotages boat speed. Trying becomes striving, and striving undoes itself.”

These words made me remember how struck I had been while watching the championship singles race at the Head of the Charles, how surprised I had been to see what looked like ease instead of effort in the swinging back and forth of the rowers.

Everything I read seems brilliant at 2 a.m., but this book by Craig Lambert also stands out in the light of day this morning. We have a corner room on the sixth floor of the HotelVetro, and sun is pouring into the floor-to-ceiling windows. Darlene and Claire are ready to hit the road for a quilt shop in Grinnell and then on to Omaha. Driving across country has its own rhythm. I could easily blog away for another hour here, but the boat is leaving. I need to be mindful of this admonition from Lambert:

“On crews, some rowers are called anchors, human impedimenta who slow down boats. Anchors lack grace, partly because they try to do it all themselves. The isolated mentality cuts supply lines: it blocks supportive energies from boat, oars, teammates, opponents, spectators, and the forces of nature. Anchors set up an ongoing struggle of self versus environment. Disconnected individuals to DO not swing.” (p. 126)

Or, to put it into the words of my traveling companion, “Claire and I are going to the car, and if you make us wait too long, we’ll leave without you.”

Okay, okay! Note to self: Don’t be an anchor today.

We’ll be pointing Henry westward later this morning, on the first leg of our drive back to Denver. Today’s destination: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. This is not the seasonal migration, since we’ll return by air in mid-November for the holidays. It’s been a lengthy stay in the East, beginning in early June with the 2,000-mile drive here in our new Ford.

I watched a few races on the Charles yesterday, the first day of the annual Head of the Charles regatta. What a spectacle. The power and precision of the rowers inspire me to get out there next spring and lay down some miles in a club single from the Cambridge Boat Club. One of the races I watched was the men’s championship singles. I expected to see more exertion, humans reaching desperately for every ounce of strength they could muster. Instead, these guys seemed to flow like the river itself. They moved back and forth on their slides as if there was simply no other way to do it: legs first, then the arms pulling in the last of the stroke. Then again, and again, an unbroken harmony of motion moving upstream to the finish. This is what inspired me, actually. I’ve shed my initial awkwardness in a single during the past couple of years of rowing. I’m not fighting to stay upright with every stroke now, and sometimes it feels natural. But those championship scullers live in another country. I’d like to visit it a few times before the end of my race.

I always get weird before a big trip, so yesterday was prime time for nutty thinking. Throw in the fact that Cambridge carries me back forty plus years to my college days, and you’ve got the makings for a man weeping as he rides his Trek along Memorial Drive. Not quite, but I could feel the moisture gathering behind my eyes.  Then comes the ragtag Harvard Band, shuffling across the Anderson Memorial Bridge from the stadium to Harvard Square. I rolled to a stop at the intersection just before they started a new song. The air was crisp with the mulched aroma of fall, and everyone looked smart. If you closed your eyes, you’d think the great music was being played by professionals. Open them and you see the musicians arrive looking weird and fantastic, wearing their crimson blazers and yellow flowers behind their ears. Who knows why? They are out of step, in no particular order. If they’re like me, every one of them thinks he or she was the Admissions Department’s single error of judgement. But they play on, headed for Harvard Square and the rest of their lives. An alum from the Class of 1972 records their passing on his new iPhone 4S and feels sad and grateful for the passing of the years and the miles ahead.

5:45 a.m. at the Apple Store in the Maine Mall

There are about 20 of us lined up along a red-velvet rope in front of the store, two hours before the doors open at 8 a.m. for the launch of iPhone 4S.  Since this is not my first Apple rodeo, I know the drill and am the only person here with a chair.

The scene was very different at my first iPhone launch, the original one on June 29, 2007 at the Galleria Mall in Cambridge, Mass. The store opened at 5 p.m., and I showed up at the mall 14 hours before that. That put me first in line for a great time, including an interview for an Italian TV show that I never saw. Six months before that, at MacWorld Expo, I’d seen the late Steve Jobs–hurts to write that–introduce the original iPhone. I remember with fondness how he toyed with the huge audience like a cat with a rodent. He showed three images, making it look as if Apple was going to introduce three new devices. When we realized we’d been had, that the phone, iPod and web browser would be all in one thing called an iPhone, the roar of delight was electric. Ah, those were the days!

…I was settling in for a leisurely writing session in my beach chair when the blue-shirted Apple team slid open the glass doors and came out to greet us with cheers, awkward hype, and a very organized system for prepping the sales. Each of us in line has had a chat with a rep, providing details of the phone(s) that we are here to buy. This gets us a card for each phone that we’ll present in the store, so I have one for Darlene’s white 16 GB model and my black 32 GB. We’ll both be switching from AT&T to Verizon, which we left four years ago because Verizon didn’t have the iPhone. I’ve been pleased with AT&T’s customer support, but the coverage is just too spotty. Sometimes in my studio in Cambridge I have to move to the window to keep a call from dropping.

So I’m glad that we happened to be in Maine for this iPhone launch. I was so excited that I ended up driving in the rain from Ocean Park to the Maine Mall yesterday at five a.m. I now call this recon. Not surprisingly, I was first in line, pleased with myself until I took a closer look at the poster in the window and saw that the launch was today.

There are now about 30 of us here in line, kept under control by one policeman.  The Apple team are chatting us up like it’s a cocktail party.  Darlene just called from bed to ask how it’s going. Since I have my two white cards, I was able to assure her that I’ll bring home the bacon this time, and she will have her new phone soon. I’ve been trying to get her excited about the Siri personal assistant, but she’s deeply skeptical, because of our uneven experience talking to our 2012 Ford Focus’s SYNC system.

There is something big missing here today, with the passing of Steve Jobs. Someone on Twitter suggested that iPhone 4S could mean “for Steve.” I’ll go with that.

I remember the first time I saw an Apple computer in 1984, when I was living in Wyoming. I was on a business trip to Cody and stopped by a computer store where I was able to type for a few minutes on a what was probably a “Fat Mac,” the 512K version. Compared with the IBM compatibles I’d looked at, the Mac’s screen was gorgeous. The font was elegant, thanks to a calligraphy class that Jobs audited at Reed College, I learned just recently. I was hooked and became an Apple fanatic until a corporate job detoured me to PC Land for a decade. In retirement, it was an iPod that lured me back, purchased at Radio Shack just for curiosity.  Loading the iTunes software on my Dell felt like I was visiting a foreign country that seemed oddly familiar, and beautiful. So I moved back to Apple and have been a happy citizen ever since.

Folks in line are friendly here in Maine, so I’m going to wrap this up and leave my blogging cocoon. Thank you Steve Jobs, wherever you are. I like to think the current New Yorker cover got it right, and that St. Peter checked you in on an iPad for your new digs.

Note: Stephen Windwalker of the inimitable Kindle Nation Daily asked me to live-blog the Amazon press conference tomorrow in NYC, at which there will be some kind of announcement involving the Kindle. We’ve set up this Google Docs page that I’m posting to, and Steve will port some of the posts to KND.  I thought I’d cross-post here as well, for the benefit of those of you who are subscribed to this blog on Kindle.   –Len

Aboard Amtrak Acela Express 2163

noon

As the Acela zooms through the woods of Rhode Island, providing an occasional glimpse of the sea, I want to turn to what we think we know about what Amazon is going to announce tomorrow at 10 a.m. at Stage 37 in New York City.

Of course there will be a tablet, the one that TechCrunch’s MG Siegler held in his very own hands and has since learned its name, the Kindle Fire.  Kindle Chronicles listeners may remember that Forrester Research’s James McQuivey had a code name for the tablet he predicted Amazon should create, way back in February of 2010. The name was, uh, the Kindle Flame. So there’s a backstory to tell some day about that one.

I like Flame better than Fire, but what I’m really hot for is some action on the E Ink side of the house. Siegler suggested that wasn’t going to happen tomorrow, but there is new intel out this morning that I was delighted to see at Andrys Basten’s Kindle World.  Via AppleInsider, she relayed a report that there will be not one, but two new Kindle E Ink devices announced – one with a touch screen and one with fewer features, like no audio, for the magic price of $99.  These babies have even cooler code names than the Flame. The new touch Kindle is codenamed Whitney, and the bare-bones model is Tequila, according to AppleInsider’s post.

This makes a lot of sense to me, because I couldn’t figure out how Jeff Bezos was going to spend an entire press conference extolling a new tablet device that reads books and plays movies and plays musicand runs all the apps in Amazon’s Android app store.  Wasn’t he the one whose voice quivered with passion whenever he talked about a device purpose-built for reading?  That seemed like a pretty tough pivot to make, and the only way out of it would have been, as I saw someone suggest, to announce tomorrow that Amazon is dropping the K3 with special offers price to $99.

But there’s no need to give an inch on the importance of the dedicated E Ink readers if Amazon tomorrow announces two brand new devices for that line.  That would show they still believe they created something wonderful for the minority of Americans who read more than a book a year. For that group, and I’m pretty much a member, it’s nice there will be a new tablet, but we’re not really expecting to switch our reading of books from E Ink to a color LCD screen.  I know there are many serious readers who are just fine with LCD screens, like my friend from the U.K., Eolake Stobblehouse.  A lot of this comes down to a matter of taste and aesthetics.

In any event,  I hope AppleInsider is right on this and that tomorrow morning I’ll have a chance to get my hands on two new E Ink Kindles as well as the Torch, I mean Fire — oh, whatever.  They can call it Baboon Breath if they want, and it will still probably sell out in the first six hours it’s available.

The Acela has slowed down a bit, perhaps to give us a better view of a lovely harbor filled with white boats and a forest of masts on water calm as glass.  The woman next to me is eating a big salad out of a plastic bowl and looking at a paper Atlas with a map of the U.S. All’s quiet here in the Quiet Car, except for the tapping of a totally wired Kindle enthusiast riding the rails to a big dose of What’s Next.

11:15 a.m.

That’s an on-time departure as the train wends its way carefully through a maze of tracks and overhead electric wires. I simply can’t imagine a better way to travel. If we arrive on time, I’ll be at Penn Station by 2:45 p.m. I plan to host a Google Plus hangout once I reach the GEM Hotel, so if you’d like to participate, please send me an email at PodChronicles AT GMail.com and I’ll add you to my TKC Hangout circle. If you are not on G+ yet, let me know, and I’ll send you an invite.

11:05 a.m.

At Boston’s South Station, I just took my seat on the quiet car, where passengers are asked to please refrain from loud talking or using cell phones. Sounds good to me. Most of the car is empty, so I’ve spread my gear on the aisle seat. ” Your seat is now a hot spot,” a decal on the window says, and sure enough, I’m surfing just fine on the iPad 2.

I read a post by Andrys Basten with word that two new E Ink devices will be announced tomorrow at the Amazon press conference, along with the tablet . That’s VERY good news for those of us intrigued by the new color tablet but devoted to our E Ink readers.

Sunrise this morning at Ocean Park, Maine

Today’s chapter of Understanding Media is titled “Ads” with a mischievous subtitle, “Keeping Upset with the Joneses.” Oh Marshall, you devil.  But as usual, McLuhan delivers the goods.  My top take-away is his insight that “The protestors are the best acclaimers and accelerators.” ( p. 231)  He has in mind high-brow critics of “false and misleading ad copy.”  I raise my hand in sheepish recognition.  Not so much because I judge the advertising world–that battle is over, and Madison Avenue won. I wring my hands over false and misleading political claims.  I tend to see them more on one side of the ideological divide than the other, but it’s clear no party has a monopoly on using such claims effectively.  How does it work? McLuhan reveals the formula as follows:

“Ads seem to work on a very advanced principle that a small pellet or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself. Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brain-washing. This depth principle of onslaught on the unconscious may be the reason why.” (p. 227)

Isn’t that a good thing to protest? Well, sure. But it’s difficult to disagree with McLuhan’s observation that ad critics “are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors to books and films.”  To wit:

“Highly literate people cannot cope with the nonverbal art of the pictorial, so they dance impatiently up and down to express a pointless disapproval that renders them futile and gives new power and authority to the ads. The unconscious depth-messages of ads are never attacked by the literate, because of their incapacity to notice or discuss nonverbal forms of arrangement and meaning. They have not the art to argue with pictures.”  ( p. 231)

Jon Stewart this week made a similar point about cerebral critics of the governor of Texas. “You are up against something you are too smart to understand,” Stewart opined in the second episode of his “Oh My God, Rick Perry is Going to Be Our Next President” segment. He showed clips of TV pundits asserting that Mitt Romney had beaten Perry in the GOP debate and scolded them with this: “You are thinking about this with the wrong part of your brain–the brain part.” As usual, Stewart makes his point with profanity and over-the-top satire, so click here at your own risk, to see the segment.

What McLuhan would see here is that Perry bashers will do as much damage to the governor’s prospects as teetotalers did to brewers.  This makes Romney’s challenge one that PowerPoint presentations won’t solve.

I’ve read an entire chapter of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media this morning, looking for a connection with the above photo that I took yesterday at Ocean Park. Nothing. Marshall is in rare form, toying with the automobile like–thank you very much, O blogger Muse–a Labradoodle playing with a ball at the beach.

Who’s having more fun–the dog in the photo or the man who wrote the following description of the automobile fifty years ago?

The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse and armor and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missile.  p. 223

“The Mechanical Bride” – that’s McLuhan’s epithet for the motorcar, which he admires even as he foretells its demise, or at least its ceding of center stage to all things electric.  And no, he did not see Ford’s SYNC MyFord Touch coming, much less the next wave of social media in a can, the Ford Evos.  Or did he?

The simple and obvious fact about the car is that, more than any horse, it is an extension of man that turns the rider into a superman. It is a hot, explosive medium of social communication.  p. 221

If only he’d written “social media” instead of “social communication,” McLuhan might have gotten credit for inventing Facebook as well as “the asphalt jungle,” a term he did in fact coin, at page 224.  But this Mashable description of Ford’s Evos concept car certainly fits the extension-of-man idea that is central to McLuhan’s understanding of all technological advances:

According to Ford, the vehicle gives its driver the ability to tap into this “personal cloud” of information at any time — for example, picking up where the driver left off on that favorite song he or she was listening to inside the house. The vehicle’s smart systems monitor its driver’s “physical state and workload,” adjusting the car’s handling, heating, cooling and music to suit the driver’s level of alertness, perhaps even keeping him from falling asleep.

I’m glad to see that Ford is not resting on its SYNC head start, but my Edge of the Road podcast is going to get a lot more expensive than its Kindle cousin if I have to keep buying new Fords to keep up with the curve. Not going to happen. So I hope my humble 2012 Ford Focus will get the benefit of a few Evos concept innovations, as software updates.

You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out if Marshall McLuhan was sane. For example, do we credit the following conclusion of his motorcar chapter as evidence that he was an eerie seer, or a witty blatherer who was usually off in his predictions by at least a decade?

The car, in a word, has quite refashioned all of the spaces that unite and separate men, and it will continue to do so for a decade more, by which time the electronic successors to the car will be manifest.

McLuhan wrote those words in a book that was published in 1964.  I’m thinking of 1974, when I was working as a cub reporter at The Woonsocket (R.I.) Call, driving a Saab 96. I don’t remember much electronics on that classic vehicle, though the free-wheel feature was very cool.  When you took your foot off the gas, it would slide into coast mode, increasing gas mileage. I managed to find a photo of one in the very color we had, a pale and serene blue.

Yesterday’s photo shoot with Charlie, who is my daughter’s Labradoodle, was all about the ecstasy of motion and play. He leaped into the waves after his ball and pranced back with it as if he’d invented the wheel.  You couldn’t help but smile, and I set a slideshow of him to the song “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” by Randy Newman.  If you’re reading this on your Kindle, you’ll need to switch to something else before you click here to watch it.  Enjoy!

It’s Warren Buffett’s birthday today, and mine too.  At 81, Warren is twenty years further down the road, saving banks and kicking ass.  Sixty-one seems like a very fine age to me this morning, dawning in all its postcard glory here at Ocean Park, Maine. Cue the seagull! Thank you.  I’m taking today off from my daily devotion to writing an e-book titled something like The Reading Edge: A Poet’s Practical Guide to the E-Book Revolution.  Steven Pressfield is my guide, with his stirring call to simple disciplines and warrior-like devotion to the creative task.  Resistance scurries under the nearest rock at the very mention of Pressfield’s name.  If you want to enlist, buy a Kindle copy of Do the Work or The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle.  But beware. Resistance is a wily foe.  (See Great Reason to Procrastinate Work on Book Number 61: In addition to weekends, why don’t you take your birthday off? What could it hurt?) Happy August 30th, Warren!

As for the year, I bow to another 1950 baby, Mr. Stevie Wonder.  I’ve got him playing on the Altec Lansing speaker next to my MacBook Pro. “There is a ribbon in the sky.”  It’s easy to figure out how old you are when you’re born in 1950. I’ve always appreciated that, as if the calendar aligns each year for my convenience.  When I’m feeling this grateful for my life, it’s not difficult to believe it might be so.