Even though we only drove 150 miles today, I feel fried and disoriented tonight, glad we can crash for the night at Darlene’s sister’s home in Omaha. Claire enjoyed prowling Deb’s lush garden in the back yard, as shown in the photo above.

It may be that I overloaded the circuits by banging on the Kindle podcast all morning in Room 117 at the Quality Inn at Grand Island, Nebraska. Or we haven’t quite found our road legs this early in the trip. In any event, I’ll be winding down early tonight with From Russia With Love on my Kindle. I never realized that Ian Fleming was such a stylish, enjoyable author.

Jumping around here. The gear is the thing. I travel with a MacBook Pro, iPad 2, iPhone, Kindle 3G with Special Offers, and microphones, external speakers, and a Zeo sleep machine. Plus a few clothes. Darlene bought a clever auto fridge that plugs into the cigarette lighter and keeps food and drinks cold for the road. I resisted this improvement every step of the way, arguing that I need to stop regularly at truck-stop junk-food joints for Cheetos and coffee, in order to be a safe driver.  She wasn’t buying it. And now I’ve already become a big fan of the fridge, because I can make a nice ham and cheese sandwich with pickles any time I want, like on a sidewalk this afternoon in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The flooding has already affected our itinerary. Tomorrow instead of taking I-680 over the Missouri River, we’ll detour south to I-80.  Somewhere between here and tomorrow night we’ll be dealing with the Mississippi River, if my geography is right. I’d planned to stay in Davenport, Iowa, now that we have the prospect of a tour at Ford in Dearborn, I want to get further east tomorrow.  Maybe Joliette, Illinois.

There you have it. Road notes after a barbecue supper out on Deb’s patio, by the garden.  Till tomorrow, then.

Photo by Steve Garfield of SteveGarfield.com at Boston Media Makers on May 2, 2010

As we settle in for our seasonal relocation to Cambridge, Mass., I’m thinking of how many great things have come into my life over the past few months because of the Internet.  I’m taking as my text for this rumination a book published this year by my friend Steve Garfield, Get Seen: Video Secrets to Building Your Business (Click here for Kindle edition.)

Steve’s book is about how to get seen using video, which he knows something about, since he was one of the first bloggers to figure out how to put video on a blog.  He created Steve Garfield’s Video Blog on January 1, 2004.  I’m thinking about video this morning, but more broadly, I’m thinking about the joy of risking any kind of exposure using the powerful tools of the Internet.

Here is a sample of what’s happened in my own life lately because of getting seen:

1. Yesterday, for the first time, I met in person a listener of The Kindle Chronicles who in a Facebook comment offered to help with a project I’d started to provide Kindles to active-duty soldiers in Afghanistan.  Ken Clark and I visited for a couple of hours here at the house, planning next steps for E-Books for Troops, and sharing some more of our stories.  With his help as co-founder, my initial idea has already reached an entirely new level, with our filing yesterday to create a non-profit organization, and I’ve met someone with a keen interest in things I care about, from EB4T to all things Apple, to the joys of family and reading.

2. Before Ken arrived yesterday, I met here for two hours with Adam Weiss, a brilliant podcasting consultant whom I met at Boston Media Makers, an event created and hosted every single first Sunday of the month by Steve Garfield.  Adam has helped me create show notes pages for my two podcasts, and yesterday he took me deep into the bowels of GarageBand to tweak the audio quality of the shows.

3. Podcasting about the Kindle and e-books has been fun, but the best part has been meeting listeners and fellow pioneers in the Kindlesphere.  My current posse includes Stephen Windwalker, Andrys Basten, Bufo Calvin, and Abhi.

4. The Reading Edge Facebook page is like a club I created in a tree house, where there is always someone hanging out that I want to visit with.

You get the idea.  I had friends and a life before the Internet, but in the past few months (and years) the connections I’ve made go way beyond what I could have imagined in normal hours.  I’m also pretty much of an introvert, which makes the Internet a comfortable way to begin getting seen.  You sit in a room with your laptop or iPhone or iPad and you type stuff, or upload video, photos, or audio.  You are alone at the same time you are connecting.  Perfect.  And if you keep it up, sooner or later the virtual images of people will lead you to being in their actual presence, at a PodCamp or your own living room.  You will be amazed at how your life can unfold.

It’s IT takes getting seen to really see what’s out there. There’s genius in it, and many possibilities to make a difference.

Red Barn at Bennington College

Seven years ago this month, I received my Master of Fine Arts degree from Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. Three months from now (April 7-10), my neighborhood in downtown Denver will be crawling with thousands of MFAs from all over the country, at the annual conference of the  Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP).   You won’t have to be a card-carrying poet or creative writer to attend the event’s full lineup of talks, readings, and panel discussions, or the associated Bookfair.  If you will be anywhere near Denver in April, click here for registration details.

If you had asked me seven years ago what I hoped an MFA would get me, I would have offered one word: publication.

I entered Bennington a few years after early retirement from a natural gas company, and I spent my two years studying poetry with four fantastic teachers: David Lehman, Ed Ochester, April Bernard, and the late Liam Rector, founder of the program.  It was Liam who summed up the Bennington MFA’s mission in these six words: “Read one hundred books. Write one.”  I read way more than a hundred poems in those two years, and I wrote at least one decent one.  I left hoping I would find a place in the literary world, publishing poems in ever-more-prestigious magazines. I dreamed of seeing a poem of mine one day in The New Yorker.

With W.S. Merwin in his garden on Maui

My idol was (and still is) W. S. Merwin, an American poet of towering skill and integrity, whom I visited on Maui for the sole purpose of having my photo taken with him, as he’d done decades earlier in setting up a photo of himself with Ezra Pound. I haven’t been able to locate that photo on the Internet, but I remember how reading about it emboldened me to write to Merwin and ask if I could stop by for a photo.  I did not bring any of my work or ask for his help getting published. I just wanted a photo, which hangs on the wall of my studio here in Denver.

I did publish a few more poems in good literary magazines, but I grew weary of the odds and the steady flow of tiny rejection slips.  The poetry editor of The New Yorker in 2007 said she received 600 poetry submissions a week. I shifted to writing book reviews for a while and continued to tend an earlier version of this blog while still noodling with my two book-length poetry manuscripts. I also helped out with an online literary magazine here in Denver, wazee.

In December of 2005 I first heard the word “podcast” uttered at a conference in Banff named “Blogs ‘n’ Dogs,” because the registration covered room, sessions, and a free dogsled ride.  My morning writing time in the past four years has gradually morphed into GarageBand audio editing sessions or Skype interviews for my weekly Kindle Chronicles podcast, and on Wednesday Darlene and I are headed for the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to cover the eBook sector with official blogger press credentials.

So what was the point of spending two years of my life and a good slice of my IRA getting an MFA?  Where’s the poetry, Jack? Where’s my place in the world of letters?  Twitter?  The podcast script? Here?

All of the above, actually.  This MFA revises his tweets endlessly before clicking on “update.”   And what I speak into my Snowball mic each Friday about the Kindlesphere benefits, I hope, from intangible lessons gleaned in Vermont about authentic voice, timing, and the right words in the right order.

I read a terrific article in The New York Times this morning titled “How to Train the Aging Brain” by Barbara Strauch.  Here’s a tidbit:

Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.

Maybe beating my head against the villanelle and my own creative limitations for two years in my early 50s jiggled my synapses more than I realized.  The outcome so far has been wildly different than what I expected.  I have great teachers and fellow students to thank for that.  I hope I will see some of them when the MFA writing flock descends on Denver in three months.

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!

Fridays have always been Political Gabfest days for me, but yesterday on the cross trainer there was no new show, because I had deleted the feed to my iTunes directory.  So I spun the list of podcasts remaining on my iPhone and came up with UChannel, also known as the Univerity Channel, a project of Princeton University.  It’s a series of full-length university lectures from around the world on a wide range of topics.  The audio quality is good, and the topics are serious.

So I listened to a May 25, 2009 lecture at Cornell by David Healy, a psychiatrist and Cardiff University professor, who rattled what I think I know about the world with his passionate critique of the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on the practice of medicine.  He argued that Prozac and similar drugs can lead to suicide, and he called attention to the amount of ghost writing in prestigious publications such as The New England Journal of Medicine.  Click here for audio of the lecture.

The talk lasted more than an hour, so I finished it up in the car later yesterday morning, driving to a far-away optional errand just so I’d be able to keep listening.  Professor Healy has the intensity of a fringe reformer, but if even half of his thesis is valid it indicates the daunting scale of any effort to truly reform the U.S. health care system.

This provocative podcast, unlike the Political Gabfest, left me with the feeling that I had learned something new.  I’m not sure how long I’ll maintain my political abstinence, but so far I enjoy the doors it’s opening up in my mind each day.