paranoid enough, check this out.

From Wired News:

Scientists are scanning brain activity in the hopes of catching sight of the physical mechanisms that determine whether you prefer Coke over Pepsi.

The nascent research, known as “neuromarketing,” could one day lead to new advertising strategies that directly stimulate hard-wired mental reflexes rather than appealing to fuzzy consumer attitudes.

I could see why this has Madison Avenue salivating, but (and here’s that slippery slope argument again) what about all the potentially bad uses of this research? What do you think?

municipal wireless networks in Texas has failed.

From Slashdot:

Google gave journalists a glimpse of its next generation machine translation system at a May 19th Google Factory Tour.

…

The system has been trained using the United Nations Documents as a corpus. This corpus is some 20 billion words worth of content. It uses existing source and target language translations (done by human translators at the U.N.) to find patterns it then uses to build rules for translating between those languages.

Pretty cool.

Former FBI official W. Mark Felt says he was Deep Throat.

It’s the new one by Nelly & Tim McGraw. You know the one? Where they sing “over and over again” over and over again? It’s driving me CRAZY. Thank you.

I’ve been thinking lately about the mechanics of inspiration. More specifically, the mechanics of my inspiration, since it is, of course, a highly individualized experience. I’ll focus on poetry here, although I think this should apply to prose as well; I tend to write more poetry because, well, I’m better at it than prose, and because poetry is like instant gratification to the writer. It’s quickly done and edited, quicker for the reality to match the vision, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, back in the day, I used to think of a topic I was inspired by and write on it—pretty straightforward, sure—but more often than not that came out as rambling, melodramatic drivel (you have noticed my tendency toward melodrama?). Of course sometimes I came up with something I really liked, but my yield was pretty low. And, engineer that I am, I am constantly dissecting and studying the anatomy of my ideas to see if I can more efficiently harness my creativity (is that even possible?).

Looking back over what I’ve written, I’ve noticed that the stuff I like best is more or less the stuff that was produced under pressure. Something written with a specific goal or parameters in mind. Let me explain: as an example, let’s look at one of the exercises I did in a creative writing class I took in high school. I was to use the following words in a poem: finger, voice, mother, needle, cloud. Moreover, I was to take a proverb and paraphrase it somewhere in the poem. Here’s what I came up with:

The Ghost Ship

Black cliffs rise, stern and forbidding,
through the reaching fingers of the mist
Echoes of voices
voices of the disappeared
lost in the clouds of memory
Their mothers sit quietly in the howling wind,
mending with needle and thread the tatters of lost souls
The ghost ship passes by in dead silence,
its passengers screaming soundlessly
The sea is the death of a thousand loves.

Now, call me arrogant, but I was very happy with that result. The same is true of the love poems I mentioned earlier. In fact, the last 5 or 6 poems I’ve written have been done with that sort of under-pressure writing style, and I’ve been happy with all of them (and if you’d seen some of my earlier stuff, you’d know that is pretty rare). What I’ve been doing is this, and it sort of came about naturally. I’d find myself somewhere, maybe driving down the highway late at night, listening to music, and suddenly a word, or a phrase, or a stanza would pop fully-formed into my head, and I’d rush home (or wherever) and write it down. More often than not it’d be a line or a collection of words I thought sounded particularly, for lack of a better word, poetic. But, and this is the most important part, it had no context. It would just be something evocative of an emotion I wanted to capture, or a pleasing combination of sounds. Also more often than not, I had no larger purpose for this phrase.

And so I started amassing this collection of rootless words. Eventually, I compiled a file of them, and occasionally I’ll come back and look it over. Then, like scrabble tiles, I’ll pick some of them, rearrange them this way and that, maybe add some connective tissue, and presto! I’ll have a poem. Here’s one like that:

suddenly incomplete

awoken by
the temporary grace
of a breath of your skin
as you passed by on the street

I didn’t know you
but you were all that I dream of
in the dreams that
come morning
I can only remember
as impressions of color and emotion

you were not real
in the way that children
are seeds of people
who do not exist, yet
you were the promise of meaning
and the suggestion of joy

you moved too fast
for my mortal eyes to see
leaving only brilliant,
fading afterimages
photo-flashes of vivid life
in a monochrome existence

I was left blinking,
confused
my eyes trying to readjust
to the dimness
of my everyday world

made slack-jawed and slow-witted
by the blinding vision
of unfulfilled possibility
I stood still, there
making small ripples
in the river of people
that flowed around me

I was stunned by
whispers of what-ifs
given a glimpse of the realization
of a wish I didn’t know I had

and all of a sudden
I was unfinished
made somehow less
than I had been
a moment before

I had not missed
what I had not known
what you had just shown me

and I didn’t know which was worse
the loss
or the never-having

and now
when it is all
nothing but a memory
that has not faded
I am still amazed
that something so little
isn’t.

It was built around the phrases “temporary grace” and “children are the seeds of people…”. Pretty cool, huh? I find it unbelievable that I could do something that…random, and have the result be something I like. Here’s a snippet of an unfinished poem, another one of those collections of rootless words:

light splatters across my room
like a paint spill
an accidental luminosity
a fortuitous geometry
of moon and star and window-pane

That’s the beginning of a poem that’s been almost-finished for months now. I’m just missing the connective tissue between a couple of the stanzas. Maybe one of these days I’ll get another phrase and boom, it’ll be done.

What inspires you? More importantly, how does it inspire you? How do the mechanics of your inspiration work? Comment; let me know.

So as some of you may know, my sister is getting married in a few weeks. For the ceremony, she and her fiancé wanted to do a couple of readings, and she asked me to help her find one. So we searched around and found some good candidates, but then she thought, knowing that I dabble in writing, that it might be cool to have me try and write something, and we’d keep her final 3rd party provider (Touched by an Angel by Maya Angelou) as an understudy if I wasn’t able to come up with something satisfactory; creativity on demand does not always work well, you understand.

Now, I hadn’t ever written a love poem before, and hadn’t, to be frank, historically been a big fan of the genre; the subject is pretty trite, and I have read very few love poems that I actually like. But where there’s a need…Anyway, I came up with a couple of poems that, after some editing, I am pretty happy with, and she ended up picking one of them. For your reading pleasure (?), I’ve posted them here. First, the runner-up:

Two together: a song of devotion

We came up out of the dark
and found the world free of shadow
found joy where we had not imagined a lack

We exorcized the ghosts of memory
shed the legacy of our past sorrow
and armed ourselves with conviction

Travelers both, we two
now unburdened, now prepared
for the terrain of our lives together

Our ideas of ourselves,
half-formed and shapeless,
only together are made whole
made sharp
made strong

Disbelieving the good fortune
of this chance-met circumstance,
this coincidence of moon and stars,
we come to the truth,
that we are better together than apart.

Though it demands a heavy price
love is the sweetest sacrifice we can make.
This is my pledge:
This is the ink of my love and my loyalty,
tattooed here across my heart,
indelible.

Credit where it’s due: one of the lines in the poem is a paraphrase of a snippet of a poem I saw on TV. I’d like to credit it more fully, but it was a poem written by a fictional character on a TV show, so I guess I have to thank whoever was the poem writer on the “Best Friends” episode of Cold Case:

I came up out of the dark without you
and every day since has been in shadow

Another line, my favorite, is a paraphrase of some song lyrics (really, it’s a poem)—from Walking Through the Empty Age by Chris Mosdell:

I dip my hands into this darkness
This is the ink of all our lifetimes
Here in this world of utter silence
Let the stones speak to me

Tattooed here across my skin, “I will live”
Like a rose that grows from the wreckage
Blood red, beautiful
As the storms all around me are now breathless

Beautiful, ain’t it? Brings a tear to my eye. No, really. Anyway, moving on. Here is the winner:

Influence

It is tempting to consign love
to the banality of daily existence
another of the petty magics of our lifetimes
just, or mere, or only
another meaningless, overused word

But let it come to us
and even the air is sweeter
every instant touched by fate
every breath invested with meaning

Flushed with the happy circumstances of our meetings
the serendipitous confluence of our paths
we dare to believe
that we should be so fortunate
to have found our complements in each other,
that the burgeoning excesses of others
could fill the lack in ourselves
that we could deserve these wondrous gifts
love gives us:
connection where there was a void
hope where there was despair
courage where there was fear
self-sacrifice where there was conceit

Love makes angels of us all,
and only in its arms are we free to fly.

XBox 360 vs. PS3.

as soon as I get home: Taboo. According to macosxhints, “Taboo is a plug-in for Safari that warns you if you hit the red close button and you have more than one tab open.” It’s the little things, man.