Cyborg sports: blade runners and androgen insensitivity

1.
Remember the bread crumb idea? First attempted in Hansel and Gretel, with poor results: the birds eat the crumbs and Hansel can't get home. (Of course going home to parents who hate you and abandon you in a forest is another matter...). Later in the Extremely Early Days of computing and the net, I came across the breadcrumb notion:


A Web site navigation technique. Bread crumbs typically appear horizontally near the top of a Web page, providing links back to each previous page that the user navigates through in order to get to the current page. Basically, they provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting/entry point of a Web site and may look something like this:
home page --> section page --> sub section page
This technique also is referred to as a bread crumb trail.
The good news is that Angry Birds don't eat virtual breadcrumbs. 

2. 
So today I got back from errands determined to write a blog on...well, not on this topic of distraction. I was going to write about Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, which has me thinking more about cyborgs and networks, and how the new social media technologies have changed many of the behaviors and altered many of the limitations previously attached to organizing groups of people. As I sat down I realized I might want to watch the highlights of the Red Sox victory over the Yankees from last night (3-2, 10th inning walk off hit by Reddick). So I went onto ESPN's website, and promptly found a story about...Oscar Pistorius. Oscar is a double amputee running on carbon blades, and previously he had been banned by the International Association of Athletics Federations  from able-bodied competition. The IAAF argued that the blades gave him an unfair advantage; but the Court of Arbitration for Sport (you did know such a court existed, didn't you?) ruled in his favor. (Pistorius is a multiple Paralympic gold medal winner). Cyborg sports! Carbon blades! The whole question of what constituted advantage (Pistorius isn't likely to win or even make it through the heats, though his personal best time of 45.07 for the 400 meters is quite good). And most important: Pistorius, picked to represent South Africa, will compete not only in the world championships in South Korea, but also in…drum roll…the Summer Olympics in London! 


The lead article had a link to a more in-depth conversation, so of course I clicked and read Johnette Howard's story at  http://espn.go.com/espn/commentary/story/_/page/howard-110804/oscar-pistorius-meets-olympic-qualifying-standard-400-meter-time-renews-controversy-prosthetic-legs.


And what I read was fascinating in a number of ways. Since cyborg sports is already a reality (human bodies augmented by drugs, but also by complex biomechanics measurements and training techniques, cutting edge equipment like the shark-mimicking suits for swimmers and those big-ass drivers all golfers now must have) this next phase really intrigued me. If I am an amputee, and must use these legs to run at all, should I be able to? What if those prosthetics give me an advantage; is that like taking steroids? Or does the fact that I'm an amputee balance that out? 







The answer is…we don't have an answer to whether Oscar's carbon blades (he's nicknamed Blade Runner of course) give him an advantage, unfair or not. Oscar has seven experts on a team that helped him overturn his ban. Howard comments, 


All of them provided their unpaid help to Pistorius on the condition they would independently reach their own conclusions and retain the right to publish their work when his last-resort appeal of the IAAF ruling to the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS) was done.


While all seven agreed the specific scientific report the IAAF used to ban Pistorius was faulty -- which was the only (and very narrow) criteria argued in his appeal before the CAS -- the same experts have since admitted they disagree on the bigger issue of whether Pistorius gets any sort of advantage from his prostheses. The different views are succinctly explained in this point/counterpoint debate that appeared in the Journal of Applied Physiology.


With the Iraq and Afghan wars producing young men and women who have lost legs, this dissuasion is likely to grow. I heard a Gulf War amputee speak at the Iron Man in Idaho a few years ago, and he says sport saved his life; he was depressed and thinking of suicide when he saw someone in carbon blades running competitively. The biomechanics are complex, but the moment when Pistorius crossed the finish line in Italy and knew he'd not only won the race but crushed his best time AND made the world championships and probably the Olympics - that's simple. It's fricking amazing. At the end of the race the second place finisher, Jamaican Lanceford Spence, "comes rushing up to Pistorius, clapping and smiling and finally embracing him in a bear hug that sends both men falling to the track."


Simple. Inspiring. Perhaps, for some out there, life saving.


And…well, the story doesn't stop there, because there was another cyborg sport story embedded in the first one.

3.


The article about Blade Runner also included a second story about Caster Semenya, the women's 800-meter world champion. She does not run on carbon legs - she has the original equipment, those amazing powerful legs that world class runners all have.




Her cyborg issue is not able/not abled, but male/female. 


Semenya has had a sensational career - she's only 19 - and she won the Berlin world championships in August 2009 with a time of 1:55.45 for the 800 meters. that was the fastest time in the world, period. She was 18. 


After her victory many, including Time Magazine, questioned her gender, and the IAFF (remember Pistorius?) required her to take a number of psychological, gynecological and endocrine tests. This meant she couldn't train for 11 months, and set off a storm of protest from South Africa's government and populace.


Unlike, say, the East German women swimmers who now appear to have taken serious amounts of performance enhancing drugs to win their Olympic gold back in the Cold War days, Semenya is thought to have what is called androgen insensitivity syndrome. According to CBS news:




People with this rare condition appear to be female, and they are, for all practical purposes. Yet in actuality, they have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome in each cell, the pattern normally found in males, according to WebMD. Some women don't find out that they have the Y chromosome until they try to conceive and end up getting the news from a doctor in a fertility clinic.


So should she have been tested? The CBS article points out that the Olympic Committee stopped testing in 1996 when 8 female athletes tested positive for the Y hormone; they stopped because it isn't clear that this gives an advantage, but also because it isn't something the person "did." 


Like Pistorius, she too has been "cleared" to run. Her version of the carbon blades is her physique, which is extraordinary, and which has set off a whole popular media frenzy in which some articles refer to her as he, and other articles try to re-dress the gender issue by dressing her up in more womanly attire. 

  


4.
Central to the cyborg debate is the question of augmented vs. restored. If an amputee has function restored, that fits more or less easily into our categories. He lost something; we are giving him that [human] thing back. Or in the case of Semenya, she did not do anything to augment her performance, and though she occupies a middle place in gender, she presents as a woman in the crucial areas. 


But as I follow the bread crumbs back, it is clear that notions of able and dis-abled, female and male, are radically in question as we head into the second decade of the 21st century. And as with Hansel and Gretel, there is likely to be no way back to the home one had (clear and obvious roles for men and women, clear differences between able bodiedness and its lack). Do we want to go back to that home? I don't. 

insult to injury

I was thinking the other day of a possible blog called "insult to injury" about aging and being in your fifties. Part of this was a cyborg reflection that aging is a software and hardware issue, and that a lot of cyborg narratives are driven by a human desire not to age as quickly as we do. 


So part of my fifties is being an athlete and beginning to get injuries based on this aging of the body, with the concomitant knowledge that my own inability to shift practices as my body changes is partly to blame for two torn muscles, a messed up knee, some emerging back issues (twice I've frozen up like some great insect with a carapace instead of a flexible spinal column). 


This would have to include the phrase fiftying it, a phrase Will Forest and I have developed. Fortying it meant you did something you used to do easily (make sharp field cuts, jumping with power, etc) and getting hurt. Fiftying it meant you did nothing noticeable and yet you STIILL GOT HURT. 


I've fiftied my ankle and my back, and I've spent four months in PT coming back from a two week span of trashing my knee (stuck on a mountainside above Desolation in Tahoe with a full pack trying to get down dead ends and free climbing pitches; drilling my knee on rebar and doing stupid Bike tricks that put too much jolt on my knees at Burning Man), and I've learned that the PT you are doing to get back function is actually the practice you ought to do anyway to retain function at this age.


And so the insult to injury is that it implies you have not, even now, learned your body very well, or well enough to avoid injury. And that a cleverer approach, a more disicplined approach, might well result not only in strength and lack of injury, but also...new/old body knowledge.


My friend Cat says that with our bodies now, everything old is new and everything new is old. She's right about that. 


And on top of all this, one has merely to look at one's desk (if one has a Memento Mori on it as the medieval philosophers did; mine is on my window ledge next to a spiral shell and a cup of pens) to see that these bodies that are no longer new also have a shelf life, a strange number which indicates the years this body will have this or that function, be able in these ways and less in those ways. Death is the whisper behind injury, is the spectre haunting the self we've cobbled together out of learning and myth, impulse and repetition, allegiance to some social norms and inevitably resistance to others.

Kelsey my neighbor said tonight in the hot tub that balance is the result of failure as well as success; each stumble is a chance to learn that balance. She is young and very immortal feeling, just out of college and on her way. She had her head back and knees up and looked very Maxfield Parrish. My brother Peter added that most adults are not really as shaped or formed as they appear; he quoted Louis CK: one of us is 5, and one of us is 8, and one of us is 37, but usually we are all down on the level of the 5 year old. 


And so we have failing and still capable and desired bodies, many of us. We think we should know more by now and we are right. The insult of lack of self knowledge is added to the injury of aging.


And yet...I sometimes think I always always knew it would be like this. Somewhere when I was 13 I was also 56. And so far 56 has felt wide open; what is old is new and what is new is old. I can sit at a computer that wasn't even a glint in Eniac's eye when I was 13 and remember 1967,  


It turns out that most of us do not learn along some nice curve. At least we don't for many of the most important challenges facing us as crazy monkeys, a species on the brink. 


I believe all the important questions have a location along the interface between body and world. And that body is linked to body and bodies, and bodies are linked to bodies that include machines (computers are a clear but not the only example of networks of humans and machines, with the networks and the humans doing real work to continue the life of the network). 


The pendulum swings from the philosophizing of the fifty year old to the fifty year old body and the self wound around each other like DNA strands. We talk about global warming and then about the confusions of gender, of power, of communication, of media, of humans cut off from feedback loops and thus unaware of the shit that is about to hit the world's fan. 


So perhaps once in a while one's body must be injured, so that the insult of not knowing is again felt, like a hot lash, a slap, a wakeup call. 


PS when I searched for a Parrish image of Kelsey I found this as the caption:

Barn's burnt down --
now
I can see the moon.

  Masahide

cyborg teacher 1

I was curious about whether there have been film representations of cyborgs as teachers, so I decided to google cyborg teacher. Of course, what I got was a wild array! The first link I clicked was for a real stinker of a movie, Class of 1999, in which cyborg teachers have been placed in "out of control" schools, to whip the attitudinal teens back into shape. Stacy Keach has, like, no eyes. Malcolm McDowell is uber scary. One of my favorite scenes is when the new "teachers" scan the students, and the audience views the readouts on how many gang members are in the crowd in front of the school. 


It's an interesting dilemma: the school really does have a gang problem; the cyborgs make it better at first, and then...the school has a cyborg problem. There is sadly a second movie, Class of 1999 2: The Substitute. One of the cyborg teachers from the first film comes back...and once again, substitutes get a really really bad rap. 


So the first version of cyborg teachers is aimed at the classic issue of classroom discipline, and imports the basic RoboCop logic. Society, and the soft nonaugmented humans who make it up, has failed; kids are in gangs and anarchy is loosed upon the blackboard jungle world. There is no pretense of learning; it is simply a struggle to see which war lord will control the mostly terrified students. 

Of course novels and films about the problems schools face with violent students is an old story (see Blackboard Jungle among many takes). And of course there is the classic 1980s Reagan era solution to all problems like this: terrorists? Columbine? Just get a cyborg superhero, or a truly heroic American on steroids, to take on these shitheads and beat sense into them (or the life out of them). 


But I'm struck by the 1990ness of these images. Cities, public schools, the world has somehow all been taken over; the people who used to run things are now victims, and the erstwhile victims are now aggressors. But the people who used to run things (read: white middle class filmgoers and voters) have a (literal) new weapon: technology. Technology can help them regain control, and control, it turns out, is what it (school, urban life, geopolitics) is all about. 


Today, as the U.S. government teeters on debt failure, a crisis completely designed and constructed by ideologues intent on making good all those rabid right wing radio ideas...I consider how to teach, what to teach, to my students in the fall. In a way, I want them to be competent cyborgs in a world where media representations outnumber actual representations. 


Here is another site dedicated to cyborg teacher:

The classroom is itself a technology that I would argue is a virtual space, designed, organized, enclosed, no different than a space comprised of bytes; the classroom is a part of a larger education system whose parts are cooected to every aspect of American culture: home to road. The teacher and the student walk “into” the classroom from some other place and erect the theater of the system as they go about their business. The teacher stands at the front of the room, the student sits, listens, and writes notes. If a student leaves the room, he or she will walk down the hall and look into other “rooms” in which others are pretty much doing the same.

This illustration of the cyborg is mearly a test, a hypothesis, a means of seeing, not meant to be factual. It’s meant to be pleasant, perhaps a distraction; it’s meant to invite a game into the picture: to create learning spaces just as virtual as the classroom. What is this learning space: Interactive Fiction, of course.

http://www.steveersinghaus.com/archives/294

That is, the face to face classroom according to Steve Ersinghaus might be fruitfully reimagined as a place where people are partly somewhere else (as in my online course) but also synchronically linked (that is, in that virtual place at the same time). 

The cyborg teacher as cyborg enforcer looks at students from the point of view of enemies, of uncontrollable violence animals with a patina of humanity. The cyborg teacher as teacher of cyborgs imagines that the students are always already partly elsewhere, with different goals and priorities, and that a good deal of what modern teachers teach is how to think through things over time with some degree of time commitment and focus. 


Sometimes I think that given our media saturated and information-centrifugal world, everyone in the US is ADD. Learning to attend - not attend as be in your seat, but to attend to what is being offered as learning, to attend to one's own priorities and skills - turns out to be a massively cyborgian task.


About one month to go on this sabbatical, and I'm getting ready to dive back in to this task. I can imagine a prompt that asks students to "read" classrooms, and teachers, and what combinations are best for learning. I want my students to use social media to connect with other people, students and otherwise, to produce real knowledge, to join forces and collaborate on real problems. 

First cyborg stop: teaching the frack out of Fracking in Monterey County.

Reading The Dada Cyborg

I am loving this book to pieces, partly because it deals so well with Hannah Hoch, a terrific Dada artist. It is giving me good ideas about how to negotiate between the early cyborg meanings in Norbert Wiener's style of cybernetics, and later more "pomo" meanings in the work of Donna Haraway and others. I'm also interested in ways the cyborg can allow artists and activists to begin intervening to challenge reactionary and militarist political trends. Weimar feels so often like a too-contradictory republic/Statist cyborg, one that "resolved" into fascism. And the United States post Reagan feels that way as well.

For now I want to simply post Matthew Biro's answer to the question, "In a nutshell, what is the Dada cyborg?"

The Dada cyborg is a motif or image type that I kept identifying in Dada art and, in particular, the work of the Berlin Dada artists. As I investigated Dada cyborgs and, simultaneously, the concept of the cyborg as it was developed in cybernetics and cultural theory after World War II, I came to the conclusion that the cyborg frequently appeared in Berlin Dada art because it could represent a new conception of hybrid or “networked” identity. By analyzing various appearances of the Dada cyborg between 1919 and the early 1930s, my book thus traces an emerging pattern of cultural activity that links Dada art with the rise of mass media as well as the (roughly) contemporaneous cultural theory of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Jünger, and others. It is a concept of identity that appears across multiple media and shows us the roots of our own media- and conflict-saturated consciousnesses today.

http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2010/01/dada-cyborg.html

Hannah Hoch's photomontages are amazing. Here is one form 1919-20 that Biro discussed in great detail, analyzing (among other things) the human/machine hybrids of the Kaiser and of her lover, the Dada artist Raoul Haussman. It is called "Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany."

The golden header

1.

I first found out on my way to watch the last minutes of a depressing game.

My bro called me "Did you see it? Did you see it? Did you?"

I could only think...no. We scored? The US women scored? But...isn't the game more or less over?

It was so awesome getting all that from one sentence repeated in a frenzy.

Telephones are pretty awesome for getting good news fast.

2.

The Women's World Cup of Soccer is front and center on my Summer Sports agenda. I watched France-England and a bunch of Sweden-US (we lost 2-1 on a freak carom off of our wall) and US - North Korea.

When we scored in the 76th...SECOND!!!!! I was both delighted and...well, and had that slightly doomed feeling you get when things come quickly and easily. When we missed a close off the bar header I felt proud of our attack.

Then came the penalty on Rachel Buehler. The amazing, insane stop by our goalie Hope Solo. Then the heartbreaking calling back of the play, giving Brazil a second chance. (At the time there was no apparent explanation; later we learned that one of the US players crossed the line and encroached, but...this is NEVER called this tightly, as far as I can tell). Then Marta scoring the penalty kick to tie it.

AND the red card sending Buehler off for the rest of the entire frickin' game (awful call upon awful call). Then...

well this is one of those moments when it seemed the US really woke up as a team. They played on fire. Even with Marta putting in a marvelous goal to go ahead. Even with a player (why do they keep saying "man?) down? But effort after effort was repelled by the back on its heels Brazilian defence.

And then the Play.

3.

I've seen The Catch: Montana throw to Dwight Clark for the winning score in the 1982 NFC title game against Dallas. I've seen Viniateri kick that insane field goal in 2002 after the Tuck Rule saved the Patriots' season in the snow against Oakland.

But I think The Play is...well, I can't get it out of my head. I've seen it maybe thirty times on YouTube and ESPN. Rapinoe cruising up the left side, hauling, then putting her head down and hitting an absolutely perfect, probably religion-founding, cross, just out of the reach of the Brazilian goalkeeper, curving just enough toward the US striker.

And then Abby went up (afterwards it almost looked like a dolphin just about to break the surface of the ocean after a dive). And never ever blinked.

I am in love, seriously. I went to bed and closed my eyes and saw Abby hit it again, some kind of halo around her head, like a soccer saint. Ball. Goal. Tie. Hope.

Honestly. The best.

Playing in Rain, I meet Tom Bombadil

1

When I was a new dad, I'd come home from teaching in San Jose around 330, round the summit of Highway 17 and see that big old ocean stretched out below. Like a window on another world.

And it was. The window was from 330 to about 530, when I'd have to be home in time to cook food for my family and take care of the little guy. And that window often was filled with disc golf. One problem: in the winter it rains, and so it would rain, and I'd try to gauge the amount of rain on my windshield as I approached the exit. Either get off here and play, or admit it was too wet and go on home.

I played in a lot of rain.

2

Today I woke up to a cold threatening to rain day. Great: roofers are on my house, the paper is down but the shingles aren't all on. Solar panels are waiting to be lifted and put on the roof. Oh well. Take the boy to his math class; take the dog for a walk in the chill air; go to the doc for a look at the overall health of the body; drop by the local skateboard store to see about possible teen jobs for the son and heir. Then to the cafe for caffeine in its most glorious form, and writing until the computer says "running on reserve battery."

Then grab a sandwich and play some disc. Except it is dumping rain. So eat food and wait for the run to stop. And when it doesn't go to the course and wait. And read.

The rain pauses for a long couple minutes. Then back comes the rain.

3

Sitting in the car does things to a man. Well, not quite like being out at sea for months. But the rain sleets down the windshield, and so if you watch the trees through the water they seem to shiver and melt, like some Hollywood hallucination special effect.

Ok time to do this. Patagonia rain shell with hood, check. Ski hat with brim, check. T shirt to wipe down discs, check.

The plan: throw from under the trees on hole 20 over to the practice basket, then run and putt out and run back and dry off and do it again.

No cars in the parking lot by now. 5 pm and I've got the place to myself; even the birds are safe inside, doing whatever birds do when they are hiding out from rain. Reading bird books? Considering new migration routes?

And then I meet Tom Bombadil.

3

Tom (not his real name) drove up in a slightly beater car of uncertain coloration. I've seen him up at de la (the name of our arcadian disc golf course) many's the time, over the course of 14 years. He's got the weatherbeaten face of someone who spends a good deal of time outdoors, and for all the time's I've seen him playing, I've also seen him working on the course or taking with someone, usually about their lost disc.

Both Toms are merry fellows,who wanter and explore the natural world. Both are known for the quality of their voices. The Tom with the beater car proceeded to tell me stories about finding discs in the most amazing places, including 300 feet down a huge arroyo way off the beaten path of Hole 4, and underneath a massive tree that had fallen in the night. The discs thus found are mysterious and epic, like any number of things from Tolkien. No “one ring” discs, but certainly discs of uncertain provenance and ancient manufacture. One disc in particular got my attention, an almost mythic disc I've never heard of: the fabled Pegasus.

As the rain fell and the day wound down, Tom regaled me with tale after tale of discs found and lost, rare plastics unearthed, valuable ace-run discs stolen by scoundrels, the Building of the Course at Pinto Lake. He was out in the rain to pull poison oak, which when wet gives up its long long runner roots (unlike weedwacking or cutting which only lets it come back bigger and badder than ever).

I bade him farewell, threw a final set of discs out into the now ridiculous rain, and hauled to my car. As I looked back, I saw Tom traipsing off into the brush. And thought of that rhyme from time out of mind:

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow;
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.

Bionic Dog

I am at The Verve on a cold maybe gonna rain Tuesday in Santa Cruz. The coffee is excellent (well when the café is also a great local roaster and the beans are roasted Next Door, that’s going to happen). I’m massively cyborged right now: phone is hopping with pictures, texts, email alerts; MacBook is working overtime on a wide variety of tabs and themes. Women’s World Cup (US women win 2-0 over North Korea). I read the comments on ESPN’s GameCast site, check the Giants game (holy crap! Up 11-3 over the Cubbies and it is only the 5^th inning!). Email: send messages to my son’s math tutor, check for “trouble” email from school/work/home, read some FPIF (Foreign Policy in Focus) on the amazing Chinese art at the Tate:

In the vast exhibition hall of London's Tate Modern, the installation looks from a distance like a huge patch of gravel. Perhaps it is the first stage of a construction site or the last stage of a demolition. Only when you come closer and crouch down can you identify the little objects. A discerning eye might determine that they are reproductions. The rest of us rely on an accompanying video about Ai Weiwei's project, which explains that the Chinese artist had commissioned a village of artists to produce the porcelain objects and paint them to resemble the real thing. What from far away looks like a gravel parking lot is actually one hundred million artfully produced sunflower seeds. http://www.fpif.org/articles/art_v_state

The brain is racing around a wild and bizarre racetrack, a steeplechase shaped like the inside of a computer merged with the global pings of a manic caffeine driven pingpong ball or pinball. I’m reading about the fickle nature of capital, the recent release of Ai Weiwei from Chinese prison, meanwhile mulling over the NPR show I heard on the way here (a frankly disappointing, much too limited discussion of “fracking” on Diane Ream show) and wondering how “clean” it would be to frack with natural gas to get natural gas, instead of using other dirtier methods…

And then I found a bionic dog in my Inbox.

2

The email included a complete cut and paste of a SFGate article on Naki’o, “the first-ever “bionic man's best friend."” Below the print were two videos, one from ABC News, showing Naki’o running on four prosthetic legs, and generally acting like a happy energetic puppy. The story has big pathos:

Abandoned by a family fleeing their foreclosed home last year, Naki'o and his red heeler [Australian Cattle Dog] littermates barely survived the harsh Nebraskan winter. In his weakened state, Naki'o stepped into an icy puddle in the basement and got stuck in the freezing water. The 5-week-old puppies were eventually rescued and taken to an animal rescue center. But Naki'o lost his paws and the tip of his tail to frostbite. Under the shelter's care, his paws healed to rounded stumps, but he was left unable to walk.

As a dog owner and I suppose now a dog “person,” (a funny phrase and probably worth pursing – as opposed to a cat person, but also as opposed to a person person?), I had predictable reponses: restored function, happy dog, happy adoptive humans, great ending to a sad story. Then other questions came up: how much did this cost? Who did the work? And is this going to be an option for pet owners, and if so, is this gong to move us into the big-cost insurance world for pets that already exists for humans? (for the answer to this last question, I recommend the terrific series on animal insurance on This American Life at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/392/someone-elses-money).

The story is that veterinary technician Christie Tomlinson found the dog (where?) both “charming” and “crawling on its belly to get around.” So she raised $1300 to have Naki’o’s two back legs fitted with prosthetics; when he did well the company Orthopets offered to fit the front legs for free. The total cost was $4500, thoug it isn’t clear if some of this was donated by Orthopets. It was this last fitting that made the dog into the first fully “bionic” dog.

The prosthetics look totally cool to me; they are meant to mimic dog limbs, and it does indeed look as if the dog can move freely and happily. So. Happy ending right?

3

Increasingly I have been reading the comments at the end of articles like this. For many cyborg readers (that is, reading articles online and linked to sites that allow a wide audience to comment, flame, spam, etc) the end comments represent much of what is awful about the internet. My friend Crystal hates the mostly inane and often hateful posts; the author Jarod Lanier in his manifesto You Are Not A Gadget calls out the lurkers and trolls that destroy coherent conversations on the Net.

But for some reason I’m drawn to what people say about articles. Perhaps it is the writing teacher in me; I want to know what a wide range of people will say because that gives writers information. And it isn’t hard for me to move past the empty comments in order to find the spread of responses from a potentially huge audience.

In this case, the comments mirrored my own responses. First of course, admiration for the people who designed and perfected and fitted these prosthetics, and empathy for animals who have been abandoned or injured. Second, the feel-good part of the human story: people showing large amounts of empathy for suffering and dong something about that. Then…just as in the comments, I wonder about the people who abandoned these animals. Do I have the whole story? Are they cruel people? Bad people?

Here are a couple sets of comments:

Diana says: 
23 June 2011 at 10:33 am 
That story is so sweet it makes me want to cry.



Dogs Rule says: 
23 June 2011 at 10:55 am 
Freeze the limbs off the idiots that abandoned Naki’o and his siblings!

Empathy builds the animal-centric community, and that community can also express a wide range of emotions at those who are outside it. Anger against those who hurt or abuse pets serves to constitute a part of this community.

This it is only a matter of time before the accumulatin of pro-prosthetic and pro-animal sentiments produce a response by those outside:

K Fils says: 
24 June 2011 at 7:46 am 
Bravo Orthopets! How wonderful that there are still so many kind and giving pet doctors!
With all the poor animals that end up as amputees, I wish there was an Orthopets everywhere.
I hate that people lose their homes and simply abandon their pets. Pets are family and should be treated with the love and respect that family deserves. Karma will get these folks.



Kat says: 
24 June 2011 at 9:00 am 
So glad you could hit in the gut those poor people who cannot pay for medical coverage for their human problems. Paying $6000 to buy the new feet for that god, plus the surgery itself, really says how important humans are. Great the animals are being helped, but many humans need help, and the humans aren’t getting the help. In some countries, the humans would eat the dog, because the humans can’t afford the food.



I agree with Kat says: 
24 June 2011 at 4:46 pm 
Seems like a lot of resources wasted on an animal when people could use help. In a way the story is heart warming, but also indulgently disgusting. How strange…



And that was my own response, partly informed by how I often read: how will others read this? And how do I read through a wide range of eyes, including first second and third thoughts? People were quick to jump on Kat, for assuming that people who help pets don’t help humans in need…

But this is what writing is (often) supposed to do: generate not simply agreement, but a variety of responses, so that we see what was assumed, left out, needed to be developed.

The comments are prosthetic to the article. Poorly designed or not, they are crucial. Technology lets us see what otherwise would remain invisible: this range of responses, this range of emotions.

Both sides have some work to do, it seems. And the comments allow them to see that work, and to do it. To design better writing prosthetics for a wider reading community to use.

Death in the Afternoon

Yesterday I got my dog and ran over to Meder Street Park, where I found a memorial going on, about 75 people. I decided to run and then attend to see what was happening. When I got to the dog park I found out that the memorial was for 25 year old Zachary Parke, the bike messenger and climber who was killed in a hit and run on Empire Grade Road on June 8, a couple weeks ago. He was hit from behind on a narrow dark road by Elliot Dess, who fled the scene, failed to call 911, lied to the police, and is now facing felony manslaughter and hit and run charges.

Man. I sat at the park and thought about bikes, and cars, about mixed use conflicts (bikes vs hikers, cars vs bikes, cars vs pedestrians).

I thought about two lives, one ended, one about to become a kind of hell. No way to hit rewind.

When I got back to the memorial, I walked among the mourners and well wishers, seeing many young faces, some drawn and sad, others talking and smiling in the perfect June sun, all trying in their own ways to come to terms with what had happened. Cliff met all the dogs at the memorial, and I stood in front of a table full of Zach's mountain climbing gear, including chalk bags that he had made himself. Long shadows from the trees...I tried to imagine his life, his family, all the people affected by his too early departure from this glorious life.

I took a flyer with images of Zachary on it, and then looked at some other pictures of him, one as a little kid with whipped cream on his face. That little kid, smiling into the camera.

At the food table a woman said "Please take some bananas" so I took a bunch (literally) and Cliff and I walked home, past the Jewish cemetery on Meder. I stopped and thought back; when I'd walked by this earlier, I had seen all the cars parked and thought there was a funeral, but all I saw was the usual Arcadian scene: gravestones, trees, grass, birds hopping from branch to branch. And now I understood that there had been a death, and the funeral/ritual was a new kind of funeral: mostly to honor the life of the fallen young man, but also to bring friends and fellow cyclists together to ask questions about safety of roads, about justice.

When I got home I put the bananas on the dining room table, and the pictures of Zach next to my computer. Lia and Paul came in from a ride, hot and tired and happy, newlyweds. I showed Lia the images of Zach and she was quiet as she read about his life and death.

When I asked her where she'd biked to, she said, "Up Empire Grade Road to Bonny Doon and back."

Reading Shteyngart

At 476 pages, Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook is decidedly Russian in length. (For comparison, the Bantam Classic version of Crime and Punishment is 576 pages; don't even get me started on the Norton Critical Edition at 704 individual leaves with writing on them).

And it is drop dead funny, lie in bed in the morning reading more even though you should be rising to start your day engaging. Russian. Jewish. 1993 American. So encompassing that as I was sitting out in the California June sun this afternoon, I felt only partly present; another part of me was in a lower east side office dealing with psychotic Russian fathers of mafiya Russian sons named The Groundhog. Or in a fictional Eastern European former Soviet nation, Stolovaya (Russian for cafeteria) and its down at the medieval heels capital Prava (part Praha/Prague in the go go 90s, part Pravda meets the National Enquirer).

I simply wanted to take a moment to do something that "Housekeeping vs The Dirt" did: try to represent, not "the text" and its meanings and successes/failures, but instead a record of my own reading of it. And so: I begin reading it on a whim, finding it on my wife's nightstand, and wondering what it was doing there. Not that my wife isn't a voracious reader; she is. But for a moment I wondered if this book slipped in undercover, a wild and wooly Philip Roth meets V Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis with an accent that gets more pronounced as it imbibes more alcohol (of which there is a stunning amount). I am not sure why it is named as it is, unless Vladimir Girshkin, the main character, is said debutante...more likely it is one of those "how can we sell more of these? let's get a chick lit title and surprise the hell out of all those beach blanket readers from the Hamptons!

Vladimir's story is "part P. T. Barnum, part V. I. Lenin." It takes aim at the new immigrant experience, as well as the American and Wester ex-pat experience (again, I kept seeing Czech Republic, and all those Americans descending on the New Place to Be). It sends up the weird Bohemia of Manhattan in the early '90s, and the weirder Bohemia of Eastern Europe after the wall fall. So much of the language is comic, you don't expect the accumulation of comic moments to end up serio-comic, with quite a lot to think about after all.

One moment worth considering. At the beginning Mr Rybakov, the "fan man" who cheerfully introduces himself as psychotic, is trying to get our hero to help him gain his U.S. citizenship. (He almost got it but failed the citizenship ceremony; when it came to the part about protecting the US from enemies domestic and foreign, Mr. R began to beat an enemy-appearing hapless Turkish man with his crutches). When Vladimir says that there is nothing he can do to influence the INS, "ten hundred-dollar bills, ten portraits of purse-lipped Benjamin Franklin, were unfurled on the table to form a paper fan."

First, instinct: Vlad grabs the hundreds and stuffs them in his shirt. Then, American reflex: "What are you doing? You cannot give me money. This is not Russia!"

And the response: "Everywhere is Russia," said Mr. Rybakov philosophically. Everywhere you go...Russia."

This turns out to be way truer than the reader can possibly predict. For a Russian, and especially for a Russian Jew...and an immigrant at that...Russia is everywhere, and what is happening in post-Communist Russia is, indeed, happening in other places as well.

What that means exactly is the burden of the book, and the sum total of the many many spot-on details of psychology and economics in this novel. Let's just say mafiya, Ponzi schemes, glossy brochures advertising nonexistent industries, uncertain allegiances of former security forces, and the kinds of ethical and personal quandaries such things are likely to engender, flourish in places like New York City and Miami.

I wonder if Bernie Madoff is reading this novel in prison. Hey Bernie, did you like the part where the mafiya Groundhog gets beaten by Slavic airport guards? Oh that side splitting comic sense of justice...

PS Here is the picture of Gary Shteyngart on the back, which partly made me want to read this: