Confession

I have a thing for libraries, as so many of us do. I spent my high school years haunting the Nashville Public Library, as part of the auto-didacticism that is required of anyone who aspires to an education. I consider libraries to be an essential part of civilization.

When I was at RPI, however, the RPI Library was substandard, I mean officially so. The accreditation authorities said as much in so many words. The book collections were pretty thin, there were an insufficient number of journals, and the building was at the very edge of the campus, symbolic of an attitude of “They’ve got textbooks; why would they want to read more than that?” The library building itself was an old “phony Gothic” stone chapel, and not really suited for a library building, being dark, cold, and prone to dampness. So that was a factor as well.

There seemed to be something of a consensus that a new building was needed. But there were those in the RPI Administration who were dragging their feet.

One symptom of it all was that there were two different committees that were supposed to give “input” on library matters to the administration, the Library Advisory Committee (LAC), and another one whose name escapes me. No matter, I joined them both. Such committees always have trouble filling their student slots, so it was pretty easy.

I won’t bore you with the details, because this essay isn’t about the RPI Library per se. Suffice it to say that there were many interesting turns of events, and the library even became a Student Rebellion issue for a while, generating a few “feel-good” stories in the local media. See? At other schools they’re doing silly things like protesting the war, but at RPI, they just want a better library. (There were some anti-war protests at RPI also, but why ruin a feel-good story with that sort of detail?)

Anyway, I wasn’t a student protest kinda guy; I was a writer. I wrote about the matter. I wrote an article in the RPI Engineer, a student magazine that, just coincidentally, I’d recently managed to get supplied to all the Engineering Faculty for free (One more advantage of being friends with the Dean of the School of Engineering). So it became fodder for some Faculty/Administration arguments.

I wrote the article in diary/journal format, dated entries, that sort of thing. One administrator reportedly got into a bit of trouble because of some of the things I’d written, although I rather suspect that it was more because he was on his way out anyway, for very different reasons.

Anyway, eventually the decision was made to build a new library. A large part of the money came from a donor who stipulated that it should be named after the retiring University President, who, ironically enough, had been the single greatest obstacle to the project from the beginning. There were a few snarky comments about this from those in the know, but mostly it was a matter of “Hell, for $10 million, he can name it after his left testicle for all I care.”

The old chapel building became the computer center, if you can believe it. They built a climate controlled structure inside of the old building, the stone walls acting as heat ballast to assist in the air conditioning.

Time passes. One of my college reunions happened to coincide with the anniversary of the ground breaking (or some other important date). There was a gathering of people who had something to do with the matter, including the architect (it had been his first major building, and had basically established his career), the aforementioned former RPI President, various committee chairmen, librarians, etc. And me.

So there were some speeches. And bedamned if just about every one of them didn’t read from my article about the committees, and the back and forth with the administration, and so forth.

So here’s the thing. I said that I wrote the article in diary format. But I didn’t keep a diary. Hell, I barely kept notes. Occasionally, when writing the article, I’d come to some point where I didn’t remember something, and I’d just keep writing. In other words, I made some stuff up.

I know, I know. There have been a bunch of scandals in recent years about journalists making stuff up, and how bad it is, and I agree, in principle. I’ll even stipulate that it’s no excuse to say that I wasn’t a professional journalist (although actually, at the time I was a stringer for McGraw-Hill’s technical news service), or that I’d never had a journalism class, where they might teach about journalistic ethics (ha!). Or even that I was young and young people do make mistakes.

And I’m certainly not going to try to alibi that what I was writing about wasn’t that important. They were minor details to me at the time, but who gets to say what is and is not minor in the long run?

I will say this, however. It was a long time ago, and by now, despite having a really good memory, I have absolutely no idea which of the details in my article weren’t true. And furthermore, neither does anyone else. I wrote the history of the matter, and there it rests. It’s probably as true as any other primary source, and I’ll stand by it. History is a human invention, in more ways than one.

Sweet Melissa

Freight train, each car looks the same, all the same.
And no one knows the gypsy's name

No one hears his lonely sigh,
There are no blankets where he lies.
In all his deepest dreams the gypsy flies
With sweet melissa...

-- Allman Brothers Band

In the first semester of my sophomore year at RPI, my living arrangements broke down completely and I moved into a big house with a lot of other guys on Hoosick St., where I passed the second semester in the bright haze of the Student Revolt that thrashed the U.S. college scene in the spring of 1970, after it became clear that Nixon's secret plan to end the war in Vietnam included a lot of war in Laos and Cambodia. There was also the Kent State thing and everything everywhere went kerflewy for a while, even in so conservative a place as RPI.

By the end of my sophomore year, I decided that living off-campus wasn't really that grand, and besides, I had a lot of on-campus responsibilities, plus, no automobile. So I went to the campus housing office and put my name in. The mad rush for the best housing had already subsided and all the better quarters were supposedly gone. But RPI had a policy of housing any student who asked, so I was sure to have a place to live. It was just a crapshoot as to how bad it would be.

That summer, my folks moved to Illinois from Nashville, and I helped them move. I made some halfhearted attempts to get a summer job, but non-farm jobs in southern Illinois are not thick on the ground, and I had no farming experience to speak of. So that was the one summer in my high school and college years when I just basically loafed.

I returned to RPI to discover the damnedest thing: for years, all RPI co-eds were housed at Burdett Avenue Residence Hall. BARH also held a fair number of male students, the fraction of RPI students who were female being that small. Also, for years, the freshmen co-eds complained of the arrangement. All other RPI freshmen were down in the Freshman Dorms, strange brick-and-cinderblock buildings with names like Nason Hall, Crockett Hall, and (the one I'd been in) Hall Hall. The freshmen women felt left out of ordinary freshmen living, disconnected from their incoming class, as it were.

So in 1970, the powers-that-were decided to do something about it, and that "something" was to make some additional renovations to one of the freshmen dorms, Warren Hall, to be specific, and use it to house the freshmen co-eds. Actually, again owing to the small number of freshmen women (I believe there were about 80), it was only the top two floors of Warren that housed the freshmen co-eds. The bottom floor held the lounge and about 60 upper class men and women.

One of those 60 was me. Go figure. I'd won some sort of strange lottery. The rooms were doubles, and each had its own bathroom, which put it way ahead of the rest of the freshmen dorms, which had communal bathrooms at the end of the halls. There's nothing like waiting for a shower on a cold morning, or finding all the toilet stalls occupied.

Warren Hall was also about 200 yards away from the Student Union, where I was to spend most of my time that year. Going into my junior year, I was still nominally the editor of Perspective, ostensibly a magazine of politics and philosophy. But I'd managed to put out two issues, not quite single-handedly, and there was never to be another. I might have turned it over to some of the New Left type guys who were kicking around, but I didn't get along with them in those days. (We're happy to spend time together at reunions, nowadays, but I can't say who has changed more, me or them. It's probably irrelevant at this distance).

In any case, I was also managing editor of the Rensselaer Engineer, which had a better budget, an actual staff, and better cachet with the professors and such. I wound up spending a lot of time that year on Engineer activities.

Early in the semester was "Activity Day," or some such, where all the student activities that had any connection to the Student Union (i.e. practically all of them, since the SU doled out money) set up a table in the Union and begged, er, asked the new freshmen to join up. I was working a small table for Perspective, but also lending John Benson, the Engineer's editor a hand, since there was (let's face it) more interest there.

I remember practically nothing of the entire afternoon except the moment when Melissa walked in.

She had, I learned later, recently given up on trying to straighten her hair, straight hair being the fashion at that time. I think the idea was to look like Joni Mitchell, which is a really great idea for Joni Mitchell, but not so good an idea if your hair is naturally curly. Melissa's was not quite Afro curly, but it did not take to the idea of straightening, and on that day, it was a halo around her head.

Also, the day was one of those bright, overcast days, where there are no shadows, but the light can nevertheless be enough to make you squint. But Melissa did not squint as she came into the room; her eyes did go a little wider, however, and the light from behind us caught them and the blue of them gave me that pressure in the forehead that says, "Okay, you got me. I'm hooked. Just reel me in and fry me up."

There were only maybe two or three other women in the freshman class who were in the running for "best babe," or whatever phrase one uses to try to cover the aching need that wells up within us when confronted by that which we desire. Melissa was the most striking of the lot. And, as you may have already noticed, she lived in my dorm.

One night, I visited her in her room and. we violated the dorm rules by my staying past the time when visitors were supposed to leave. By several hours. We left the lights off, and eventually we had to put a towel to block the light that seeped in under the door, because our eyes had become so dark-adjusted that the slit of light hurt our eyes. We mostly talked, in that time-honored tradition of young about-to-be-lovers, and even at this distance I am reluctant to reveal any of the things she told me. I have no idea what I told her, other than that I'm sure it was equally personal, equally precious, and equally unimportant to anyone other than ourselves.

Likewise, the other details of the "us" that existed for a while are not that interesting to outsiders, at least that would be my guess. But there are some lessons to be learned from the ending of it.

I don't think that much of it was my fault, though I am predisposed to grab all the blame I can manage. Essentially, Melissa could not take being at RPI. The workload was a factor, I would imagine, but not that great of a factor. No, the real problem was that Melissa was simply not able to handle being the object of everyone's desire.

Consider. If a girl is somewhat pretty, or even beautiful, in ordinary circumstances, well, there are still others who occupy that ground. In a high school of, say, 3000 students, the top 2% of the girls, (by whatever measure of attractiveness you care to use), still number around 30. Moreover, there are still plenty of other girls around, so the boys aren't all vying for the affections of just those 30.

But at RPI, the top 2% of freshmen coeds in 1970 calculates to 1.6. And there were 1000 male freshmen, and four times that number of other male students. In a random lottery, the odds that Melissa would fall for me would have made drawing to an inside straight look like a sure thing. So I was exceptional. Okay, fine. But she was even more so.

Simply having "a guy" was not nearly enough. Of the thousands of other students at RPI at that time, how many were so socially dysfunctional that they would pester the most attractive woman around, despite who else she might be seeing? Maybe if I'd been the jealous sort, always around, always snarling at any other male who looked at her, then maybe Melissa's phone would not have rung two or three times an hour with some guy at the other end asking her out. Some guy she'd never met or barely remembered. Maybe. But I was not that sort of boyfriend, and, frankly, if I had been, I don't think we'd have lasted as long as we did.

Eventually she could not take it any more. She saw the worst of male behavior on a regular basis. Regular? More like continuous. And she got so tired of it that she had to leave.

So she did. She left RPI, and she left me. She broke up with me first, explaining that she had to leave and that I was a major reason for staying, and, well, it's both flattering and distressing to be given that as a reason for a breakup. There were a few scenes between us before she left, and I accept full blame for those.

Then she was gone. I tried maintaining a correspondence, and that worked for a little while, and then it didn't. One thing about this writing thing is that it takes a while to get it under control. I suspect that had something to do with it. But, ultimately, who knows?

I think of her occasionally, and I have the heartfelt hope that she had a good life after she left RPI. She deserved the best. She deserved better than I was at the time, even, and you know how full of myself I can be.

I didn't have much of a social life for a while after Melissa left. That's the way it is with romantics. My next lover was the wife of a pretty good friend. That's the other way it is with romantics. We do so like to play it safe.

Perspective

The first magazine that I edited at RPI was a thing called Perspective. It was a journal of politics and philosophy, founded by a couple of students named Ken Rothschild and Rick Kamens, both of whom were seniors my freshman year. They hadn't done all that much preparing a succession, so there was really no one to turn the thing over to except me, which they did in the spring of my freshman year.

Rothschild deserves a little tangent. He'd won some sort of prize in physics his freshman year, and he was one of those fellows who was always bursting with a hundred ideas at once. The problem was that, of those 100 ideas, 95 of them were crap, 3 were marginal, 1 was good, and 1 was excellent. But he didn't really seem to have a notion as to which was which, so he spent a lot of his time working on crappy ideas. I hope he�s found a good editor somewhere along the line.

Anyway, at a time of student unrest and the "New Left," Perspective had a very strong philosophical bias, and its patron saint philosopher was Nietzsche. This was the Walter Kaufman version of Nietzsche, who was a lot more interesting than the dreary man-into-superman-peering-into-the-abyss-will-to-power guy that most people think of when they hear his name. I once asked Amy about Nietzsche, and she said that she�d always gotten the impression that he was cold and humorless. So I read her a couple of my favorite passages, and she said, "Well, that's just hilarious, isn�t it?" Poor Frederich always had the problem of being too hip for the room.

Anyway, Kamens wrote an article for the first issue of Perspective that I edited, entitled "Science and Tragedy" using Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy as a spring board for some ruminations on science. I changed the title, for layout and space reasons, and Kamens got pissed, as well he should have. My bad. He wasn't the last person I managed to alienate in my roles as editor during my college years, and I can't think of a single case that wasn't my fault. My only defense is that I don't think I made the same mistake twice.

Perspective was a camera-ready, photo offset print job, and we made good use of the cool fonts you could get with the IBM Selectric typewriter, though we did have to settle for ragged right justification. Later, on the Rensselaer Engineer, we got full linotype justification, though the printer then used the linotype to feed a photo offset. We eventually won some awards for things like layout and such. In fact, as nearly as I can recall, we won awards for almost everything except Editor and Editorials. In case you're keeping score, those would have been the awards that were specifically to me.

I managed to get out two issues of Perspective, plus a special little one-shot called Ellipsis, covering the Moratorium March on Washington. We did Ellipsis on a ditto machine, because I was fascinated by the ditto stenciling process, which allowed multi-colored printing. You were limited to maybe 25-100 copies, but it's not like there were thousands of readers clamoring to read more of the political musings of yours truly. Or even dozens, to be honest.

In the two issues of Perspective, I made maybe 2,000 lame jokes about the title of the magazine. Or maybe 2; memory is a tricky thing. I'd like to think that Perspective was where I first got to thinking about the point-of-view problem in philosophy, but I think it was more like just part of the general background. That was when I was learning about Special Relativity and quantum mechanics in physics, after all, and both of those have their own interesting (and differing) take on what observer means. I'd also taken mechanical drawing in high school, (front, side, top, and perspective views), and I'd been writing amateur fiction since grade school. Point of view was always on the list of interesting topics in each of those endeavors, and yet it still took me many, many, years to generalize the subject.

Ben is of the belief that the discovery of perspective in the graphic arts is one of the most important, if not the most important, ingredients to the Renaissance. He'll even go so far as to suggest that the camera obscura was the defining invention of the time, though he might backpedal a little if you mention moveable type.

Moveable type was an insidious invention. Without moveable type copyright law would never have come about, to mention one unobvious connection. The ability to mass produce books also led to the King James Bible and the Protestant Reformation. Without the ability to put bibles into the hands of the masses, common language translations were unnecessary, and without mass bible reading, why (and how) would the Reformation have occurred? Before general literacy, the Church told you what God said, and as long as they kept their stories straight, how would you ever think otherwise?

I've heard it said that Martin Luthor believed that if common people read the Bible, then they'd interpret it the same way he did. So Luthor had himself a bit of a viewpoint problem. Once people generally got to stick their oars in, all hell broke loose, as it were. The back and forth amongst those who were, each and every one of them, convinced of their possession of the real meaning of scripture, is the stuff of history, i.e. wars, torture, unrest, and revolution.

Then Descartes slipped one in on everybody with Cogito Ergo Sum. His little aphorism made "I" the test of existence, but only in translation, as it were, since there is no first person pronoun in the original Latin. Descartes elevated subjectivity to the level of a first principle, almost without anyone noticing that was what he�d done.

Nietzsche had his own take on the matter. If one's personal relationship to God is the important thing, how about if I relate to God as if he were past tense? "God is dead," Nietzsche wrote, doing a little Snoopy dance on the grave still haunted by the Holy Ghost. Nietzsche had mastered the art of being both humorous and serious at the same time.

Or, as I like to think of it, he had his own perspective on Author Omniscient and he was going to follow it to the vanishing point.

Dorms

RPI experienced the same post-War growth that every other college and university in the country experienced, as the GI Bill opened the spigots of pent-up demand for higher education in America. The “Korean Conflict,” which killed over 50,000 Americans without officially becoming a war, got its own GI Bill in 1952. Benefits became untethered to war as such with a further extension in 1966. The National Defense Student Loan Act also pumped money into the system as a response to Sputnik (Thank you, Comrade Khrushchev!), making up the difference for a lot of us.

The result of the influx was a lot of hasty construction. By the time I arrived, some more modern dorms had been constructed, primarily for upper classmen and graduate students, and the fraternity system had also risen to the challenge of providing housing for sophomores and above. So the post-War housing became the “Freshman Dorms” and all freshmen except women and students who lived locally was required to live there, and also to eat in the Frosh Dining Hall. Ostensibly this was for the purpose of “unifying the class,” but some suspicious souls thought it was to make sure that the resources were fully utilized (and reimbursed). The freshmen women, incidentally, wound up in the Freshman Dorms two years later, in the top two floors of Crockett Hall, but that’s another story.

If “The Graduate” had been made in the post-War period, it wouldn’t have been “plastics” that the guy said to the protagonist, it would have been “cinderblocks.” Everything seemed to have been built from them. My home in Donelson was made with the large sort; the RPI freshmen dorms used a narrower kind. The outside walls had a brick facing, but the main construction was cinderblock, as were all the interior walls, which were not load bearing. I know this because a reasonably large person could stand in the hallway and push on both walls, moving them by as much as an inch in some cases. People who pissed off their fellows sometimes found their rooms shrinking. Or it could have been just for laughs.

Another laff riot was to “penny” someone’s door shut. That involved two or three guys pushing against the dorm room door, creating a little space, and shoving pennies edgewise into that space. The resulting force on the door mechanism made it almost impossible to turn the doorknob. Absolutely the favorite thing to do to someone just before they had a date, though that required some stealth

The floors themselves were likewise thin, enough so that you could locate the ceiling light in the room below just by searching around for the warm spot on your floor. If the guys below got on your nerves too much, a dropped bowling ball would create enough of a shockwave to shatter the bulbs and sometimes the entire fixture. Ah, good times.

The rooms were steam heated; RPI had its own coal-fired steam plant at that time, and exploring the “steam tunnels,” the access tunnels for the steam heating system, was another rite of passage. The dorms rooms were alternately too hot or too cold and always too dry, at least from this southern boy’s perspective, and the windows seldom sealed properly. On really cold days, some enterprising freshmen would spray water on the windows, which froze, sealing them properly and also putting a bit of extra moisture into the air.

Over winter holiday breaks, ice hockey in the first floor hallways was the order of the day, at least in some dorms, and ours had a star goalie for the hockey team, the closest thing that RPI had to a celebrity athlete. Rags stuffed into the communal shower drains put water into the hallway, then opening up as many windows as there were unlocked doors and voila, improvised ice rink. The fact that the hallways were way too narrow probably helped the guys toughen up, and gave “bouncing off the walls,” an entirely new exemplar.

There was one guy in our dorm who was a climber; he headed to the mountains on weekends, but during the week he was perfectly happy to practice repelling down from the roof. I don’t think anyone ever tried to penny him in his room—that would be pointless—nor do I think he ever tried pennying anybody’s room shut from the inside, but it’s an interesting thought.

When I got to RPI, most of the dorms had been converted, “modernized,” or
Something like that. This meant thin wood paneling on the walls and covers over the bare radiators. I think the dressers/closets were better as well. One dorm, Nason, I think it was, hadn’t been upgraded, and visits to friends in Nason felt like a little trip to Sparta. Thin wood paneling doesn’t sound like much, but the difference felt huge.

A few friends of mine have, for years, made a point of getting a Frosh dorm room for reunions, putting all sorts of sixties stuff in it (blacklight with posters, lava lamp, stereo with period music) and basically having a weekend long dorm party. Beer would be available; I shan’t mention other possibilities. I considered it a nice service that they were doing for the rest of us alumni, few of whom retain the necessary hardware to run the software, as it were.

Reunions are held in early June, which isn’t quite the perfect time. The perfect time would be in mid-Fall or mid-Spring, when the temperatures are mild, but with just a hint of cool. In the early evening, after dinner, I could lay on my narrow bed with the window open, the wind rustling the leaves of the row of trees on the other side of the parking lot, and behind that, the ivy on the walls of the Troy Armory (okay, that's mostly gone now as well; modernization takes its toll). The light would slowly fade and someone would start up the music in some other dorm and the sounds would drift in and out of focus. Eventually I’d have to get up and either study, or read, or maybe I’d go down to the Student Union, or even just walk around the town. The possibilities seemed endless. I liked that feeling, though I don't get to feel it quite as often these days.

Games People Play

During my sophomore year at RPI, I had a housing crisis. I’d moved out to some apartments fairly distant from the campus with a couple of guys, both of whom had cars, and I did not. Actually, one of them flunked out before the beginning of the year, so that left just the two of us, me dependent on him for transportation to and from campus. It was possible to walk the distance, but it was definitely not a fun thing to do when the air temp was hovering near zero, as it did a lot in Troy in the winter.

It also turned out that the two of us ceased hitting it off, something that can happen when you go from being a buddy to a roommate. That’s part of the “education” thing that we hear so much about.

Anyway, long, painful, and somewhat embarrassing story short, in mid-winter I moved out, to a place nearer to campus, on Hoosick Street.

The Hoosick house had been a fraternity and some locals had bought it after said fraternity moved out, with the idea of making it into student housing. I’m pretty sure they hadn’t taken the flunkout factor into account, so when I moved in, there was plenty of room. I got what had been a double room all to myself. The other guys in the place had mostly come from my freshman dorm; that’s how I knew them. So it was back to semi-communal living, only this time with kitchen privileges.

There was a fair amount of mischief to be had in a place like that, and I had some of it, and watched some other people engage in it, and formed my opinions as to which mischief was safer than the other sorts. Good stuff to know. Also, that was the spring of 1970, when Kent State happened, and all other sorts of hell broke loose, so no one was paying attention to the more benign ways of being naughty.

So, loud music, soft drugs, alcohol (the legal drinking age was 18 in NY at the time, so that wasn’t even illegal), various girls running around at odd times, (though not nearly as often as salacious or puritanical minds would like to think), those were some of the activities. Also, there were the ice hockey games in the back yard, in which I did not participate, and the card games in the living room, in which I did.

One was the standard collegiate bridge game: the one that starts sometime on Friday afternoon, and finishes up sometime Monday morning, with no break as such, just people shifting in and out of it. I played fairly intensively for a while, then I gave it up.

I gave it up when I realized that, if I continued to play, all that would happen was that I’d become better at bridge. And nothing else. All playing bridge was doing for me was making me better at playing bridge. Bridge is just a game. So I quit.

On the other hand, there were also poker games, and poker isn’t just a game. Poker deals with probability, deception, and money. Poker is like life. Later, I took up poker on a regular basis, in an attempt to improve my skill at deception, to mediocre results. That has nothing to do with my appreciation for poker, however.

The poker games at the Hoosick house did suffer from the fact that “dealer’s choice” often wound up being some wild card game or another, like baseball where threes and nines are wild. It was about that time that I formulated my rule that any game where a royal flush can lose isn’t poker, and I don’t want to play.

I’ve come to divide games into “just games,” “good games” and “great games.” Like I said, bridge is just a game, though there is a social aspect to it, and if the company is good, it can be a good game. To be sure, some bridge terms are common parlance, like “trump,” “finesse,” and “slam,” but those terms are adapted to bridge; they don’t originate there. Contrast that to poker, where “bluff” originates, along with “busted flush” “inside straight” “ace-in-the-hole” and others. Great games leave their mark on the language, and they leave their mark on lives.

There’s a long standing dispute between chess and go enthusiasts over which is the better, or more profound, game. Both are great games. Chess is complicated, while go is complex. That’s the way I’d put it. But learning either (or both) will sharpen your wits as well as teaching you something about yourself, your opponent, and the very idea of opponent.

From out in left field, I came across a game that’s definitely a good game, and it may be a great game, but I haven’t seen enough examples of it to be sure. It’s a variant of Monopoly, sometimes called Auction Monopoly. In this variant, when you land on a piece of property that is un-owned, it goes up for auction, with the minimum bid being the board-listed price.

Oddly enough, the auction rule dates back to the predecessor of Monopoly, which was called The Landlord’s Game. It was designed and patented by one Elizabeth Magie (thank you, Wikipedia!), based on the economic theories of Henry George, old Mr. Single Tax himself.

With the single rule change, you get a vastly different game from standard Monopoly, because the auction sucks all the money out of circulation pretty quickly. At that point, a serious deflation settles into the game, and prices would drop – except for the price controls, which render most property too expensive for purchase. The first time someone lands on Boardwalk, for example, it almost invariably goes without sale. No one has enough money left to buy it. On the other hand, the winner is usually whoever manages to get the monopoly on Baltic and Mediterranean.

If you allow other rule changes, rules that inject money back into the game again have major consequences (re-inflating the currency), and so forth. I’ve often wondered whether there are other rule changes that would allow for things like fraud, corruption, market bubbles, and so forth, but that’s probably more suitable for computer games, which I seldom play, except for the demon-spawn Spider Solitaire.

Nietzsche and Me

We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex. – Hugh Hefner

Just for the record, I always found Hefner’s use of the editorial “we” somewhat jarring. The above sounds more like an invitation to group sex (with a single female participant) than a one-on-one dialog.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

___________________

Friedrich Nietzsche was a hard luck guy, no doubt about it. He was, for a time, an intimate of Richard and Cosima Wagner, then broke with them, in part because of Wagner’s anti-Semitism. His enormous output of philosophical work in the mid 1880s was greeted with what can most kindly be described as cool indifference by the intellectual community of Europe, and he suffered a complete mental breakdown in 1889, living another 11 years in full psychotic fugue. Suggestions as to the cause range from syphilis to brain cancer. If he had syphilis he probably contracted it from his time as a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, his physical contacts with women somewhere between few and non-existent. In any case, Nietzsche certainly had some neurological complaint, as he frequently suffered from blinding headaches, yet continued to work in snatches punctuated by near total collapse, a situation that gives insight into what Nietzsche was getting at when he glorified the will.

After his collapse, his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, took over his affairs. She and her husband were anti-Semites, fairly virulent ones, though it’s difficult at this distance for a non-historian to gauge whether “virulent” meant merely “average.” In any case, her editing of Nietzsche’s notebooks and publication as The Will to Power began the distortion of his legacy. Being appropriated by the Nazis as a forebear sealed his fate for the first half of the 20th Century. It didn’t help that Leopold and Loeb cited him as an inspiration. Very bad English translations can apparently be as pernicious as listening to Black Sabbath records played backwards.

And the first English translations of Nietzsche were very bad. I’ve read a few of them, and whoo boy. Nietzsche was a poet as well as a philosopher, and he wrote with wit and irony. Subtract those, and, well, you might as well think that Jonathan Swift really was in favor of cannibalism. It surely didn’t help that his most famous work, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), was also his most poetic and allegorical. Even most native German speakers didn’t know what to make of it.

Then there was the unfortunate fate of the word “Übermensch” first translated as “Superman.” “Strange visitor from another planet” wasn’t what Nietzsche had in mind, but there you are. Proto-Nazi or comic book inspiration, those were what the poor fellow had been reduced to.

Then, in the 1950s, one German-born, American academic philosopher, Walter Kaufman, set out to rehabilitate Nietzsche’s reputation. It didn’t hurt that he taught at Princeton, and that he was a brilliant translator and a poet in his own right. First with books about Nietzsche, linking him to the existentialist tradition (a decided step up from Nazis and comic books), then with superb translations of Nietzsche’s own works, by the mid-1960s, Nietzsche the philosopher was respectable again. Indeed, he was more than respectable; he was hip.

Okay, there are various reasons why one might be embarrassed at having had a youthful fling with Ayn Rand, albeit in the Platonic sense, except that Rand despised Plato, and the phrase “in the Aristotelian sense,” doesn’t really, uh, make sense in this context. Nevertheless, I was young, open to new ideas (or new ones to me, anyway), and besides, among other things, she introduced me the Nietzsche. Not that this was her intention (or that she had even the vaguest notion of my very existence); indeed, she was attempting to warn me off.

In “Rolls Rex, King of Cars” my erstwhile collaborator Sharon Farber’s first story about a young girl named Billy Jean, she has Billy Jean’s hippie mother tell her not to go snooping around the farm next door, so the first thing that BJ does when left alone is make a bee line for the farm next door. I myself wasn’t quite that forthright. What happened was that I once found myself in a conversation with someone, comparing Rand and Nietzsche, and I realized that I hadn’t actually read the guy. If I kept that up, I figured that sooner or later, someone was going to think I was a nitwit, and I do not like being thought a nitwit. I especially don’t like it if the someone thinking I’m a nitwit is me.

(Since then I’ve learned that most intellectual discussions involve someone faking it at some point or another, basing their opinions on a book review, or a panel discussion, or the Cliff Notes version in one way or another. Furthermore, it is the height of impoliteness to point this out. Live and learn).

Anyway I got some of the Kaufman books and I read Nietzsche. And here’s the interesting thing: I found that, even when I disagreed with old Friedrich, he was still damned interesting to read. Stimulating. Informative. Manna for the budding intellectual, as it were.

Then I went to RPI, and in my freshman year, I assumed the editorship of the student magazine, Perspective. The two guys who had started it were seniors, and they were soon to be out of there anyway. They had a budget from the Student Union, so, hey, cool. I hadn’t made contact with science fiction fandom yet, so I didn’t know about all the folks making do with mimeograph and corflu; I had several hundred dollars to spend on full photo-offset printing, and I learned the most basic skill for getting people to do unpaid work (nagging). I managed to get two issues out, one my freshman year and the other my sophomore year and that was pretty much it for Perspective, but I had quite a bit of fun doing it.

Nietzsche was pretty much the patron saint of Perspective. Rich, one of the outgoing editors, had an article/essay in my first issue titled “Science and Tragedy.” At least, that was his title; I had to yank an illo at the last moment and for layout purposes, I changed the title to “Science and Apollo; Art and Dionysius.” That had been, more-or-less, nearly as I could tell, what he was driving at, a parallel between Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and what C. P. Snow called “The Two Cultures,” except that Rich never mentioned Snow. He was, however, really pissed about my changing his title, which is entirely fair, and entirely my bad. I shouldn’t have done it, and my only excuse is that, if you appoint a freshman as editor of your magazine, you should expect some screwups.

There was also a guy named Greg who had written a pseudononymous critical letter about Perspective, as well as a couple of things for the school literary magazine, The Gorgon. I penetrated his pseudonym through the clever technique of getting drunk with one of his fraternity brothers. By “clever” I mean “totally accidental.” So I met with Greg one afternoon and had a nice chat, and son of a gun, yet another Nietzschean. These guys were just thick on the ground back then; I told you Nietzsche was hip.

____________________________

A Few Aphorisms from Nietzsche. Note: Don’t expect any of that “whatever does not kill me is a rope stretched across an abyss that looks back at you when you’re hunting monsters because God is dead” stuff. Better you should read The Nietzsche Family Circus.

_________________________

Discovering that one is loved in return really ought to disenchant the lover with the beloved. "What? This person is low enough to love even me? Or stupid enough? Or -- or ---"

Sometimes in the course of conversation the sound of our own voice disconcerts us and misleads us into making assertions which in no way correspond to our opinions.

A sure means of irritating people and putting evil thoughts into their heads is to keep them waiting a long time.

There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.

Never to speak about oneself is a very noble piece of hypocrisy.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the best even of their blunders.

Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing.

Man is very well defended against himself, against being reconnoitered and besieged by himself, he is usually able to perceive of himself only his outer walls. The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path.

An injustice we have perpetrated is much harder to bear than an injustice perpetrated against us...

When our head feels too weak to answer the objections of our opponent our heart answers by casting suspicion on the motives behind his objections.

It is more comfortable to follow one's conscience than one's reason: for it offers an excuse and alleviation if what we undertake miscarries--which is why there are always so many conscientious people and so few reasonable ones.

One has to repay good and ill -- but why precisely to the person who has done us good or ill?

Pseudonyms Anonymous

Hello, my name is John, Peter, Walter, Matthew, and Dorothy, and I am a pseudonym.

Or at least I was or have been a pseudononym, at various times. Most of them date from my school days at RPI, where I was first editor off the student political/philosophical journal, Perspective, then Features Editor, Managing Editor, then Editor of the Rensselear Engineer.

When you don’t have money to pay writers, getting stuff actually written becomes a bit of a problem. You assign things to the staff, who are volunteers, just like I was, and they do it or not, depending on whatever reasons made them join the staff in the first place, tempered by the other demands on their time from school work and basic needs like trying to eat, sleep, bath occasionally, and get laid (there’s some correlation amongst those, you’ll note). You impose on friends and acquaintances. You learn to nag. You come up with cockamamie science fiction writing contests.

That one worked pretty well, actually, provided you’re counting words and not paying much attention to quality. We had six judges, faculty members mostly, and every one of them picked an entirely different winner, and thought that the stories chosen by the other judges were complete crap. So we printed all six and reported the first part of the judges opinions and not the second. I’m not a complete idiot.

Anyway, when the cost/benefit ratio on the various methods of cajoling etc. went too high, I wrote some more stuff. And in the time-honored tradition of editors since the beginning of time, I put different names on most of it, so it wouldn’t look like only one person was writing it all. There was a practical, if mildly unethical, reason for this: we got money from the Student Union to produce the magazines, and the number of students involved in any given activity was a factor in that activity’s budget, so the appearance of a larger staff made our budget more secure. Also, being represented on the Executive Board of the Student Union was a factor in budgeting, which is why I joined the E-Board, as it was called, my Junior year. I am a nefarious and conniving sort.

I also used pseudonyms for a few submissions to The Gorgon, RPI's student literary publication. I did this for a different reason than the other times I used pseudonyms; it was for fear of embarrassment.

As I have noted, I consider myself to be a lousy poet. This belief is backed by the fact that I am, indeed, a lousy poet; anything past simple rhymed couplets, limericks, and doggerel that I’ve attempted just makes me cringe on later reading. However, on the path to learning this great truth, I wrote a fair amount of poetry. Midway through this stop-me-before-I-kill-again realization, I decided I’d submit some to The Gorgon and see how they looked in print and what the response would be. Or see if they rejected it as crap. Either way, I’d learn something.

The problem was that, although they did indeed publish some of it, the only response that I could discern was from me, which is that it was still lousy, and so was most of the other stuff in The Gorgon. Not one of my more profound revelations: that most poetry written by students at a small engineering school was crap.

I will follow the sense of mild humiliation that remembering any thing about my writing poetry with a bit of a brag. RPI has this honorary society called “Phalanx.” Up until around my time, during those insidious “kids got no respect for tradition” sixties, the members got to wear cheesy white coats with a purple square on one of the pockets (representing the phalanx military formation, right?). There were also pins, I seem to recall. We got rid of those, and by “we” I mean student government generally (I was an E-Board member, eh?). We then got rewarded by being made members of Phalanx and not getting anything to show for it except our name on a list. By “we” here, I mean “me.”

Anyway, making Phalanx isn’t the brag. The brag is that I later heard that one of my pseudonyms had been considered for membership in Phalanx, but the idea was dropped because nobody could find him on any class rolls, him not actually existing, you see. But it was kinda cool.

Years later, Sharon Farber, my sometimes collaborator and I used a pseudonym a couple of times, one “Dorothy Smith,” (“Dot” Smith—get it? Oh, we had ‘em rolling in the aisles). We used Ms Smith as a pseudonym for a few stories where one or the other of us had a story that didn’t quite work and the other supplied the small, but necessary fix. Dorothy was the fixer-upper, a sort of “Remember thou art mortal” reminder. Much later, we had a profound disagreement on a collaborative story such that not even Dorothy could fix it so we ceased collaborating

Back in the late 80s, I first went on-line with Compuserve, which was the equivalent of being in a highly moderated Usenet Newsgroup. Moreover, every Compuserve user was theoretically identifiable; Compuserve had to know who you were (since somebody had to pay the bill), and you couldn’t just pop off and seconds later show up in a new identity, because everyone had a number tag and Compuserve email address. That was pretty much the case for the other on-line worlds, Genie, Delphi, America Online. Write anything bad enough and there was the possibility of real consequences.

The Internet, anonymous re-mailers, web-based email, cybercafés, public terminals, all these have changed that dynamic. It’s possible to operate online from a position of totally anonymity.

And I never do that. When I make a comment on someone’s blog, I give my own name and the path back to my own web pages, email addresses (I have several; doesn’t everyone?) or over to my little blog experiment where my user profile has those things. I’ve tried internet pseudonyms and they don’t feel right to me at all. Part of it may just be wanting what I say to have the weight of a real, identifiable person behind it. Part of it may be a sort of "old man in a raincoat on a park bench across from the playground" feel it has to it.

But I’ve been reflecting lately on what happens when we toss away components of the Superego, thing like accountability, consequences, empathy and persona. These are also components of the self, and they are part of what keeps the Id in check.

The Id is also part of the self. Ironically, denial of the Id gives it more power.

So every day I see things posted on the ‘net that are the verbal equivalent of “monsters from the Id.” Most often, they are anonymous; almost invariably they are written as if words have no consequences except possibly in relation to other words. Cyberspace becomes a massively multiplayer role playing game where magic rules, and not just in wizard-sodden gaming circles.

I am real; I have weight. Do your worst, puny magicians. My hide is thick with scales.

Dwarf magic does not work on dragons. Nobody knows why. - John Gardner, In the Suicide Mountains

1968 Part II

June 3 - Radical feminist Valerie Solanas shoots Andy Warhol as he enters his studio, wounding him.

June 5 - U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California by TAWKRFK. Kennedy dies from his injuries the next day.

The Wikipedia says that The Central Intelligence Agency's Phoenix Program was officially established in June, 1968, but the article on the Program itself says that it began in 1967. Since, among other things, it involved assassination and interrogation by harsh methods (i.e. torture), it's easy to see how basic information about the program is suspect.

In the summer of 1968, I was working full time as a lifeguard at the Downtown Nashville YMCA. Actually, that is an understatement. The other certified and experience Y lifeguards had all gotten nice summer jobs at suburban pools, where they made more money and got to meet girls. This left me as the only lifeguard that the Downtown Y had to fill the high chair.

The pool was open 6 days a week, for 12 hours each day, although I sometimes got there a little late, and I was allowed to leave early if there was no one wanting to use the pool past 5. Still I was working as much as 72 hours a week for less than minimum wage.

On the plus side, it was easy work; there would sometimes be stretches of well over an hour with no one in the pool at all. And during the swim classes, the main safety responsibility fell to the instructors, so I was sometimes allowed to duck over to the café and have lunch.

Also, because of the hours, I didn't really have much of a chance to spend money. So I saved several hundred dollars that summer, despite having weekly paychecks that seldom cracked $50.

July 23-July 28 - African-American militants led by Fred (Ahmed) Evans engage in a fierce gunfight with police in the Glenville Shootout of Cleveland, Ohio.

July 25 - Pope Paul VI publishes the encyclical entitled Humanae Vitae, condemning birth control.

August 5-August 8 - The Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida nominates Richard Nixon for U.S. President and Spiro Agnew for Vice President.

Nixon was selling "The New Nixon" a forthright soul who had wandered the wilderness and who was now past the slush funds, sweaty brow, and "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore."

But really now, everyone knew he was still an asshole. The only thing was that he was an asshole who hadn't tried yet to get us killed. Lyndon Johnson, however, had been trying to get us killed for quite a while.

Besides, George Romney, the Republican anti-war candidate, shot himself in the feet so many times that he could have used them as colanders.

In late August police clashed with antiwar protesters in Chicago, Illinois outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which nominates Hubert Humphrey for U.S. President, and Edmund Muskie for Vice President. Richard Nixon was to use the Democratic debacle to great advantage, speaking of the "silent majority" and disparagingly of "the Hippies" which everyone took to mean anyone who had any opposition to the war, any desire for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, or any white male who had hair that managed to creep over his ears. In other words, me, about six months after leaving Nashville. But I'm getting ahead of myself. In any event, I'm not the guy to ask about the Chicago DNC riots. For that, you want Skip Williamson.

[Brief aside: In Tom Brokaw's 1968, he gets a former Chicago cop and a former anti-war activist together to have at it a bit. The Chicago cop claims that there were park benches being burned during the riots. The activist says that the story is a "total urban myth." The cop replies, "I was there," and the segment ends.

Why the hell didn't Brokaw follow up on this? It's pretty easy to find, for example, photos of park benches being piled up as barricades, but I'm damned if I can find a single burning bench photo, or even a reference to it. Which is to say that the cop was almost certainly lying, or, more likely, remembering something that never happened. And Brokaw lets it pass, as if finding out who was telling the truth would be" taking sides."

Asshole.]

In September, 1968, I arrived at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute. My parents drove me the 1050 miles to get there, and "Classical Gas" by Mason Williams was larded onto the top 40 stations with a trowel. I remember waking to it somewhere in Baltimore, near the middle of the night, from being asleep in the back of the station wagon.

Somewhere in the first semester at RPI, Jean Shepherd performed in the gym, and asked his audience, "How many of you here believe that your life hasn't started yet?" Many hands went up, with some amusement. Shepherd proceeded to tell them what idiots they were, waiting for it to begin. I had not raised my hand. I figured that my life had begun with my arrival at RPI. I was wrong, of course; I'd had a life in Nashville. But I was also right; it wasn't the life I wanted.

That first semester, I learned how to drink. The legal age for alcohol in New York State at the time was 18, and since no freshmen were allowed to have automobiles, it wasn't even that dangerous. The RPI Student Union Rathskeller served cheap beer to anyone with a student ID, and there were a set of bars down in Troy that specifically catered to students. I made a hit with some of my buddies by knowing that common detergent contains optical bleach, which reflects UV as blue-white light. The bars had a cover charge, but used a UV ink stamp on the back of your hand to allow re-entry. A little bit of detergent, properly painted (one kind barfly loaned us her eyebrow brush; she probably found one of us attractive, but I have no idea which of us it was, which means it may have been me, dammit) saved you the cover charge.

On September 7, Women's Liberation groups, joined by members of New York NOW, targeted the Miss America Beauty Contest in Atlantic City. The protest included theatrical demonstrations including ritual disposal of traditional female roles into the "freedom ashcan." While nothing is actually set on fire, one organizer's comment - quoted in the New York Times the next day - that the protesters "wouldn't do anything dangerous, just a symbolic bra-burning," created a mass perception, and everyone now remembers the bras being burned.

RPI legend has it that the proper spelling of nerd is "knurd", which is "drunk" spelled backwards, dating from the time when you were one or the other. But some knurds drank, and besides, something new had been added to the mix. The RPI class of 1972, which arrived in 1968, already had a goodly pothead component, the younger brothers of those who had already gone to college, or those simply from places where marijuana culture had hit the high schools. It was only a year or two after that that drugs hit Donelson High, or so says my sister. There may have been somewhere in the country further behind the curve than Donelson, but it's hard to imagine such a place.

I liked hanging with the heads, but I did not indulge my freshman year. I wanted to see how it went for my fellows. Hey, isn't there a scene in Beowulf where he holds back for a while, taking Grendel's measure? Yeah, that was me and drugs. Beowulf and Grendel.

October 2 - Tlatelolco massacre: A student demonstration ends in a bloodbath at La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, Mexico, 10 days before the inauguration of the 1968 Summer Olympics.

October 2 - Marcel Duchamp, French artist (b. 1887) and great-grandaddy of Dada and Surrealism, dies.

October 11 - Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission (Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, Walter Cunningham). Mission goals include the first live television broadcast from orbit and testing the lunar module docking maneuver.

October 11 - In Panama, a military coup d'etat, led by Col. Boris Martinez and Col. Omar Torrijos, overthrows the democratically-elected (but highly controversial) government of President Arnulfo Arias. Within a year, Torrijos will have ousted Martinez and taken charge as de facto Head of Government in Panama.

During my first semester at RPI (and, quite frankly, during most of the rest of my time there), I merrily traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard in search of adventure, which basically translated into listening to music and/or trying to get laid. I was much more successful in the former endeavor, as I recognized a musical opportunity when I encountered it. By contrast, I was so socially clueless (one ubernurd, far from the mothership) that I basically had to be hit over the head and dragged off to bed by any woman who found me attractive. If I hadn't been good looking, and it hadn't been the 60's, I'd still be a virgin.

I made a couple of trips to Vassar, in the company of my friend, Bullshit Harvey (not his real name), who had a sister going there. The girl who took me home from the dance later decided that I'd been lying about my politics. I can say now that I really didn't know enough about my politics to lie about them, but I believed that I was lying at the time, so she had me there.

The Games of the XIX Olympiad began on October 12, in Mexico City, Mexico. The image that you've all seen from this is the one of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, 2 African-Americans competing in the Olympic 200-meter run, who raised their arms in a black power salute after winning the gold and bronze medals for 1st and 3rd place. By contrast, after winning the gold medal for heavyweight boxing, George Foreman walked around the ring with a tiny American flag, bowing several times to the audience.

But the part I remember is this: Bob Beamon of the USA shattered the world record for the long jump by more than two feet, in a leap of 29 feet 2 & 1/2.

What does it say about the way things were in 1968 that all the counter-culture tropes were abundant at RPI, an old, conservative, engineering school. It said that the times were out of joint. I knew guys who didn't bother to change out of their ROTC uniforms before getting high. Everybody talked the talk, "bummer," "good trip," "Remember kids, don't forget to smash the State!" Even the straightest student quoted Firesign Theater, "Now it's time to play, 'Beat the Reaper!"

The campus political radical guys were seen as amusing, and not nearly as much into the party time as they should be. After all, our student deferments would only take us for four years, and the war was going to last forever. Eat, drink, and try to make Mary.

October 14 - The United States Department of Defense announces that the United States Army and United States Marines will send about 24,000 troops back to Vietnam for involuntary second tours.

I started out at RPI in physics, because I had no idea of what I was doing. Freshman year, the only difference between physics and engineering was that the physics majors took a foreign language (mine was German), while engineering students took mechanical drawing. I'd already had mechanical drawing in high school, though, so I went for the new stuff, rather than go through what I'd already taken (that's part of the "didn't know what I was doing").

In German, however, I quickly hit my standard limitation. I'm very good in languages up to the point of the vocabulary drill. Then I fall behind, because I'm just lazy that way. It probably wouldn't be a problem in an immersion course, but there were none of those around.

So my first test scores were A's but by the end of the semester I was approaching low C territory. No need for further interpretation; I transferred to engineering, and wound up in an experimental course called "Elementary Engineering" taught by Paul Daitch, who would later be my sequence advisor in Engineering Science. EE also had a TA named Gary Steinman, who I later worked with on another experimental course, this time with me as a TA.

November 5 - U.S. presidential election, 1968: Republican challenger Richard M. Nixon defeats Vice President Hubert Humphrey and American Independent Party candidate George C. Wallace. Nixon got 301 electoral votes to Humprey's 191 and Wallace's 46 (Wallace took 5 southern states). The disproportionate electoral split masks the fact that Nixon only got 43.4% of the popular vote, to Humprey's 42.7% (with Wallace taking 13.5%). If the South had still been "solid" for the Democrats, Humprey would have picked up Wallace's 5 states, plus also the surrounding halo of "moderate" southern states, and would have won the election.

I'm sure it would have mattered if Humphrey had won, I just don't know how, or how much. Nixon was an evil bastard of a war criminal, but he hadn't started the war. Neither, of course, had Humphrey. The thought of either of them running the country put us all into frenzied paralysis. It seemed clear that the country's problems ran deeper than merely being a matter of who was President.

By the end of the year, my hair had grown at least to Little Dutch Boy length. That was enough to get me physically threatened by some random working class male at least every couple of weeks.

November 14 - Yale University announces it is going co-educational. We all yawned, as we'd already read The Harrad Experiment, and, having had a couple of months of college behind us, knew that the orgies simply weren't that easy to find.

November 22 - The White Album is released by The Beatles.

December 13 - Brazilian president Artur da Costa e Silva decrees the AI-5 (or the fifth Institutional Act), which lasts until 1978 and marks the beginning of the hard times of Brazilian military dictatorshiop.

December 24 - Apollo Program: U.S. spacecraft Apollo 8 enters orbit around the Moon. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William A. Anders become the first humans to see the far side of the Moon and planet Earth as a whole. The crew also reads from Genesis.

Whenever I hear someone talking about the cataclysmic events going on in the world, I think of 1968 (and '69, and '70) and think, "Not yet."

History happens to people, and every person's history is different, both their personal history and their embedding in the larger scheme of things. Every Baby Boomer's story is different, and even a year's difference in birth date can make all the difference in the world. I graduated high school and began college in 1968. That's how it was for me. That's how it was for all of us who had those experiences in 1968. Others had it different. If you think you understand it without having been there, you're wrong. Those of us who were there don't even understand it; we just remember it.

And badly.

Alcohol

Forget the caffe latte, screw the raspberry iced tea
A Malibu and Coke for you, a G&T for me
Alcohol, Your songs resolve like
my life never will
When someone else is picking up the bill
I love you more than I did the week before
I discovered alcohol
O Alcohol, would you please forgive me?
For while I cannot love myself
I’ll use something else
–”Alcohol,” Barenaked Ladies

If you take a molecule of the simplest hydrocarbon, methane, remove one of its four hydrogen atoms and replace it with a hydroxyl group (-OH), you get methanol, the simplest alcohol. The hydrogen at the end of the hydroxyl is more “labile” than the others, so it’s relatively easy for methanol to lose it. That leaves the oxygen with a very friendly bond dangling, and it likes to hook up with its nearby carbon buddy, to form what is called the carbonyl bond. Since carbon is pretty firmly quadrigamous, it has to give up something, and since the carbon already has three hydrogens, one of them just has to go. Essentially, the methanol gives up two hydrogens, enough for a hydrogen molecule. In smog photochemistry, the hydrogens go one at a time, as part of a process involving “hydrogen centered radicals.”

This result of dehydrogenating methanol yields formaldehyde, the simplest aldehyde. “Aldehyde” is, in fact, a contraction of “alcohol de-hydrogenated.” Rounding out the “simplest of its kind” bestiary, is formic acid, the simplest carboxylic acid. It has an alcohol group (-OH), and a carbonyl group (C=O), and a single, lonely hydrogen remaining with the carbon, though it has another hydrogen in the hydroxyl group, which it easily loses in solution, giving formic acid its acidic character.

Formic acid is pretty nasty stuff; ants make it and it’s what they use to sting you with. In fact, formic acid was first isolated by distilling dead ants. Formic acid is specifically toxic to the optic nerve, so the ingestion of formic acid, or a formic acid precursor, can cause blindness.

Methanol is a formic acid precursor, biologically, so formic acid is responsible for most of methanol’s bad effects when ingested. The enzymes that turn methanol into formic acid are cross-potentiated by ethanol, so ethanol is an antidote to methanol poisoning. The metabolization of ethanol substitutes for the metabolization of methanol, giving time for the methanol to be excreted via lungs or urine.

Ethanol is our old friend grain alcohol, the active ingredient in the demon rum. Bootleg ethanol during Prohibition and at other times was sometimes cut with methanol, to give it “more kick” or simply because denatured alcohol is cheap. “Denatured alcohol” is usually made unsafe for consumption by the addition of methanol. There’s an urban legend that says you can make denatured alcohol fit for drinking by filtering it through pumpernickel. It’s not an urban legend that people have tried this, of course; clearly people have tried it. The question is whether or not it does any good.

Ethanol has two carbons to methanol’s one; a way of looking at the setup is that if you replace one of methanol’s hyrdrogens with a methyl group (-CH3), you get ethanol. The same thing happens for formaldehyde/acetaldehyde and formic/acetic acid. However, acetaldehyde and acetic acid (vinegar) are much more biologically benign. Acetaldehyde forms a trimer in the presence of acid catalysts such as sulphuric or phosphoric acid, to make paraldehyde, a pharmacological sedative.

But it is ethanol, not paraldehyde that most people are familiar with. Simply stated, ethanol ingestion gets you drunk. It gets you blotto, looped, lit, loaded, hammered, wasted, pickled, pissed, polluted and plastered. It intoxicates, inebriates, befuddles, besots, bewilders, and stews. It makes you three sheets to the wind, and either more or less interesting than you are when sober. Whatever it does, a lot of people want it done to them, at least from time to time, so ethanol technology has an ancient history.

Many of the most basic tricks of the chemical laboratory were first used to do something interesting to ethanol, especially to concentrate it into hard liquor. Distillation is the best known, and can be used to concentrate alcohol to 96% purity, the rest being water. Ethanol and water at the 96/4 proportions form an azeotrope, which is a mixture of stuff that boils in the same proportions as it is in liquid form. You have to work hard to break up the ethanol and water azeotrope, and if you do, you’ve probably wasted your time, because exposure to air will allow the ethanol to absorb enough water to form the azeotrope again. Besides, for most people, 192 proof is quite enough.

When I lived in upstate New York we’d drive out into the country (which was a short drive) every fall and buy fresh apple cider in big plastic jugs. Sometimes we couldn’t finish a jug before it went hard; sometimes we’d just let it sit on the back porch until it went hard. Then we’d make applejack, a traditional New England drink.

The principle of applejack is pretty simple: water freezes at a higher temperature than alcohol, and when you cool a water alcohol mixture, water freezes out. Here’s a list of the volume of ethanol in a water/alcohol mix, and the freezing point of the water in that mixture (in degrees F and C):

[0:32,0], [10:25,-4], [20:15,-9], [30:5,-15], [40:-10,-23], [50:-25,-32], [60:-35,-37], [70:-55,-48], [80:-75,-59], [90:-110,-73], [100:-175,-114],

Put it another way, if you have some dilute ethanol mixture, and you cool it to the requisite temperature, the water will freeze out until you get the water/ethanol mixture above. So if you start with a 14% mix of ethanol and water (the highest alcohol you can get from fermentation alone), the water will begin freezing at somewhere near 20 degrees F. Most freezers are around 0 degrees F, so you can boost your ethanol concentration to around 35%. In applejack there is additional freezing point depression caused by the sugar, so your actually wind up with more like a 30% concentration of ethanol, but that’s 60 proof, and that ain’t bad. If you happen to have a real cold snap (the coldest it got while I was at RPI was -28 F), you can get upwards of 80 proof.

Those old New Englanders knew their stuff.

The theater group at RPI had a traditional beverage they called “Players’ Punch,” or alternately, “blog” (no relation to weblogs, of course; it was probably a backformation of “grog” and possibly “blotto”). It consisted of various fruit juices and sodas, plus laboratory ethanol (the commercial equivalent is Everclear), or, failing that, whatever liquor was available, usually vodka or rum. To this was added dry ice, which chilled it mightily, and froze out some of the water. Potent stuff, and pretty dangerous, because the perception of alcohol content involves smelling the alcohol vapors, and if you get the drink cold enough, it deceives. Also, the dry ice added some carbonation, and carbonation enhances alcohol absorption by the digestive tract.

A high school friend of mine who went to Vanderbilt University, told me of a concoction called the “Funderburg,” no doubt named for its creator. It was a blender drink; I think it used frozen concentrated grape juice. I decided to make blender daiquiris by a similar method. That was the year I ran a lab course for undergraduates, which meant that I had access to the fabled laboratory ethanol.

The drink was simplicity itself: one 6 oz. can of frozen limeade concentrate, then the same can filled with 95% ethanol. To that was added a tray of ice. Then hit the max button on the blender. The final result looked a bit like a slushy, and was very cold. The liquid itself was somewhere around 80 proof, by my estimate, but because of the cold, it tasted about as alcoholic as wine. Very dangerous stuff.

Whenever I think about this particular concoction, I’m bound to remember one particular night in 1972 involving the blender daiquiris plus the Quicksilver Messenger Service’s extended version of “Who Do You Love?” by Bo Diddley. Modesty and discretion compel me to refrain from giving specifics. I will note, however, that the effects of ethanol are such that, while one may still remember that actions have consequences, the relative values placed on the actions vs. consequences may change substantially. Suffice it to say that it all Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.

Playing the Changes

In the late ‘50s into the ‘60s, my Dad operated a small radio/TV repair business. Sometimes it was on the side, occasionally it was his main occupation. He eventually gave it up, as color television and general transistorization shrank the ecological niche. The capital expense of color television repair equipment was too high, and transistor circuit board electronics were too hard to repair and cheap enough to just replace.

During this time he wound up in possession of all sorts of odds and ends. It happens pretty often once people know that you repair things; they just give you stuff, hoping that you can repair it easily enough to make it worth your while, and they’re just glad to get rid of it. You should see my workshop.

One thing that wound up in my Dad’s basement workshop was an old jukebox, designed to play 78s. It no longer worked and Dad gave it to me to take apart, because I liked taking things apart to see how they worked. I still do; it’s just getting harder and harder to figure out how they work, which is the source of my own reply to Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from something that has no business working in the first place.

The old jukebox had an electromechanical system that selected the record to be played: a bunch of push buttons that activated a servo that pushed the selected record out of a rack. Beneath the record was a spindle and turntable that pushed up to move the record off its carrier, up to the needle arm, which stayed at the one height.

Later 45 rpm record jukeboxes had a turntable that stayed at a constant height and the records were selected from a set of 45s that were in a sort of torus that rotated to bring the selection to the top. A mechanical arm then grabbed the correct record, pulled it from its position, then swung around to place the record on the turntable.

In both cases, the jukeboxes had a sort of mechanized ritual aspect to them: put in your coin, then watch the robotic sequence of actions that culminated in music. In some ways, the ritual is as much a part of the nostalgia as the music itself. Also, because of the delay, different songs never encroached upon one another.

The AM radio experience of the 1950s had a similar feel to the jukeboxs, with the added feature of the Disk Jockey persona, a hyperkinetic voice introducing records, selling product, and generally trying to generate a party atmosphere while sequestered into a tiny room with artificial lights. Often they’d talk right through the intro to the song, stopping only when the lyrics began. Memory tells me that it was a rare event to play songs back to back. That was usually reserved for phone-in “contests” of “Choose your Favorite Song and Win a Free Pen and Pencil Set,” or whatever.

When I got to RPI in the fall of 1968, WRPI-FM had just switched over to the “Progressive Rock” format, following the lead of some ground-breaking stations in NY, Boston, and Philadelphia. The next spring they boosted their power and coverage and became the most popular FM station in the Albany/Schenectady/Troy area.

I didn’t join WRPI until the spring of my Senior year, and I also staying in Troy during the summer between my undergraduate and graduate years at RPI. But I’d converted to the WRPI way of hearing music much earlier, and part of that was appreciating the segues.

A good deal of the joy of Progressive Radio was the mix, not just the music that was being played, but how it fit into the context of the other music that was being played. You can trace it back to the “party stack,” a set of 45s that people would bring to parties for dance music, and hit compilation records, often for a similar purpose. Then you had “Mood Music” which is to say, Music to Seduce Your Girlfriend By. That often had a lot of strings or Johnny Mathis, or Frank Sinatra.

Progressive Radio expanded the vision of the mix, and the segue, the seamless connection of one song to the other was the unit element. The typical radio setup was twin turntables and a mixing board, making it easy to do a cross-fade. We also had various additional sources like cassettes for station breaks, EBS and PSAs, and, for commercial stations, the commercials themselves. At WRPI, we used an eight-track player for pre-records, though there was also a couple of giant reel-to-reel tape decks that were also good for echo effects, or for playing practical jokes by getting a half second delay into the announcers headphones that is absolutely guaranteed to make it impossible to speak coherently.

There was a more-or-less standard evolution of DJ experience at WRPI. Someone would join the station with a particular set of musical tastes, maybe they liked folk, or jazz, or acid rock, and they’d lean toward that set of tastes initially. For that reason, there was a list of “format songs” categorized according to type, with a set sequence of types. You could choose any song from a group during the sequence, but you couldn’t vary the sequence much, though once each sequence you could play whatever you liked. I pushed the envelop on that pretty quickly by playing entire album sides (hey, “The Land of Grey and Pink” by Caravan is a single cut, even if it’s over 20 minutes long), and almost got into trouble for it.

By the time I got there, the “WRPI format” list was something like an inch thick of computer printout. You could literally go for days following the format and never play the same song twice. Some guys did play the same songs every show they had, but it was rare for someone to be on more than once a week, and the next guy would not have the same favorites. In fact, it was considered a gaffe to play something that the previous announcer had played. In many ways, it was the anti-thesis of the radio jukebox.

That, of course, polarized the audience (and our student listeners). Some were very happy with WRPI, and some just wanted a big campus jukebox, maybe one filled with Progressive Rock, but a jukebox catering to student tastes (and requests) nonetheless.

Requests was one of the real issues, in fact. One of the most popular WRPI shows for many years was “Request Line Oldies” on Sunday night (Sunday was block programmed with special shows, the only day in the week departing from the Progressive format). But at other times, the DJs didn’t want to hear from requests.

They had a point. Nobody was getting paid; it was a student volunteer organization. So what did we announcers get out of it? Fame? We were faceless, and many of us used “on-air” pseudonyms (I just used my initials). Groupies? Yeah, right. Something swell to put on our resumes? Maybe for a few guys, mostly the techies. The sound of our own voices? Sometimes there were shows where the music was non-stop for an entire hour, right up to the station break, followed by a quick recitation of the playlist of the past hour, then back to another hour of solid music. It was public speaking for shy introverts.

No, most of us were there because we loved music, and loved to program the shows. Substituting someone else’s tastes turned it into just another unpaid job. Besides, if you’ve spent an entire week thinking about what you’re going to play, setting up a flow and a mood, you’re absolutely not going to suddenly break that flow by inserting Lighthouse, no matter how much you like Lighthouse.

Still, I did play a request from time to time, usually refraining from mentioning that it was a request, because all you had to do was say the word “request” and you’d spend the rest of the show on the phone dealing with the flood. WRPI had a lot of listeners.

I should also mention that there was one guy, John Robinson, (coincidentally a member of the Albany Science Fiction Club that I was part of at the time), who had an uncanny knack for calling me to request a cut that I had on my list for the night, often only one or two down. John had my number, I guess, in more ways than one.

Anyway, getting back to the DJ evolution. After first getting their “fave raves” out of their systems, getting tired of playing the same things over and over, the next step was to branch out or go deeper. The guys who started on Dylan would get to Van Ronk, or Buffy St. Marie, then whoops! Folkways and Rounder were filling their stack. The jazz guys would go from Brubeck to Miles, then to Coltrane and Coleman. And so forth. Even so, the format was there to keep them in line, more or less.

In the evenings and nighttime, though, the announcers were no longer subject to the format. Those were “prime time” (which extended to 2 A.M.), where the most experienced announcers were slotted. And during the “Great Music Drought” of the early 1970s, when rock hit a dry spell, some of the evening guys went over entirely to something else, most often jazz, to the further exasperation of the audience.

But after the overt musical glitches worked themselves through a DJs tastes, most of us began to work the flow itself, playing music that blended into a particular mood or theme. Then came the sort of one-upsmanship that enjoyed putting two things together in a way that both surprised and satisfied, like rubbing Neal Diamond up against Firesign Theater, or “Let It All Hang Out” into Frazier and Debolt. Sometimes the idea was to jolt the listener a bit, which could be as simple as hard following soft, or loud following quiet. I never did manage to find a place for the most jarring segue I ever heard, though. That was an accidental juxtaposition that came on a Sunday, between Barnett’s and my Indian Music block, and the following blues show. Soft Carnatic flute music flows into John Lee Hooker with all the grace of The Titanic into the iceberg.

The group dynamic that developed was competitive, with a little taste of messianic snobbery thrown it. “Here’s the good stuff,” we’d say, “And by the way, didn’t I just do a really good show?” The goal was to get people to call in, not to ask for you to play something they already liked, but to find out what the hell it was that you just played. Or to call and tell you how much they enjoyed what you were doing. Even better if it was your peers, though we know what happens when the comic starts getting laughs only from the band. In any case, the general consensus was that I was very good at whatever it was that we were doing.

Over the years, I’ve made mix tapes and more recently CDs. I’ve also listened to other people’s mix tapes, and some are good, but most are just ordinary, because that’s what ordinary is, isn’t it?

More recently, we have the phenomenon of the iPod and related devices, but I think the real advance there is the “shuffle,” which lets the machine surprise you. Most recently, I’ve loaded mine with albums by T-Bone Burnett, Mark Knopfler, Blossom Dearie, The Clash, African folk, African pop, The Low Millions, Cyndi Lauper, Jack Teagarden, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, The Cranberries, Elvis Costello, Javanese Gamelan, INXS, Diana Krall, Kaki King, The Crystal Method, Chris Issak, Suzanne Vega, The Don Redman Orchestra, and Artie Shaw. I’m paying particular attention to the segues that the shuffle provides.

I do wish it had a cross-fade function though. Sometimes the wait between songs just drives me crazy.

You say nerd; I say knurd

The sharp-eyed reader may observe that I have sometimes used an alternate spelling for the word commonly spelled as "nerd." In fact, before the movie Revenge of the Nerds, the only way I'd seen it spelled was knurd, and nurd.

A little web research says that I am part of a minority opinion that holds that knurd was a coinage at RPI, derived from "drunk" spelled backwards (a trope later used by Terry Pratchett). Certainly "knurd" was the first spelling I saw, in the RPI Bachelor college humor magazine, in 1968. The earliest appearance of the alternate spelling that is noted on the amateur scholarship sites that I can find is "nurd" in a 1965 issue of the Bachelor, which I have seen, and even probably have in some file boxes somewhere. When I was a publications knurd at RPI, I scored back issues of many of the student publications and I was fascinated.

The predominance of the k and u spellings of knurd at RPI is a fact. The question is whether or not the word itself under its current meaning (someone consumed with intellectual activities, often having poor social skills), came from RPI. There is, incidentally, no real argument as to the first appearance of the written word "nerd." That was in a Dr. Seuss book in 1950, and the word was cited in a Newsweek story in 1951 as being someone who was "square," which is close enough to the modern meaning. But the Newsweek reportage was translating oral slang, so the spelling gives no real help. The Dr. Seuss coinage may have been the source of the spelling (the meaning in the Seuss book was ambiguous), while the oral usage could have been inspired by the knurd/drunk origin.

Still, there was an earlier humor magazine at RPI, The Pup (famously banned for having published a fake and very unflattering picture of the dean of students). The issues of that magazine that I read didn't include a usage of knurd, to the best of my recollection. I've spoken to RPI alumni from earlier times, but, unfortunately, people in general do not have the sort of memory segmentation that I have, so they haven't been of much assistance.

The most parsimonious (and therefore most likely) explanation is that the origins of the word are still unknown, but the knurd spelling of it came from a later surmise by some students at RPI. I will hold out one not unreasonable possibility: the postwar GI Bill period of American colleges was a time of massive expansion and flux. It's not at all impossible that the origin of the word was indeed "drunk spelled backwards" and that this origin was first lost, then later rediscovered by the same sorts of students who'd invented the word in the first place. Certainly the Pratchett example is one of parallel formation.

It's not as if knurd isn't a natural category, after all. We self-select, and self-identify. If we don't, others do it for us.