This morning I finished the transfer and update and backup of files, erased all my data from Lubertson and turned him in to the College of Liberal Arts. Most likely he’ll be sent to China for recycling of parts. Now I sit in my armchair comfortably typing in front of an extremely bright glass covered screen with a good deal higher resolution than Lubertson’s. There’s no power cord to worry about, no throbbing furnace in my lap, no loudly whirring hard drive, no long waits between operations or need to shut down applications to move from one to another, no need for an external hard drive except for backup. My pose is a lot like that on the ubiquitous billboards for ipads in Los Angeles: relaxed, at leisure. This is all extremely nice: a huge upgrade in comfort and convenience in using the instrument I spend most of my waking hours with.

But what’s more amazing is the fact that this machine, nine years newer than Lubertson, has no functions, cant do anything, that he couldn’t do, simply does it all better. If one compares technological progress in the most recent interval to the progress of the previous nine years, 1992-2001, the slowing of innovation is what’s striking. Netscape was founded that year”the beginning of the world wide web. In 1992 Doug and I created the Multimedia Blake Hypercard stacks that within two more years were rendered obsolete by html. 1998 marked the advent of the Powerbook G3 laptop, allowing for portable computing. I carried the machine everywhere”to England for the Shakespeare conferences, to Lund, to Ketchum. Digital cameras and iphoto and itunes came online at the end of that span, in 2001, just before I got the Titanium. By then I had all my course materials generated in Dreamweaver, was working paperless and was taking the computer to every class and projecting onto the screen most of the time, for better and for worse.

The technological change of the preceding nine years was even more transformative. In 1983, computers were only for geeks. My high technology was a selectric IBM typewriter. We got the first Mac 512 in 1984, when Jan started law school. The power it conferred to delete, replace, find, cut, paste, outline, and save was as magical as the ability to flap my arms and fly in dreams. I still have it in the garage.

Yesterday morning I went to Dusty’s office for a consult on my blog and other computer matters and he looked at my old Titanium Mac and shook his head”how can you still be using that thing? I’ve been planning for a couple of years now to replace it and purchase my own computer instead of using a university issued one, as part of the large retirement strategy, and lately old Lubertson has been going slower and slower and louder and louder and behaving more erratically, and any day I was fearing it would crash. I went home, spent an hour researching different purchase options and then biked down to El Corral Bookstore and returned with this new Macbook Pro”cost $1099.

I’m calling it Independence, offspring of Lubertson2, the Titanium I wrested from the University as a prize for producing the Field Guide, offspring of Lubertson 1, the first laptop I inherited in 1998 from an unnamed colleague who never used it, offspring of LuLu, the office computer I worked on with Doug Smith, and Albert, my home computer.

I spent the night until Jan came back from City Council at 12:45 am migrating all my data and then loading my songs from Tucson, the portable hard drive, onto it, with much troubleshooting along the way. And this morning I started to transfer the 20 Gig Photolibrary which right now is still copying its 28 thousand pictures. That was going on while I meditated, after a short night’s sleep, and it felt as if my brain itself were undergoing some kind of transfer procedure like the one they show with androids in the movies. The new machine feels clean and powerful and ready for a lot of new beginnings. Acquiring and using it is part of my own cleansing and regeneration efforts.

Took my listening walk with the dog up Poly Mountain this morning. The clock moved back on Saturday. The dawn was fresh and brilliant after last night’s rain. On the way down, near the gate, I was arrested by a burgeoning yellow acacia at the side of the path. Two peeps emerged from inside its opaque crown. The new leaves glowed green as the light swelled. Pearl-shaped leftover raindrops glittered like diamonds in the sun. The slow strains of cello and viola in Beethoven’s Hymn of Recovery slowly crescendoed in my earbuds and burst into a high-pitched dance of the first violin. A tiny bird flew out of the canopy, remained suspended and vibrating, then fired a blast of colors from its emerald head and ruby throat.

When I saw white butterflies in the sun
Flutter among my broccolis,
Like a tragic king at the oracle
I knew what was in store.

Now dark mornings find me
On aching knees
With headlamp pointed down
Searching undersides of ragged leaves
Stems fouled with droppings
Tangles of shredded buds.

I spot the velvety worms
The color of what they’ve eaten,
The shape of where they hide.

I lift them tenderly
With forefinger and thumb
To squeeze out their guts.

the prequel:  Traitor Joe’s

from SLO New Times

It may be of interest to readers who shop at Trader Joe’s that the company has agreed to shift all its seafood purchases to sustainable sources by December 12, 2012. This decision came after a campaign called “Traitor Joe’s,” mounted by Greenpeace, pressured the company to abide by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s “red list” of species to avoid.

Trader Joe’s had refused to do that and didn’t reply to e-mails from customers back in February, but I just discovered an update on their website stating the intention to “address customer concerns including the issues of over fishing, destructive catch or production methods, and the importance of marine reserves.” Hooray for Greenpeace, for Trader Joe’s, and for its customers.

I˜m ready to move on to another late quartet.  On the drive to pick up Ian from school in A.G. I listen to Opus 132, quartet #15.  The third movement Adagio is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. The exaggeratedly slow opening tempo that slows even further, the notes’ uniformity of length, and the alien sequence of low pitches add up to what seems like several minutes of formless, unconnected sounds.  They’re followed by a wild flurry of ecstatic dance music, then a slightly more active modification of the slow section, then another exultant interlude, and a finally a complicated set of variations of the opening that combine both slow and fast sections. Beethoven called this “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesen an die Gottheit,” A Convalescent’s Holy Song of Gratitude to the Divine.

My reading reveals that though I’d never heard of it, this piece is one of Beethoven’s greatest hits. Produced while he was suffering from a combination of painful abdominal ailments from which he feared he wouldn’t recover, he wrote to his doctor afterwards that the notes helped to cure him.  I listen to an online lecture by musicologist and composer Jeffrey Kapilow to an audience at the Stanford Medical School that provides a lucid and enthusiastic explication of the piece’s unique structure and style.  I can follow the lecture the third time around with the score in front of me, except for the part about the last little section. Sitting in front of the shrine in my study that contains my parents’ cremated remains, I imagine the opening preludes and chorales as two alternating voices: one invoking the dead the other their replies.

audio [opens in new window]

You who came before us now speak
Here still at rest we stay and watch

Comforting, you offer witness
Life no longer can disturb us

Lying, sitting standing you gaze
And our repose remains complete

Held in effortless suspension
At last we know our final state

May you grant us understanding
All we can pass to you is love.

Slideshow

This is a win for San Luis Obispo. Jan will serve effectively and humanely. She has the talent, the experience and the dedication to do an excellent job as mayor, leading and representing the City”which according to last month’s newspapers is both the most desirable place to live in America and is about to fall off a cliff. Either way, it will benefit from her leadership.

It’s a win for her, because it provides the opportunity to fulfill not an ambition, but an ongoing mission of public service and leadership. When I first met her 44 years ago as a junior at Stanford, she organized a campaign to get women equal rights with men to live off campus at much cheaper rents than those in the dormitory. This involved facing down the President of the University who wasn’t eager to lose the revenue provided by the policy of protecting female purity.

When we lived in the wilds of British Columbia during the 1970’s, she helped found a satellite campus of a community college and became its first director. When we moved back to California, she got a job as Director of Graduate Student Housing at Stanford and devised a network of neighborhood coordinators”now called Community Associates–which still remains vital.
While attending Law School, she organized the mature returning students and then took a part-time job as a law clerk involving the preparation of a landmark Supreme Court case assuring equal opportunity for women in the workplace.

When we moved to San Luis Obispo 22 years ago, she immediately embarked on a course of public service that led to appointment to the County Parks and City Planning Commissions and to her election to City Council in 1998 and again 2008. All of her political and humanitarian work in this place has been volunteer or for minimal pay, for she’s been able to make her living as an attorney.

The mayor’s job will allow her to use and expand abilities cultivated over a lifetime.

It’s a win for me, not only for the reflected glory”imagine the pleasure I’ve taken in knocking on thousands of doors and telling whoever opens them about the virtues of the woman I love, and in posting hundreds of signs of tribute to her all over town. But also imagine what it would be like to live with someone this energetic and smart whose time was not occupied being in charge of a whole city.

So here’s to our new mayor, and to this fleeting moment of triumph, and to all of you who contributed in one way or another to make it happen.