Monday, August 1, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Retirement of The Rooster Roast
THE ROOSTER ROAST was a blog project that lasted for two years. It set out to examine literature and cultural trends, as well as generate catalysts for short fiction and poetry. While “World Literature” is a field that ironically requires the anchor of one set national vantage, THE ROOSTER ROAST was a challenge to this premise, in an attempt to break the necessity of geopolitics in experiencing raw human culture.
This collection of writing is now available in print form, and the name now ceases to exist. It's concepts, as well as the series that it has set forth, continue on.
To “Think and crow” is the mission of THE ROOSTER ROAST, and I hope that some of these pieces inspire readers and prod them into generating their own written work that knows no borders.
After having been retired in May of 2011, The Rooster Roast is regarded as a success, and I am proud of much of the original intellectual and creative work that has gone into this body of work. It will inspire writers to both write in cyberspace, while not forgetting to also print in realspace. When imaginary space and actual space communicate together, a great deal of clarity may be reattained as we interact with others on a day to day basis. I think this may make us happier, writing and reading in this way.
Most sincerely,
The author
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
On Troubadorial Pedagogy: Understanding
Says the Figure to the Man
But the virtue of memory, and of the pastime of our people's thought, should be recalled while re-orienting with our new “now,” should it not? We can agree that the totality of our planet is round; it makes sense to believe this not only because we can each remember learning this same piece of knowledge during our time in the school, but because it makes sense to just accept it as true. It serves more of a purpose to us if we believe that it is round, rather than foolishly overwork the mind with such banal and unnecessary functions as the re-discovery of facts that have already been discovered. Still, the morning and night come and, still, the seasons continue to oscillate between hot and cold temperatures, despite our monthly measurements that have recently led us awry in their tracking. Until we obtain evidence that suggests otherwise, let us both agree that our objective place here is spherical and in motion of some kind. Have you never flown in a plane that was high up in the air, above the clouds? Can't you recall the slight curve of the clouds, how they were attracted to Earth's body in the shape of a slight roundness, as you shot through the sky? Was not that an awesome experience?
My appreciation for your wisdom comes out of knowing that my own is equally translucent. By looking in mirrors, we see nothing but a composition by space's orderly hand. In short, to recognize one's own is to recognize one's other. Sense has come to a halt in what was at one time our golden, flourishing democracy. Before we received the word that our world's government was to crumble, ours was a desirable civilization. And to think that there are more of us out there, willing to build a new structure, people riddled atop the land that we now look on below, gives my heart a fluttering sensation, as if swimming in newness. One day soon, this surface that we now stand on will be the center of vibrant human activity once again. Of course, it will have to be within the lower confines of this structure. No anchor of order can act as such if it rests inside the skeletons of exclusive architecture. But now it becomes clear to me that we should have been informed by our government where our emergency government was to be located: in the side of a mountain, under water, or perhaps entombed in the ground. For all we know, our leaders are still working diligently, composing the next steps of our crippled movement forward.
But to return to our original point, to this blurry concept of knowing that you speak of, and in regards to our inability to truly know without an established third, my efforts to see its actualization are, to those that believe in it, including you, determined. I commit to you then, you whom I regard as “friend,” if we may establish this, to our collaborative project, despite the inevitable disagreements to come. In what cited breaths I now breathe, I devote myself to this structure that we stand on, so that the structure that we all stand on might know direction and purpose. I hereby commit myself to building what we call society, in a light that is pure and programmed to shed the worst of men.
First, it would be to our benefit to begin a regimen that is regular, that caters to each of our own well-beings. In my own case, waking up early and doing physical work for one whole hour every morning is how my mind best readies itself for the day. I eat three separate times while it is light, and sleep when the light has left the sky long enough for me to feel in the presence of stillness. Then, I sleep until the first light returns. Since eating is something that each of us needs to do, it would be in the interest of our project that we both conduct our most intensive discourse around the regularity of our meals. That way, we are sure to be of the same mind. Let us designate as our most intensive meeting the time directly following our first meal. Assuming that we have each warmed up to the world after equal dormancies with the night, this will be a time in which we are each closest to our common friend, sleep. Sleep and eating, then, are our first designations of the third, that point with which our discourse can sink anchor.
I do not yet know anything about you, but to make progression in our friendship, I would like to tell you my name, which is Azureus.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
On Troubadorial Pedagogy: Deconstruction
Says the Man to the Figure
Where at once there was this token that represented value, now there is only an object. It represents neither work nor time, nor does it represent a nation. It does not have any utilitarian value. This token cannot be melted down to make a tool. It cannot be burned for warmth. It cannot be eaten.
This token has an inscription, yes. But the inscription is of a person whose ideas you and I have drifted away from. He is a man, and may as well be a character from a storybook or film that we had seen at some point in the past, but have since failed to recall. He is from a story that we believed in at one time, but that was then betrayed by the most powerful in our society, leaving the utility of his ways in a gutter, forgotten. The words, “The Highest Power Guides Us” are burned into the token's surface. You and I know what a higher power is, but each of us has already had this conversation somewhere before, and have never agreed on what exactly the highest power is. This token is worthless in your and my exchanges. Watch me throw it to the horizon.
What have we now? We have the last remnant of ordered man. Here we sit, you and I, on the ledge of mankind, after his history has dissolved and then eaten him alive. To know anything, it becomes clear that first of all, we need to know where we are. Terra incognita, la naturaleza, a landscape of hidden foliage and springs surround us in all directions, on top of which great cement buildings and roadways are laid down, that we can now regard only as abstract aesthetics.
We belong to no country, you and I. Each of us knows no fact, as the other is sure to refute such utterances of fact with his equaling fuerza, inherent in an intelligent man who is skeptical of such utterances. The language that we speak aligns itself with our own health concerns, our own experiences, each of our interests that affirm that, indeed, I will be safe into this night. I will eat something, I will remain experiencing this place for a long time to come. I will outlive this other man, yet help him if he would like to learn; I will give him nothing.
Each of us was deemed intelligent in the time of our nation's life. Each of us was quick to pounce on maledictions, and celebrate the colors of rhetoric. We were regarded as adroit in distilling the sense from the nonsense, skilled in each of our measurable fields. Degrees, we had, to assure our fellow man that indeed certain skills were embedded within us. The system of granting degrees provided a compass of knowledge, guiding those whose inclinations it was to find the most efficient routes to truth. They were endorsed by our nation, these degrees. Now, you and I sit here, exercising a new methodology for re-presenting these same mechanisms that ensure order and direction, as our words now do one another no justice within this new human politic, muddied by the dust of desolation.
Together, we sit. Civilized? Uncivilized? Together, we hunger. Do your eyes say deception? Do they say “give” or do they say “take?” How might you be regarding me during our primordial exchange? Below, man has resorted to savagery, as each has initiated his own grabbing pursuits. Our ledge, atop this piece of art, marks ambivalently the same place at which all can be seen and reflected upon, as easily surrounded and toppled.
How do we know our strengths in this, our new domain? How do we acknowledge our shortcomings? The two halves of our brains are analogous to the skills of our hands; right handed? Left handed? Ambidextrous? I claim both, but so do you. Without an order to designate our limits, we are limitless. Without limits, we are each an übermensch. But can there be more than one such man? Must not you and I, as equals, know when one is speaking outside of his realm of experience for the sake of our joint, benevolent survival? Yet I am willing to sacrifice one side for the sake of our language, for the sake of our building, our balance, for our new order of communication atop the playing out of exurbia. I choose to sacrifice for our friendship half of my ambidexterity of mind.
My memory is finding its legs, friend, as surely yours is finding its. The order of the machine has taxed my own faculties, though their recovery is now in full effect. I remember my schedule, my reliance on the clock, my dependence on the computer, my orientation with points on a calendar, holidays, seasons. Now, the seasons have changed and February is warm. The New Year was brought in with the hospitality of a sweltering heat that wrapped itself around us like a glove, and the Summertime was blanketed with white. It was to these signs that our people departed from its currency, as the measurement of time slipped further and further away like a curtain, and the movement of our currency from sea to sea was seen to be at the hands of only a small number of men. Those same men who corrupted the integrity of our story.
But panic is not an option, as the rules that once determined wrong from right, attractive from repulsive, base from moral, and corrupt from virtuous, do not allow us to identify what panic is. All we have is... well, I suppose all we have is our breaths.
Our climb was hard, friend. I have realized that elevators are an overlooked luxury, surely, after having scaled these walls. Locked doors and eclipsed laws make an object out of what was once a place of business, this monument of man that we here stand on. It is our determination of mind and physicality that has landed us atop this behemoth. Only the strong willed and strong bodied will be able to join us. Let us collect ourselves for the coming night, as it will be cold and miserable if preparations are not made in advance.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
ON TROUBADORIAL PEDAGOGY: Introduction
- Introduction -
Contrary to the Troubadorial Pedagogy is the Protocol Education. This latter entity, deployed only by businessmen, abides by rules that are laid out by the recurring cultural trends in the community for which it serves, if it even serves at all. These trends are ones that give off an appearance that suggests that a broad world view resides inside, though a fragmented and lackluster one may actually be in effect. A protocol taught is a protocol learned, and a protocol learned is a protocol maintained. A protocol maintained lives up to its purpose: to perpetuate, on one hand, a continuous increase of value into a group of controllers and, on the other, a steady flow of value through an abiding group of servers. Controllers are propelled, servers are pacified.
By defining the Protocol Education, a node is solidified, around which a discourse can be engaged. This node can now be surrounded, cut off, and analyzed as if it were a science experiment. This new intellectual vantage, of floating around and outside of an objective body, provides a dimension in which one can see what he is and what he is not, based on what protocol is and is not, and, thus, allows for his own traits as an individual and teacher to emerge. From this vantage is where Troubadourial Pedagogy begins.
Imagine, if you will, that your food system, health system, educational system, legal system, all which function under one governmental system, has shut itself down because a stagnation has arisen within the dualistic conversation held between two political parties. The stagnation is characterized by not long lasting silence, but by just the opposite: a constant balance of rhetoric, a stalemate that trumps action with speech, that is maintained by two equally passionate bodies.
It is as though two respected gentlemen have gotten into a conversation at your friend's party, one that many of his guests have been in and out of; it is a vibrant conversation full of color and passion, inspiration and endless possibility. Your friend is happy that they showed up, as curious listeners willfully enter into the excitement, and then leave to do other things as they please. The men slam their fists onto the table, and the ladies laugh at their zeal. They are the life of the party, it can safely be said. Without them, the party would be dull and mediocre. These are very smart men, and they show it. Your friend is enamored by them, and tells his guests about their backgrounds and interests, each of their histories and what brings them to the party. Each of the men digs his feet deeper into his language. Every lucid point is given a slight pause for reflection, and then is gutted by a new counterstrike from the other side. Though in disagreement, their consciousness of and respect for the rules of rhetoric keep each of them in perfect balance with the other. But the conversation has gone on into the night, and the two men continue talking ad infinitum; guests begin to yawn and leave, bidding gracious farewell to their host.
What eventually happens, as the men each fight off exhaustion, is that the sun rises. You wake up and find these two gentlemen still going at it, and they are not very gentle anymore. They keep talking and refuting, as one billows a tirade after cutting off the others nonsense. Your friend cannot kick them out because it turns out that one of the men owns this house, and the other had fronted all of the money for the party. Your friend is late on his rent, and is forced, powerlessly to allow the conversation to continue. He is benign. Though the beginning of the party was fun and you enjoyed yourself, you are now waking up to a wasteful place, as the house needs cleaning, and no one is doing anything. Two people are arguing, and one person is sulking. This place is a mess. You have a mind for the conversation playing out, as in you understand the points being made and appreciate the tact that is used to make them. At the same time, however, you also have a heart that feels for the hard work that you know your friend has put into his house, his home, his party, into keeping his friendships secure and his company happy. Which utterances from you will reflect both your mindfulness and compassion? How do you choose to speak to this place, to fully address with heart and mind a realm of humanity that has failed to own up to its existence on the planet?
The systems of man have come to a grinding standstill, as post-modern man has run himself into a unique situation. He has abstracted himself so much that, ironically, he has been spat out as a simple, pure creature that does not know what to do with itself. He now faces a monumental project of re-ordering the human race. In short, he has stumbled upon a kind of post-Postism. Surely, the work at hand is large, but there are others that share interest in this project of defining order, and collaboration will eventually ensue, once the problems and distractions are eradicated. The cork has been pulled. Word is out. There is going to be trouble. Chaos begins to pour out of its old confinement. It dissolves into everything.
People do not know what to do with themselves, and begin to grab relentlessly, at all costs, blind to any moral method. One man makes his way to a building for shelter. The doors are locked. He makes his way to one of its sides, a wall of sheer cement with small windows in random spots. It is going to be a difficult climb. He takes off his belt, and uses the buckle to chisel small holes in the cement, large enough to grip with each hand and toe, as he slowly makes his way upward. Car horns and explosions sonically pad the distance. Finally, he makes his way to the top. The sights around him reflect a humanity in its most dismal state. Absolute chaos. He has found sanctuary, but only for now.
People run up to the building fast and grab the handles to its doors, and quickly run away. The man looks down over the ledge, and watches one man sprint up to the building, grip the handle, and then sprint away. Only moments later, another man from a different direction runs to the door, grabs the handle, pounds on the door hard, even slams his body against it. He looks up the side of the building and ponders. Then, he runs away. The man knows that eventually, people will start bringing heavy objects to the building to break in. For now, he is safe. His body is tired. His determination is burning.
Late afternoon sheds itself from the back of the nighttime, and the man is hunkered down on the building's rooftop for the night. Then, he hears the sound of scraping behind him. Hours have passed, and another person has made the climb to the top of the building. The man is bewildered by the figure's strength and will. Collapsing on the ground in an exhausted sitting position, the new addition to the rooftop smiles, breathes heavily, and fights to find steady breath. Neither person says a word. For three days, neither person says anything, but each has maintained an understanding that, “that ledge belongs to you, and this ledge belongs to me. Your area is yours, and my area is mine.” Each night, the two people hunch down and cover themselves with their jackets, listening to the pandemonium in the distance. Then, one morning, after the third day, a peaceful stillness introduces itself. No sound is heard. After three days of occupying themselves, of listening to their own inner dialogues and waiting out the social storm below, of tapping on their smart phones in a futile attempt at knowing anything at all, they have accepted that they belong to a new world, one that has never before spoken. They look across the distance between them, and one slowly makes the walk to the other. They extend hands. Then, one begins to speak.
It is here, in this beginning to a hypothetical conversation among equals, that this work departs into the body of its development, and where I leave you to be with its characters.
Knowledge Farm
- John F. Kennedy
Lazerus Dale Conway was a man, but also a concept. He leaned over in a meeting one time and spat in another man's ear, who had thought it to be an accident. Such is a virtue that comes with being eccentric, I suppose – people put up with you doing things that would otherwise be detestable, as you are believed to have a sense of something that no one else can put a finger on. They know that the eccentric embodies innovation, rather than conventions of good manner. The innovation is worth some spit in the ear. After wards, a few of us found out that Lazerus Conway had spat on purpose. It was a conscious and malicious gesture. The victim was a man on our board responsible for initiating a crackdown within our company, which led to the bust of fourteen thousdand high school students throughout the country, guilty of sharing bits of our product. Conway couldn't stand it. Everyone knew of his disgust with the whole operation.
The best place to begin a story on Conway is to begin with a story of a great war. It had been twelve years since the country was attacked that Conway began establishing himself as a real force in the industry. When the attack happened, the country had finally realized the hypnotic stupor it was in, and snapped out of benign activities like paperwork and dandruff. Up until the attack, everyone had simply abided by their obligatory routines, their day to day drawl. Obliviousness is a frightening thing because it belongs to those who overlook the sound of their own voices, and the voices of others. It is the automatic pilot that turns human beings into vehicles that obey without a second thought. Like snapping out of a deep sleep, snapping out of obliviousness portrays the world anew. And that is just what happened to the country. War became the excitement that renewed a sense of purpose. Under the flag, we were organizing for revenge.
I remember the morning well. I was eating breakfast, preparing to leave for work. It was a cloudy, cold morning haunted by radiowaves and electromagnetic conversations. In retrospect, my mentality was far too serious for its own good. The "enter, work, leave" routine had weighed on my life heavily. Everyone around me was a co-worker, not a person. Each had his own way of playing out what he thought was happiness, and those that actually had it were not believed by people like me who either couldn't find it, or denied it altogether. My power had gotten to my head, and I full-heartedly admit it now. Everybody knew me. I knew success.
Lazerus Conway had no time for such obsessions. The guy acknowledged all, and did not spend any time getting into their dreams, aspirations, inner-workings; he payed no thought to figuring out what motivated people, figuring out their functions and discovering the steering wheel of their lives. It was worth nothing to him. He had a resilience to loneliness – projects abounded in his mind. On the morning of the attack, he went straight to his computer.
Knowledge farms, they were called. They were popping up all over the globe, and employing every applicant that sought work. Every person that wanted to work and earn his living found what he was looking for when he submitted to work at a knowledge farm. No matter a person's experience, class, race or belief system, everyone was welcomed into these superstructures. It was the industry to join all industries. It would be the final industry, many thought. It would be man's last innovation, to finalize the developments since his discovery of language, writing, agriculture and computer technology. Knowledge Farms were the end of the road; they completed the loop of everything man had ever discovered.
Conway was a Socratic scientist with an attractive face and soothing voice. His blue eyes cast bejeweled reflections into those that communicated with him face to face, and his swampy beard kept his self-image from drifting aloft.
He was brilliant, nothing less. It was not that he knew very much, but that he had a curiosity that teased at an unraveling that would devour us all. His scientific mind was poetic, and his language was chosen with the precision of mathematics. It was not uncommon to hear Conway burst into laughter at random, or to find him hulled up in a corner with his eyes fixed on space and probing at a problem. He was at work most of the time, but his family life never suffered (his home office was an extension of his work environment). What work he conducted at the farm turned up on his bathroom counter, atop his dresser, even accidentally on the shelf of his refrigerator, on one occasion. The work he compiled at home wound up in his locker at the farm, in his lab coat pockets, and pinned to the walls of his job space.
Reader, I do not exaggerate nor do I try to deploy any hyperbole when I say that Lazerus Dale Conway worked as though with the nimble fingers of God. Christ, I never thought I would confess to such an outrageous sentiment! My eyes water as I write this confession. I was there; I was alive when God returned to the clay!
But dare do I lose myself amidst such nonsense. It was just at the end of my time in the university, and the rabid hunger for knowledge infected a group of eleven of my peers and myself. We would work together and fill in the cracks and gaps that would never fail to emerge after countless hours, catching and tossing one anothers thinking, inventing and assessing for the health of the future. We even had a name, a club if you could call a think tank a club. We would break into three groups to accomplish one goal – four would gather information, four would organize the information, and four would re-present the information with an entirely new skeleton, muscular system, mentality, purpose. Then, each of us would draft our own working copy to submit for assessment. Our systematic approach allowed us to complete assignments with dramatic results, allowing us extra time to spend in the city, living out the rambunctions of our youth to their fullest capacity. This was the first knowledge farm. There were twelve of us.
When the chapter of our university life came to a close, we found that our unified efficiency held so much power that to let it dissolve would have been an insult to intelligence. It was then that we decided to sit down and assess where we could take our collective intelligence – our human interactive computer. It was then that we turned it into a machine. As the first Knowledge Farm, our machine was the node for an entire industry of Knowledge Farms to follow.
It was right at the beginning of a great cultural ambivalence in the country that we, all twelve of us, one by one, said "yes" to prolonging the Knowledge Farm project. With the largest culture distributors of the country selling purely skin-deep culture and millions giving into the trends as if locked into a deep sleep, we thought of our group as a sanctuary of sorts, a haven from the slow, agonizing death that claimed so many millions all around us. The idea that cooperation was the most powerful tool a person could utilize led us to believe that we could change the world, change ourselves, and change the demonic cultural monoliths that were obliterating the moral integrity and human potential so many strived to preserve. The distributors were the enemy, as they preyed on the sleep of the populace.
"Knowledge Farm" was the name that our group adopted, and it became an incorporated company once we began selling our answers to marketers, developers, and even governments. The most complex questions known to man were submitted to us, and we would formulate answers that proved operational. Knowledge Farm provided pathways to what everyone sought: the future.
But Conway! The man will haunt me every day of my life, as I both cherish him as an innovator and despise him as my competitor. Years of magnificence, packed into a brain that the best and most adroit neuroscientists would undoubtedly have committed murder for! The way he sat in meditation, his humanity for all, his way of seeing kindness and purity in people underneath their layering of applied cultural sludge; his way of learning a person's story, even though the story involved murder and rape and greed; his ability to give everything away, even his most prized possessions, short of his own wife and children. How people gave to him without thinking twice! How his work in the Knowledge Farm surged and breathed life into it! How he transcended the twelve with the one! Oh, how he despicably capsized my life's work!
Sitting in my chair, I think about the thousands that abandoned their jobs because they finally learned – they finally found out. So much giving, and it made so much sense, this immaculate webbing of needs and providers, providers and needs. My loneliness leaves me perplexed – my bookshelf stares down my soul.
Millions upon millions have found new hope because of Lazerus Conway and his invention. I am a fool, now in the throes of reinvention, of accepting death, scraping at the walls of my skull to invent... invent... invent... so much invested has been lost, as my pen drowns the page in hopes of salvaging any repute.
It was the day that I turned the key in the lock for the last time that the voice of Lazerus Dale Conway rattled in my thoughts and affirmed the loss of my life's work. It was what he had spat into the ear of the intellectual property supervisor only a few years before. I had heard him breathe his words after the popping off of his disgust. He will die poor and remembered, I, rich and forgotten. His words will see me to my sleep, the ones that he uttered as if he was the future itself, cased within the confines of a man. He said them right to my face, in a nonshalant tone as he passed me in the hall, with his hands in his pockets, turning to me with a slight pivot of his head.
"It's about time that harvest season came to the Knowledge Farm, sir," he had said, "wouldn't you agree?"
*