Hello Group and Kole!

It has been a week(almost) since I went on to the top of our own "Pimple", i.e., Stone Mtn with the gang. And if called to testify, I can attest to how much fun the whole blasted event was, it being my first CafeATL meeting. For the lurkers here who are shy about making themselves heard,I suggest they attend.

The most fruitful thing, given the diversity of interests and pet peeves in a group like this, is that it is really hard not to meet on the same wavelength. So along those lines, at the meeting I got to talking with another member (Art) about English litterature and the conversation kept going till after 11.00 pm that night of the hike. And it has been a really long time since I have had that experience.

So thanks you Kole, for organizing this and going with the rest to the top of the rock even though he had a bad brush with bad chinese food the previous night!

And I hope I will meet the folks I met last Sunday again at another meeting as well as the others on the list.

Cheers! Sashi

I must admit my first reaction of Ms Lisa Chester’s missive was “that sounds like a posting by a porn star!”. This must be because of how it read in my haste: “Lisalips”. So I would suggest that Ms Chester(is there also a pun here or is it her real name?) consider renaming her “edgy” column with something that refers to the content of what she wants to write/talk about.

The content of her excerpts on dating however made me remember this ambitious site: www.solvedating.com . Perhaps Ms Chester can float an Atlanta Dating Market, something similar to the botched Pentagon’s futures market on their buddies, oops baddies and get rich with an IPO.

Her wisdom re clothing (or the lack of) is more measured. Also what would be of more interest to me would be to read her “writing’ vs say her “journalism”. But nevertheless each to her or his own cannons or keeping with the season, turkeys I say!

Sashi

I'm so busy and in such a bad mood these days that I practically stopped reading messages at CATL. I still read e-mails, though.

Your reaction to the "lisalips" posting is very appropriate. Just as I read your e-mail, I checked out her message and found that almost every phrase of it makes me laugh. I think, what she has succeeded in with her message was to partly dissipate my bad mood :-)

Did you know that "lisalips" is a writer, publicist, and trendsetter (what's the latter, by the way?), being trend-forecasting (what's that??) and setting to focus on relationships, fashion, and what's hot?

She has many interests and occupations for a promising career. Check out the link at the bottom of www.fromlisaslips.exposurinc.com.
I think, in some twenty years she'll prove an excellent columnist or even editor to one of those popular glitzy magazines that you can find in Kroger in a checkout line.

Hmmm ... I just found out that she had withdrawn her posting (# 3657) from the CATL list. Do you know why? :-)

• Art

--

:) oh boy I am glad that my 2 bits helped clear some air and offered you some amusement. I also noticed that along with her posting, my posting was "un-posted" as well. I am deciding if I should take umbrage at such ghastly censorship!

Usually I ignore such "riff raff" that seem to float on the board under the guise/license of "writing", including all types of vomiting/sneezing/farting etc.

What is simply unreadable I ignore. Ms Lips's posting however smacked too much of self promotion and I just had to write my 2 bits even though I had read it at an ungodly hour last night.

As for 'trendsetter', 'edgy', 'trend-forecasting' etc, they are just another set of meaningless adjectives. It might be instructive to create a literary hoax in this context panning Ms. Lips. Maybe that will be my next project. :-)

Also I should point out to Alan Sokal's hoax here: www.physics.nyu.edu

you will enjoy it!

Hope Sir Booby fares well and you will be able to wrap up his saga in a few days!

• Sashi

-- You know, Sashi, when I came to US I could not understand what all these Greek fraternities were about. It first I thought that its members studied works of Greek philosophers or dramatists, or at least learned Greek language. But I could not understand why Greek?

Soon I learned that the members of the fraternities are ordinary undergraduate American "guys" who typically do nothing but watch/play sports, eat chips, drink beer, flirt, party etc etc, in short, they have nothing to do with Aristotle!

But why calling them Greek fraternities then? Partly I was explained and partly I understood myself: in America if you call something by a new fashionable name, at least by a name, you can sweep a lot of things "under this name", talk vaguely about it and earn money (basically promising that something is going to work but what it really is and what it really does is unclear).

Such things happen everywhere in science, for example. People studied atoms and molecules for decades, but now it is "trendy" to call these objects "nano-objects". Angstroms are more and more called 0.1 nm :-)

This small re-naming opens up extensive possibilities of obtaining new grants and publishing articles in such journals as "Nature". The same thing is happening with the prefix "bio".

"Alpha Kappa Sigma", "Gamma Theta Omega". "nanocluster", "nanotechnology", "biopolymers", "biomachines" ...

Maybe the analogy is indirect but I think one can also add to this list the new concepts of "edgy", "trend-forecasting", "trend-setting" etc.

• Art

--

He wakes and sees that he had fallen asleep under the tree where he was reading. Winter light is streaming through the woods, angel’s hair that is being washed by the creek. The water looks inviting and the sky above is smoky blue. His heart is filled with a great tenderness, first towards the woman and the child that he had been carrying on his mind.

He walks into this dell of tenderness and stops there for a while. Everything and everyone that life had put him into opposition with, come out of the shade. People he hadn’t seen in years, some who were dead to this world for many years. He sees his grandmother’s hand and hears her voice telling him stories from her youth as he is lying next to her, his young hands feeling her skin. And then he sees his childhood friends, in a circle waiting for him to throw the ball he is holding in his hands to one of them. Where are they now? Lost to time, they are physically as gone as that field in which they gathered every evening for their games. Now only tall buildings stand in that field, he was recently told.

He walks further, deeper. He sees his friends of youth, amongst whom he came to become a man. And behind them he sees those, whom he fought. His fists had punched that face and his heart whirled, a cesspool of hate, at the sight of that face, for many years. However he sees more than those acts alone. He sees the cracks in them running through the ground and into and beyond him, joining him with them. He didn’t know that then. And this awareness is quite recent, the woman and the child brought him into this awareness.

He also sees his dreams, those he had thrown away after breaking them apart, hanging as the numerous silken filaments from the tree branches. He sees her towards whom he was driven by unclassified passions that flow under the bedrock of human need. He sees his failure too, in the choices he had made; where to stop, how to reckon the thickness of the rock and how deep to drill for the secret water that never came, that never rose to his lips.

He feels tender towards his own mistakes and to the way he had hit himself, in anger for making those mistakes. He feels tender for those who in their mistakes hurt him and he in his pain, in blind reaction, lashed back at. The creek is rippled by a cold wind. Perfection perhaps then comes through acceptance and continuation of the doing. And the awareness of beauty only via watchfulness.

He walks back to the edge of the woods, singing a song, complete with this awareness of the man, of the woman and of the child.