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Google Etiquette

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Google Etiquette

Of late I listen to an audiobook: Paramahansa Yogananda on the Bhagavad Gita, as explained by his disciple, Swami Kriyananda. The Gita is one of the great scriptures of enlightenment, a conversation between Krishna the God of Love and Arjuna the universal devotee, right at the moment when Arjuna beholds a civil war in which he is supposed to fight.

“Brother against brother, cousin against cousin, how can I fight in this terrible battle?” Arjuna asks, his heart breaking. Krishna has an answer, and Yes, Arjuna is supposed to fight. This life is a play of shadows, rebirth is a certainty, consciousness is evolving, at one level, we must live out our dharma.

I’m not sure I totally agree with Krishna’s answer. One scripture or another is always in hand, and I always debate with it in my head. I am on a journey and I don’t have answers, I have questions, and boy oh boy, do I have a lot of opinions. Just because some holy person centuries ago wrote something doesn’t mean I have to buy it. Used car salesmen, the lot of them. Prophets, scribes, proselytizers, and disciples, all selling their brand of God. As if God could be a brand. Or defined by any one person, one path, or one book.

My husband Sabin finally forbade me to read the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying at bedtime, because it riled me up. I’d try to draw him into a debate and then sleep restlessly, arguing in my dreams. But I don’t think we’re supposed to take any gospel literally. It’s my opinion that we’re supposed to struggle with the words of God, all of us like Jacob wrestling the Angel of God. Finally, a blessing is bestowed.

Another of the great scriptures that has a longtime spot on my nightstand is The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali. I like Patanjali’s work because it’s methodical. He gives a practical curriculum for advancing in consciousness. I want to get there from here–don’t ask me where ‘here’ and ‘there’ are, what progress consists of, or how it is measured. I’ll send a postcard when I’ve arrived. Meantime, there are these paths. Ahimsa, nonviolence, is one of the crucial ones.

For the last few years I’ve undertaken ahimsa in my language. Specifically, refraining from the violence of dishonesty. Honesty comes easily to me, but sometimes too bluntly. I tend not to tell lies. But I can tell truths with a sharp edge. So the deeper, more textured layers of this issue fascinate me, eg, the small dishonesties that pass for social courtesy. Because kindness matters, too. Kindness is the crux.

How do I tell a scrupulous truth without hurting someone’s feelings? For example, how do I refrain from saying that a haircut or dress is flattering, when it’s butt ugly? How do I negotiate my simultaneous responsibilities to the truth and to kindness?

Which put me in a sticky situation recently, when I visited with someone who I knew had googled me. This person asked me what I did, as if it were unknown. Well, the spouse had googled me. Marriage being what it is, I assume the spouse had shared information about me.

There is a crude but effective invisible hit counter on my website. It gives useful stats about visitors to my site: how many page loads, what state or country. Usually the information is pretty anonymous. I can tell that someone using Verizon internet in New York state was on my site, for example. It’s great fun to see hits from distant countries.

Sometimes a large company or institution names their ISP network after themselves, so the name of that institution or company appears. For a while, my middle daughter had my website set as her default Safari page on her macbook. I knew when she took her computer to school and played on it, because a user on her school’s network would pop up on my counter.

The day before the visit with my new acquaintance, who is a lovely person, my counter showed the name of the company where the spouse works. Now, this isn’t a small company; it took me a while to figure out who at that company might have been interested in me. But it’s not that hard. I went to the company’s website and took a look at the page on their employees. One of the names matched a name on a list of people I’d been given, some of whom I’d also googled.

So, out of truthfulness and kindness, what am I supposed to do when someone pretends they know nothing about me, but there’s an indication that they’ve googled me?

In this instance, surprised, I opted to play dumb. I said that I was an author. And then eventually the conversation came around to spouses, and since I’d taken that first step into the shadows, I asked what the spouse did. As if I didn’t know. It was distressing to be in this position, holding hidden information like a steaming potato. I felt like a liar. That’s not who I want to be.

But if I admit to googling, do I seem like a stalker? If I admit to googling and the other person doesn’t, do I position them as dishonest, which is unkind? If I mention that I know that they’ve been on my website, is that a violation of privacy, another unkindness?

What are the rules of kindness and honesty in the world of immediate information via google and statcounters? What would Krishna or Jacob’s Angel have to say about the virtual world?

The day after that visit, I had a business meeting with a married couple who told me straight out, up-front, no BS that they’d googled me, been on my website, and watched the video clip. It was a great relief. It made me like and trust them. It seemed to me that the universe had sent me this latter experience as a foil to the prior one, to illustrate for me the way that I was supposed to follow. The Universe works that way, with care and great intelligence, for seekers and strugglers.

From now on, I’ll confess straightaway to my nefarious googling and statcounter information. Hopefully I’ll be able to do it with courtesy and tact. That’s my growing point.

Why I love Apple & Its Products
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Why I love Apple & Its Products

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My husband Sabin claims that I am a gadget person. It’s not how I think of myself, but his view makes sense. I do enjoy gizmos that make my life easier. A recently purchased Krups water kettle boils the water for my morning tea lickety split fast. Considering that the dog (yellow, 55 lbs) and the 5 year old (also blond, 48 lbs) have both already jumped on my fetal-position, bed-hugging person by 7 am at the latest, and usually earlier, I worship that first steaming cup of Earl Grey. It goes down like amrita, the divine milk of immortality. Once the dog hairs are out of my mouth.

Before 2006, I was a PC person. I liked its functionality, its no frills business mien. All the programs were written for PC. My relationship with PC’s began in the late 1980’s, when I put myself through grad school in creative writing by building billing databases for a small accounting firm. I was also teaching Freshman Composition. Teaching was often less fulfilling. Those rasty undergrads were not as easily programmed as Dbase.
Cut to more than a decade later. My kids got Macbooks. They were learning on Apple computers at school. They knew more about computers and the internet than I did. My technologically illiterate husband got a Macbook. He was soon proficient at it. Worse, he got better and faster results than I did! Insult with a dash of injury. There was no help for it, my days as a PC person were numbered.
So in 2006 I betook myself to the Apple Store at 57th street in Manhattan, and I stocked up. iMac and Macbook, Applecare for both, Microsoft office, procare for myself. I took the computers home. I set them up. They worked.
No joke: right out of the box, with no fussing and no bs, the iMac and the Macbook worked. I had budgeted a solid week out of my writing to learn to use them; I only needed a few hours. And part of that time was spent gawking at a machine that was so insanely easy to use. I installed Microsoft Office and word processing was up and running. MacLink Pro translated my old Word Perfect files into Word docs. It was all very disconcerting. What was the catch?
Ah, yes, this is an imperfect world, a vale of tears and sea of illusion, and there are always problems, issues, and obstacles. The airport card on my iMac was a tad flakey. Sometimes, after a restart, the card just wasn’t recognized as installed. I’d have to restart several times before it showed up.
Dutifully I lugged the iMac in to the Apple Store and had my first talk with a genius. A polite young man, for whom my iMac worked perfectly. But since I insisted, he kept the computer to run diagnostics on it. A day later they called and it was still working perfectly.
OK, understandable. I picked it up and lugged it back home. Mostly it worked great. Sometimes that naughty airport card played hide-and-seek. Twice more I lugged it into the store to be checked out. Patiently, one mannerly genius or another, and one was a women, ran diagnostics. My iMac refused to show its dark side. This was not the geniuses’ fault; they ran a lot of diagnostics. They truly wanted me to be delighted with my iMac.
Finally, a few months before my applecare ran out, it happened again. I called applecare in despair. “I’ve brought it in to the store three times!” I wailed. “Do you know how heavy this thing is? I’m not a computer idiot, I’m telling you, the airport card only works intermittently!”
So they sent a tech to my home. Voila, the airport card played dead! Yay! Immediately, the airport card was replaced. Perfection.
There have been other issues these past 4 years, usually with my kids’ computers, twice with my macbook. Applecare has been unfailingly polite, supportive, and helpful. Other Apple stores have opened in Manhattan; I’ve been to the ones on 14th street, and lately, the Upper West Side store. Never had a bad experience. Some weird stuff happens in these NYC stores, all kinds of folks wander in, some with chips on their shoulders. I’ve witnessed customer explosions. Never once have I seen an Apple employee lose his or her cool.
I’ve ordered online from the Apple online store, and it’s the same deal: exemplary, respectful customer service. An attempt to figure out what the customer needs and provide it quickly, with a minimum of hassle.
It’s not just the customer service, though. Apple products work well. I was an early iPhone user, and I remember vividly bringing it home and using it. It did everything it said it would. The iPhone was one of those few things in life that lived up to its hype. What else can say that? Even sex is hit-or-miss, especially after you’ve been married for a bunch of years, and there are kids in the next room, just waiting to run in and launch themselves at you.
So, yes, I’m now a diehard Apple devotee. Do I have suggestions for them? Sure do. I’m just that person; if God Herself came down to stand next to me, I’d thank and praise and then pull out my punch list: “Merciful Deity, Can You do something about war, poverty, and illness?”
Also, I’m waiting for the iPad to multitask before I shell out the $ for one. But it’s just a matter of time. Probably after my husband or one of my kids demonstrates their obvious superiority by possessing one.
Symbolists
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Symbolists

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I am a fortunate woman: my four daughters, three biological and one step, are among my most favorite people. They are such wonderful fun to be with, each in her particular way.
Last week afforded a few days for me to spend quality alone time with my eldest daughter, who is now an anarchist. She spent a lot of time quoting Foucault, Lacan, and George Carlin to me. She stayed up all one night reading Obama’s DREAMS FROM MY FATHER and then spent the next day haranguing me mercilessly about the evils of racial disparity. I was stuck by her despair at ever rectifying the terrible wrong of racial inequality. She’s completely correct, of course, that it is a foundational evil. But I think we can restructure things for the betterment of all humans. I am bolstered in this opinion by her passion.
Years ago I took her to see MUNICH, starring the amazingly gorgeous Eric Bana. “Your generation will both inherit and solve this conflict,” I told her, when we walked out. She gave me a stricken look, but she seemed to agree.
And when they do, the solution will arise out of the passion that she and her peers have for true equality, for real tolerance.
Over a lavish dinner one night: “And what is the sociological implication of this meal?” I asked.
“That we have so much, that this kind of luxury exists, only because there exists people who have so little, who live in unimaginable poverty,” she said, flatly. She described a ghetto in Africa. I tried not to let it ruin my enjoyment of the meal.
“I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction,” she quoted Carlin. But, with four children, I am invested in the survival of the species. So we fell into a debate about humanity: Are we worth saving?
“No,” she said, fiercely. The politics of power and inequality are too deeply ingrained for us ever to create a just society without the toxicity of racial inequality. “Maybe if 90% of us are killed off and the rest of us start over from scratch, that’s the only way,” she insisted.
But I beg to differ. Not because I believe in masses of humanity. Pretty much, from what I’ve seen, groups are evil, institutions are codifications of, at best, apathy, and at worst, vindictive Naziesque murder. Think of the Catholic church and the Inquisition. Think of McCarthyism. Actually, there’s no end of institutional evils to think about. Nope, I don’t like institutions.
But I do like individuals. I don’t know if society will change itself. But I do think that impassioned individuals–like my daughter–will stand forth to proclaim a new and better way of being, a more just way of cooperating, and that humanity will resonate with that better way.
I believe in the power of the individual to effect change. As an example, a friend of mine is the investigative journalist who, decades ago, broke the story about the dangers of asbestos. This he did despite threats and persecution from asbestos companies who had billions of dollars at stake. Thanks to his courage, fewer people now die of asbestosis.
It requires a refusal to go along with herd-thinking. It takes the resourcefulness, the stubbornness, to filter out the chaff, think for oneself, and hold onto unpopular ideals. One person, or a small group, is all it takes. In this thinking, I am like Abraham. Abraham bargained with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah: and if Abraham can find ten good men, God will spare the cities.
Of course, it didn’t work out so well for those two cities. That doesn’t diminish my faith in the individual.
My beautiful daughter and I went to some museums. She was delighted by Odilon Redon. He’s not the kind of artist of whom my Renaissance-obsessed husband approves, but I get it. Redon with his fantastical creatures and renditions of mythos was aiming for another universe, another realm: akin to the kabbalistic realm of Beriah, the world of thought and creation that comes from the realm of Atzilut, which is changeless. In Beriah, which is a kind of heaven, we find duality. It’s a world of essences, principles, and ideas. It’s a realm that can effect rectification.
So perhaps my daughter’s anarchy is inspired in Beriah. And it is individuals like her and Redon who can access those higher realms who will bring transformation to the rest of us.
To Bouguereau or not to Bouguereau?
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To Bouguereau or not to Bouguereau?

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I got my ass kicked by Jacob Collins and Jim Cooper last week in a debate about Bouguereau.

This pleasant drubbing occurred at the Newington-Cropsey Foundation’s annual award dinner. This year painter and teacher Martha Erlebacher was honored.

It was an amazing evening. I was seated at a table with Martha Erlebacher, painter Philip Pearlstein, sculptor Sabin Howard, painter Jacob Collins, author Ann Brashares, and critic Jim Cooper. I was in the company of my artistic betters and was glad to be included. It was a treat to just listen to the conversations going on around me, let alone participate.

Of course, being me, with plenty of brash and engaged opinions, I had to contribute. Before dinner, I walked into a discussion Jacob Collins, one of the pre-eminent realist painters, was having with Jim Cooper, an art critic who runs Newington-Cropsey foundation. They were talking about the French Academicians.

Now, what is it with the French Academicians? Candy-assed painters, all surface sweetness and no structure, the lot of them. Look at Bouguereau. It’s like fluffy pink cotton candy. You might go into a diabetic coma. If I see one more painting of a shepherdess, I might barf. Why settle for sugary trifle when, with, say, Raphael or Fra Angelico, you get lamb chops with a side of asparagus and a hunk of chewy bread?

But no, Jacob and Jim said. I have a problem of taste. Jacob pointed out that we in the 21st century view Bouguereau through the lens of the myriad second-rate copyists who come after him. We can’t judge Bouguereau on his own terms because a thousand imitators followed him, and they did not have his immense talent.

This was a point well-taken, and has given me much to contemplate. Collins is no idiot. He certainly knows his way around a figure on canvas.

Jim, whom I adore, took me to task rather mercilessly. No one does hands like Bouguereau, he pointed out. Then he lectured me about Corot, with whom I have a love-hate relationship. I find Corot lazy and self-indulgent. He lacks the spiritual might of, say, Turner, while playing with light in similar fashion. But I do love to look at Corot’s paintings, despite him being one of those second rate French Academicians. But no, Corot is not an academician. Jim contends that Corot is the first of the great modernists.

It’s true, I have been brainwashed into revering the Renaissance by my Michelangelo-esque husband Sabin Howard, who, I might add, has also scolded me for dismissing Bouguereau. Et tu, Brute! This when I have to sneak off in secret to the MOMA to see the Edvard Munch exhibit, feeling as much shame as if I’d been meeting an adulterous lover! Before I come back into our apartment, I have to check myself and make sure I have no MOMA tickets or brochures sticking to my person, lest I draw the wrath of Sabin.

So, Bouguereau? Or not?

Award for Excellence in the Arts: Martha Mayer Erlebacher
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Award for Excellence in the Arts: Martha Mayer Erlebacher

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Award for Excellence in the Arts: Martha Mayer Erlebacher

Last night my husband Sabin Howard & I attended the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center event honoring Martha Erlebacher. Martha is a realist painter and teacher. She taught Sabin twenty-seven years ago at the Philadelphia College of Art, and Sabin credits Martha and her deceased husband Walter Erlebacher for giving him the tools with which to create beautiful classical art with a powerful modern sensibility.

It was a wonderful, heart-warming evening. Sabin and I picked Martha up at her hotel to take her to the Lotos Club. In the taxi, I asked about Sabin as a young art student. He had, at one point, sported a gigantic thatch of a beard that would have made ZZ Top proud. Martha laughed, told me that in all her decades of teaching, there were maybe 5 students who had serious, big talent as artists. Sabin was one of them.

She and Sabin fell into a conversation about the draughtsmanship of drapery. I shut up and listened. When two artists of the caliber of Martha Erlebacher and Sabin Howard are discussing drawing, Leonardo, and the play of light, I want to hear every word that comes out of their mouths.

Martha and Walter had to re-invent the Renaissance system of proportions and of how to structure the figure. Walter Erlebacher had been a darling of the art world when he was an abstract expressionist showing at the Whitney Biennial; when he turned to the figure, to the human body, they dropped him. Sad commentary on the lack of taste and vision in the art haute-monde.

No one was doing realism and the figure back in the 60’s, when Walter and Martha understood that the human body is the greatest expression of truth, beauty, and narrative that human beings have. Against a condescending environment in the art world and a disembodied academia that had forgotten the perceptual power of art in favor of heady conceptual babble, they reinvented the proportional system. Martha was the painter and Walter was the sculptor.

“The sculpture of human form is the metaphor for the human desire to live forever,” Martha told me, as we spoke later in the evening. She was telling me how her husband was a genius.

“Don’t underestimate yourself and your contributions,” I said, gently. She shrugged. But this evening was about her. Sabin introduced her, and it was an intense moment for him, because he got to publicly express his gratitude to someone who had, literally, changed his life. Who had set him on the path he lives. “Martha gave us the manual on how to make awesome, powerful, visceral classical art!” he said, with tears in his eyes.

Noah Buchanan, a painter with a big following in California, also spoke. Noah related some funny anecdotes about Martha’s classes, how her words had stayed in the heads of her students who went on to be teachers themselves.

It was a joy to behold the praise being given to a woman who has made such a quiet, fierce contribution to the world, to both the joy and the discipline of art. She’s also a beautiful painter. The painting shown above is her “Dream of Eden.”

TED.COM & The Young Michelangelo
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TED.COM & The Young Michelangelo

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My husband Sabin Howard has become enthralled with the inspiring video lectures on ted.com. I understand why. Sabin and I are seekers of enlightenment, and that spark is the intention behind the website. I usually don’t mind when Sabin brings his MacbookPro to the bedroom and insists that I watch. Although I wish he wouldn’t do it on Monday nights at 9:00, because I am really invested in Jack Bauer saving the world.

The latest two videos were Ben Zander on classical music and Sir Ken Robinson talking about how schools kill creativity.
I had reason to ruminate on Robinson’s words in light of a lecture I attended last week at the New York Academy of Art on The Young Michelangelo, given by a professor who has a forthcoming book of the same name.
Now, this professor meant well. He tried to enliven his speech by mentioning sodomy several times. Usually sodomy is a provocative subject. This time, the unfortunately pompous academician managed to make both sodomy and the young Michelangelo Buonarroti boring. It was an accomplishment that made my husband seethe with fury. Not because of the former subject but because Sabin, as the finest living figurative sculptor, considers himself a direct heir to Michelangelo, and the sculptor poised to rebirthe classical figurative statuary into the modern mind as a living, breathing, urgent topic of thought. For Sabin, the boringization of Michelangelo is a catastrophic evil.
He got so mad that I wiggled out of the dinner invitation with a group of NY Academy folk and the professor. I didn’t want to watch Sabin get into a fight. Sabin’s the pale German/British/Northern Italian genotype and there was an uncharacteristic red flush on his cheekbones. It didn’t bode well for a civilized dinner.
And I got an earful in the cab on the way home. Good thing I bowed us out of dinner.
But I sympathize with Sabin. I’ve seen this distressing academic syndrome before. Professor Zollner, whose books I revere, managed to make Leonardo Da Vinci boring, in a talk a few years ago at the NY Academy. How, you may ask, could anyone make Leonardo, one of the top 5 most fascinating human beings in human history, boring? Well, it takes talent.
And a sense of oneself as an entitled gate-keeper who is generously doling out information to the special few out of the largesse of one’s brilliant scholarly achievements.
George Bull, the translator of Vasari’s Lives Of the Artists, succeeded brilliantly in transforming Vasari’s commentary into something dry, dull, and off-putting. This is just an egregious violation of all things holy, good, and true. Vasari was one of the early PR legends and a genius of a gossip monger. Lives Of the Artists should be rendered in the juicy, salacious style of US Magazine. If it were, everyone would want to read it. Everyone would love and hate Benvenuto Cellini, that stormy and sociopathic artist who, it is rumored, threw his assistant into the furnace to get it hot enough to cast his sculpture.
I stand for the democratization of art and ideas. Great art belongs to everyone. It cuts across class, caste, and education levels. This is one reason why post modern art isn’t art. It’s merchandise. Worse, it’s a shame that the 20th/21st centuries will have to live down: that ridiculous crap (by which I mean Dung Madonna, Piss Christ, anything by Jeff Koons, etc.) doesn’t appeal to anyone who isn’t getting a PhD or doesn’t have a monetary interest in it. That is, art dealer$ and gallerie$ will swear to you it’s great, but that’s only because they want to $ell it to you.
When Sabin loads his heroic scale APHRODITE into a truck to transport it, everyone stops, awestruck, to admire. Everyone responds to beauty. Firemen, school teachers, garbagemen, the women running the florist shop, lawyers, bankers, the restaurateurs on the corner–they all comment. Random people in cars pull over, get out, and admire.
This is what great art must do: strike people like a lightning bolt and uplift them. It doesn’t require a PhD to behold and be uplifted by Michelangelo!
How would I have given a lecture on Michelangelo? I’m a storyteller, and I want everyone to love Michelangelo. I would have pushed the lectern out of the way, grinned, and said, “Michelangelo was one of the greatest artists ever. He was also a mean son-of-a-bitch and a liar, so cheap that he’d wear his leather pants until they cracked and fell off his stinking body.”