Skykus

Flying airtran from Denver to Atlanta, I discovered that all airtran flights have wi-fi, which is great, but not free. You can, however, get free access to twitter through some special thing. Anyway, I posted a few comments on that flight, but on the way from Atlanta to Chicago. I decided the moment called for something more... interesting? Anyway, I wrote a series of haikus through twitter to the world below. So, I give to you "The Twitter Haiku Sequence from 30,000 feet" ...or umm, "Seven Skykus!"

1.

thirty thousand feet

Airtran, what could beat two seats?

one not-broken seat

2.

a long novel begs

but my attention is short

and twitter is #

3.

i'm higher than clouds.

sounds illegal but isn't.

jurisdiction stuff.

4.

what is cooler than

thirty thousand foot haikus?

refrigerators

5.

ode to a brown shirt

not this one, the other, says:

“refrigerator”

6.

just an hour in

and my haiku jokes all end:

refrigerator

7.

battery dying

signing off and thinking “land”

while descent begins

For those that are interested, the landing was one of the worst I've experienced. I hate being a couple hundred feet off the ground for a little too long. It always makes me think something is going on. Looking out the window I keep thinking, we're very close to the ground and non of this looks airport-y. Also, planes should not bank shortly before landing. I think rudders were created for that.

Obama and [p/c]en[ce/ts]

A few weeks ago, I was talking about a class I took right before graduating college. It was called “The American Autobiography” and, for some reason, the name of one of the texts had slipped my mind. Franklin’s autobiography, a slave narrative, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and what? The text I had forgotten was Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father. It was probably because I didn’t finish it. I remember getting up to his college years and losing some of my interest, but other things in my life distracted me and I graduated, returning the borrowed copy to a friend. Now, this really has nothing to do with Barack Obama, but the point when I lost some interest remains important to me. I started to care a little bit less when he got to college because, suddenly, the book wasn’t about me anymore.

Assuming a myriad of perspectives on that last comment, I could guess that it could be interpreted by one person as a comment on literature: that we always relate ourselves most strongly to the child or adolescent character. The twentieth-century canon supports that observation with success of The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. Someone else might claim that to relate your own childhood to the childhood account of a US president is the most arrogant reading you could ever unconsciously produce. That may or may not be true. I can’t imagine it would be a compelling book if readers were unable to relate to Obama’s childhood to their own.

The narrative of his childhood and adolescence has a particular resonance for people who lived away from their "home country" as kids. At the heart of his narrated self is an individual who is pervasively aware of otherness. Thinking about that, I realized that a large part of why I like him is because he understands more about difference and commonality than most people. When the generalized public is referred to as "folks" in just about every clip of presidential speechifying, I feel betrayed because the sensitivity to otherness appears to be contradicted by a unifying rhetorical move that reeks of purely political motives. However, if I give politics the benefit of the doubt for a moment, talking about the “folk” doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The unifying power of that rhetoric doesn't necessitate a homogeneous society, nor does it have to deny the rich diversity that Obama has celebrated.

I don’t really have a final point, but I’m wondering if maybe individualism and collectivism are not separable ideas. That sounds very collectivist doesn’t it?