Gender relations

Franz Erhard Walther, 1983 - Paris, Centre Pompidou - by A. Barake

Still digesting the readings from Thanksgiving...

I read Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" recently, and as I was driving in this morning, it hit me how such a study can be a good reflection on the state of gender relations at a point in time yet how it is just that, a touch point  since these relations are so varied, so much in flux, constantly evolving and I asked myself if her study was of any use in day-to-day life.

The sample size being dealt with is huge- 3 billion give or take a few million on each side of the equation, and this results in a large variety of sexual behaviours, variability and variety. The middle of the bell curve is very broad, even if we limit it to Western culture, as she does.

Yes, we are a laboratory for sex, as we should be. Until we get totally artificial about it, survival and renewal require this experimentation. Since our brains are so adaptable, interest in sex requires huge variety I guess. There is no end to the variations, and the minor things are as exciting as the major ones, however you define the categories. Marketing and advertising depend on this instinct as their currency of the new.

Despite the difficulty of categorizing such a complex topic, De Beauvoir's expose covers and uncovers much ground. Her method is to work at the delta she perceives between gender status, behaviour and emotion in every context of her time, and historically where she can.

One observation which struck me was the notion that a large number of  women she observed define themselves through a male spouse or mate, as a means to gain territory, because of the cultural power disparity that existed. Desire and power, the old story, examined with great perspicacity and dissected and countered with new approaches. The central thesis of the book.

I extrapolated this notion to the study of relations between gay men and hetero women - to try to answer the question of why there can be friendly attraction without sexual attraction. Also, to test whether there was a converse with lesbians and hetero men. There isn't in a general sense. De Beauvoir has a chapter on lesbianism, and she concludes that the relation between heterosexual and same-sex desire is much closer and symmetrical in women than in men.

Having also read what Camille Paglia says about homosexuality, I am not sure that one can conclude anything like that. The spectrum is very broad as I wrote earlier, and maybe de Beauvoir's snapshot is just a reflection of what she could see, or what was visible when she wrote the book at mid-century.

Gender relations and sex remain very difficult things to generalize about, and I think it goes back to the idea that we are attracted to the new, to variety, and that behaviours that test and taste that variety are usually good for evolution, for survival, so long as they are not culturally or biologically damaging.

As the culture and the population widen, the behaviours that can be experimented with can grow, there are wider safety margins, and there is also motivation and opportunity. The taboos and secrecy around sex that act as cultural anchors to maintain tribal cohesion loosen as the tribe expands to include the planet's population. The need for protectionism disappears, reflecting the monetary and commercial globalization.

This may be why there is a resurgence of fundamentalist thought, a backlash, a clinging to what can be perceived as a moral high-ground, based on limited communications, limited population size, limited cultural migration. Pockets of resistance.

Oh yes, the book was banned by the Vatican. Go figure.

Themes versus categories

From my flickr

Trying to make sense of experiences and events can lead to categorization.

I try to resist that, given that I think and have written here that categorizations are usually trade-offs between understanding and convenience.

A grouping is as good as the criteria used for grouping, and there's the rub.

Rational categorizations, the ones used by encyclopedias, are part of our cultural thinking. What I think is missing from the cultural tool arsenal is emotional grouping. (I really should say it is missing from the serious argumentative arsenal, but is very present in rhetoric, which can have a bad name.)

I think the reason for that is individuality. Emotions are based on experience, and this differentiates the perceived and experiential validity of the grouping depending on the audiences' family, clan, nation, etc... This may be why AI is so hard.

But...

now we have the means to not generalize.

We can simulate individuals, mirror them really, and build networks of relationships, like Facebook and other network applications do, and map the emotional gradients and correlate to the other more usual and accepted categorizations and deal with the rhetoric.

But I did not begin this post to write about that.

I want to write about the notion of theme, which is a categorization of emotion and fact, intertwined, used in the arts.

Let me give an example: the outsider theme

I was reading Edward Said's autobiography over (Canadian) Thanksgiving, where he talks about his feelings of being between cultures, and I related it to other immigrant and emigrant writings. Rushdie provides liner notes to Said's book, and I believe that Hitchens was a supporter and friend. I mention this because both are contrarians and sometimes wilful outsiders.

How to describe, or even define the theme of "the outsider"? How does it differ from a category?

Outsiders may feel kinship based on the feeling of belonging, which is rooted in emotion, even in biology.
Attempting to completely categorize the theme of the outsider with words will fail, because one has to feel as an outsider to completely know and understand. Sometimes the feeling is due to internal stuff: memories, wounds, predispositions, inheritance, rather than external immediate factors. It is not reliably induce-able and I would also say that it is not measurable - yet.

For example, a novel's or a painting's theme is a shot in the dark, a collection of experiences and perceptions manipulated to model a simulacrum or resonance of the theme in the audience's mind.

The success of the work depends on the accuracy of the resonance between "player" and "listener", and sometimes on the group think that comes with it, the meme concept, aided by marketing, and that is how culture moves along and changes. Evolution in action.

Happy (survivalist) themes succeed more easily, thus escapist magic, futuristic fantasy, sex stuff. Stuff that is more emotionally ambivalent like Graham Greene's and J.M. Coetzee's  works provide themes that can take root, sometimes grow into the main thread, the canon, produce seed, and thus can join other classics in the taxonomy or network of thematic relationships we call culture.

Themes versus categories. We can now manage thematic encyclopedias. The Web is the perfect tool for this.

Cognitive Philosophy

There seems to be a movement afoot - long overdue - to embody the foundations of intelligence and philosophy. It is partially old news, the heroic AI of the 50's, 60's and 70's has been discounted despite our benefiting from the results of that research in today's mainstream technology: neural nets, machine speech recognition, handwriting recognition, natural language translation, cars that drive themselves, and all kind of other low-level intelligent (unconscious?) activities simulated by programs.

I think that it is the Minsky flavour of AI (now re branded cognitive science), the one grounded in logic, seems to have fallen out of favour -since the fruits of that work did not rise up to the expectation of the "I" in AI; an AI based only on logic, a formal game with symbols that pretended to be words. How can that be smart without the observer having to make all kinds of allowances and assumptions?

This stuff was subject to sometimes acrimonious debate for a while, until technology and big data made many of the arguments moot.

The good news is that there is now a strong movement towards the recognition of the role of the perceptual environment and its embodiment in animals like us as part of the equation.

This realization may be due to the Web, indirectly, since it should be now be obvious that the seeming "intelligence" of the Google search would not exist without the "environment" of all the Web sites, which are of course interactions with people's brains (in fact there was a very simple AI program that used "Google distance" as a way to measure metaphorical strength between concepts. For example "Castro" and "cigar" scored pretty high on that scale).

So now there is a movement, a possibly serendipitous program of research coming together to ground AI in the real-world of experience, and some of the people that I think are leading this effort align themselves along a somewhat elegant but odd symmetry of ideas.

Let me explain.

There is David Gelernter, the computer scientist and columnist who wrote "The Muse in the Machine" and "Mirror worlds". These books made me want to go back and look at AI again. In fact I ran back. His arguments are so cogent, so seemingly simple and common-sensical that I almost missed their radical novelty. He states that data and the links between data is the key to intelligence. These links are often emotional gradients, in the sense that logic is not always what binds ideas; it is similar emotional affect!

The brain associates memories based on the closeness of the emotions they evoke, the sensory input parallels that occurred as the memory is created. The whole model, not just the idea...how you felt, how cold or hot or tired or dizzy you were. This links data to environment so elegantly that it is a mystery to me why no-one has picked up on this earlier. He breaks the syntax/semantics dichotomy very deeply. Also, Gelernter has very conservative political views - right of centre. I am noting this now so as to make my strange symmetry argument a bit further down. Bear with me.

There is George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist. His work with Johnson on embodied philosophy and with Nunez on the origins of math, takes the empirical evidence around the links between our brain wiring and the perception of the world and uses it as a foundation for philosophy.

Basic brain mechanisms are considered to be foundational and ideas grow as hierarchies of metaphor (i.e. links).

Metaphor becomes a key mechanism for cognition. Similarly to Gelernter,  Lakoff et al propound that metaphors are based on evolutionary and environmental constraints, not some platonic logic ideal. No such thing as the separation of  mind from the world of things. These guys are existentialist scientists. Finally! The rampant positivism and Platonism of the English speaking world, the Whitehead/Russell school, is giving ground. Merleau-Ponty and Husserl are now more visible in the world of scientific cognition.

Lakoff is an ex-student of Chomsky. He seems to disagree with the flavour of Chomsky' thesis of hard-wired syntax in the brain. He believes syntax and semantics to be more of a spectrum of complexity in cognitive biology than a differentiator between humans and other animals. Also he is a non-neo-con, a strong and vocal opponent of  right wing politics as it is played in the US today, and although I hesitate to slot him with Chomsky on the political front, they are on the same side of a hypothetical centre line.

So we have right and a left wing thinkers on cognition who fundamentally disagree in the political realm, the realm of people relations, nations, influence, and power. That is a healthy and good thing. This lends support to the notion that there is a grounding in "objective" reality for this thinking on cognition, it is much more than opinion.  (A slim argument, I know, but hey, this is my blog, I can say what I want.)

Aside from the political thing, I want to continue to talk about is the cognition thing. There is another thinker/scientist that seems to be breaking new ground along those same lines.

He is a neuro-scientist, one who gets his hands dirty opening up craniums, working with brain surgeons. William H. Calvin. I read two books of his: "Conversations with Neil's Brain" and "How Brains Think, Evolving Intelligence Then and Now". His ideas centre around the notion that cognition is an initially subconscious Darwinian process among neural bundles that remember perceptions, integrate them and ultimately model the environment perceived by the body, and that the successful "species" of memories/emotions (let's call them cognitions) are the ones that we call conscious, the ones that rise to the top of the noise of cognition, to differentiate themselves as our inner voices.

His research fundamentally agrees with the models put forth by Gelernter and Lakoff. Like Lakoff, he believes that most cognition in the brain is fomented through unconscious processes. Like Gelernter he finds that memories are linked through non-logical processes. He shares with Lakoff a deep knowledge of Chomsky's ideas on innate language ability and like Lakoff disputes the simplicity of these models, without denying the human brain's ability to parse language. He also talks of metaphor, not surprisingly, since all this is supported by empirical evidence at the chemical and behavioural level.

So I am very happy that this stuff is happening. I tended to get hot under the collar when I read "classic" texts by Minsky or Pinker on intelligence. They seemed simplistic and smug. I was always perplexed by the lack of attention given to Grey Walter's ideas which preceded but anticipated Gelernter's. I wanted 'The Muse in the Machine" to be discussed more, but to my chagrin, Penrose's strange books on quantum brain hypotheses got more press.

Let's get back to empirical research, let's continue the program of work that will ultimately bring philosophy and psychology back into science.The foundational thinkers list above should also include Turing. Even Penrose mentions his "other work". He did mathematical research on molecular biology (plants mostly) and how stem cells can become complex structures. His mathematically-based hypotheses on these matters were validated experimentally just this year in the UK. Ultimately this theoretical work may prove to explain some of the brain mechanisms underlying the work Calvin and others are doing.

There are conceptual layers to all this analysis, from the bottom-up: the molecular, the cellular, the systems (bundles of neurons evolving), and the cognitive and behavioral, leading to metaphor, logic and science, including physics, on to philosophy, morality  and politics. The gaps needs to be filled so that we have a continuum of understanding. A New Science in the Vico sense. Something we made and understood that we made, but that is grounded in experience.

(I just found an earlier post that was wishing this stuff would happen, and so here we are.)

More on COTS vs custom software

Lausanne Flon Copyright 2002-2008 A. Barake

It has been my experience that integration and associated maintenance of commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) is an expensive and difficult process due to a few factors:

• The "normal" upgrade cycle for vendors is often strategic and is driven by internal rather than external compatibility – upgrades also tend to break interfaces regardless of intent, it just does not help that the intent to play well with others is often at odds with large company policies (i.e. marketing strategy), especially when their suite of products covers many functional domains
• Integration requires glue, and glue can either be COTS or home grown. For COTS, see above objection, and add cost. Home grown defeats the argument of using COTS in the first place Q.E.D.

Now, if we look at home-grown software, we have a few things to consider:

• Maintenance is dependent on knowledge, but unless you are writing in APL  (and even then), the pool of developers with expertise usually exists; reading code and fixing it is what they are hired for and have some training in.
• Developers in my experience much prefer to work on code where the source is available than integrate stuff using configuration and proprietary tools where the options are limited and the dependency on documentation and vendor support is limiting
• Code is now pretty much commoditized except in specialized areas (telephony switching, military stuff, embedded stuff) and even then… there are only a handful of approaches that people use to write and maintain code and most good developers can immerse themselves in a code base within days of weeks and make it their own.
• Renewal is key, and owning a system and renewing it by adding features is easier with home grown that has few integration points with COTS than with disparate COTS on different version cycles with glue in between.

The standards efforts are a sort of socialist (Stalinist really) approach to trying to control the ecological process described above, but is thwarted by vendor power struggles and the usual embrace and extend strategies, coupled with purchasing power in the hands of non-detail oriented people (i.e. not tecchies).

UNIX and other open system approaches have and are trying to tackle the problem through factoring out of common functional requirements into modular technical modules and protocols, and have had some success in advancing the state of the art – the Internet and its associated protocols and services are a direct result. The OSI stack is a manifestation of this approach and has become a pattern of understanding outside that world.

One approach is to layer the commercial stuff and isolate it from other commercial stuff through standard gateway mechanisms, off the shelf if you like, and these include queues, UNIX gateways and subsystems that use HTTP, SMTP and LDAP, xDBC as well as XML protocols where practical and where translation mechanisms are easy to obtain (message brokers, AJAX, browsers, SAML…) At another level we should be writing our own application code to use these underlying systems and the glue should be at the application level – i.e. SOA – services are COTS with standardized interfaces, applications are not.

Brad Warner

I have been reading Brad Warner's book Sit Down and Shut Up! about Zen. His writing makes me think he is a kindred spirit. The book is engaging, very funny, and down-to-earth and it somehow manages to transcend the words and project the deep essence of the Buddhist meanings he wants to convey.

Brad is a Buddhist monk and a teacher. He also plays bass and writes columns on the Web. He writes about how his Buddhism allows him to react in a balanced way to situations and to people that may be frustrating or annoying. However, I get the feeling that he is still fighting the demons that assail us many of us, the ones having to do with pride and with having the last word. I guess that one aspect of enlightenment is the destruction of that urge, or at least its domestication.

What got me thinking about this was one of his Web columns, responding to a label he acquired for his association with the Suicide Girls site. That he responded at all was indicative. I often feel the same, some energy has to dissipate when one feels wronged. The state I am trying to attain is one where I don't feel wronged in the first place.

The other coincidental event that got me going along this train of thought was a funny excerpt from a diary-joke-agenda that suggested ways to "annoy the Dalai Lama". I don't think any of those methods would work, but they are so funny that they contain their own flaw; and the solution to this little problem: humour.

I think Brad knows this, and that is why his books are so great, the jokes are part of the religion. What other religions have jokes so deeply embedded (I know of only one joke in the Bible - about Peter being a rock to found the church on, and that one is really a pun that only works in Latin and its derivative languages)?

Dysfunctional requirements and IT ideology

From my flickr

There are 3 types of requirements : functional, non-functional and dysfunctional (the latter are usually not documented).

The dysfunctional ones represent the distance between the proposed system and the organizational structure.

IM/IT systems must align against the business organization (people and processes) to work well. Management must decide who must budge before a new system is put in place in either camp. When deciding whether to build or buy a system, this effect must be considered. Neglecting to factor-in the cost of the organizational change can cancel the perceived economic benefit of using commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS).

Organizations usually have to change to fit the COTS assumptions, especially for large enterprises with large systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP). This can also apply to core business systems, since they differentiate the company from others. Think of mobile phone billing for example.

If COTS is chosen (for ERP for example), it is likely that the finance and personnel departments will have to change their processes significantly. There are many case studies that show that CEO support is required for such migrations to succeed, since it becomes a governance issue. It has become the common wisdom now.

Replacing custom-built software with COTS is a form of devolution. Size matters in this kind of decision because the “cost of re-organizing versus the benefit of saving on development costs” equation must be juggled. The bigger the org the more the cost of adopting COTS since the org usually has to change. The converse holds as well.

So where does the argument that COTS is preferable come from? Why does upper management often fear custom work? Why do they see it a a dependence on their technical staff, and why should this be preferable to a dependence on vendors? One possibility is that the pattern emerged from the computer hardware world? COTS for hardware usually makes sense for non-manufacturing sectors since the costs of custom hardware are prohibitive and it is generally ridiculous to suggest that one should build computers from scratch. Again, there are notable exceptions, Google apparently configures boxes quite heavily to suit their needs.

The COTS for software approach is not so obvious with the advent of open source and the devolution from mainframes towards lower cost systems, the proliferation of high-level development tools and the commoditization of the software stack. For example networking and OS are now mostly standardized, and much of the higher level layers are becoming standard - Mail/Web, database and application servers. Even development environment possibilities. The database-to-presentation layers are now the target of service-oriented architecture (SOA) driven commoditization, but the vendors are all looking for their own lock-in (i.e. avoiding commoditization) while claiming interoperability to get the sale.

For example vendor A’s ESB makes integration with vendor B’s apps much more difficult than with vendor A’s. Interfaces are easy to import but hard to export. Such pitfalls can be avoided by a vendor diversification strategy across the application layer that is coupled with good cost control and use of custom solutions where appropriate. Thankfully ESB’s are not a prerequisite for SOA, but this is not generally well understood.

So IT planning strategies need to revisit the seemingly popular notion that custom is always a liability. I think that if cost control is the business objective, then it should be decoupled from the “customization vs. COTS” argument. There is no direct mapping. The organizational size attribute has to be factored in, amongst other things.

Another ideology-prone minefield is standardization. Standards should really be orthogonal to this discussion, but are related in strange ways. Standards are sometimes perceived as a factoring exercise to reduce the proliferation of types of solutions and products in an IT department. This can work very well with hardware. Where standards are problematic is when they prescribe major system software COTS without taking into account organization structure (again). Why prescribe COTS through standards? Well COTS is good, right? And less COTS variety should be even better. Hummm.

Vendors claim and often try to provide the flexibility in their products to allow (some) business process mapping and legacy integration but usually at the cost of configuration complexity or alternately through costly professional service customization.

The benefits of these approaches over custom development need to be weighed carefully; there are plenty of case studies that show success with either approach and the cost-benefit is not at all straightforward, especially when you consider upgrade cycles and other dependencies.

If product/portfolio standards are adopted by an organization, then it must also adopt compatible organizational and operational standards, since software is really an extension of organizational processes and COTS will force an organization into a process relationship with the vendor. It is a form of outsourcing.

This can ultimately lead to having the hired-guns, the management change consultants and the vendor IT/IM professional services too tightly coupled, resulting in them having a profound influence on organization structure and operations. Are organizations prepared for this kind of loss of control in exchange for perceived but generally illusory cost benefits?

I think that one of the sub texts of the discussion is at root ideological - outsource development versus do it in-house. Yes, IT departments do have much influence and are complex things to manage, and require expertise, but control cannot always be gained through outsourcing or by buying COTS, unless you are very small or have very simple needs. Horror stories abound. Control and accountability concerns need to be well understood and documented and the business objective must be stated explicitly and decoupled from the implementation. There are no silver bullets, only smart management.

Dylan and Drake - Ego spectra

(Picture copyright A. Barake, 2007)

Have been reading a book of interviews with Dylan. I also mentioned here that I read and recommend Joe Boyd's memoirs. I "discovered" Nick Drake through these, and subsequently listened to some of his music. The stuff I like most is him singing to his own guitar accompaniment, sparse but deeply moving. It is full of melancholy. the ego struggling to emerge but battling emotion. Drake committed suicide.

Dylan's interviews and songs reveal a different type of ego, one that is dominant, defining of a reality. The person is re-invented with every appearance, and is making us consider adopting some of this vision.

This spectrum of ego - from the struggling and disappearing one to the inventive, playful and somewhat monstrous one is particularly interesting given that these are solo artists, both very original, defining themselves in the difficult music business. The support of others is limited, until you break through. Your belief system is mostly held near your heart.

In Dylan's case, the media circus and controversy tried to take hold, and he built a humorous shield to deflect the ego distorting forces and to maintain his creative force.

Drake was trying to break through and seems to have been struggling against his handlers as well as himself. He was more alone, in a sense, than Dylan, or at least not ego maniacal enough.

As ego is questioned, depression sets in. An argument can be made that depression in a loss of ego, a flattening of it that leads to inability to make the future for oneself. A strong ego influences destiny (character is destiny) by changing the perceptual environment. Management types would call it "selling yourself", missing the underlying irony.

It is easy to sell a template ego, for example the "MBA persona", or the jock persona, but in the arts, individuality and novelty are the goal, so the frame of reference gets pretty narrow, the market too. Success means enlarging that frame, creating the market. Dylan did it through force of character, strong confident performances, new poetic lyrical modes, and hubris. Drake did it too, but with his music and style. It took longer.

For most of us, the ego is sustained by our family, our friends and to some extent our peers at work. We adapt to these micro-cultures (or not) when we interact. Depression can occur when there is indifference or forced adaptation that violates beliefs and upbringing.

It is therefore important not to let any erosion of the ego occur through lack of self-respect. Unfortunately, our ape behaviour is all about climbing the ego ladder, and this erosion is all too common in groups.

Solitary artists, like writers and the afore-mentioned performers sustain the ego through their art. The songs are externalizations of the ego, and provide a hedge against the erosion. Criticism of the songs can be destructive for that reason. I think Drake was very susceptible to this (from my reading of Boyd's memoir of him). Dylan would be too, but then the songs are held up by all the fans and many have become classics - he is immunized.

The most important thing, revisited.

display, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

What is more absurd than a sports car? It is usually limited in seating capacity, more expensive to buy, to service, to insure, and to run. It has an engine that is oversize, and is built for speeds that are usually illegal. Yet such a thing is highly prized and often is an object of desire. Like swimming pools in Arizona. Supply and demand you say? Yes, in a strange way, in a way where utility is not a factor. Buying groceries with a sports car happens, and so does cooling off in swimming pools on hot days. But just saying these lines sounds drab, pedestrian and quaintly humorous, not to mention pretentious and stilted. Indicators that something is off, way off.

So if it is not supply and demand for utility, what is it?

Display maybe, like huge elk horns or very red bums on baboons? Yes, but that is a bit obvious is it not? What if sports cars were inexpensive? Would they still be desirable? Dune buggies were a type of response to this question, back in the fifties and sixties. One was advertising a life style rather than wealth. Ability, possibility, culture. There is a sports car culture, there are gatherings, and there are cults. However, beyond those activities, there is a signifier. Someone driving a convertible fast red thing signifies leisure, some wealth, and a fit to western culture. A link to all the others that have a name, that did the same in films or TV shows.

So, this on-the-surface-absurd artifact becomes more desirable, and more must be charged for it to remain so. It has value. It is important, more important than utility, wealth, or the things it signifies. It becomes a goal in itself, a life aspiration for some.

We all have external memories in the form of data, notes, pictures; external power and strength in the bank and in our wallets; and external body displays in the closet, the garage and on our heads. These are very important things. Are they the goal, the end, or is the end security, pleasure, environmental modification to suit ourselves? You tell me, I have to go get a haircut now.

Are you more important than your money?

From my flickr

A short time ago Leonard Cohen lost much of his money. He published a book of poetry and seems to be doing OK again. I think he is more important than his money. He has a name.

Donald Trump, in the 1980’s was purported to have said that a panhandler on the street was worth more than he was. Yes and no. Donald had his name to trade on.

Aristotle Onassis gave advice about how to get rich: buy an expensive suit and hang around posh parties. Make a name.

You can tell when money is more important than you are if it controls you. Hemingway said the rich were different, and he meant that the money was what guided their lives. Money can make you act in ways that are inhuman, simply to protect it, the abstraction of a number in the bank, that is not allowed to decrease, but must always increase. This is the danger. Making a name in something other than money, like Bill with software (maybe not a great example), is liberating, because the money will follow, not lead.

Soros is becoming a humanitarian, yet his name is associated with currency trading. He is trying to liberate himself. Bill too, with humanitarianism, and Warren Buffett of course. So rich guys sense that the money is more important than they are and try to use it to change that. It helps to have name recognition, for talent rather than for wealth, but the game is to make wealth accumulation look like talent, which is not always easy, since much of it depends on luck, leverage and ruthlessness. It is much more like being a general than an artist, and the field is full of opponents You can always be a patron of the arts and get it by proxy, but that is like being a john. No real love there.

Closer to home, there are the real-estate agents who convert heritage and land into abstract profit, and who are slowly eroding the material fabric of the city six percent at a time. The malaise of our town is that money is more important than anything. We do art on Sundays, but the meetings at the museum or at the library have more to do with operating expenses than with creation. And the old folks die, leaving their abstract numbers to their kids who leave to live in the bigger cities, and who sometimes come back to settle, buying old houses, tearing them down, or covering them with maintenance-free siding and giving six-percent to the real-estate agents who cover the town with their signs.