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The Amazon Kindle DX is a beautiful device. Its design is user-friendly, intuitive and cohesive. It is clean-edged, minimal and thinner than many major magazines. Its format size is comfortable and makes tactile sense; it feels like something you hold in order to read, giving it a useful aesthetic kinship to books or magazines, a vast improvement on smaller e-reading devices. It is, in point of fact, far more comfortable than planting yourself in front of a computer monitor to read large amounts of text.

The Financial Times is the latest publication to weigh in on mounting expectations that Apple will release a touchscreen tablet computer this fall. There are rumors the computer maker is hoping to counter the rise of cheap netbooks with something lower-cost than their standard Macs and with a larger screen based on the model of the iPod Touch and the iPhone. The news could mean a breakthrough in personal computing standards and even portability of the workplace.

American journalism has lost one of its elder statesmen. Walter Cronkite was one of the founding fathers of broadcast journalism, pioneering a warm, conversational style for delivering facts with detachment and gravitas. The old-style newsman delivered news to the American viewing public about John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the protests of the 1960s, the Moon landing (40 years ago Monday), Watergate and other major moments of crisis and achievement.

libertad aquella musa
aquel ritual de autodesconcepción
el reto que guía o confunde
siguiendo líneas que no vemos
finos hilos de ópalo y vapor
matriz y desvergüenza…

We must, in this age of integration and complexity, work to recognize those areas where we can learn from cultures that build into our own, that enrich or sustain us, that give humanity, broadly, its metaphysical sense, its creative-adaptable quality. We know France as a place of great culture and profound philosophical insights and a highly developed legal system. But we tend not to think of France as a country whose most famous culture is simply one of many that came to dominate, and very really did stamp out the other cultures competing for survival, in a fractious agrarian society outside the capital, in the 19th century.

Poetry is the frontier where language in use comes in contact with future meaning, and in the process, when best executed, brings a wealth of transcendent truths into the present. Poetry is relevant to all uses of language, though there may be trends that suggest popular culture is looking to new forms of poetic activity to replace specific old models: many musical artists now play the role of mythic historian or wandering troubadour, but poetry is not confined to these purposes.

Knowledge is wealth in its purest form, fully possessed by and inseparable from the individual. As noted in previous sections of this essay, the application of deliberately obtained knowledge to complex situations establishes the sovereignty of the individual. Variety is wealth insofar as it offers an array of options which may be combined in countless ways to confront the problems of living in the world. Variety in knowledge offers adaptability, and adaptability is the key to survival and prosperity at all levels. Ultimately, resilience, rooted in such flexibility, is the real meaning or value of wealth, of any kind.

It is often lamented that the United States suffers from a culture that plays to the “lowest common denominator”, even as it gathers its collective urges to proclaim the loftiest of philosophical aspirations. So we are forced, as citizens, as intellectuals, as free spirits —as followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson or of Kerouac, Jerry Springer or Madonna, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.— to grapple with the argument that American culture is inherently “anti-intellectual”, and therefore unable to deal with overtly complex thought patterns, or convoluted, multiply parenthetical (or as Woody Allen might say it, polymorphously nested) sorts of syntax.

We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers.

¿Sabemos sobre qué terreno pisamos, qué fundamento se levanta debajo de nuestros pies para darnos lugar? si las palabras tienen un peso variable incluso en el momento en que se dicen, y cuál es el trasfondo de esa variación? o sea, qué mensaje escondido pueda haber en la energía que conllevan y dejan caer sobre nuestra percepción de la realidad? sabemos, acaso, si hay significado alguno ni constancia en la forma que elegimos para expresarnos, si tal vez vayamos construyendo dos historias a la vez, la que nos sirve ver en el momento y la que veremos con tiempo, cuando otro significado nos sirve de una manera más completa…

máscara de matiz y de vidrio
r e m o t a i n c i s i v a t r i s t e y a p t a
te matizamos queriendo ir más allá
entre las angustias —y soberbias— y humildades
más implacables
con pies que no andan
que son glándulas de mitología
de esmeraldas que cerebrales nievan
s o b r e n i e v e s s i n f i n . . .

Nada es estable, todo es por decisión : solemos pensar que las circunstancias nos exculpan de la problemática de la decisión, que “no tenía opción” o “no había remedio”, que “no tuve la situación adecuada”, como si vivir en lo óptimo fuera un derecho, y cuando llega a tanto, ya hemos ido bastante lejos en nuestras expectativas…