(fleeting)

I’ve been reassessing my “Finished” program, and I think it’s time to make a few changes.

First, I’ve long been aware that I tend to re-read books in the fall more than I read new books, so I am anticipating a decrease in my willingness to tackle new work. I’ll still be reading some new/unfinished things, but not at the expense of re-reads.

Also, I feel as though I have achieved the root reason for doing this: my poetry TBR shelf is now just over a third of what it was at the end of 2018.

And instead of weekly updates, I’ll be going back to a monthly update, like I did in April. And maybe I’ll finally find some time to write a few more “hot takes.” So, this will be the last update until the end of September.

Boiler Room is located in the basement – sorry, garden view level – of The Castleton, a red-brick, pre-war apartment building in Stevens Square in Minneapolis.

(I know this building well. Nearly thirty years ago, an old friend used to live in an apartment just through the ceiling and across the hall from where I’m sitting right now. Nearly all the songs I wrote or co-wrote with him during the four years he lived there were recorded in that apartment on his Yamaha cassette 4-track as we hunched over our SM-58s. I was so much older then…)

The coffeeshop is very comfortable, and larger than it looks at first. A scattering of tables; several booths at one end, couches and an Ikea shelf packed with books and board games at the other. Dispite seeming almost empty, with a weekday siesta vibe, I gradually noticed there was a constant flow of people getting to-go orders. Boiler Room may roast their own coffee, and if so, they know what they’re doing. Their house blend was smooth, rich, and sweet.

Okay. Since this is the first of what I hope will be many posts about coffee and coffeeshops, I need to mention a few things.

First, I am absolutely not a coffee snob. I will happily drink any kind of coffee, from single-estate pour-over to truck-stop robusta. I can obviously taste the difference; I let my surroundings inform my palate. How we define something is always a matter of context. My at-home morning coffee has been exactly the same for nearly eighteen years, but if I’m out somewhere and they serve coffee, I’ll drink it, whatever it is — usually black, but sometimes light & sweet. Dark roast, light roast. Whatever.

Second, if I stop in at a place that I really dislike, you’re probably not going to hear much about it. A nice place with meh coffee is one thing, but if it’s a deeply inhospitable or uncomfortable space, I probably won’t waste my words or your reading time on it. Life is too short for that kind of negative shit. This is just a blog, this isn’t Yelp. Besides, I think there’s something much more compelling about hearing someone’s positive impression of something you may dislike, than hearing someone’s negative impression of something you like.

And third, I have no intention of trying to visit a different place every day for a month or anything like that, so please temper your disappointment when there isn’t another coffee post tomorrow.

All right then.

Here are some pictures, and I’ll be back with another coffeeshop visit soon, hopefully with a lot more coffeeshop and a lot less meta.

Robert Bringhurst says somewhere: “Letters are things, not pictures of things.” Letters are therefore free from conceptual associations, which leaves them open to stand in for any sound without being contaminated, manipulated, or warped by an idea that might otherwise have accreted to it.

And like letterforms, words are simultaneously specific and open in very particular ways — and often in exactly the opposite way that pictures or pictograms are. Letters and words encourage metaphorical thinking, whereas pictures limit or even stifle it.

Walter Ong talks about what is called “secondary orality:” driven by widespread electronic media such as radio, television, telephones, recordings, computers, etc, our typographic, literate society has shifted towards some of the key features of primary oral communication: participatory, communal, formulaic, and with a focus on the present moment.

Also, it’s crucial to remember that “secondary orality” differs dramatically from primary orality in its “self-consciously informal style, since typographic folk believe that oral exchange should normally be informal ([whereas] oral folk believe it should normally be formal)…” (Ong: Orality & Literacy, p.136).

So, from this point of view, an iMessage exchange and, say, a CD of a live jazz concert actually bear many surprising similarities. And despite their strong “oral” characteristics, neither the iMessage convo nor the live CD (not to mention a podcast about analphabetic symbols!) could have existed without the centuries of alphabet/script culture, followed by several more centuries of dramatic formalization of literacy and the explosion of print culture in the last 500ish years, with its “domestication” of sound…

All of this is to say: we are living in an era so dominated by secondary orality that it’s virtually impossible for most of us to understand why words are so overwhelmingly better for communication than emoji are — not to mention how difficult it is to grasp just how meaningless we’d find modern emoji without the preceding three or four millennia of alphabetic writing.

And so we end up like a person who stops washing their hands because they haven’t gotten sick in a years — or who doesn’t see the point of vaccines because their utility, efficacy, and ubiquity has faded so utterly into the background, and are therefore susceptible to the absurd idea that vaccines are irrelevant or even deleterious.