Disclaimer: This blog, Listics, and it’s predessors, including but not limited to Sandhill Trek rel. 2.0 and the original Sandhill Trek are not now associated with, nor have they ever been part of arcane movements such as runic revivalism, futharkh spelling, nor any other pan-Germanic proto-linguistic baffle-gab promoted by the likes of Guido von List.

The existence of such a person, a man with a suspiciously Italianate first name, had nothing to do with naming this blog Listics. Anyone who says otherwise is a cad and a bounder. While we here at Listics thoroughly approve of Herr (or should I say “signor?”) von List’s choice of facial hair styling and fabulous headgear, I must re-emphasize, that his relationships in the Germanic Paganism movement, the insidious influence of Blavatsky and her nest of Theosophists on his otherwise clear and noble Wotanist thinking, have nothing to do with the work we are trying to accomplish here at Listics.

But, while we had thought that Guido Karl Anton List was a far remove from any cultural avatars that may have influenced what passes for higher consciousness in these environs, we have now been proven wrong. American Romanticism has impelled our work from the beginning, romanticism combined with a sort of native “one lord, one faith, one cornbread” naturalism.

Yesterday, Chris Locke, in a shocking thrust at the heart of American culture sullied — yes SULLIED — the memory, the reputation of New England’s favorite sons, Henry David Thoreau and by extention Ralfualdo Emerson. If Locke is to be believed, then the entire literary history of the Romantic movement on these shores is tainted — yes TAINTED — by some sort of ur-Fascist elitism and a bourgeois individualism masking as egalitarian idealism but in reality sowing the seeds of authoritarian and ultimately autocratic dictatorial repression.

Of course, this could just be my own inference, a sort of guilt by association thing…

When I hear someone say, “Oh yeah, I’m spiritual, but not — you know — religious,” I am reminded of Father Rageboy’s first commandment, to wit:

Vapid and narcissistic are they who repeat the mantra “I’m spiritual but not religious.”

Kneeling for communion at the temple of rage I heard the priest intone, “Take, eat this you whitebread muthahfuckah… it’s nobody’s body, we’re spiritual here but not religious, it’s just a metaphor… whitebread, get it? Do you get it!? Whitebread schmuck.”

I could see why they called it the temple of rage. The temple of rage, of course was but one stop on my metaphysical journey. I also spent a great deal of time at Starbucks seeking the clarity of an open wireless connection. And the Crate and Barrel outlet store down on 4th Street in Berkeley. Williams of Sonoma on Union Square. Pottery Barn at better malls across America. Nordstroms. The Nature Company in its original location just outside the tunnel on the Alameda. Smith and Hawken in Mill Valley… Ahhh, hippie capitalism at its best. Plant materials from Berkeley Hort. Sensual massage at Esalen down in Big Sur. A house in Marin, good dope, identical twins… little scorpios in their tandem stroller and identical maple cribs.

Spiritual was I, and bourgeois to the max. Dining out in the gourmet ghetto, riding BART with a New York Times done up in a commuter’s fold. The Larkspur ferry before that. Double vodka martinis and rubber bridge all the way home. My partner had some kind of three way going with Kaiser and Bechtel… Libyan bauxite, French refractories, and the best Bechtel built nuclear reactors available for offshore construction. We kicked ass. I was way spiritual on the commute home in those days.

I could balance the bindle and the straw and horn in copious quantities of Bolivia’s best in rough seas off Angel Island and never drop a crumb on the floor of the head. “Head.” That’s ferry boat nautical for toilet.

Was I spiritual but not religious?

When Locke writes these condemnatory tracts linking Emerson through Nietzsche to Hitler and Corporatist emergent fascism founded in post-war Allied fervid religious gratitude and shit, I pale. Is it me? All these people I hung out with were heavy into the Urantia Book and all that crap. Is it mean spirited and hypocritical of me to admit that I was only there then for the dope and the music.

All I can say right now is that I was NEVER that spiritual. And by the time I got religious I was well on my way to informed atheism, so screw the guilt. I can sit back free of guilt and enjoy his explication of the spiritual left and the spiritual right and the undercurrents that unite them, informed and aware and in concert with the idea that there is a lot of denial present whenever spiritual fundamentals overtake reason, common-sense, and altruism, whether that spirituality is founded in religion or the bourgeois mysticism that is vapid narcissism.

Something is happening here and I know what it is, I’m jonesing for more truth.

Chris Locke points to the googler’s WorldCat extension… in your Google search precede a title with “find in a library” and the good Doctor Google will do just that.

Little bit of synchronicity here is that I just tumbled to Book Burro (hat tip to the “tech-teach,” Liz Lawley).

Book Burro is a Web 2.0 extension for Firefox and Flock. When it senses your are looking at a page that contains a book, it will overlay a small panel which when opened lists prices at online bookstores such as Amazon, Buy, Half (and many more) and whether the book is available at your library.

Book Burro is cool and it’s got that WorldCat integration too.

David Weinberger has opened a “markets are metaphors” contest, offering readers a chance to provide him with one liners in Maastricht where he’s offering the keynote speech at a conference called “Markets are conversations.”

Nothing will top Chris Locke’s “Markets are misheard lyrics,” but it’s a fun game to play anyway.

Doc says today,

One virtue I’ve seen in the programming world is a preference not to re-invent code that’s already doing a fine job.

Doc’s old friend, I mean former long time, not “old” as in decrepit because god knows I have a few years on both those boomer boys, but here’s my point… Doc’s colleague and Cluetrain co-author Chris Locke has been spreading this message himself for quite a while now in his role with Ken Krugler’s and Steve Larsen’s company, the vertical search leader Krugle. SearchInsider says that Krugle claims,

…developers spend 20 to 25 percent of their time looking for code and technical information…. Krugle crawls source code, whether in open repositories or within source code control systems.

Question:

Since Doc is one of the media heavyweights in open source, and open source is about code (source CODE, geddit?), why has he been so silent on the functionality, the utility, the need for a tool like Krugle? I can only find one reference that Doc made to Krugle last month in IT Garage (after an admittedly quick Google search). The product has launched, and during the beta period over 35,000 people, most of them developers, some of them — like me — simple souls in reckless pursuit of knowledge and understanding, have downloaded and used it and provided feedback. Unlike your perpetual beta web-too-oh! ad hockery, this tool was professionally designed, developed and released. It had a four month beta period and now it’s ready for prime time. So what do you think of it, Doc? What do the Linux folks have to say?

Check out Chris Locke’s amazing MySpace herpetarium construction.

…and here is the promised Snake Preview of Samuel Jackson as the Voice of God in the recent audio remix of the Holy Bible.

Today Doc Searls sent me a URL for the 35th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, delivered by author Tom Wolfe last week.

So begins a May 16 post on the Krugle blog by Chris Locke. I’ve admitted shame-facedly that I don’t use an aggregator. Even if I did, how could I possibly read everything of interest? I’m pleased to have run across this gem less than two weeks after Chris posted it, less than three weeks after the incomparable Tom Wolfe made his speech (even though it shows that I have been absent from the world live web and out of the conversation and so forth. Life ain’t no ice scream stand so don’t ’spect no scoop).

Chris’ post spins a tangent from the Wolfe speech, a tangent that vectors in on the topic of open access to refereed science publications. A few years ago, as a consultant engaged by the president of an East Coast land grant university, I ran across the bizarre electronic serials acquisition expense structure that prevented researchers at the University from sharing journals online through the University library that were acquired for their colleagues at a private lab, and vice versa. My sense of this was that the publishers had a profitable lock on what is essentially a niche market. I was familiar with software licensing schemes that are just as limiting and just as bizarre. The status aspects of library accessions hadn’t occurred to me until I read Wolfe’s piece, but now the importance of the leveling aspect of open access has been made quite clear!

And this clarity came to me through the linkage made by blogger Locke, the linkage to an open access publication, a scientific paper published in a manner that sets the entire status structure of scientific accessions librarians and their patrons on its ear. This may be way short of an epiphany, but it is a pleasant gestalt: the assemblage of Locke’s insights regarding open access publications, Wolfe’s status thing, and my own modest experience with a consummately bureacratic queen bee of a librarian and the scientist drones who fed her ego.

I had hoped my big “take-away’ from Wolfe’s address would be a good book. He touts Born Fighting by James Webb. So I went to Amazon, and after reading a little about the book, I’ve decided a novel about an old man with daughters and an elephant and a grove of ripening lula avocados will be more to my taste.

…and so to bed.

Locke opens the door a crack and we can see some introductory structure for the layers and layers of philosophy and ethics critique that he has been folding and rolling, buttering and folding and rolling, like some sort of literary phyllo dough at Mystic Bourgeoisie. He’ll never eat lunch in that town again.