sw00258a-gre1984june09uf

How Graduate Record Exam
 Altered My Life

 In June of 1982 Janice (my companion wife) and I
 moved into Gainesville, Florida, as I was preparing
 to begin working as a new night auditor at Holiday
 Inn-West.  Within the next two years I took two
 computer courses, one computer math course, 
 and two other courses, one of which was a basic
 accounting course, at Santa Fe Community College.
 One fellow co-worker urged me to seek a degree in
 Accounting.  Accounting was not at all a discipline
 I was interested in, but I thought it worthwhile to
 give it a try.  Doing so meant I needed to study for,
 take, and score high enough on a GRE.  As I began
 readying for that exam a latent interest in mathematics
 moved me to swerve from my central interests: poem-
 making, poetics, and literary criticism.  
 -
 Last week I borrowed Harold Bloom's The Best
 Poems of the English Language from a library here
 in Springfield, Missouri.  That act led me to do a search
 which took me to Trevor Dodge's site where, because
 of that social philosopher's recent death, I first became
 aware of Jean Baudrillard.  I sent an email to Mr. Dodge
 who emailed back.  He suggested going to Wikipedia as
 a fair amount of Baudrillard information is available there.
 He also said that if I do read any of Baudrillard's works
 I should initially read Simulacra and Simulations.  I,
 unlike many others, do not believe in coincidences.  Well--
 that deep (sometimes dry) subject--I am in the habit of 
 linking to Silliman's Blog every few days.  Not many hours
 ago was the last time I was there, and the first entry I saw
 and began to read/ shortly made me suspect I was heading
 into a lengthy discourse and that--though his name had/ not
 yet appeared--it was somehow in its Cyborg focus going
 to center on Jean Baudrillard; and when it did, I thought:
 how could Silliman have engendered this so quickly.  Well,
 again, he didn't, at least not recently.  It's the transcript of
 a talk he gave at the University of Montana in 1989.  Even
 so, the fact it was there when it was on his Blog unhinged
 me a bit, just as did Baudrillard's remark about America--
 which I moments ago found via a search--being "the only
 remaining primitive society".
 -
So, out of this, what?  Baudrillard says: "a copy of a copy 
of a copy" and Silliman says: "I'm a poet."  If there is any
reality at all, wherein is it; and to what degree is it there?
Roarshock:  If I think of "blast it all", I think of Hiroshima,
and "culpa, culpa, mea maxima culpa"; if I think of "bite
me", I think of blood and certain dogs.  Reality: is it that
you want?  I'm here to tell you that a couple of falls on 
my epileptic head told me a thing or two about reality.


 - - -

 03 12 07 - further remarks
---------------------------
 There is centrally more in Silliman's talk 
 than my comments on it indicate.
 -
 If we aren't alive in a real world,
 perhaps we're alive in a reeling world.

 If you think confusion abounds now,
 just wait till the nano zillions zing zing.

 One day maybe those few humans yet alive
 will seek salvation in interstellar time capsules.



Brian A. J. Salchert