"IN THE DEW of little things, the heart finds its morning." And I, born once upon a high noon in August under a lion's sign, roar amen. We'll meet again--all of you in whom I have taken root--in yet another sunrise soon... * * * IT'S BEEN A MONTH since I left the country and settled (temporarily, I hope) with my family in the heartland of America. Ah, the sweet sorrow of departure and the thrill of a new adventure! And, yes, the geyser of goodwill and the grace of friendship that I've been blessed with all along! It had been a whirl of beer binges and videoke, reunions with friends long missed, and poetry dedicated to me like a talisman for tracing my way back home soon (Thank you, dear ole' Temistokles Adlawan). Plus a toast from two kindred spirits whose beautiful minds and hearts will always be cherished. Read on, here's a reprint of two opinion columns from Mayette Q. Tabada and Ana Escalante-Neri:
Xman Redux
by MAYETTE Q. TABADA, Sun.Star Cebu, 13 May 2007
CHEAPSKATE that I am, the first thing I bought when I had something left over from my salary was this mobile phone. Inexpensive and simple, the new phone fit me, down to the longish time it took to unlock and the limited memory of my ancient SIM card.
As far as coexistence anxieties went, this new phone and I settled down in no time, except for a few days ago, when this infernal gadget went crazy.
Fumbling with the keypad, I panicked every time the phone tone indicated an incoming message. Each time, I feared the worst: my younger son finally swallowed his older brother and was regurgitating him out, with the pieces in odd order.
Every time, it was this and that writer asking if Myke was gone, had gone, was really, really gone.
Texting is really ideal only for thumbs that fly over the keypad and eviscerate nimbly the rules of English writing. It is not for technophobes that feel they have to use the shift key every time to begin a sentence with a capital letter; or leave a space after punctuations (two if a period).
Also, texting is just too bloody for explaining to the young, the heartbroken, the dreamers that the mentor they wrote for, imitated, drank with—heck, loved—had, as of 3 PM last Friday, taken off for an 18-hour flight with his two young sons and a pocket full of finger puppets to go home to his beloved Arlaine.
Thanks to Myke, my editor-on-leave, I discovered a facet of the phone I thought I knew: push the buttons too quickly and this unremarkable piece of plastic will rear its spirit and refuse to execute a command.
Toxic, my editor would have said, nodding his bangs sagely while smiling roguishly.
Yeah, everything’s toxic alright, Xman. Some just use the poison to make poetry.
I first worked with Myke U. Obenieta in 2000. Our group of writers and photographers were prowling in the firecracker-making countryside of Babag, Lapu-Lapu to catch children and minors assembling in the illegal trade.
It was my first special report but my heart was not in it. Why punish the victims? For Myke, his interest was not to expose and investigate; he wanted to listen to the stories woven by those small, nimble fingers before an accidental spark sent them flying all over the countryside.
 In the exacting world of journalism, Myke and I felt, more often than not, like mutants. In the backyards of Babag, we took to calling each other Xman, or “X-Man,” if according to Myke, as he was more straitlaced about grammar than I.
Over the years, in the newsroom or during coverage, we bumped into each other desultorily. I knew him better though as one of the most graceful editors to light up a classroom or a young writer’s dreams.
Some students stumble into writing because, caught between the devil and professors who believe in “publish or perish,” they have nowhere to go but into the roiling waters of the publishing world.
But the ones that grow into their craft have, hovering over their pens, not just Muses but angst-ministering angels and nurturing mutants. Until he finally made good on his travel plans last Friday, the Xman did not assign writers as go off with them on rambling, irreverent, offbeat, funny explorations of language, the movies, drinking, poetry, parenting, loving and other digressions that inexplicably fed the Craft.
For those unable to believe he has left, let me comfort you with Epictetus.
It’s not only because quoting some long-dead Greek confers the proper gravitas on leave-takings. The fellow is in one of the books left behind in the normal clutter of my editor’s desk.
This, as well as an oil-and-pastel painting of a ballet dancer, the communities of writers woven around his four scrupulously updated blogs, and the unfinished series of despedidas requiring at least half-a-year to complete, are portents that Myke has just stepped out and will, one afternoon, pop up to declare to us, day-shift stiffs: “Hi, beautiful people!”
* * *
Leavetaking by ANA ESCALANTE-NERI, Sun.Star Weekend Magazine, 25 April 2007
 IT IS HARD to write about someone who has left, but even harder to write for someone just about to leave when you imagine you could still venture the hope that they would stay. Offer a final argument against their departure. The ache is keener when you see what spaces remain occupied—his mess on his desk, blunt-tipped pencils in a mug, he on that chair where he’s sat in the lifetime of eight years—while knowing that a mere few, few days would empty all that.
There are only five days left, to be exact, before my Weekend editor Mr. Myke Obenieta leaves with his two boys for Kansas to join his wife Arlaine.
I am tempted to send him, in lieu of this column, something incoherent (uh, not that my columns aren’t) with twice the usual character requirement.
Or maybe I could be dramatic and turn in a blank page, tell him that would be enough to explain the great void we would all feel in his absence. Sniff, sniff. Choke, sob.
Or I could do the corny but heartfelt thing and write about his being more than an editor, but an occasional beer buddy, too, for whom I’ve offered to foot the bill only to find out when it was time to pay that I had not enough cash in my wallet—the only time we managed to laugh about not getting paid enough writing.
 A mentor, he was, as well, paneling in the two regional writing workshops I attended where he was the easiest of the bunch to forgive despite all his insulting comments on my poems….naw. He did no such thing. If anything, he’s been best at giving encouragement and good advice, literary or otherwise.
Perhaps what I can do is give some of that back, casual good advice, from one traveler to another?
Myke. Stuff your suitcase with the usual chicharon, otap, rosquillos, dried mangoes, pastillas, danggit. Our kababayans in the States are heartsick for those. They won’t mind your charging them quadruple their original price. Use profit from sales to tide you over until you find rich relatives to mooch money from during the first few months of your stay.
On the plane, when your two little men start to become a handful, think tranquilizer. Not for them, silly. For you. There should be at least three hundred other passengers on board anyway to keep an eye on them.
When you get there, don’t stop yourself from constantly calculating exchange rates. That way, you won’t have the heart to spend on anything, especially the little luxuries you never needed anyway when you were here. So when you come back home to Cebu, to us, to me, your favorite columnist, you could feel free to bore us with your stateside tales in an unnatural American accent if only because you’ve saved so much dolyares and could afford to buy us beer. If you spring for more than a couple, we might even pretend to be interested.
The important thing is coming home, at some point. Hopefully before the new Weekend editor recommends to fire me due to an attitude problem. A catty treatment from me. Uh, wait. Sorry to have to break it to you here, but I believe that position has been offered to me. Great news, right? You’re guaranteed a job when you return, and I get the chance to pay you back for all your kindness by offering you a tiny 300-worder space-filler under my editorship.
Meantime, ayo-ayo, Bai. Do enjoy your new adventure and give our regards to our fellow-poet Arlaine.
Wait, wait, a final thing. Don’t bring large bottles of toiletry in your hand-carry.
And your desk. Maybe don’t clear it.
Or clear it.
Or don’t.
Jun
13
2007
 IT'S BEEN A MONTH since I left the country and settle (temporarily, I hope)with my family in the heartland of America. "In the dew of little things, the heart finds its morning." And I, born once upon a high noon in August under a lion's sign, roar amen. We'll meet again, all of you for whom I have taken root, in yet another sunrise soon.
Ah, the sweet sorrow of departure and the thrill for a new adventure in an alien landscape! And, yes, the outpouring of goodwill and the grace of friendship that I've been blessed with all along! It had been a whirl of beer and videoke, reunions of friends long missed, and poetry dedicated to me like a talisman for tracing my way back home soon (Thank you, dear Temistokles Adlawan. Moreover, here's a toast from kindred spirit and colleague whose beautiful mind and heart will always be cherished. Here's a reprint of the opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (May 13, 2007 issue) by Mayette Q. Tabada:
Xman Redux
CHEAPSKATE that I am, the first thing I bought when I had something left over from my salary was this mobile phone.
Inexpensive and simple, the new phone fit me, down to the longish time it took to unlock and the limited memory of my ancient SIM card.
As far as coexistence anxieties went, this new phone and I settled down in no time, except for a few days ago, when this infernal gadget went crazy.
Fumbling with the keypad, I panicked every time the phone tone indicated an incoming message. Each time, I feared the worst: my younger son finally swallowed his older brother and was regurgitating him out, with the pieces in odd order.
Every time, it was this and that writer asking if Myke was gone, had gone, was really, really gone.
Texting is really ideal only for thumbs that fly over the keypad and eviscerate nimbly the rules of English writing. It is not for technophobes that feel they have to use the shift key every time to begin a sentence with a capital letter; or leave a space after punctuations (two if a period).
Also, texting is just too bloody for explaining to the young, the heartbroken, the dreamers that the mentor they wrote for, imitated, drank with—heck, loved—had, as of 3 PM last Friday, taken off for an 18-hour flight with his two young sons and a pocket full of finger puppets to go home to his beloved Arlaine.
Thanks to Myke, my editor-on-leave, I discovered a facet of the phone I thought I knew: push the buttons too quickly and this unremarkable piece of plastic will rear its spirit and refuse to execute a command.
Toxic, my editor would have said, nodding his bangs sagely while smiling roguishly.
Yeah, everything’s toxic alright, Xman. Some just use the poison to make poetry.
I first worked with Myke U. Obenieta in 2000. Our group of writers and photographers were prowling in the firecracker-making countryside of Babag, Lapu-Lapu to catch children and minors assembling in the illegal trade.
 It was my first special report but my heart was not in it. Why punish the victims? For Myke, his interest was not to expose and investigate; he wanted to listen to the stories woven by those small, nimble fingers before an accidental spark sent them flying all over the countryside.
In the exacting world of journalism, Myke and I felt, more often than not, like mutants. In the backyards of Babag, we took to calling each other Xman, or “X-Man,” if according to Myke, as he was more straitlaced about grammar than I.
Over the years, in the newsroom or during coverage, we bumped into each other desultorily. I knew him better though as one of the most graceful editors to light up a classroom or a young writer’s dreams.
Some students stumble into writing because, caught between the devil and professors who believe in “publish or perish,” they have nowhere to go but into the roiling waters of the publishing world.
But the ones that grow into their craft have, hovering over their pens, not just Muses but angst-ministering angels and nurturing mutants. Until he finally made good on his travel plans last Friday, the Xman did not assign writers as go off with them on rambling, irreverent, offbeat, funny explorations of language, the movies, drinking, poetry, parenting, loving and other digressions that inexplicably fed the Craft.
For those unable to believe he has left, let me comfort you with Epictetus.
It’s not only because quoting some long-dead Greek confers the proper gravitas on leave-takings. The fellow is in one of the books left behind in the normal clutter of my editor’s desk.
This, as well as an oil-and-pastel painting of a ballet dancer, the communities of writers woven around his four scrupulously updated blogs, and the unfinished series of despedidas requiring at least half-a-year to complete, are portents that Myke has just stepped out and will, one afternoon, pop up to declare to us, day-shift stiffs: “Hi, beautiful people!”
Apr
20
2007
ON THE VERGE of another adventure far beyond my comfort zone, and having faith in Graham Greene's words that "one's family is one's true country," what warmth to just let go and whirl about en route to raising more stakes in my proverbial place under the sun.  "In the dew of little things, the heart finds its morning." And I, born once upon a high noon in August under a lion's sign, roar amen. We'll meet again, all of you for whom I have taken root, in yet another sunrise soon.
Apr
20
2007
 ONE WOULD SUPPOSE, considering the constant grimace about successive grim topics such as politics and the forthcoming elections in this blog, that it's a fashion style to wear my wrinkles on my forehead. So when it seems like the remains of my hair and my cowlick are scraping on cobwebs and puncturing my thought balloons, it's such a relief to just shake the stress away with odds and ends of humor scoured along the way.
If the bottles are shaking after pounding your fist on the table to make a point in the face of your beer buddies, hereunder are handy quotables to quell the dissonance of reason and rigmarole in this election season when it looks like there's a conspiracy to make fools out of all of us. These hand-me-down quips, come to think of it, would be fine for grinning and bearing it all:
 I was born intelligent; education ruined me.
***
Practice makes perfect, but nobody's perfect. So why practice?
***
Since light travels faster than sound, people appear bright until you hear them speak.
***
The more you learn, the more you know, The more you know, the more you forget.The more you forget, the less you know. So why learn?
(And, hey, wouldn't it be cool if after seeing shirts emblazoned with a candidate's callus-fortified face, all of us thirsting and hungry for honest-to-goodness elections would witness our piss-worthy politicians wearing that shirt up there instead of the kagalanggalang (kuno) Barong Tagalong and Amerikana suits if ever--God forbid--they'd be voted again and souse themselves once more in the froth of power?)
Mar
23
2007
SOME GIRLS grow up ballsy, and become feminists. Which is fair enough in a world unduly and long ruled by chauvinists with ants in the pants about growing up.  Then again, when world domination sounds too macho out of the mouth of bra-burners--at the risk of transmogrifying themselves into bare-knuckle parodies or cracked mirror images of the "enemy"--it's such a relief when power struggle spawned by age-old inequality along gender lines gets straightened out loud and clear. Like this spunky and innocent certainty about that hole which has caused many a mighty man's downfall throughout history: "With this I'm going to control your LIFE!"
Other than victimization, vagina also alliterates well with victory.
That's downright the naked truth, or so agree lovers of Eve's daughters. And even without getting an earful of Ensler's many-splendoured monologues about that hallowed magnet of man's fascination, obsession and sometimes abuse, the message is simply easier to ascertain than finding the fabled G-spot: Whether you like it or not, we all--whether tyrant or wimp--came out of it!
Thumbs up, therefore, to the celebration of Women's Month.
Nov
19
2006
SOME blogger got me tagged for a ride en route to that netherworld of self-indulgence. So, take it or leave it, here goes the buzz from my upfront dialogue with the rear-view mirror: Which actor would best play you in the film of your life? Takeshi Kitano.
What would the title of your autobiography be? Still Grinning and Scratching My Head After All These Years
If you were a country, which one would you be? Italy by day, Japan by night
If your philosophy in life could be summarized on a car sticker, what would it say? Walking is better, but having a chaffeur is best.
If you could choose your own nickname, what would it be? Geez, this question’s Einstenian enough to rumple the remains of my hair!
If people used your name as a verb, what would it be for? For telling everyone not to take themselves too seriously
 If you had your 15 minutes of fame, what would it be for? For Scarlett Johannson to tell the paparazzi that it was me who devirginized her through mental telepathy
If you could be a fictional character, who would you be? Peter Pan. Or if I’d grow up, Zorba the Greek and Odysseus.
What three qualities in a woman would be essential for her to qualify as the love of your life? Hey, wanna meet my wife?
Which TV character do you most identify with? The voice-over in the commercials
How would you describe yourself in a lonely hearts ad? Thrives well in solitude. Envious of lighthouse keepers, librarians, carpenters, chefs, gardeners and landscape artists, and directors of blue movies. Addicted to beer. A frustrated guitarist and symphony conductor. Lured but scared of the sea. And, yes, I have a lifelong crush on Nora Aunor.
 If you could be an animal, what creature would you be? Pegasus
In what era do you belong? Way back where the air of innocence was struck with the soundtrack of such televised fares as Hawaii Five-O, Six-Million-Dollar Man and Superstar.
When someone asks you, What do you do? What would you like to be able to say? I aspire to be St. Augustine, thank you!
Which fashion designer epitomizes your sense of style? Would you haul me off to the nearest nudist colony, instead, please? What car would you be? I’d rather be a tartanilla hauled by Pegasus.
What season is most like you? Rainy, the sort that drives me and my kids outside in the downpour while my wife prepares arroz caldo or pancakes and hot chocolate in the kictchen.
Where are you in life’s swimming pool? In the deep or shallow end, floating, sinking, on the diving board or in the changing room? Swimming pool? Get real, life is either an ocean or a sewer.
 What song sums you up best? Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana because it sounds barbaric and heavenly at the same time
What flower would you be? Dama de noche, if not a nocturnal sunflower
What are your three best qualities? I remember. I celebrate. I believe. (Otherwise, I’d be damned!)
What three words would your detractors use about you? What three words would your friends use about you? Who do you agree with? Guess what? Reading the minds of my friends and foes alike is too presumptuous for my own comfort.
Which of the seven deadly sins are you most likely to commit? Lust and pride. (If not, I would be a saint.)
What famous person, past or present, would most enjoy your company? Bert “Tawa” Marcelo, because he laughed a lot whether he meant it or not. Plus the cool fact that he used to be an endorser of San Miguel beer. Swell!
Mar
06
2006
COMING TO TERMS with the cold, with its dark undertones, has been constant in my poetry. Here are variations on the theme, with a bit of revision since it first saw print on the pages of Philippine Graphic (8 April 1996) and the anthology Likhaan: Best of Philippine Poetry and Fiction 1997 (UP Press).ALL THE UNSUNG  They come wind-
willed, without a creak
from the rusty gate.
Those who went
are here again, shouting
for their shadows.
My breath clouds over
everything when I
call back. No more
the barking dogs. I
swing the windows wide
and wonder why
the sky lately looks
starved of stars. I
gather myself,
cold. I hear nothing
but birdbone stuck in
the wind's throat.SPECKS OF SEAI I remember, and the breathing of the drowned draws the ripples.
The waves drowse no more,
wobbling the boat while the wind
blows out the weathered hats
of fishers. I stand wordless at
the breakwater's edge and hear
the burst of spume. Storms recur
in my head. Now returns all
the shipwrecked. All the dead.  II
Flitting by are swarms of fishes.
In the coral within my skull skulks
the coelacanth and I, diving
deeper, peer at it, prying it loose.
As it surges off, unhooked,
my depth-deafened ears hear
the scabrous clarity of scales. I blink,
resurfacing in the eye of the surfs.
Only the remora remains, mossy
in the rustling waters of memory.
ADDRESSED TO A NAMELESS MARINER This is just to say how I envy the sea  gulls. Theirs is the blue of both sky and water
in one fell swoop while all I can see
are but the odds and ends of leavings: fishbones,
a litter of shells, stranded sargasso... Your bottled
letter found me among these ebbtide
souvenirs. On this usual shore. I stumbled,
tripping over it. Now I know the wind's a guide,
goading the waves on until even my feet
wavered, as when I hurled this missive, this
reply folded like a wing. May air ripple through it
like a sigh. This is just to say goodbye.
Feb
14
2006
 MY WIFE ARLAINE, teasing as ever, asked me yesterday if I have anything romantically surprising for her today. Lemme see, I winked. Last year, we spent our Valentine's Day trying to steer clear from the stampede of lovers out for a candle-lit dinner. So we deemed it more spectacular to hie off at the sidewalk near the Fuente Osmeña park. There, she could only chuckle as she watched me wolfing down a burpful of balut, my lips sluicing vinegar and salt. Less costly, less cliche.
Today, I risk getting a frown from her as I resort to going back to the basic, setting out to bring her a bouquet of orange and purple mums and a box of heart-shaped chocolates in motley colors. Trite, the mother of my two sons will tell me. But, as I'll retort with yet another wink, I know she'd hum along when I'll breeze through bits of a hackneyed song: The fundamental  things apply as time goes by...
And I will tell her, too, the words still hold true out of this first poem I wrote for her six years ago:
MUSING MY ONE TRUE POEM
Unless you come into me,
I have only the heart
of a blank page. The  beat
of metaphors tapping limp as the feet
of rain in the desert. The wreath
of smoke out of mirrors. The breath
of me disfigured of speech, spitting
shards or forking the words like a snake
from the pit of my tongue.
Until my touch becomes your second skin,
nothing can break you open or spurt
the seed of my silence into fruiting
the phrases only bees
and worms embrace. In the absence of words.
In the scent of flowers. In the flesh
of dreams where the dead can
teach me: To read with all ears the dance
of the shovel in a patch of paper
where a gardener burns the weeds
and a gravedigger whistles until
I can fill all that's hollow
and come into you.
Feb
14
2006
 WHAT'S LOVE IF it's not something to die or kill for?
On a day like this, when the air is suffused with sweetness and light while the call of commercialism whittles down the wilderness of the heart to a cozy cage of sentiments, passion is often given a short shrift. As if it were devoid of violence out of a wrenching away from the self-centered zone of comfort. As if its beauty and tenderness weren't always threatened by danger or pain and fear of losing.
Methinks nothing's worth loving unless it spawns inside us a ruthlessness to be reckless in pursuit of our private Eden. Yes, not until it smolders enough to ignite in us a purging compulsion to endure burning. Ah, that feeling of being killed softly. Something that most love songs gloss over, sad to say.
Against the overchewed and junk-food notions of romance, here's my poem slightly revised since its publication at the Sunday Inquirer Magazine (August 27, 2000) :
PRANDIAL PIECES
I'm at your banquet because wolves
are invited, hoping your heart
is on the plate.
A toast startles you. As if stars,
falling, shattered the wine glass
you're holding.
I'll wash with the wine your bloodied
hand until your eyes suffice
to drown me.
You say the dishes are almost cold.
I reply with a burp. Suddenly,
the knife drops.
A rodent slurps on my vomit. All I care
of etiquette is when hunger devours
the heartbeat.
Jan
20
2006
 SOME SQUIRM at the sight of spiders. Creepy, they say. Never mind if those crawlies are nowhere near the tarantula's level.
Then again, I'd stick my neck out to vouch for one of the world's most overlooked natural wonders, a perfect model for order and harmony, wrought out of such silken concentration worthy of a Zen master, with such craftmanship packed at once with lethal potency and fagility enough to give monks a run for their meditation, an ode to solitude: the spider's web.
No wonder, a character in Bergman's film Through a Glass Darkly had visions of God as a giant spider.
Caught in his own fantasy, my eldest son Golli (short for Gabriel Ollivan) thinks he is Spider-Man. God bless the power of imagination. Stuck myself in the web of my own flights of fancy, I hope he'd grow up to understand and empathize in due time his father's own thread of longing for fortitude and grace. Here's my first published poem (which I have recently revised since it was printed in the Philippines Free Press, 4 June 1994 issue) shortly after my creative writing fellowship at the 1994 National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete:
SPIDER SENSE
He thinks of how a spider makes its web, how the web is torn/ by people with brooms, insects, rapacious birds; how the spider/ rebuilds and rebuilds, until the wind takes the web and breaks it and flicks it into heaven's blue and innocent immensity.. - Stephen Dobyns
Windowing
the whiteness
of the wind,
the blind's incandescence
straight from the storm's eye as I
see a web, unspidered. 
Fled from the dead, I hear
the mourners in the living room chanting my name.
My shadow looms in a corner,
reaching for cobwebs while
a whorl of gossamer
whirls in my head, darkly,
lest they'd see me, skull-shaven
or with hairs graying in
the wee hours
of awareness.
Jan
17
2006
JACKPOTS happen like this: Just when boredom starts to kick in while you're idling through the mall, you spot a book sale. See what I got, scoured from the shelves in one of the stores at Robinson's Cebu. A handful of second-hand gems priced at 10 pesos each---whoa!---here are my first four book acquisitions in 2006:  Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Upon its publication in 1968, this book of essays confirmed Joan Didion as one of the most prominent writers on the literary scene. Her unblinking vision and deadpan tone have influenced subsequent generations of reporters and essayists, changing our expectations of style, voice, and the artistic possibilities of nonfiction. "In her portraits of people," The New York Times Book Review wrote, "Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naïve acid-trippers, left-wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful....A rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country." Herzog. Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow's "Herzog" received the International Literary Prize in 1965; the story of Moses E. Herzog, a confused intellectual suffering from the breakup of his second marriage, the failure of his life and the specter of growing up Jewish in the middle part of the 20th century. All God's Dangers. This triumphant National Book Award recipient assembled from the 84-year-old sharecropper's oral reminiscences is the plain-spoken story of an "over-average" man who witnessed wrenching changes in the lives of Southern black people – and whose unassuming courage helped bring those changes about. "There are only a few American autobiographies of surpassing greatness....Now there is another one, Nate Shaw's," raves The New York Times. "When, finally, this big book is put down, one feels exhilarated," agrees Studs Terkel. "This is an anthem to human endurance."
 The Soul of a New Machine. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and selected by the Modern Library as one of the100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century. Computers have changed since 1981, when Tracy Kidder indelibly recorded the drama, comedy, and excitement of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market. What has changed little, however, is computer culture: the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the mystique of programmers, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations. By tracing computer culture to its roots, by exploring the "soul" of the "machine" that has revolutionized the world, Kidder succeeds as no other writer has done in capturing the essential spirit of the computer age.
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