This book focuses on the contribution of Morse's colleagues and employees to the creation of the Test Telegraph, specifically those of Ezra Cornell and Joseph Henry. The book views Morse primarily as a businessman and consolidator of ideas rather than conflicts between Morese and his associates and his effort to present a finished, uniform system under his sole imprimatur. The bulk of the material addresses three periods in Morse's life: his visit to Albany in 1823, the period leading up to and just after the creation of the Baltimore-Washington test line in 1844 and the 1860 renewal of the Magnetic Relay. The battle between Morse and Cornell over the invention of the Magnetic Relay forms a central conflict in the drama. What emerges is a complex portrait of ambitious and brilliant men and the age in which they lived.

Part I of this collection are stories written just after the author's (brief) stint at Cornell University -- (with the exception of 'Execution', which was written much later). 'They are presented in chronological order as best I can remember and of such diverse styles as to seem to resist even the simple act of collating them into a book in any other logical manner. Suffice it to say this was a period of experimentation in many ways. The attentive reader will be easily able to comprehend the reasons that the styles are so diverse. Part II are more modern stories composed mostly as short pieces presented first on blogs and social media. Part III are poems dating from when I was 14 years old to the present. The longest is 'Brian Bluehand' which was composed while attending Ithaca College.

The American West was transformed not only with the gun but with the moral imagination and if the latter becomes crippled or atrophied thru disuse and therefore incapable of defining the new physical spaces we come to inhabit, it may seek to expand those boundaries by inflating itself with darker and more mercenary forces. We learn only then what physical and emotional lines we are willing to cross. Our characters not only navigate the uncharted, sometimes brutal waters of the Pacific but the shifting boundaries of both the physical and moral imaginations.
This compellingly well-written novel of the post-gold-rush American West takes place primarily on the coastal waters off California and Washington and revolves around some of the members of the U.S. Coastal Survey. Our pro/anti-tagonist, a lowly ship's steward, lurks among the scientists, artists and engineers, tracing his own path of iconic creative/destruction learning that individuals who seek a rational existence outside the sphere of society's standards find themselves progressively marginalized until their actions seem to become the equivalent of and indistinguishable from irrationality. Their only true rationale may be found in the commission of further crimes. It is the utterly convincing rationality of Mandelbrot Feuerstool's irrationality that makes him such an intriguing character.
Feuerstool's disaffection with conventional standards and morality begins with a trivial disagreement with the Captain of the "Active," John Alden, over the ship's milk ration which occurs in the context of the shipboard suicide of the Captain of the sister ship " U.S.C.S. Ewing," Archibald MacRae, and it is the former not the latter that seems to preoccupy the mind of Captain, John Alden. Subjected to the inevitable suspicions of his shipmates for witnessing the shipboard suicide, Feuerstool finally jumps ship to pursue his fortune ashore like the rest of the population. He is then paradoxically even more adrift both physically and mentally; Unable to map the boundaries of his existence he will seek his answer and illumination in the commission of yet (another?) murder, -- and then another as he acquires a talent for this gruesome form of dialectic.
Pursued by demons real and imagined, he reaches the perhaps despicable conclusion that one is always left with the option of accepting the punishment and judgment of others while rejecting the basis of that judgment. For those who take moral responsibility into their own hands in this way it becomes their obligation to determine whether those most responsible for meting out his punishment are seeking justice or so blindly committed to retribution that they therefore become in the end more inherently heinous and short-sighted, --and more dangerous than those they seek to pursue, prosecute and punish.
We are mere spectators to the transformation that the work of the survey unwittingly works on the character of the West but there is a corresponding unwilled but also inevitably amoral transformation of Feuerstool himself, --but into what?
He is being pursued by T.N. Machin. Machin had been pursuing Feuerstool for the alleged murder of his prospecting partner Kirlew Hume committed on an Indian sacred site when he is elected to the California Assembly. His choice is whether to continue his pursuit or abandon it and take up his public post. Increasingly this choice hinges on his waning ability to make sense of the crime, (realizing there are consequences also for those who either abandon or defer the pursuit of justice).
Like the west itself, the characters do not reach out to welcome judgment but rather evade it. Like T.N. Machin, the reader must determine for themselves why and if the search for meaning and justice must be continued. Feuerstool may be forced to sound the depths and limits of his own rather fluid morality in creating for himself the form of his own retribu