The Great Concavity

Dallas to Nashville 12/12/11

2011-12-14T22:51:00.003-05:00

When departing Dallas, you should plan a route that clears the Dallas-Fort-Worth-Metropolitan Axis as rapidly as possible, like escaping the gravity well of a dying star or the blast radius of a dirty bomb. Then begin travelling in the direction of your destination.

From the interstate, 90% of America is effectively the same hedgerow, interspersed with the same strip mall. I suspect strip mall architecture, like the 747 and the BSD kernel, is one of those mid-twentieth century engineering stop-gap measures that has seamlessly slid from temporary stand-in to workhorse to cultural motif.

The highway interchange connecting Houston to Texarkana smells like cabbage and natural gas. Surely no one is surprised by this.

Arkansas is bigger than you expect it to be. It might be a tardis.

The nickname of Arkansas is "the Natural State." In the sort of ironic move one expects of the United States, it has devoted its southern half almost entirely to poorly regulated heavy industry.

There is a young man in Little Rock driving a Honda Prelude that must be a full decade older than himself. At the remarkable, seemingly impossible, speed of ninety-five miles an hour, its heavily modified and egregiously abused exhaust system emits a brutal, death metal vocal solo sound like a buzzsaw being mounted by an amorous yak.

Walt Whitman and I love this young man quite tenderly, and we admire his courage, even if it is born of ignorance.

Somewhere in the Arkansas alluvial plain, there is a place where massive aerials and giant steel signs bearing the ancient brand XXX sprout. They bloom in the same shade of red. There may have been some cross pollination. Please don't touch your dials.

Tennessee smells of paraffin.

In which I pretend to be Carver 2

2011-12-04T00:03:00.003-05:00

"Anyway," she says, "I should go. Work tomorrow"

"So what," I say, "it's seven."

"Seven there," she says, "ten here, and Dan just got the baby to sleep and he hardly ever sleeps."

The baby.

"Get some rest, be well." I say. She hangs up.

I open another beer and stare out into the rain. The drops hit the wet concrete of the alley behind my place and flash like sparks in the streetlight. Like static on the untuned screen of reality.

I think about the path of each drop falling to the pavement. Once, I heard on public television that things only happen the way they do because we see them the way they are. That somehow everything that could happen has, that there are other universes where the static pattern of rain drops I'm looking at is different, because the drops all fell a different way. Public television said that all those other universes are only a tiny distance away from us, but the direction to them is one we can't ever see. It's hidden down deep in the world, smaller than we can know.

There are other versions of me, I think, looking at other patterns of rain. Near to me as my own blood.

I wonder if I stare at the rain long enough, the pattern might shift without me knowing it, might switch over to some other scrambled channel.

I stare for a long while.

Moment(um) 6

2011-11-22T00:29:00.002-05:00

Early winter. Elmira, New York.

I am bored because I am the only one of the dozen or so underpaid English instructors working at Elmira college to actually live in the city of Elmira, a tiny rust belt speck industry forgot sometime in the seventies. Everyone with any sense lives in Ithaca, 45 minutes up the road, where there are coffee shops and used bookstores and vegans and poetry readings.

Elmira actually has an amazing jazz club, but I don't know this. I won't learn this until I long after I leave, when my father takes me to see a set a friend of his is playing there.

It is a great set, but that is another moment.

For now I am bored and wandering around a Barnes and Noble. It is fluorescent and blandly comfortable. It does not smell of musty paper or contain any hidden treasures or host a cat, as an Ithaca book store might. No one has put up posters advertising crystal healing or a jam band. There are just crisp, new books and rows and rows of those identical dark green Barnes and Nobel chairs overstuffed chairs.

I am in one of the chairs. I don't remember how I got there. I am completely caught up in reading, for the first time, The Great Gatsby.

I suppose it is somewhat scandalous that I did not read The Great Gatsby until after I had already earned a graduate degree in English.

This moment is a long blur once I begin reading. I barely put the book down. I finish half of the slender trade paperback there in the overstuffed chair at the Barnes and Noble, realize I am hungry, stumble to the front of the store, pay for the book, move to a Wendy's across the parking lot, order a burger and fries, and keep reading. I devour Gatsby and a number one combo with a diet coke there in the red booth of the Wendy's, occasionally looking up to see sparse snow falling, the headlights of the few other shoppers leaving the mall.

There is a power in this. A freedom. I have the book, the burger and fries. I do not need coffee shops, jam bands, healers, fashionable people, bars. I have imposed on myself a tiny apocalypse. There is finally time.

Moment(um) 5

2011-11-14T00:20:00.003-05:00

It is now.

Or as near to now as could possibly matter.

I am on my way back from the CVS down the street from my apartment, a bag of last minute groceries in hand. I am in Dallas and the night is mild and the avenues are wide and hostile to pedestrian life.

I remember the runs I would make like this to the Giant grocery around the corner from my apartment in Binghamton, when having a place of my own, answering to myself, was still novel. When being able to go and grab rolls or soda or an order of fried dumplings whenever I wanted was still a thrill.

But that was nine years and four cites ago. That block is almost a thousand miles away and the Giant chain of groceries doesn't even exist anymore. No more TV jingle, "See you at the Gi-ant!"

All that gone, and here I am with the groceries again.

Moment(um) 4

2011-11-09T22:45:00.005-05:00

It is late summer and I am driving back to Atlanta for work after visiting friends in Ohio. I am stuck in traffic in Cincinnati in an old Buick LeSabre. The AC is busted and I have the windows rolled down. The late afternoon sun bounces through the cement of the city in a diffuse cathode glow. There is a high school just off the highway, and a football team has taken the field for late afternoon practice. Their white helmets are lightbulb bright against the dark blue and red practice jerseys, the dull brown of the tired field. When traffic finally stops completely, I watch them run plays up and down the field.

Two long legged high school girls: one tall with a red ponytail bobbing along behind her, the other slight and brunette, are running together around the red-orange track on the perimeter of the football field. They have the track to themselves, running lazy circles around the boys of the team. While I sit in traffic on the highway, I wonder what this moment is like for the two of them. Perhaps one has a boyfriend on the team? Maybe they are checking the boys out, or looking to be checked out themselves? Maybe the reverse is possible, and they are resentful of being objectified and gawked at? Maybe they are totally oblivious, just out for a run in the afternoon breeze, unconcerned with football players or bored old men stuck up on the freeway?

Traffic starts and I leave them all behind. They have youth and the afternoon. I envy them that.

Moment(um) 3

2011-11-09T22:03:00.005-05:00

It is Easter of my freshman year of college. I am sprawled across one of those double beds you make by pushing two little dorm beds together in a friendly huddle of non-observant Jews and out-of-state students. I can feel the seam of the bed in my back, beneath the cheap comforter. We are all smashed on Manischewitz. I prop myself up against the cinder block wall and take a sticky sweet sip of it from a plastic cup. It is just getting dark. I am amazed it is still light out, I have never been drunk in the afternoon before. The game has been truth or dare for hours now.

A few minutes ago, in retribution for my repeatedly inflicting a truly juvenile lesbian kiss dare on her and her roommate, one of the girls down the hall dared me to kiss Brian.

I did so and found, much to my surprise, that it was entirely unremarkable. Neither arousing nor disgusting. Years later, I will cause my friend Steven to stagger back in shock, simply by giving him a peck on the lips. This moment will make me feel powerful and fearless.

Now I am basking in the magic of the afternoon's affection. It is my turn. I call out "I dare everyone to kiss me!" And I push off the wall and work my way through the huddle, kissing each in turn. Last to go is Vicky and when I lean in she is laughing so hard our teeth clink off each other, like tapped glasses.

"That wasn't very good," she chides me. Her boyfriend's turn is next.

He thinks for a minute, "that wasn't a nice thing to say," he scolds her, "kiss him again."

"Really," she arches an eyebrow. He nods. She looks at him, then at me, smoldering.

And then her tongue is in my mouth, supple and soft as velvet and tasting of grapes.

The game switches to truth then.

I won't have another kiss like that for years.

Moment(um) 2

2011-11-08T20:46:00.003-05:00

It is election day, 2004. I am driving across the Water Street bridge in Elmira, crossing the Chemung on my way from a south side polling station to a north side polling station. I have been awake for the last 44 hours, dropping literature, preparing canvasses, and now checking polling places for turnout information. A stack of poll watcher certificates flutters in the breeze on the passenger seat of my Taurus. They make me feel incredibly important. The day is cool and kind, with a high pale overcast. The sun is a glowing smudge, like someone crushed a lightening bug against the sky. I hear Bob Edwards voice on the radio, reporting that turnout is unexpectedly high. A Kerry campaign official confidently asserts that they are on track to win.

Everything, I think, is still in the balance.

Moment(um) 1

2011-11-08T20:09:00.005-05:00

It is mid-November, the fall of my first year in grad school. I am walking across the railroad tracks from her apartment to mine. I'm in a long sleeved shirt, hands dug into my jeans pockets. Walking in the cold has a sort of macho appeal. The weight of the semester is finally off me. I blow out a long breath for the sheer joy of seeing in billow out in a cloud in front of me. It is snowing the first snow of the year, a thin coat of heavy, wet stuff. Snow like buttercream. I am wearing Chuck Taylors and even the hundred yard walk from her place to mine is enough to soak the soles through. My feet are freezing.

I still have yet to learn to wear boots in the winter.

I do not yet know that she's been seeing her boyfriend back home all along.

I can't guess that I'm about to see her for the last time.

I can hear her little Ford Escort pull out into the street behind me. She's driving home to Kentucky for Christmas. She catches up to me just as I'm crossing the tracks and I wave for her to stop. I walk around to the drivers side, there in the middle of the street. There is no traffic, the whole town has gone home for Christmas. She rolls down the window, looks up at me with those impossible green eyes.

"What?" she asks, exasperated.

I lean in, and kiss her, just once, snow melting between us and the cold smell of winter cutting the floral laundry detergent on her coat.

"Just that," I say, and then I keep walking. I am sure that this is the coolest thing I have ever done.

I might just have been right.

I never see her again.

Why I cringe when someone says "Human Nature"

2011-10-24T22:00:00.002-04:00

It's not because such a thing couldn't exist, it almost certainly does. There is nothing magic about our species, after all, we are just a strange electric topology that dreams. No, I cringe at the phrase because it's forever bandied about as if "human nature" could be contained in a slogan, an axiom, maybe a philosophy. This is absurd. Human nature is the novel of novels, the story of billions of people over the course of thousands of years. It is the phase space of every story ever written.

Seattle 2011 Part 2

2011-10-14T23:40:00.002-04:00

Seattle is like Ithaca New York with an industrial base, ten times the population, and access to a major body of salt water and a mountain range.

I spent all afternoon walking along the waterfront. At one point, this pair of tall young women were walking along the same route I was. We were both stopping to look at the sound, or down at the sea stars in the surf, and so we'd overtake each other from time to time. At one point, as they overtook me, I heard the blond one say to her brunette friend, "I mean, I like cheese, but I don't understand why *you* like cheese."

I almost said something at that point, but I'm pretty sure they'd noticed me, and it seemed weird.

Seattle 2011

2011-10-13T23:18:00.002-04:00

So, I'm drinking beer in the Holiday Inn hotel bar in Seattle. Don't ask me how I always end up in these places, I once spent 72 hours in Copenhagen and ate half my meals at the shawarma stand in the train station. What can I say, sandwiches were cheap, left me more money for Tuborg.

Anyway, I'm in this Holiday Inn bar. Food is awful. Beer is good, some sort of local pale ale. This bottle blond waitress in a navy blue work shirt is putting up fake cobwebs and orange Christmas lights for Halloween. That sort of place. I'm watching the National League Playoffs on one of the flatscreens. I only watch baseball in the post season because it lets me play politics by proxy via sport. I cheer for leftist cities over conservative cities, free states over right to work states, and teams without unholy amounts of money over the Yankees.

But really, I'm not watching baseball. I mean, I'm looking at the TV but I'm paying attention to two or three conversations going on in the bar. An older woman in a red sweatshirt is kind of sort of flirting with this guy sitting next to her, while her husband looks on. It's nothing really, just the way married people sometimes get sometimes when they want someone new to talk to. She puts her hand on his elbow when she gets up to go to the bathroom. At least, I think she does. I'm trying not to look, and frankly, my peripheral vision is shit in these glasses.

And this kid in the table in the back corner is just killing. He's got friends, and family too I guess, just packed in back there and he's got them all around his little finger. He launches in to some story about how he got cut off from ordering drinks on the flight out here. "I step out of the bathroom," he says, "and the stewardess is waiting for me, and she tells me, 'I can't serve you anymore, we've had complaints'" and then he waits, just this perfect beat before he goes on, "and I'm like, 'FROM THE WHOLE PLANE?'" His voice cracks at the end. The whole booth howls with laughter. I've had nights like his. I know he'll be trying to get that beat just right the next 4 times he tells that story, and it will never be right, he'll try like mad to get it back and it will never quite be right. Sorry kid, guess that's why we aren't professionals.

In which I pretend to be Carver

2011-10-10T23:10:00.002-04:00

Sometimes, I still call her up.

When she picks up, I say "I feel like we're all living too much in our heads now, too much in our screens. I'd be happier if I could get in touch with the real world again. Maybe work with my hands. Maybe cook."

"You were never any good with your hands," she says.

"That's cold," I say.

"I didn't mean it like that," she says, and I can hear her smile a little and that makes me feel good, but then she goes on, "I mean you could never cook. Not seriously. Remember that time you stuck yourself with a knife? You're too blunt, all thumbs."

I think about it for a minute, then I say, "it's not me that's blunt, its the world."

"Yeah," she says, "I guess that's about right."

The line is very quiet. You can't hear a dead telephone anymore. I'm not sure I can really remember when you could. How can you tell if a thing like that exists at all, if you can't even hear it hiss?

"You still there?" I ask.

"I guess," she says.

When Rain

2011-10-10T00:05:00.002-04:00

I will remember the sky here.

When rain finally comes,

the air itself glows

like some cliche about a pregnant mother.

During the day,

the glow was storm light

but now, Dallas night light

paints sprinting low clouds yellow

orange, and, in one spot over an Addison restaurant

purple, like the ground effect on a low rider.

Family Tradition (fragment)

2011-09-24T15:19:00.004-04:00

We are a people;
who stare out into middle distance.

My father would stand in the kitchen of my grandfather's apartment
smoking under the humming exhaust fan
staring into some undiscovered country
in the cabinet where the old man kept his cheerios.

As for me, I remember places I have lived
by the things I stared out at during long sleepless nights.

In Ohio, it was a tiny shoddy house,
a sort of standalone tenement apartment,
placed inexplicably in the parking lot of the cement factory
opposite me. The lights there came on at ten,
burned all night, an old Chrysler was parked outside.

In Atlanta, it was the rain,
and the monster subtropical trees the rain summoned up from the earth.
I would sip beer under the yellow security light of the apartment complex;
watch the orb spider string anchor lines across the branches
listen to the freight trains coast by in the dark
engines off, wheels screeching and links chiming.

Here in Dallas, it is the clear Texas sky, the purple and red of the vast sunset.
Sitting in the dark, the constant air traffic into DFW reminds me,
of our opulent oil driven moment, the continuing clatter of global capitalism,
just as buzzing prop planes lining up for approach
at the little private field two miles north, remind me of its romance.

Morning, Texas 09.22.2011

2011-09-22T09:54:00.002-04:00

I am driving to work
the highway is North Texas concrete, dull and yellow
I am drinking bad coffee I brewed from good beans
a flash of movement makes me check the mirror
a boy and a girl are dashing past behind me
making the best of a break in the traffic
I want to tell you something about their hair, their clothes
so we can both remember this moment
but I've forgotten all of that
all I remember is the dark slashes of their bodies
crane-like lines against the sullen morning sky,
the precious, slender bridge of their linked hands
and their laughing smiles as they bound the last steps to the curb
they have survived their morning crossing
they are alive

Why I want to teach in the Failure Program

2010-10-20T14:19:00.003-04:00

The school I teach for now, like all the schools I've taught for, has a boatload of "Student Success Programs." Clever pedagogical experiments designed to prepare students to succeed, to lead, to excel.

I wish them luck, but I don't want to work for them.

I want to teach in the Failure Program. I want to look students in the eye, and say, listen, competitive systems, they have losers. I'm glad that you are all planning on being winners, I am, but you do realize there is a good chance that, well, that won't work out for all of you? Statistics, you know...

I've tried compassion. I've tried saying, well yes, but what about those losers, over there, shouldn't we be nice to them? Compassion doesn't work. The other always deserves what she gets.

I tiptoe around my relatively moderate anti-property authors. I preface everything with, "well, this author says." I suggest, mildly, that maybe there might be some trade off between community good and individual riches. They shake their heads. They look confused. I am not preparing them to succeed. Haven't I heard? They are all going to be rich. Why trade that for some lousy public good? Don't I know? "Public," means "crappy," like "public school," "public housing," or "public park." Why mingle with the riffraff?

I want to shake them. I want to shout, "Listen!!!!!" and then whisper, "you're dying." We all lose to death in the end, children, compassion is self interest. What you would visit on the least among you will be visited upon you, soon enough.

Timmy the Tiny Turtle Learns to Swim

2010-09-02T16:37:00.002-04:00

I got a great offer from my twitter friend, Kerstin, who PROMISED to illustrate a children's book for me. So, here is my AMAZING children's book manuscript that I in no way wrote just now because I had a cup of coffee and still can't figure out how to revise this page of my dissertation.

Timmy the Tiny Turtle Learns to Swim

Page One: Timmy is a Tiny Turtle [image of tiny turtle's face and head]
Page Two: He's just hatched! [now we see timmy has just pushed his head from an egg in a large nest]
Page Three: He knows he shouldn't stay on the hot, hot sand. [hot looking sand]
Page Four: Where should he go? [puzzled looking Timmy]
Page Five and Six: The Sea! [Full two page spread of the sea, with gulls, surf and happy clouds]
Page Seven: But first, he has to scuttle past the Ravens [Scary Raven]
Page Eight: And the Coyotes [Scary Coyote]
Page Nine: Go, Timmy, go! [Timmy scuttles with great vigor]
Page Ten: He made it! [Timmy enters the surf]
Page Eleven: Now he has to swim! [Timmy immersed in water]
Page Twelve: He's never done that before. [Timmy pushed back by a wave]
Page Thirteen: First he pulls with his left flipper. [Timmy paddles into the wave with his left flipper]
Page Fourteen: Then with his right. [Timmy uses his right flipper]
Page Fifteen: Timmy's doing it! [Timmy zooms past a fish]
Page Sixteen: And just in time [Timmy surfaces for air]
Page Seventeen: He has a long swim ahead! [Distance view of Tiny Timmy bobbing in the vast ocean, as he swims off into the sunset]

Couch to 5k

2010-09-02T09:44:00.002-04:00

The official Couch to 5k Running Program:

Week 1: Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes.

Week 2: Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 90 seconds of jogging and two minutes of walking for a total of 20 minutes.

etc.

The Andy Couch to 5k Running Program:

Week 1: Walk around the neighborhood to get a lay of the land

Week 2: Forget the whole thing

Week 3: Decide to start again. Walk briskly to the gate of the apartment complex. Reflect on the fact that you live in a gated apartment complex. How the fuck did that happen. Walk to the telephone pole. Stretch. Walk to the bus stop. Notice they are cutting bus service to this stop, the bastards. Decide you better start running. Run to the end of the block. Hey this feels pretty good! You can do this! Keep running. Oh wow, it kinda hits you all at once. That hurts. Walk for awhile. Not too long. Maybe to where that white car is parked. The end of the car. Ok, the driveway after it. Run again. Oh, you got this. Run to that telephone pole. Run to the next one. Run up that hill! Oh man, lungs! Lungs are burning! Walk again. Walk down the hill. This part is flat, you can run on this part. Keep going. Ok, ok, walk. There is a crosswalk up there so you might as well walk up to it. Run again. Up the hill, you can make it! Oh man, is your ass supposed to hurt like that. You'd better stop. Wait! You can't stop in front of this woman running down the hill. She's kind of cute. Don't stare! Keep going until you are past her! Keep going! KEEP GOING! Ok, ok, she's past. The tricky part now is to stop without falling down. Just go from a run to a walk gracefully. Well, you caught yourself, so that's whats important. She had earbuds in right? She didn't hear that. Shit. She's right there. You didn't even make it out of her field of vision. Good one. She'll probably get a good laugh out of that with her boyfriend tonight. Hell, she's your age: her husband. Probably tell her kids a joke about it. Whatever fat boy! Walk it off. Ok, you always run this hill, so go ahead and run it now. Up you go. Why doesn't it feel like you are going any faster when you run? Ok, go ahead and stop. Just remember, you aren't running to look better, you are running to feel better.

The persistence of analog memory

2010-07-05T14:39:00.001-04:00

The persistence of analog memory
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

Textual Materiality

Life during wartime

2010-06-27T18:26:00.004-04:00

I've taken to walking the mile or so down to a local coffee shop in the afternoons to work and watch world cup. Atlanta is hot this June, well above ninety by mid-day most days. I am almost always the only one moving about outside. The air is heavy with damp, I can see it, hazy and blue, hanging between me and the tops of the tall pine trees that trace the property lines in this upscale suburb. The haze mutes the grey-green lines of the military cargo planes, rendering them smudgy and seemingly insubstantial as they rumble by, languid and pregnant, on final approach to the Air Force plant in Marietta.

They are a reminder that, all these years later, the war is still hiring. I have two friends with the occupation now, both civilian contractors. I got a birthday card from Kuwait. A product of Hallmark Dubai festooned with rainbow camels and minarets. My department chair sent around a request for people to work on a data visualization job that looks to be connected to the Human Terrain System. I'd love for her to ask me to participate, so I could say something like "I'm afraid my conscience doesn't permit me to participate in the war effort," and feel brave but I'm sure she won't. They will get volunteers. Really, I'm not at all certain my refusal would do anything but lend me an undeserved sense of moral purity. I drive a car. I pay my taxes. I voted for Obama. I'm as complicit in this thing as anybody.

Not sure I'm going anywhere with this. Just saying hello to my two remaining readers.

Sneaky Peak

2010-06-09T14:25:00.001-04:00

Here is a sneak peak of some diss content. I picked this because it speaks to some issues raised at a recent conference:

Thus, we can see how the adoption of the GFDL was a Wikipedia policy choice guided by the need to secure and retain free labor. Wikipedia's most important content policy, the Neutral Point of View (NPOV), was shaped not only by the need to recruit this labor but by its collective nature as well. The NPOV was one of the first Wikipedia policies to be put in place, and was based on Nupedia's "Non-bias" content policy. However, a comparison of early versions of the NPOV to the Non-bias policy shows how the NPOV quickly evolved to meet the particularly collective needs of labor on Wikipedia. The Nupedia Non-bias policy images lack of bias as the function of a single article author erasing his or her own particular bias in the interest of writing an objective article. It reads, in part, "This question is a good (albeit not infallible) test of a lack of bias: 'On every issue about which there might be even minor dispute among experts on this subject, is it very difficult or impossible for the reader to determine what the view is to which the author adheres?'" ("Nupedia Editorial Policy Guidelines"). From a very early stage, the NPOV reflects Wikipedia's need, not to erase or obscure the bias of a single author, but rather to build consensus and enable cooperation among multiple authors. The earliest revision of the NPOV still retained on the English Wikipedia, dated to November 10, 2001, reads in part: "The neutral point of view attempts to present ideas and facts in such a fashion that both supporters and opponents can agree. Of course, 100% agreement is not possible; there are ideologues in the world who will not concede to any presentation other than a forceful statement of their own point of view. We can only seek a type of writing that is agreeable to essentially rational people who may differ on particular points" (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view&oldid=334854039).
Furthermore, textual evidence from later versions of the NPOV, as well as early Wikipedia press releases, demonstrates that this consensus building feature of the NPOV was seen by Larry Sanger and others as a key to ensuring Wikipedia would attract, retain, and use collective labor effectively. By December of 2001, the NPOV had been extensively updated and expanded. In a large edit dated December 24, a Wikipedia user known by the alias The Cunctator, who had been a vocal advocate for decentralized processes in Wikipedia governance and against the editorial authority exercised by Sanger, revises the NPOV to remove policy discussion from the page itself (Wikipedia had included discussion of content on content pages, prior to the creation of separate talk pages for discussion) while adding extensive language explaining the policy and what he sees as the reasoning behind it to the page. Among the added content is a section entitled, "Why should Wikipedia be unbiased?" which reads, in part:

Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia, which means it is a representation of human knowledge at some level of generality. But we (humans) disagree about specific cases; for any topic on which there are competing views, each view represents a different theory of what the truth is, and insofar as that view contradicts other views, its adherents believe that the other views are false, and therefore not knowledge. Indeed, Wikipedia, there are many opinionated people who often disagree with each other. Where there is disagreement about what is true, there's disagreement about what constitutes knowledge. Wikipedia works because it's a collaborative effort; but, whilst collaborating, how can we solve the problem of endless 'edit wars' in which one person asserts that p, whereupon the next person changes the text so that it asserts that not-p? (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view&oldid=270452)

The Cunctators addition to the language of the NPOV shows how the policy was understood as a means to ensure that Wikipedia was able to recruit the labor needed to build and maintain the site from a diverse pool of potential contributors, and that "collaborative effort" needed to build Wikipedia functioned smoothly, and was not wasted in "endless 'edit wars'." Sanger, who had clashed with The Cunctator frequently and sometimes bitterly in discussions on the Wikipedia-L list and Wikipedia itself, effectively endorsed this language when he proceeded to make an extensive set of copy edits to the page over the course of December 27 without substantially changing the content. Furthermore, Wikipedia's first press release, dated January 15, 2002, quotes Sanger as saying: "If contributors took controversial stands, it would be virtually impossible for people of many different viewpoints to collaborate. Because of the neutrality policy, we have partisans working together on the same articles. It's quite remarkable" (http://web.archive.org/web/20020712053853/www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_press_release_1). Like The Cunctators additions to the NPOV, Sanger's language here shows how the policy helped Wikipedia attract, maintain, and coordinate its labor supply. Together, the GFDL and the NPOV helped to ensure that Wikipedia enjoy the large pool of collective "free labor" it needed to grow and thrive, and thus addressed the clear anxieties about attracting and retaining volunteer labor that both Wales and Sanger express in their interventions in the GNUpedia and Spanish Fork incidents.

Buffer overflow

2010-06-03T23:36:00.003-04:00

I kicked myself off Facebook to try to get myself to finish my damn dissertation. Maybe I'll post on here occasionally, just as a way to clear the buffer, get a few spare thoughts out of my head.

I've fallen into listening to the new The National album on heavy repeat as I write. This is good because I like it and its mostly faded to background so I can work to it. Its bad because they are the sort of band that smolders, the sort that makes me think of girls with dark eyes a size-and-a-half too big for their heads, makes me wish I'd spent my youth learning to speak French and smoke, so that when I met one I could mutter sweepingly beautiful obscenities at her while dangling a gauloises impossibly from my lower lip.

See that sentence ain't gonna fit in my dissertation... should have written about Godard instead of Wikipedia.

If anyone's reading this, prepare for more inane digital telegrams in this genre. You have been warned.

now we'll leave the silver city
cause all the silver girls gave us black dreams
-The National, "Conversation 16"

Hrrm

2010-06-01T15:54:00.001-04:00

According to Alexa the warrior forum is the 486th most visited site on the internet. Not sure what its deal is... possibly a community worth investigating!

Frederick, Maryland

2010-05-31T00:43:00.003-04:00

it is an 11 hour pull from Maryland to Atlanta. I am driving a dead man's car, so his spirit is riding with me (a man's spirit gets into the things he maintains with his hands. if you had some fantastic steampunk contraption you could read back the intent behind each uneven spot in the fender he hammered out, pull synaptic state from the torque on the spark plugs)

the car sings his spirit as we ride. it is a cool strength, like a deep pool of still water.

this is not the only ghost along for the ride. the ghosts of the not yet born, our digital children, seep in through the cell phone. the antenna they ride is a mandelbrot set, each fold contains the whole. they whisper to us and tell us where to go.

we are no longer on internal guidance, spirit. we are a beam-rider now. we are the missile they called sparrow.

I am running with the windows open, since the AC is busted and I can smell the country better this way. it is molecular communion. smell the dogwoods, spirit. smell the taut heat of the mid-day sear. smell the cool rain as the anvil thunderheads break against the blue ridge mountains. smell our constant companion, the asphalt, its low bouquet here waxy, here earthy, here funky and almost human, like a lover's sweat.

it is a long golden evening in the mountains, spirit. it is almost june. the thing about june is always the knowledge of august. summer has become indian summer in America, spirit. august will be here soon.

when the light fades we are riding down a river of embers. taillights and flashers, the glowing rivers of the firefly american empire. the asphalt breathes moist, giving back the day's heat

behold, spirit, the greater Atlanta metropolitan area. 85 erupts from two lanes to six, downshifting from William Faulkner to William Gibson without engaging the clutch. there is low overcast. the sky is actually the color of a television, tuned to a dead station, a dull concrete phosphorescence.

spirit, we are some fantastic steampunk contraption. we are running down the groove in the record of America. listen, can you hear it? we are singing its ghost.

Why Software (might) be better than Service for Social Networking

2010-05-23T20:44:00.002-04:00

Ok, one more concern folks have had about this Diaspora thing. Some folks don't seem to understand what the big deal is, won't Diaspora just end up evil, the same as Facebook? Didn't we all migrate to Facebook because Myspace was owned by Fox news and going to evil-land? Why will this be different?

The logic behind why Diaspora won't be evil is this: Diaspora is software you run on a computer that you own. This matters for two reasons:

1. You retain control of your own data. If you use Facebook or a similar social networking service, you send them all your photos, status updates, likes and dislikes and they host them all on their servers. This makes it both technically and legally easy for Facebook to do whatever the heck they want with your data (you sign over your rights to it in exchange for use of their servers! I'll explain why Diaspora won't do this in just a minute). With a distributed system, like Diaspora, you keep your data and share it only with your friends. This makes it much harder (again, both legally and technically) for someone to aggregate and data-mine vast quantities of consumer information using a system like Diaspora (at least as it is currently designed). For security, all data traffic between your computer and your friends' computers will be encrypted.

2. No business model motivation for spying and data mining. Facebook HAS to monetize its users, it is the only way for them to stay in business! That means they have to snoop on you. Diaspora is being developed by a team of volunteers, supported by donations! Because it will be software you run on your own computer, there will be no overhead costs to be paid. The software will be released under a Free Software license (a variant of the GPL, if you're into that sorta stuff) so it can be maintained by the community. This is a very well understood means for maintaining software, and it works (examples include the GNU/Linux operating system, Apache webserver, GIMP image editor and many, many, many more).

Anyway, that's the logic... I actually think this is a vast experiment to see if this will actually work... but an important one, one that deserves the best possible effort.

Responses to comments on my earlier post

2010-05-23T16:32:00.002-04:00

I posted a link to my last post on Facebook and Diaspora to Facebook (IRONY!) and some folks there raised some concerns in comments. I'd like to respond to their concerns here:

1. The name "Diaspora" is offensive because it trivializes the real human suffering of actual, historical Diasporas.

Ok, you might have a point here. See my suggestion #1 in the previous post where I urge Diaspora developers to take input from as wide a public as possible. I think this is important advice for the Geek community, which can be insular and misunderstand the needs of the larger culture. If they had followed this advice at the name stage, they might have chosen something else. Then again, they might not have. A project like this, I think, needs a name with historical and political implications bigger than itself, and by definition, any such name will connect it to historical events far more immediately dire than Facebook. As such, it risks trivializing said events. In any case, the name is set and abandoning it now would mean a massive loss of publicity and social capital. I hope that, if this is your only problem with this project, you will be able to set this aside and not, as George Lipsitz would say keep "waiting for the perfect bus." As I hope my next couple of paragraphs will explain, this is an important moment when something like Diaspora is very much needed.

2. I'm not concerned because Facebook is only interested in mining data for marketing and advertising, not censorship.

I have two responses to this one. First, a system without any oversight or accountability, like Facebook, really can't be trusted to keep behaving in a benign way. Now, with the recent implosion of Myspace etc. looming over them, Facebook clearly has some reasons to use a relatively light hand on their users. However, as time goes by and people commit more and more of their data to Facebook, the system may well become much harder to leave, and thus, Facebook may feel like they can get away with more active interventions in site content. Like, say, if BP decides it doesn't like its ads popping up next to commentary on the (next) oil gusher. Lets not forget the compromises that a variety of supposedly libertarian tech companies (Google included) made in exchange for entry in to the Chinese market.

Second, I can't believe that I'm hearing people who I know have read Raymond Williams argue that just collecting data for advertising and marketing purposes is harmless. The feedback loop that couples lives lived in increasingly private spaces subject to increasing levels of corporate surveillance to an economy of systematic over-consumption is incredibly destructive. They get us to buy too much as it is, how much worse will that get when they can glean our anxieties and our desires from the traces we leave in our digital lives? Yes, advertising and over-consumption is much older than Facebook, but Facebook is a recent and particularly egregious example of a space of corporate surveillance. For those who want this argument made in more detail, see Mark Andrejevic's excellent iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era

3. I'm not concerned because I don't really use Facebook all that much

Again, I have several points of rebuttal. First, the place where this discussion started WAS ON FACEBOOK. You could have commented on my blog itself. You could have sent me an email. But clearly you thought the public space afforded by a Facebook comment thread was the best place to discuss this issue. That's fine! That's actually one of the great things about Facebook, it provides a space where debate can happen in the open, among friends, where people can jump in and out of the conversation. That's a valuable resource, which is exactly why I think we need to make sure that resource isn't wholly owned by an unaccountable corporation with a business model that requires that it carry out constant surveillance of all of us. Second, the use of social networking to contact people and organize events is, in my anecdotal experience, already becoming the norm for many people. That tends to make the use of Facebook much less optional, unless you don't want to get invited to any social events or hear from any of your friends. Additionally, you give away more data than you are aware of on a network like Facebook. Some data points are obvious, like what you "like" or become a "fan" of. Others are less obvious, like your clicks on profiles, pages, etc (all of which, testimony by Facebook employees has indicated, Facebook records). Still others are totally out of your control, like actions that your friends might take that data miners could use to derive information about you (statistically, for example, they might be able to guess that someone who has a larger number of friends "liking" Barack Obama is a Democrat).

Finally, and most crucially, this is a key moment if we want to insure that we retain control over the software we use to keep in touch with people and share information via the internet. Facebook is only part of a much larger trend that seeks to "close" the once "open" architecture of the web and subject it to control by large corporations. Think of the Apple iPad, which is no longer a general purpose computer, able to run any software you want, but rather a sort of tethered device, only able to run applications pre-approved by Apple. If we don't build a Free social network now, we may lose the ability to do so at all.

I hope this has spoken to everyone's concerns! It is good to talk about and think about these issues, and I'm happy to continue this debate here, on Facebook, Twitter, wherever...

Diaspora and the future of the internet

2010-05-23T14:21:00.001-04:00

So, by now, most folks have probably heard about Diaspora, the distributed replacement for Facebook. Basically, the idea is to replace the web-based Facebook service with a piece of software you would run on your own computer, which would allow you to share information with you friends. This radically distributed solution, the thinking goes, would allow users to control their own data and protect their own privacy.

The notion recently came in for some criticism on the download squad blog, in a piece that suggested expecting users to run individual servers would lead to Diaspora's failure. The authors seem to feel that server maintenance is beyond the ability of the average computer user.

It is not immediately apparent to me that this is necessarily so. Napster, after all, asked users to serve music files to one another, and it succeeded until the music industry intervened.

However, it is important to take the warning against putting too much responsibility on individual users seriously. We have to understand that machines and people always exist in communities. To that end, I would make several concrete recommendations:

1. On the technical side, the Diaspora team should solicit the advice of a wide variety of computer users, and design their software to be accessible to everyone. Geeky config options are great, but keep them out of the way. Out of the box, it should just work, and power users can tweak later.

2. On the social side, people interested in migrating from Facebook to Diaspora should organize. A Facebook walk out day, for an en masse migration would work. People get value from the social connections on a network, so we'll want to move as many of those all at once as possible. More technically savvy users should stand ready to help novice users make the transition.

What to people think? Should we start organizing the Facebook walk out?

The iPad and the "Geek Civil War"

2010-04-04T08:44:00.002-04:00

Just a quick comment on the debate over the socio-political implications of the new Apple iPad currently the matter of some contention.

On one hand, Cory Doctorow warns that the iPad is a dangerously "closed" device that restricts the rights of it users, encouraging them to consume rather than create. He points out that the much lauded Marvel Comics app for the iPad prevents users from sharing or reselling comics, potentially destroying a great deal of fan culture, which has revolved around these activities. At one point he asserts, referring to the sealed nature of the device itself "if you can't open it, you don't own it."

On the other hand, Joel Johnson of Gizmodo attempts to refute Doctorow in an article appropriately titled "Cory Doctorow, You are a Consumer Too." He complains that Doctorow's article purports to "sneer at everyone who is excited about the iPad, warts and all, and explain to us that we're dupes." Ultimately, he suggests, Doctorow's commitment to open systems puts too much of the responsibility for maintaining and repairing computers and software onto users themselves, who would rather be spending their time using computers and software to accomplish other tasks. He concludes that, despite sharing many of Doctorow's concerns about issues like DRM and content lock-ins, "But I don't want to use shitty computers with shitty operating systems, just like I don't want to drive cars that come with their own schematics. Instead I want to drive beautifully engineered machines that scream with precision fury. And if they break, I want to take them to a shop and have them fixed. You keep the 3D printer; I'll take AAA."

These two approaches to the iPad demonstrate fairly common discourses about computers, computer mastery, and computer ownership. Doctorow's anti-iPad critique is typical of a hacker position I call "cyborg individualism," that stresses the need for individuals to master and control the computer hardware that they own. "If you can't open it, you don't own it," is a telling line, as it reveals that the ideal Doctorow wants to defend is that of ownership. Ironically, the desire to own hardware totally leads to various forms of commons systems for managing software, as a means of preventing software owners from establishing "illegitimate" control over devices.

Johnson's rebuttal points out the failure of Doctorow's position to spread beyond a very small elite technical community, but I think it suggests the wrong reasons for this failure. It isn't that people just want to be consumers, and have their needs met by nearly unaccountable corporations, its that the model of self-sufficient individual as an alternative to this consumer relationship is a failure. We should not all be expected to write our own drivers, build our own computers, install our own operating systems, and we are certainly not capable of actually supplying ourselves with the necessary inputs to run a contemporary technological society. However, I don't think that means that we should accept consumerism as a necessary condition. Instead what we need to be doing is exploring and attempting to build new forms of community that might really meet those needs, and that is something the acceptance of individualism and individual property as ideal conditions by Doctorow and others like him too often precludes them from really embarking upon.

Tonight, tonight

2010-03-24T19:58:00.004-04:00

I went to the IJ brewery, on account of Stross mentions 'em in Accelerando. Ended up sitting with some computer science from Finland. He didn't speak dutch either, so we were a fun pair of ex-pats.

Somewhere around our 3rd beer, this American classic car pulls up on the sidewalk. A convertible with the top down, maybe a Camaro or Mustang of late 60s pedigree, I couldn't tell. The boys inside hopped out of the car, plugged speakers into a post onto the exterior, set up a drum set in the back seat. One stood on the hood with a guitar, the other on the trunk with a base. They wore leather jackets and sunglasses. Their hair was perfect. They started a rambling dutch introduction I couldn't catch a word of. The crowd seemed amused though. Then they started their first song.

It was an electrified version of "Love the One You're With," they were a cover band.

Two songs later they launched into "Country Roads," and the whole bar sang out the refrain. They played a short set, maybe 8 songs. The lead singer came through the crowd with a little red pail, collecting Euro coins. A waitress brought them beers and left them on the hood.

When they were finished they gunned the engine and roared off down the street, an act that, given Dutch gas prices, must have set them back at least 5 euro.

Amazing. Like something out of Godard. So strange to see "American-ness" in the funhouse mirror of New Europe.

Reboot the Reboot - First Thoughts on Amsterdam

2010-03-23T11:58:00.003-04:00

Ok, so maybe I want a personal blog. I need a "professional" blog somewhere, but the concavity should be for, shall we say, creative non-fiction.

I've been in Amsterdam for about, oh, 4 or 5 hours now... managed to stretch a conference visit into a 5 day trip! I'm almost delirious from lack of sleep, I never sleep on planes, but I know I have to keep going, if I fall asleep now I'll be back up at midnight and all out of whack tomorrow.

When I get to someplace new, I like to walk a wide circle around the place where I'll be staying, like a cat turning circles before laying down to sleep. I like to do this for several reasons. On the practical side, it orients me to the area, helps me learn north from south and keep from getting lost. However, what I really like is the thrill of strolling through ordinary neighborhoods in an ordinary way thousands of miles from my home, like an extraordinarily unlikely extra in someone else's movie. Guy on street #234, Amsterdam exterior day, is just an ordinary guy with no significant role to play in this movie, oh, but he's 6,000 miles out of place.

Oh and you are in a cast of thousands on the street here. Not like Atlanta where you are rarely, if ever, in a cast of dozens on the street. Bicycle friendly cities are awesome. I was enjoying a Heineken at a cafe near my hotel when school let out, and families and knots of children of various ages came bustling down the (subtly marked! careful about that!) bike paths, laughing and chattering in dutch. It felt deeply right somehow, the mix of people of different ages riding together, the discussions between riders... like a proper, living community.

Oh and I'm sure I'm not the first to notice that the simple, upright design of what seems to be the default bike here is awesome. You are almost in a standing position riding it. Looks comfortable and easy to maneuver. I wouldn't want to do 30 miles on one, but that's not what they are for.

Pics from my trip on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/trainsnthings/

David Graeber Defines "Ethnography"

2010-02-04T15:55:00.002-05:00

And explains how it may provide a model for radical scholarship. From Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

When one carries out an ethnography, one observes what people do, and then tries to tease out the hidden symbolic, moral, or pragmatic logics that underlie their actions; one tries to get at the way people’s habits and actions makes sense in ways that they are not themselves completely aware of. One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that: to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts.

File under "Things I read a year and a half ago but did not recognize the full significance of." In the sense that Graeber defines it here, I would call my work "ethnography," even though it is probably an ethnography performed by someone learning the ropes of the method as he goes along, and trying to adapt to the strange "field environment" that is an online wiki community. What I like most about Graeber's definition is the concrete sense of purpose it gives to academic work. Reading this while reviewing Fragments for a class reading really made me feel more confident about academia as a whole.

Return of the Concavity

2010-01-26T08:16:00.002-05:00

Hey everybody. I'm going to try to revive my blog after a long hiatus. I'm also going to try to refocus what I'm writing here, away from random personal and political stuff (Facebook and Twitter will keep anyone who wants to be up to date on my personal and political rants) and toward a crtical examination of what's called been called Free Culture, Peer-to-Peer culture, or Peer Production. Basically, all of these terms refer to the mode of producing culture that we find on Wikipedia, in which many loosely organized collaborators work together to produce a larger text without a strictly hierarchical organization.

I think it is also important to explain what I mean when I say I intend to take a "critical" take on this method of production on this blog. I do not come here to bury Wikipedia (or YouTube, or Hacker spaces, or what have you). These are some of my favorite things. I think that these projects, and the people involved with them, are often animated by a tremendous idealism, and a wonderful sense that they are working together to build a better future for all of humanity.

I think that idealism is real, in fact I'm banking on it. What I'd like to do here is to argue that some of the cultural assumptions Peer Production brings with it from capitalism may serve to undercut the very idealistic goals that its practitioners embrace. My hope is that their genuine commitment to a better, fairer, human future will motivate them to move away from these assumptions and towards a new vision for Peer Production based on a broader understanding of human equality and shared responsibility.

A tall order for a blog, I know, but I might as well try. At the very least, I'm hoping writing these vignettes on a regular basis will keep me current on the bleeding edge of the discourse about peer production as I slog through the backlog of Wikipedia data that is my dissertation.

How We Became Posthuman

2009-11-11T20:56:00.002-05:00

No. Really. Behold the "beautification engine" which mathematically maps "normal" faces into "more perfect" shapes.

In other words, it uses computerized data manipulation to map embodiments onto the body. Yay.

PS: This is probably tripe to everyone else... it is just a note to myself

Truth system trumps reading comprehension in Wired

2009-10-31T20:04:00.004-04:00

Wired magazine is currently running a good, informative article on the battle over vaccination. In it, they provide a wonderful quote by the late, great Carl Sagan, in which he presents reasons why the persistent belief in wacky pseudo-science (like the totally unproven link between vaccines and autism) may not be driven simply by ignorance and stupidity:

“A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

In other words, people don't believe pseudo-science because they are weak minded, but because capitalism sucks, and does a lousy job of providing support for human beings, which it tends to treat as machine tools. (Yes, I am aware Sagan does not single out "capitalism" for critique here. I am attempting to extend the useful Mormon tradition of posthumous conversion for use by us socialists.)

However, rather than build on Sagan's words, Wired seems to ignore them, as the very next sentence in the article suggests that proper middle-class rationality is self-evidently superior to all other forms of thought, and is only ever ignored because it is just too hard for the dumb, lazy masses.

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

Let me be clear here, I think the vaccine deniers are wrong, and that preventing children from getting vaccinations is a terrible mistake that could have deadly consequences. However, treating people as children who just need to be properly "disciplined" will only ever make them act as children. If we want to earn the public's trust, we have to build a system of knowledge production (and of production in general) worthy of that trust. One they can be confident is working for them, not to enrich some CEO. Until we do this, their fears will continue to manifest themselves in these dangerous and harmful ways.

Pop Music, Memory and Digital Media

2009-10-27T20:46:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago, Bruce Sterling posted a reflection on "plots [that] can’t exist in a world of ubiquitous computing," to his blog. He discussed the challenges horror-movie writers face working in an always-connected world (how do you isolate a helpless victim when everyone has the ability to call the authorities always in their pocket). Before moving on to point out the consequences of our pervasive communications networks to another genre, "lovelorn, romantic torch songs." This song by Everything But the Girl for example:

Sterling quips:

Tears your heart out, right? Well, why doesn’t she go on freakin’ Facebook? Why doesn’t she just Google him? It’s not that alligators ate him: he just blew town. Big deal. Get video Skype. Your vanished lover is probably married now and has two kids in Omaha, but hey, that’s another problem.

The introduction of always on digital communications and information storage into the everyday lives of ordinary people (at least among the relatively privileged classes of the developed world) does indeed alter the shape of memory, loss, and longing. The experience of discovering a "vanished lover... married now [with] two kids in Omaha," or any of the other encounters we have with those digital ghosts, those patterns of data connected to people we no longer really know but who persist in the linkages of our social networking software, reminds me of another pop song. Namely, "She's got you," in which Patsy Cline mourns that:

I've got your picture that you gave to me
And it's signed "with love," just like it used to be
The only thing different, the only thing new
I've got your picture, she's got you

She goes on to list other artifacts she once shared with her beloved - records, a class ring - before concluding "The only thing different, the only thing new/I've got these little things, she's got you." The objects of love, stripped of the aura of the beloved, a dilemma probably older than human language - since even bower birds court using gifts - but in this song already betraying the effects of the regime of mechanical reproduction. Snapshots and records easily and efficiently commit memory to mechanism, capture shared experiences now stripped of their original context. The regime of the digital multiplies these "little things," creates the data ghosts that can so easily haunt us. But it does more than that. Because digital artifacts are non-rival, we can easily share "little things," broadcast them not only across our social networks but even to the world at large. Take for example the website My Parents Were Awesome (one of many websites using the "tumblr" service to share photographs, and one of the few not committed to schadenfreude), which invites participants to share scanned in old photographs of their parents. The only context is the site title, but that title suffices to make these little things a powerful meditation on history and mortality, as the user scrolls by picture after picture of youthful people, knowing everyone depicted has since grown old enough to have a child capable of uploading photos to a tumblr site. It is the sort of meditation one might have had with a box of family photos in the age of mechanical reproduction, in the age of the ubiquitous digital network, you can always find someone's family photos.

Thus our digital ghosts invite us to both narcissism and communion. The boundaries of memory are what has changed.

Mid-town towers from the staircase of the High Museum of Art

2009-09-13T14:16:00.001-04:00

Mid-town towers from the staircase of the High Museum of Art
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

I haven't been blogging here too much lately. I've had too many other possible outlets to share brief thoughts with friends (facebook, twitter, et. al.) and too much work to do to compose longer ones. Just in case any friends are still checking in here, I thought I would share this cell phone photo I took during a visit to Atlanta's High Museum of Art. I like art museums, in part, because they give me an excuse to stare at objects without feeling self-conscious. Really, I often would like to carefully investigate the way light plays over a piece of junk in the street, or get lost in the texture of the sidewalk. But then people stare. If I spend 10 minutes looking at the brush-strokes of a painting, everybody thinks I'm erudite and refined.

Which I am not.

Anyway, I liked this window in the staircase of the High as much as I liked the collection.

My other other Blog

2009-08-22T15:24:00.001-04:00

I've ended my long stretch as a bad blog-team member and added something to the Food blog my twitter friend Carlo was nice enough to invite me to join. You can read about me trying Atlanta BBQ here.

Democracy is in the Streets

2009-08-06T08:41:00.002-04:00

This one goes out to all the wanna-be revolutionaries, frustrated leftists, and boomers who are still living in 1968 I have met during my time in the humanities in the American Public University system.

It is time for us to get off our asses.

Have you been watching the news? Have you been monitoring any of the many forms of informational media we have available to us in our 21st century ecology of spectacle?

If you have, then you will have noticed what I have noticed, namely, that we are getting our asses kicked. The crazy right has organized to intimidate, harass, and shout down the elected officials we worked so hard to elect over the last two campaign cycles, as those officials campaign for health care reform that will literally save lives.

Its working. The shouting mobs are swinging the media narrative to the right, creating the impression of "grassroots" opposition to reforming our expensive, broken, ineffective health care system. Robert Reich fears lawmakers may be swayed to pass weak, ineffective reforms, reforms that might provide little real help for under-insured and uninsured Americans and thus weaken public confidence on the very notion of "health care reform."

There is only one way to fix this, we need more bodies in the town-hall meeting rooms, we need our people to be in front of the TV cameras, not just theirs!

We need to get off our asses.

So lets go! We've been waiting for this! The good fight waits to be fought, Democracy is in the Streets again.

You can find health-care events and meetings near you via the FireDogLake campaign silo widget, which I've embedded on the right hand side of this blog, or via HCAN, which also has tips for effective actions in the face of the Teabag mobsters.

This is our fight to lose. Get mad. Get organized.

Gates, the Police and the History of Race in America

2009-08-01T11:40:00.003-04:00

As usual, I'm well behind the ball on this, but I did just want to say one thing about the whole Henry Louis Gates affair. There has been a lot of good commentary on this, but one thing I've been surprised by is the constant drumbeat of "responsible" advice dished out by many well-meaning commentators, white and black alike, who stress the importance of never, ever raising your voice to a Police officer. One particularly egregious example can be found in the recent Salon article by Gene Lyons: Black men, white cops and media mind readers. In it Lyons tells us that Gates' arrest is justified since, "it's not a crime to act like a jackass, but cops can't have crowds seeing them cowered by a loudmouth." Lyon's conclusion is that the whole arrest can be blamed squarely on Gates, who could have avoided the incident if he had acted with, "a degree of self-control."

In other cases, the advice to avoid raising one's voice to, arguing with, or otherwise aggravating officers of the law is explicitly positioned as "survival advice" for Black men. In a recent piece on NPR, King Anyi Howell describes the techniques he has developed for dealing with the undue Police attention he finds he attracts simply by "Living While Black." He writes:

And I've been profiled so often that I've almost developed an art form for asserting my rights, while not offending the officer. I read recently that black men, when pulled over, have to be some odd combination of Samuel L. Jackson and Sydney Poitier, the former being known for his aggression and the latter for his eloquence. It may sound appalling to some, but that's exactly the tightrope I've learned to walk in dealing with the blue line of racial profiling. There's an unspoken understanding between the offending cop and me when I get pulled over. We both know it's not necessarily because a taillight is out, or my music is playing too loudly. And we both know it will likely end up in some sort of search. I don't act indignant because I'm the Jedi master, employing mind control to get us both out of the situation as quickly as possible.

I'm disturbed by two things here, the first is the notion that some or all citizens should show automatic and unquestioning deference to officers of the law, men and women who, if I understand the constitution correctly, are ultimately answerable to the sovereign people of the United States of America, bound to "Protect and Serve" not to command arbitrary respect based on arbitrary authority. The second is that no one seems to want to mention that when people of color are advised that they must always be careful not to act in a manner that might be seen as aggressive or threatening in the presence of a Police officer, this advice, however well meaning and well informed by the situation at hand it may be, implicitly conditions people to think of themselves as second-class citizens, hemmed in by arbitrary power beyond their control. I'm reminded of a passage from Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," in which he describes his Mother's actions after she found him injured in a fight with white boys in the neighborhood.

She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I had a fever of one hundred and two. She would smack my rump with the stave, and, while the skin was still smarting, impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom. I was never to throw cinders anymore. I was never to fight any more wars. I was never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again. And they were absolutely right in clouting me with a broken milk bottle. Didn't I know she was working every day hard in the hot kitchens of white folks to take care of me? When was I ever going to learn to be a good boy? She couldn't be bothered with my fights. She finished by telling me that I ought to be thankful to God as long as I lived that they didn't kill me.

It is difficult not to feel some sympathy for Wright's mother here, after all, she just wants to keep her boy safe. But can a system that makes keeping your loved ones safe mean teaching them to be subservient ever be just? In the end, the responsibility for changing that system rests with us, the sovereign people of the United States. Why do I fear with have become too fond of the shallow stability provided by our near-police-state to take up that responsibility and see justice served.

Leaving Northwest Ohio

2009-07-14T23:03:00.002-04:00

My last week here in this flat, flat part of the world. There are many things I will not miss. The decided lack of proper pizza or, for that matter, much of anything in the way of edible cuisine. A surprising scarcity of good, fresh produce. A certain degree of cultural isolation.

I will however, miss this: the fact that, any time I wanted to, I could hop on my bike and ride out the long, flat, straight trail into the silence and emptiness of the corn, soy and wheat fields that stretch out here like the Bonneville flats rendered in grain. A landscape that seemed, at first glace, the very picture of natural bounty, only revealing itself as an artifact, as an engineered landscape, upon deeper inspection. For a cyborg romantic like me, there was something beautiful and captivating about the arrow-straight rows of crops, mechanically perfect in their geometry, flickering by as I rode past them like the spokes of a spinning wheel.

The corn flats of Ohio are, perhaps, the apotheosis of our industrial culture at the dawn of the 21st century: monotonous, isolating, hungry for diesel, and incapable of producing anything could sustain a human being without massive industrial intervention. Nonetheless, they are possessed of their own stark beauty. I will remember that.

Somethings wroooong here...

2009-07-13T14:27:00.004-04:00

This ought to go without saying, but when Robert Reich argues (in his current TPM blog post) that waiting until after the August congressional recess to get a health care reform bill out of the Senate Finance Committee would be "a death sentence" for the bill as, "the gravitational pull of the mid-term elections of 2010 will frighten off Blue Dogs and delight Republicans," he documents something badly, badly wrong with our democracy. When impending elections threaten to derail legislation supported by over 70% of voters who the hell is our government representing?

We're living in the future...

2009-07-07T14:42:00.002-04:00

Just some future-shock moments from today:

Michael Jackson's star studded arena-funeral (admission for lucky winners of the ticket-lottery only!)

Welcome, Senator Franken.

If you hit refresh on the above article enough, you'll eventually see an ad for Northrup Grumman's Laser Defense Systems Division

Michael Jackson 1958-2009

2009-06-26T14:52:00.002-04:00

The rest of the internet has had their say, so why shouldn't I?

I think this Obit on Daily Kos gets a lot of things right.

Some have wondered if the allegations that Jackson was guilty of child abuse should be playing a larger role in our collective remembering of the man's life.

I think that, in a way, Jackson epitomized the obsession with the pedophile as monster in America at the turn of the millennium. A monster at once genuinely evil and completely pathetic. An evil so queer, so far from ourselves that we can hate it without any reservation. Without ever seeing the monster in the mirror. And weak. Jackson's frail frame assuring us that this is a creature that could only feed on children, that we ourselves could confront it safely and easily.

I am reminded of a certain creepy hanger-on to my group of friends when I was an undergraduate, a poor, broken thing with an unfortunate habit of leering at other people's girlfriends. I confronted him once, brandishing a baseball bat. Oh, the supreme confidence I felt, assured of moral righteousness and an easy victory.

How easy it was, in that moment, to forget my own monstrosity, my own violence...

Oh, but of course some will protest, "that is not at all the same, a pedophile's crimes are far worse."

True enough. But is our response, the space they hold in our collective unconscious really proportional to their crime? Or are we propelled by the same impulse that lead me to that ridiculous confrontation in a dormitory parking lot (and ultimately an anti-climactic one, as the creepy little man held his ground! I stormed off frustrated) the impulse to find someone both weak and evil, the better to forget the evil lurking in our own souls, and the evils committed by those strong enough that we fear to confront them (knowing, of course, that it is our cowardice that allows those evils to continue).

Jackson was a brilliant artist and, as the Kos eulogist puts in so beautifully,a dismembered soul. We, of course, held the knives. To what extent does that make us complicit in any crimes he might have committed?

I didn't get to be an Astronaut when I grew up

2009-06-09T17:26:00.002-04:00

But now I can exchange 140 character or less messages with them!

Some of you may remember this post from awhile ago, wherein I speculated on the possibility of using a spacecraft on a suborbital trajectory to make a super-fast trans-Atlantic flight.

Of course, once I found an actual shuttle astronaut on twitter I had to see if he could confirm my idea. The shuttle, you see, has the ability to glide to a landing at emergency landing strips in Spain and Africa if something goes wrong with the main engines during liftoff. That's a fairly similar flight plan to the one I speculated about in my post. Not quite exactly the same, but probably the closest thing anyone has ever planned for or simulated (no shuttle mission has ever had to actually use the emergency landing option).

So I asked him in a tweet how long it the flight would take, lift-off to landing.

His response, "Roughly 30 minutes"

Which was my prediction! Go me!

Andy's Rules of Networked Subjectivity

2009-06-04T10:23:00.002-04:00

Rule 1 - The Phenomenology of Memetic Epidemiology: When the nodes of a given network are richly interconnected, and the connections between nodes are very fast, any new phenomenon spreading through the network will, from the point of view of any one node, seem to appear nearly simultaneously from several points of origin.

Missing the Point

2009-06-01T19:43:00.002-04:00

There was a time I had a great deal of sympathy for the Libertarians. Those days are waning.

It doesn't help when they trot out bits of flimsy argument like this article by Brendan O'Neill posted today on Reason Online.

In it, O'Neill criticizes what he sees as the unfair treatment of Bill O'Reilly and other right-wing talking heads who, he writes, have been implicated in the recent murder of George Tiller "in the kangaroo court of liberal opinion." O'Neill argues that, "rather than seeing this dreadful killing as the action of a probably crazed individual, too many liberal commentators are discussing it as the logical outcome of the "dangerous" words and images propagated by O'Reilly and others." O'Neill makes the case that this represents a liberal version of the "'"effects theory,' the idea that certain of speech are so irresponsible and inflammatory that they can easily provoke unhinged individuals to take unhinged actions." This serves, in O'Neill's view, to improperly shift responsibility for violence away from individuals who actually commit violent acts, where he believes it belongs, and onto individuals who, like O'Reilly have merely expressed their opinion on a controversial matter "vividly." Attempting to hold speakers, rather than actors, responsible is unacceptable to O'Neill as it blurs, "the distinction between words and actions" and, in his mind, threatens to create an environment of pervasive censorship. He writes,

To seek to restrict a broadcaster's speech on the basis that it might inflame viewers to do something awful is an insult to all of us, since we're treated as little more than dumb attack dogs that hear "orders" and then carry them out. And to seek to restrict speech on the basis that it might coax one or two unhinged loners to do something awful would be turn society into the equivalent of a lunatic asylum, where everyone watches their words and controls their tone of voice just in case they give a madman the wrong impression.

It is in his repeated invocation of that essential libertarian figure, the individual, that Mr. O'Neill misses the point.

Th danger is not that Bill O'Reilly's rhetoric will somehow turn otherwise safe individuals into killers through the sheer power of its language alone, as if by magic. Nor is it that we must restrict O'Reilly's language because it is dangerous if individual members of some class of people imagined as being especially susceptible to outside influence, like children or people suffering from mental illness, should happen to be exposed to it.

Rather, the problem is that Bill O'Reilly, and many of his fellow "mainstream" public opinion makers on the Right are part of a larger right-wing movement, one that includes violent, extremest elements. Glenn Greenwald and David Neiwart, among others, have done painstaking, remarkable work documenting this movement and how it functions. It is not that O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh et. al. are all part of some literal conspiracy along with men such as Scott Roeder (Dr. Tiller's assassin), or more organized violent elements of the right-wing such as the Militia movement, the Minutemen, or the Klu Klux Klan. Rather, "mainstream" right wing talk TV and talk radio cultivate a sense of shared cultural and social identity with these groups. By adopting the violent rhetoric of these groups, as O'Reilly did when he called Tiller a "Baby Killer" and ranted that the Democratic Governor of Kansas had "blood on her hands," these "mainstream" pundits become part of a larger social formation. They benefit from their participation, as extremists and their fellow travelers make lucrative and devoted fans for their programs. Extremist movements also benefit when national media figures like O'Reilly co-opt their ideas since they gain ideological cover for their positions, and access to huge national audiences.

To put it more briefly, it is not that Mr. O'Reilly's program is the equivalent of Grand Theft Auto, it is that his program is analogous to Radio Hutu.

Thus it is neither Scott Roeder, alleged murderer, nor Bill O'Reilly, public speaker, who are the whole story as individuals, though clearly the law will and should find Mr. Roeder legally accountable for his actions. Rather it is the ways in which the two of them are linked in a larger cultural formation. Doubtless Mr. O'Neill would find this entire line of argument ludicrous and distasteful. For him, the individual is the end all and be all of decision making and agency, whereas I believe human beings exist in cultures that fundamentally shape their actions and beliefs. I leave it to the reader to decide which of our models of human nature he or she finds more plausible.

I will, however, agree with O'Neill about this. O'Reilly should not be censored. Not because it would somehow be unethical, but because it would not work. Using the blunt instrument of the law to drive a movement like this underground without building a strong, broadly based coalition against it would simply leave it to fester, and return even more dangerous. Instead, what is crucial is to make ever more public the links Greenwald, Neiwert and others have found between "mainstream" right wing thought and racism, violence, and other broadly unappealing forms of action, to force those within the movement uncomfortable with murder and hate to reconsider their actions, and to galvanize public opinion against these hateful and ultimately self-defeating ideas.

The Future We Got

2009-05-31T23:41:00.002-04:00

People like to complain about the future we got, the 21st century we all ended up living in. "Where's my flying car," they ask, "my jetpack, my Martian vacation?" I admit, I've done it too. The 21st century can just seem so... mundane.

But, then again... maybe it ain't...

A doctor providing access to late-term abortions was murdered in Wichita today.

This, sadly, is nothing new. This sort of terrorism has been a staple of American politics for decades.

No, what is a sign of the times is the instant coverage the man's death got on Wikipedia, and of course the vandals who quickly descended on the article to crudely mock him.

I should note here, that I want to discuss these acts of vandalism here, not because I support them in any way, but because as a Wikipedia fan and scholar I find them interesting, in the same way a biologist might find the parasites and diseases that flourish in the natural environment interesting.

I should also note that only someone closely watching the page, as I was, either because they were curious about the editing proceedure, or actively assisting in editing, would ever notice that any of this vandalism ever took place. At most, the vandal's messages persisted on the page for a minute or two. I would estimate that most of the time the vandalism was erased in less than 30 seconds.

Some of the acts of vandalism were quite normal, boring really. One called him a "baby killer," another changed his occupation to "executioner."

Others were stranger.

One flippantly joked about the Doctor's murder using references from pop culture, writing that he had "gone to the Land of the Lost" and replacing the text of one section of the page with "Slestak him."

Another expressed his enthusiasm for murder in the patois of internet message boards and chatrooms, calling the killing an "Epic Win."

I must admit, both these cases caused me a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, though I should have known better. We do not think of the sort of person who laughs at the killing of doctors who provide access to abortion as being the same the sort of person who talks about Sleestaks in the voice of an LOLcat. Yet here these two activities were overlapping.

I couldn't help but wonder, were these young, hip conservative hard-liners, teens or twenty somethings with a taste for kitchy pop and internet memes and a fanatical devotion to a vision of Christianity so warped it celebrated the murder of supposed enemies? Or were they 4chan style provocateurs, in no way committed to any political cause, simply on the nigh-on sociopathic pursuit of "lulz," disturbing others just for the sake of showing they could do it, and laughing at their discomfort.

I suspect the latter is at least part of what is going on here, but I cannot rule out the former, and I admit I find the former more interesting, and troublesome. If there are christian hard-liners among the net-meme crowd, it suggests the fanatical right will be with us for a long time, and will not succumb to generational change, either human or technological.

So this is the future we got - IP identified griefers making fun of a dead man on the 8th most visted website in the world using the language of a net-based subculture, either for the cause of reactionary politics, or of simple sociopathic glee. It isn't the best future, but you gotta give it this, it ain't a boring one.

Here's a happier note about our Century 21. I've been reading an Asimov novel, Nemesis set in the 23 century. In it, the protagonists build a faster than light starship, and head out for the stars. Pretty cool and futuristic, right? Here's the thing, they don't know where to go, because in the 23 century of the novel, no one has discovered any planets circling around stars other than the Sun yet.

Here is wikipedia's list of extrasolar planets , those are all the planets we have already discovered around other stars.

Oh yeah, Asimov wrote Nemesis in 1989.

We've come a long way into the future, baby.

And the future maybe sorta weird and scary... but it is also pretty cool.

The Journey I Took

2009-05-23T19:31:00.003-04:00

I haven't put a post up here for awhile, mostly because I've been trying to figure out whether or not I want to write something about my recent experiences, and if so, how I want to write about them.

Ultimately, though, I don't think I can get back to blogging without saying something about this, so here goes...

This winter I was scrambling to find something in the way of employment. The academic job market is bad, and I hadn't heard anything but rejections from the faculty positions I had applied for. I had always been interested in joining Peace Corps, so I figured I might as well fill out the application.

To make a long story short, the Peace Corps needs English teachers and they quickly accepted me and nominated me to serve in a position in Central Asia.

That is not the journey I ended up taking.

Peace Corps requires a health evaluation for all incoming candidates. As part of mine, I had to have some lumps, or nodules, on my Thyroid gland I had been aware of for the past few years re-evaluated. I wasn't too concerned, the prior workup had indicated the nodules were benign.

I went in to have the nodules re-biopsied just before Easter. The Monday after Easter the doctor called, the biopsy had returned "suspicious" results. There was only a 20 percent chance it was cancer, he said, but I would have to have at least part of my Thyroid surgically removed to rule out it out.

Thyroid Cancer, I should note here, is a disease with a generally positive prognosis, for cancer at least. 15 year survival rates for the more common varieties run upwards of 95%. Most patients diagnosed under the age of 40 live out normal lifespans. Those of you who know how I deal with disease will know this comforted me not at all. I already knew a great deal about the rarer and more deadly forms of Thyroid cancer from the last time my nodules had been evaluated, and now I learned a great deal more about the possible complications that could render the less aggressive forms deadly. Every sensation in my body became a harbinger of doom. A back ache was a sign of a bone metastasis, a head ache of one in the brain.

After two weeks of waiting for a surgical consult (um, yeah, no matter what a health insurance company shill tells you, there ARE wait times for care under our precious market based health care system, at least if you are not a millionaire) I met with the surgeon. Who told me that, based on his reading of the history, he felt I was actually looking at a 70% or better chance of having cancer, and that he wanted to completely remove my Thyroid gland. Terrified, I consented to the surgery and drove myself home feeling slightly unreal.

The week between the consult and surgery was surreal. I was in some ways less afraid than I had been before the consult, in some ways more. Foremost in my mind was the risk of damage to my voice. Thyroid surgery requires the surgeon to work close to what are called the recurrent laryngeal nerves, any injury to these can paralyze a vocal cord and leave you permanently hoarse. As someone who relies on the presence of his booming voice as an important part of his teaching repertoire, this possibility terrified me. And of course there was the fact that I had been told I was very probably facing a cancer diagnosis. It was a long week.

My mother came out to help me through the surgery and recovery. The night before the operation was scheduled I wrote letters to friends and family, to be opened if anything should happen to me, and slept a few fitful hours. We drove in to the hospital before dawn, since my appointment was for surgery at 7:00am. The surgical prep area played a recorded loop of the sound of ocean waves. The pre-op nurses were chipper, joking with me to try to keep my spirits up as I sat through a long progression of anesthesiologists and doctors all asking the same questions about my medical history, and describing my procedures to me, not knowing I had already read every scrap of information on them the internet would bring my way. I had IV lines inserted into both hands. I wondered if these would be my last moments with my voice, and found it ironic that there was so little to say. My mother came in to sit with my for awhile, and then they wheeled me into the operating room. The sedative they gave me made me giddy. All my anxiety melted before the brunt of chemistry, and then there was blankness.

I came to confused, and in a fair amount of pain. I think my first words were "I hurt" though by then I knew enough to realize that it was a good thing that I could say that without too much trouble. My mother told me that the doctors were saying they thought my Nodules had been benign after all, based on what they had seen during the surgery, though I knew we would have to wait until later in the week when the full pathology report was finished to be sure. At the very least the rarer and more lethal forms of cancer had been ruled out.

Time acted strangely during my stay in the hospital. Probably a side effect of the morphine. The day wasn't too bad, other than some pain and weakness from the lingering effects of the surgery and anesthesia. I vomited up my first clear liquid meal, which was more embarrassing than anything else. My voice came up to nearly full strength fairly quickly (it had suffered some temporary damage from my intubation during the procedure), and that was encouraging. I managed to send some email and other messages from my mother's laptop. I slept on and off.

My room mate, it became apparent from the discussions I could hear his doctors having with him through the thin curtain dividing our room, was in the hospital to have a surgery related to complications stemming from chemotherapy he was undergoing for lung cancer. It is terrible to say, but the realization of how lucky I was in comparison to him relaxed me tremendously.

Oh, and somewhere in there I regained the ability to pee, which was nice. The day after surgery was all about regaining things I had never really considered losing.

Then evening rolled around, and my mother left, and my room mate was discharged, and things got weird. I wasn't with it enough to concentrate on even so much as a television show. I drifted in and out of consciousness. Time passed incredibly slowly. I woke up thinking it was the middle of the night, only to realize it was 8pm.

Morning came after what seemed endless night. After a long day of waiting, testing to see if my stomach was ready to tolerate food (by feeding it deplorable hospital cuisine, who can screw up grilled cheese and tomato soup? seriously) I was discharged.

I lay on my futon watching TV, trying not to move my stiff and tender neck too much, while my mother spent her time (I am somewhat ashamed to say) cleaning my apartment, which she found unacceptably dirty.

On Friday, the surgeon called. The pathology showed my nodules to be benign. My mother, who had been stoic until then - trying to keep me from falling further in to my constant near panic - cried with joy.

And I slowly got stronger. I stopped needing vicodin for pain after a few days. My father came out to relieve my mother, and she returned to work. My surgical drain (which was gross) came out after a week, my stitches a few days later.

But my thyroid was gone for good. Since you need thyroid hormone to live, I'm now dependent on synthetic thyroid hormone for life. Taking the synthetic hormone is no trouble, just a small tablet every morning. Looks sort of like a birth control pill, actually... maybe pills delivering artificial human hormones lend themselves to a certain form factor?

I read a variety of accounts of what it is like to be on Thyroid hormone replacement drugs before my surgery. Many patients report no major side effects. Others report a wide variety of problems, weight issues, depression, anxiety, memory issues, cognitive difficulties. So far, I feel fairly normal, though I have only been on the drugs for a few weeks, and the lingering remnants of my natural thyroid hormone have not fully left my system. It is wait and see, but I'm hopeful I will be able to get on with my life on the drugs without any real difficulty.

In any event, I am starkly aware of how lucky I am not to be facing a cancer diagnosis. Oncologists like to tell thyroid cancer patients that they have a "good" diagnosis, but they still face the challenges of constant monitoring for recurrence of their disease, radioactive Iodine scans and treatments that require them to be withdrawn from their thyroid replacement drugs (which causes them to become ill as their metabolism runs down without the necessary hormone), and life on a "suppression dose" of synthetic hormone - essentially a very slight intentional overdose of the hormone that helps prevent their cancer from coming back. Even if I do end up facing some challenges because of my hormone replacement, they will pale in comparison to all that. I'm ready to face them.

Still, my pill every morning can't help but remind me that my life hangs on a slender thread. In effect, I now am permanently facing a death sentence one month away, on indefinite reprieve. Every month I will go to the drug store and pick up another month of life.

Really though, this was always true. Our lives are never as certain as we pretend them to be. In a sense, all this has simply forced me to see life the way it is, without guarantees.

So, that is the journey I ended up taking, when I tried to join the Peace Corps. Frankly, now that I've written this, I want to put it behind me, and blog about silly things and TV shows and politics and digital culture.

Except, of course, that I hope I don't lose this sense of how good it is to be alive.

I just want to take this chance to thank all my friends and family that stood by me as I took this trip. You really can't know how much your support has meant to me, unless you have been through something like this yourself, in which case you understand what the support of friends and family means in the deep way that I only now have come to comprehend.

So yeah, thanks everybody. Life is good. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

The Rare And Little Seen

2009-04-03T20:44:00.003-04:00

PEEP EATING SHARK

Peeparodon Andyus

Happy Peep eatin' season!

Update

2009-04-02T15:24:00.001-04:00

For the sake of an Update.

Deep Thought: If you die in a prominent act of violence or major natural disaster, and you hold dual-citizenship or are a naturalized citizen of one country who claims heritage from another, there will be at least one Wikipedia discussion about how to count you among the dead.

That is all.

The Best Line

2009-03-21T15:37:00.003-04:00

From Matt Taibbi's recent article on the Bank Bailout from Rolling Stone

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

Word. I hate how people use, "I worked really hard," as their justification for every goddamn unjust thing they do in this country. "Sure, I'm brutally exploiting people, but it is hard work." "Hey man, its true that my job pays me obscene sums to devise ways to keep insurance companies from having to pay sick people but I work really hard." "Designing new SUVs that will capture public interest, thus ensuring the continued burning of unsustainable amounts of fossil fuels is a lot of work."

I'm not gonna strain myself too much saying this, but fuck you. Maybe its time for us, as a society, to stand up and actually make some goddamn informed decisions about what sort of work does and does not deserve reward, instead of just blindly following some Puritan impulse to throw money at anyone who can make a convincing case for having followed some BS protestant capitalist work ethic.

If you'll excuse me I'm going to go back to goofing off listening to NPR's Saturday Afternoon Opera and slowly writing my government funded dissertation. Look at it this way. At least I'm not working hard to blow up the economy or doom the fucking planet.

None of Us Are Free, If One of Us is Chained

2009-03-13T09:42:00.001-04:00

House is a terribly silly television program, but I love it for its performances, and for turning me on to Solomon Burke:

Nostalgia for Industry

2009-03-01T18:05:00.008-05:00

There was a great moment on Battlestar Galactica this past week. Starbuck is briefing the pilots of the fleet on their duties. Among them, searching for any habitable planet the fleet might call home. The reward for any pilot that makes such a stupendous find? A tube of toothpaste. "The last tube of Felgercarb Toothpaste existing in the known Universe," she announces in a worn deadpan, presenting the unique treasure.

I thought this was a well drawn moment, showing the larger loss in a telling detail. Even more, the detail chosen suggests what the fallout of losing an industrial civilization might look like. Once common commodities, mass-produced objects like bars of soap, cans of soup, tubes of toothpaste, become precious and unique objects. Treasures of a lost world. Like Walter Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" running in reverse.

The world has never really lost a whole industrial civilization before. The collapse of the Soviet sphere might be the closest analogue. I wonder if Russians my age ever have nostalgia for the state-produced products (however poorly made they might have been) that were the common artifacts of their youth. I suspect they do. I read a study somewhere once, that said they found people who grew up in the mid-twentieth century or later associated strong childhood memories with the smells and flavors of manufactured objects - the chemical smell of playdough, the impossible sweetness of kool-aid. I, for one, am reminded of my Grandmother by the flavor of plain Colgate, a staple at her house growing up. The scent of a particular laundry detergent calls forth the memory of a young woman I was once in love with, makes me remember both her and how I once felt about her with a terrible urgency. If this detergent is on sale, I will pass it by, to avoid walking around in a cloud of lonesome memory for weeks.

All this is made more pertinent by the fact that an awful lot of very smart people seem to be concerned that the world may be, in fact, right now in the process of losing an industrial civilization. Namely ours. Bruce Sterling has an interesting post along those lines here. I had the chance to spend some time with another prominent media scholar this weekend. He was less dire than Bruce, but did argue that the surplus we have enjoyed as Americans for the last fifty years was a historical aberration, and was likely in the process of going away.

Of course he also made the point that said surplus had been managed and spent poorly. I would agree. I would add that it was often gained unjustly. My point is not to glorify industrial culture. I deeply hope we can build something better out of its ruins. My point is simply relate to you, my friends, the ways in which I have been anticipating my coming nostalgia. For the luxuries we take for granted. Oranges in Northwest Ohio. Blueberries in Winter. For bottles of oily blue washing detergent that smells like teen angst.

To think this way, makes you see the world as it is, strange and unprecedented. I walked into Kroger supermarket in my fugue of anticipatory nostalgia and found a magical and impossible place. Brightly lit, smelling of fresh bread, coffee stacked in rows, long aisles of our unlikely surplus. The likes of which will never be seen again, at least, not in the everyday lives of poor students and workers. Perhaps the ultra rich will keep a few as preserves. Trade the last can of Chock Full o' Nuts coffee amongst themselves, commenting on its cheerful yellow exterior, the uniformity of the machine-ground beans within.

And maybe, just maybe, a haggard President Obama, nearing the close of his second term, will address a nation huddled in extended families around a handful of still operational television sets. "My fellow Americans," he will announce in a worn deadpan, "we are still looking for any sustainable method of political economy. For the citizen who finds it, I offer this reward: the last tube of regular flavor Colgate toothpaste existing in the Universe."

In which I pick sides between New and Old Media

2009-02-06T07:36:00.005-05:00

I have some very, very serious reservations about the "social networking" site Facebook. Mostly, these revolve around the fact that Facebook (much like, um, blogger, which I am using now) is a commercial website that actively extracts information from its users for the benefit of advertisers. That makes it a fairly pernicious form of surveillance, leading to the very real possibility of the commodification of yet more of our existences, yet more opportunities for capital to take our lives away and sell them back to us.

Yet still, I have to admit, Facebook users have managed to build a fairly compelling social space within this sort of virtual shopping mall. That is what makes the danger of surveillance and commodification so dangerous. All that said, I thinl criticisms of the social habits of Facebookers like this one are badly off the mark.

This author sets out to criticize facebook's "25 Things" meme, which I had myself been annoyed with and had parodied a bit here. I had thought "25 Things" to be worth critique because it invited people to share facts about themselves in this environment of surveillance. And, I admit, sometimes I found people's facts a bit boring.

The author of the article I link to above, however, seems to take offense at the very notion that the proles might dare to write about themselves in this crass new medium made of tubes "the internets." First of all, it distracts them from their proper task of working their assigned jobs within the system! "Assuming it takes someone 10 minutes to come up with their list," she writes,"this recent bout of viral narcissism has sent roughly 800,000 hours of worktime productivity down the drain." Oh noes! Its not like our society is currently undergoing a "crisis of demand" where we can't come up with consumers for all our precious productivity! No, no... back to work proles! We see you slacking on your facebooks! Your role in life is to toil, never to write.

Her other critique is that Average people Suck and should not be permitted to express themselves. You think I'm being too hard on her. Here is what she says in her own words: "Most people aren't funny, they aren't insightful, and they share way too much. Facebook is a loose social network; a "friend" on Facebook might translate to someone you'd barely recognize in real life. I don't care that my college roommate's sister is anemic or that my stepcousin's boyfriend gets nervous around old people (apparently he's afraid they're going to die)." Hear that average people, you aren't funny or insightful! You must SHUT UP now and permit your duly appointed scribbling class the honor of expressing things for you. You couldn't possibly have anything to contribute.

You know, I'll admit it, I'm not always entertained by the things folks share on Facebook. Sometimes I'm even annoyed by what I see as clumsy language or cliched expressions. But listen, Time magazine writer person, shouldn't that make us wonder what is wrong with us, rather than them. People everywhere are clearly desperate to express themselves, to share something of their lives with a larger community, even through imperfect electronic means. There are important reasons to criticize the means, to try to make them better, but I don't think there is any reason to be so condescending to the people who are using them. Maybe, instead, we should take the time to listen, to get to know our fellow human beings, rather than insisting our knowledge of humanity come pre-packaged in pithy prose by writers who have been approved by the proper social elites and commercial enterprises.

One Thing

2009-02-06T00:20:00.002-05:00

Just for the sake of updating the ol' blog. Wasn't tonight's Episode of "The Office" a pretty solid episode? I felt like the promo shot, with what's-her-face Jim's girlfriend from last season, heavily pregnant were meant to set us up a bit as viewers. Make us do the math in our heads. Make us wonder "will they really go there? I thought they were smarter than that?"

And ultimately, they were smarter than that. I like how they have steadfastly refused to break Pam and Jim up this season, and present us with a completely unbelievable "Ross and Rachel" style relationship-on-permanent-hold to somehow attempt to keep "tension" in the series. Instead they've tried to render two people trying to make things work, imperfectly but honestly, within the sit-com format. I think that has been a brave move, even if they have sometimes faltered in their execution (the whole "oh look they are having a crisis" resolved with a "wait no they aren't, they love each other EVEN MORE" bit is starting to wear a little thin).

So there, my opinion on the current season of The Office, for what it is worth, which is very little.

Oh and the new judge on Top Chef is a total ass. What a tool.

25 Things

2009-01-28T22:54:00.001-05:00

So there's this 25 things thing going around Facebook (I know, Facebook... shudder). You're supposed to post "25 random things about yourself." Problem for me is, I'm such a narcissistic loudmouth, I've already told everyone in ear-shot everything they could ever want to know about me, and many things they never wanted to know. So, in lieu of 25 random things about myself, I'm going to post 25 things on a different topic.

See, thing is, tonight the "Stimulus Bill" proposed by President Obama passed the house. That is the good news. The bad news is that the President and the House Democrats watered the bill down to try to make it palatable for the Republicans. They did things like take out funding for family planning, and add tax cuts. You know what they got for these compromises, made in the name of "bipartisanship" and unity? Nothing. No GOP representatives, exactly none, voted for this bill.

So I'm writing this note to say: To hell with bi-partisanship! Here are 25 things I want added to the Stimulus Bill in the Senate, just to piss off the Republicans.

1. Money to buy 14 billion condoms and 300 million doses of Plan B, and to drop said supplies out of low-flying C-130 cargo aircraft over every populated area in the United States.
2. Language declaring National Coming Out Day a National Holiday, and providing funds to celebrate it in the public schools.
3. Block grants for bloggers, with 10 million dollars specifically earmarked for the Daily Kos.
4. Funding to install organic rooftop gardens on all public housing projects
5. To raise funds, the bill should establish a program to forcibly re-posses Hummer SUVs and melt them down. Scrap to be used on public works projects. All Hummer owners to be issued pink Priuses as replacement vehicles.
6. Full funding for Bike trails in all urban and suburban areas. All bike trails to be marked with clearly legible signage reading "YOUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT LOVES HIPPIES."
7. Oklahoma to be sold back to appropriate Native American Nations for a set of Rosary Beads and one of those "Magical Prayer Mats" you get in the mail unsolicited.
8. Charles Darwin and Issac Asmiov's birthday to be celebrated as joint holiday (like president's day) to be called "National Secular Humanism Day." Army of MFA metal sculptors hired to build giant abstract sculpture depicting Darwin and Asimov's love for humanity in the medium of their choice. Homoerotic overtones are to be encouraged, but not required.
9. Travel grants for same sex couples to go to states where full marriage equality is practiced and get married. Extra funding to be granted if couples need to avoid traveling through Congressional Districts with GOP congresspersons.
10. NEH funding increased 4000% At least half of the funding must be devoted to special projects on Pro-Feminist Pornography
11. Money to tear down border wall and replace it with "Borderlands! A Water-Fun Park Devoted to the Work of Gloria Anzaldua" Several Waterslides will cross the US-Mexico border.
12. UAW/SEIU/AFL-CIO get their own bailout grants. Money is specifically permitted to be used on government lobbying and lavish parties.
13. "The L-Word" to be named national treasure. Vast staff of Queer Theory scholars hired at lavish salaries to maintain archival material and perform fan ethnographies.
14. Funding for Peace Studies programs to be established at Annapolis, Quantico, and West Point.
15. Residents of East Hampton and Orange County to be evicted by armored units of the National Guard. Funding provided for homes to be converted to communal housing for musicians devoted to copyright-free music
16. Money to hire coders to re-write Linux kernel. They will be instructed to "Make it more communist."
17. Biologists hired to establish the species with the highest incidence of same-sex sex (other than human beings). This species to be named a special protected species. Homes of high profile GOP politicians to be seized in eminent domain for the purpose of creating parks for preserving this species. Homes will be preserved intact, signage to be posted reading clearly "Government Preserve for Gay Animals."
18. Massive farm subsidies for Arugula farmers. Tofu producers to be given similar subsidies.
19. Hire crew of painters to paint a giant Pot leaf on the Hoover Dam, while we're at it Hoover Dam to be renamed in honor of Ralph Nader
20. "Faith Based Charity Funding" provided for Nation of Islam community self-policing projects.
21. PBS and NPR funding to be massively increased. Specific earmarks for programming on "Why Kinky Hair is Good Hair," "Gay Communities in the Islamic World," "NASCAR is Stupid: An Expose," and "No, For Serious People, Global Warming is Very, Very Real."
22. Money to establish K-12 curricula on Critical Examination of White Privilege, Critical Race Theory, and Advanced Evolutionary Biology
23. Funding for Vegan school lunch programs.
24. Coors bottling plant to be seized, sold to Tsingao brewing company for write-down of Chinese held debt.
25. Money for changing signage etc such that, all gov't buildings, vessels, etc. named after Ronald Regan to be renamed after Harvey Milk, Al Gore, Bobby Kennedy, and Eugene V. Debs

There you go! 25 things! Who has more?

Economics of War

2009-01-17T12:48:00.002-05:00

I don't agree with much of Classical economics, but I will agree with this: if you make a certain course of action cheap, people will tend to pursue it rather than alternatives.

If you make bombs cheap, for example, everything starts to look like a target. Take the current situation in Gaza, almost certainly helped along by the United States providing Israel with Two Billion Dollars of military aid annually (aid that must be spent for US-made weapons, making it essentially a giant welfare check for Lockheed, Boeing, and Raytheon). So the Israeli's attempt to solve the "Palestinian Question" by using multi-million dollar fighter planes to drop bombs on tenement buildings.

Oh, and shell the place with nice, cheap, readily available American made White Phosphorus shells.

Follow that link. It couldn't be clearer. That brightly burning stuff falling from the sky, trailing white smoke? That's White Phosphorus: a high temperature incendiary that keeps burning after it lands on you, and has the handy side-effect of being highly toxic. Whether the photograph shows an intentional strike or the side-effects of using WP as a light or smoke source over a built-up area hardly matters. You can see what this stuff does when used over one of the most densely populated places in the world.

Hey, I've got an idea, if we really want mid-east peace, why don't we stop giving all this crap to the Israelis? Why don't we make war expensive, and see if that generates some more creative thinking on how peace might be achieved?

That would be change I could believe in. Why do I feel like we're unlikely to get it.

So Late It Is Early

2009-01-12T07:07:00.003-05:00

Trying to reset the old out of whack diurnal clock by brute force, seemed like a good idea two hours ago when I was nice and alert and able to read...

Now I'm watching the sky grow brighter and the temperature fall on my little weather station.

Morning like this, you step outside and can feel the cold of space against the skin, thin skein of the atmosphere is no protection... body heat just wicks up and out, into the long dark deepness between the stars.

Morning like this, it occurs to you that this moment now is, effectively, the moment you die, no rupture, no protection, just the all too brief present unfolding in its always accelerating way until it runs headlong into oblivion's grasp. Into the long dark deepness of the inanimate from which you sprang, to which you shall return.

A morning not so unlike this one, not so long ago, I sat in the window seat of a tiny turboprop, waiting to take off on the first leg of a transatlantic trip. Flying makes me nervous, the sheer number of moving parts involved in commercial air traffic overwhelms my ability to make sense of the system, forces me to take on faith the notion that one will safely be conveyed to the edge of space and back as one flies from here to there.

My imagination being what it is, I began it picture how things could go wrong. Imagined the blades of the prop outside my window coming apart violently. Imagined myself decapitated, my head surviving a few seconds as the urban legends say it will. If that were the last bit of the moment granted me, I thought, what will I wish I had done?

And I looked at the play of the raindrops being blown back across the plexiglass window by the propwash, their tiny convexities splitting dull gray morning light into subtle, leaden spectra. Watched them dance up, then down, as the engine throttled.

I thought, I would wish I could write that down.

And now I have.

It must suffice.

Lazy Food Blogging

2009-01-03T01:43:00.001-05:00

IMG_3241
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

I took some pics of my prep from the food I made to share with friends on New Year's eve. I meant to write up a "food blog" post, but I am too lazy. The pics are on my flickr with some basic descriptive captions, though... so click the picture to them out if you would like.

New Year's Day

2009-01-01T15:45:00.002-05:00

We've made it to see another year friends.

Remember, whatever happens in 2009, so long as the Supervolcano under Yellowstone doesn't explode, taking two-thirds of the Continental US with it, I'd say we've done ok.

That kinda puts our human-level tragedies in perspective, don't it?

What the hell?

2008-12-27T17:15:00.002-05:00

Just got this in my inbox, subject line "A biased ultra-positivist's thoughts." WTF? Weirdest spam evar?

Aren't you looking for someone who understands you? If not, there is no
need to read further as it shows that people who think just like you
already surround you.

You must aim to coerce others to adopt your views.
Or does it appeal to you more to nourish foolishness?

I was trying to marry someone this year as there would have been tax advantages.
They told me they'd only consider marriage for love.
They had no enthusiasm for collaboration.

They think the most wonderful thing is to find what you love to do. They're lying to themselves.
A few per cent of today's employment level would be enough to live comfortably.

People ask how I survive as I work only from time to time.
I question why they compensate talented deluders by donating to the movie industry.
Why do they hunger after motorized transport and single family homes?
Is it not self-evident that they delight in traveling only as long as
it's well-respected by the masses?

They're assured that people can't change. Yet when young, they dreamt about
immortality, ideal relationships, and perfect worlds. We are still that immature.
We'll build a society based on rational thinking.

Don't reply to this message as we won't read it. Use the best internet search
engine to search these words.

arrogant teenage intelligence inexperienced students
light philosophy strategy ideology logic
pure general enclave design insecure
terrestrial solitary personality intolerant defiance
salutation social spiritual art traits
indoctrination Borg substantive monomania clandestine

For best results, search for 3 terms at a time. Hence, there are
a very large number of search possibilities, so only the determined will not give up.

Very strange. Some sort of Google adwords revenue scam? Get people to search those words, get cash from associated ads? Seems like it could be successful. Message is weird enough to not get pegged as typical spam, and it preys on some pretty basic human insecurities. Robots harvesting ad value from loneliness. Great. Welcome to century 21. Welcome to the Network Economy.

Sympathy For the Worthless

2008-12-27T17:13:00.001-05:00

Freezer Logo
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

A picture of an old freezer I found rotting away behind my Father's house. I like to find beauty in Junk. Gives me hope.

Big Yellow Taxi

2008-12-24T23:46:00.002-05:00

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got till its gone?
-Joni Mitchell

The above two lines hold a large truth elegantly. In the text below, I belabor the same point. Needlessly, selfishly, and in a most narcissistic manner. But narcissism is the nature of the Internet Medium, I once heard, so I suppose it can't be helped.

Listen.

Human perception has a cruel flaw. It only sees clearly what is already receding from it. Youth, for example. Or, to name another totally hypothetical example, the kindness, grace, and basic decency of the human being whose door you are walking out of for the last time. When they were present the image was a muddle. Too near the sensor to be resolved, lost in the noise and reflection of everyday existence.

And then they are gone, and everything is thrown into stark relief, as if rimmed by the sharp-angled light of the dying evening sun.

Listen.

There are things in your life now. Things you aren't seeing. Things you won't see until, god forbid, you lose them.

Try to appreciate those things, ok? Do it for me. For Christmas.

Or be left like me, trying to soften the edges of the brittle comfort of the company of digital bits with a six-pack and a Richard Buckner CD.

And knowing that this is likely to be the basic state of my existence from here on out, until Oblivion finds me, tells me that all these moments I think I have stolen from her she has really just lent me, in her infinite kindness. And that now, of course, she must take them back.

And suddenly, as I lose them, I know what I have lost.

Winter Solstice

2008-12-21T14:58:00.001-05:00

Well, we've made it to the heart of the dark time, friends. It only gets lighter from here.

Of course, it'll keep getting colder until February sometime.

Take care out there.

This Special Holiday Episode of Anti-Capitalist Sockpuppets

2008-12-18T10:35:00.002-05:00

Has been brought to you by Toshiba

Happy Holidays comrades.

Chicken Blog!

2008-12-12T19:55:00.006-05:00

Tonight I decided to try this recipe for roasted chicken from big shot chef Thomas Keller. It is a very simple recipe, just sprinkle some kosher salt on a chicken and roast at high heat.

I got a chicken:

I set my oven to 450 F, as called for in the recipe, and washed, salted and trussed my chicken.

And then I stuck the chicken into the hot, hot oven. Far too hot, it turns out. Clouds of smoke started to fill my apartment about 20 minutes into the cook time. I opened all the windows (chilly!) turned on the exhaust fan in my bathroom and over the stove, backed the heat down to 400 and continued on, fearful I was making charcoal.

But, when I took the chicken out of the oven it was a nice golden color:

I basted and let rest, as per instructions, now fearful that my reduced heat would have left the interior of the chicken raw. I started my carving by removing the wings and eating, as recommended by Keller. They were delicious! Crispy and salty and perfectly chicken flavored. I cut off a leg quarter and then one breast. The meat was fully cooked and dripping moist. Absolutely perfect. Here's my plate:

Not pretty I know, but hey it was just me. I was so hungry for more of this chicken that I basically skeletonized half the bird looking to find more meat without cutting into my dinner for tomorrow. I have a picture of that, but it is kind of gross.

All and all, I recommend this recipe, but I would suggest cleaning your oven and pans fully and turning on a fan before you get started. The chicken is worth the trouble though. This is one of those simple dishes that develops the flavor of a single ingredient perfectly. Very nice.

Take Three

2008-12-10T22:25:00.002-05:00

Ok, its all that but it is also not that.

What Agrippa shows is the process of transition. The single electric light in the rural village, the car and the mule side by side. The automatic pistol, already decades old when discovered by a little boy in an attic in the middle of the 20th century, but of a design still in use as the second decade of the 21st century comes to a close.

Just like the Mid-Century public works project bridge in the middle of the 2008 Ohio cornfield, under the shadow of the stark-white blades of the Wind Turbine farm.

So often it seems, we forget transition. We imagine the past as having occurred in neat periods, like scenes in a movie. 1931 Depression! (Fade-to-Black) 1941 War! (Fade-to-Black) 1950 Conformity! (Fade-to-Black) 1969! Revolution (Fade-to-Black) etc...

Any good history or fiction will explode this view, remind us that we in fact live in an unending messy transition as technologies, social forms, aesthetic schools wax and wane - hybridize and bleed into each other. Agrippa just happens to remind me of that particularly well (and Gibson's Novels and short stories do a similar job for the future).

So the fact that the Floppy Disk Agrippa is now embedded in that transition in a whole new way - as a once cutting-edge piece of digital art now recovered and emulated by later technology is interesting

Or maybe its all interesting. Or maybe I should stop writing about this now.

Take Two

2008-12-10T22:04:00.002-05:00

On my thoughts on the Agrippa web-site I just blogged about.

Agrippa, as a poem, is powerful to me for the same reason that much of Gibson's work is powerful to me, because it complicates the Past and the Future in interesting ways. When I was a boy, I had a notion of the past as Agrarian and static - and the future as dazzling and Aerospace themed. I don't know if I can wholly blame the pop-culture industry for this, but it does seem to me that the notion of what the Past and the Future were to look like got sort of stuck in the collective imagination of the Mass-Media for awhile there as well. Feeding us images of year 2000 flying cars well into the early 1990s. Or at least, so it seemed to my very young self at the time.

The past Gibson talks about in Agrippa is rural, but explicitly technological. Old cars and concrete feature prominently - as does an encounter, apparently drawn from Gibson's own childhood, between a young boy and a long forgotten Colt M1911 found among dusty old packages. The automatic pistol as ancient artifact, as the ancestral sword.

Reading Agrippa gives me the same feeling I had when, on one of my first long bicycle rides here in Northwest Ohio, I rode across a crumbling concrete bridge. On its side I saw stamped the diamond insignia with the letters WPA and the year: 1940. A low bridge, crossing nothing more than a drainage ditch, and at the same time a quiet testament to the Great Depression and the attempts to alleviate it. Suddenly, I was overcome with the awareness of the depth and complexity of the past and the many ways it is, as Faulkner said, not even past.

And now the self-destructing floppy disk version of Agrippa, has itself become a similar artifact. A strange reflection.

How am I just learning of this now

2008-12-10T21:36:00.003-05:00

There is a whole site hosted by UC Santa Barbra devoted solely to William Gibson's poem Agrippa(A Book of the Dead).

For a Gibson-phile like me this is fascinating on two levels. First there is the role of a site like this in paying fan-boyish homage to Gibson, who seems himself to be a downright otaku in many ways. Second, there is the almost archeological work needed to resurrect the digital form of Gibson's work (which was packaged as a "self-destructing" file on a floppy disk as a comment on text and memory) from the distance past of 1992. The futuristic "hack" of the early 90s is now a museum piece.

The Future of Film Criticism

2008-12-10T17:54:00.003-05:00

A blog post over at the Institute for the Future of the Book raises some interesting ideas about film criticism and new technology. Basically it asks the question: "why don't we use video technology to do film criticism? Wouldn't this be superior to trying to talk about film in print, a totally different medium in which we have to somehow translate the moving images and sounds we are talking about into words before we begin to analyze them?"

I'm not a film critic, but some of my friends are, so I post this here for their consideration. It sounds like a good idea to me, but what the heck do I know?

Narrative and Simulation

2008-12-09T10:32:00.002-05:00

I can't help but notice that, as I watch the little evolutionary simulation I just posted about, I seem to get invested in the success or failure of the little animated car the algorithm generates. I cheer for it as it makes it over the little bumps and ridges of its simulated environment, and feel disappointed when it flips over and the simulation ends in failure.

So, out of the simulation, I construct a sort of narrative. My colleague Dave suggested that this is a common feature of human interactions with simulation in a conversation we had a week or so ago. For Dave, if I understand his argument correctly, this suggests that authors who argue that the simulation has superseded the narrative as a form (N. Katherine Hayles, for example) aren't quite correct.

Here's the thing though, I may indeed build a narrative out of the interactions I observe between the simulated car and its 2d environment, but that narrative is completely without agency. The algorithm doesn't care what I think, it just evolves the best solution to the problem based on the results of its trial and error process. Granted, the simulations we see today are based on the assumptions embraced by their creators - on the implicit narratives in their heads. The designer of my example had a story of car and some terrain and a desired outcome (car travels across terrain) in mind when he/she wrote the simulation.

That's all true today, but the question is: will it be true tomorrow? Will we see simulations feeding simulations? Will the "man in the loop" (to use the term of the mid-century Strategic Air Command) be finally displaced?

I don't think it is possible to answer that question. Certainly there are some very smart people invested in "Strong AI" (there is pretty good evidence the folks at Google are heavily committed to this project) and all that entails. It is also true, however, that very smart folks have been working on this project for decades with little to show for their efforts.

It seems to me at least possible, however, that simulation may some day be firmly in command. That Tomorrow Google may count the fall of every sparrow, just as Yesterday God did. If that is the case, the very idea of human agency may prove to be a brief historical aberration, a few short centuries of what will surely seem to be madness by the beings inhabiting the later regime.

What will human beings do in such a world - if any should survive? The same as we have always done. Create narratives about the inexplicable world around us.

Around the Web

2008-12-09T10:18:00.002-05:00

A few quick things I wanted to share with my friends and blog readers (and those categories are pretty much one and the same).

A great article by David Neiwert on his blog Orcincus (the best liberal blog you aren't reading) on George W. Bush, "Sundown Suburbs," White Privilege, and persistent racial inequality in the United States.

Wikipedia is not a kitten (a funny bit of vandalism to a wikipedia policy page - long since deleted)

Try independent, listener funded, internet radio site Soma FM for a wide variety of streaming music options. The Xmas in Frisco stream is good seasonal fun.

And finally, this little flash application uses genetic algorithms to solve a simple problem by repeated trial and error right before your eyes. Interesting and a little ominous. As the machines get faster, how much supposedly "uniquely human" creativity will they be able to replicate, simply by brute-forcing problems? Forget Foucault - that right there might be the "end of man."

Thanksgiving

2008-11-30T18:13:00.002-05:00

Is, for all its ikky colonial heritage, one of my favorite holidays. I think this is because it is the most DIY holiday. Who would ever buy a pre-made thanksgiving dinner? It simply isn't done. While Christmas focuses on the commodity baubles available from consumer capitalism, on Thanksgiving the focus is firmly on the meal, prepared by the same community that will later consume it. (Issues of gender segregation in labor here can be solved at the local level. Get off yer butts and cook dudes!)

I've had several thanksgiving celebrations this year, my Girlfriend's family, my mother's house, my father's. I'm at my father's place now, where the celebration has moved on to the musical phase the gatherings of his friends tend to inevitably enter. Another DIY celebration, as semi-pro and amateur musicians gather to play some old standbys and folk songs - simple and beautiful.

I, of course, am no musician, so I will contribute by writing this blog post - sending out a burst transmission of my appreciation of their performance into the electronic post-human noosphere that is my home...

Happy Thanksgiving, hackers of the world.

What the hell was this supposed to teach us

2008-11-18T02:11:00.001-05:00

I love good ol Sesame Street, but seriously, where's the educational take away there? No wonder I grew up to be a slacker and a ne're-do-well.

This Video

2008-11-16T17:56:00.003-05:00

Reminds me both of a Romanian friend of mine's disappointment with American Anhedonia and my own:

One of these days I'll throw a proper New Year's Eve party again - then we'll have a good time.

The Last Campaign

2008-11-16T16:27:00.002-05:00

The 2008 cycle is not over in Georgia. You learn more about Saxby Chambliss the GOP incumbent senator. In addition, if you link to Saxby Chambliss on your own blog or web page you can help move this important information on Saxby Chambliss up in rank in Google results.

To Sum Up

2008-11-12T22:10:00.003-05:00

Since this political season has ended in a modicum of victory for the forces of good, I feel free once more to set aside my sense of larger social responsibility and return to the calling I really love. That is, to advocate for the meaningless, the wasted, the useless, the trivial, the mundane, the unproductive, the nonsensical, the ridiculous, the pointless, and the absurd.

It is these ruptures, these tiny flights from meaning's vast and busy machinations that save us from the automaton's oblivion. They seemed decadent when the war of meaning was pitched and immediate, but now they seem to me precious once more.

Possible Reactions

2008-11-12T21:59:00.003-05:00

To the recent story in the NY Times, revealing that a couple guys with a website faked an entire Policy institute and created a phony adviser to John McCain - and managed to get their phony adviser quoted in the mainstream media a few times.

Mainstream Press: The Internet is full of Nonsense! Of course it is! It is a dangerous sewer of half-truth and innuendo! Any media form without the August presence of our professional standards is doomed to be such. Beware good people, Internet Nonsense threatens to undermine our entire society!

Internet Boosters: Now wait, Nonsense levels on the net are normal and well within historical precedent. We've always had Nonsense! Nothing has changed! Nonsense has always existed! Many eyes are on our valiant new media day and night, rooting out Nonsense and advocating the light of reason!

Me: The Internet is full of Nonsense! I love Nonsense!

All these moments will pass

2008-11-12T20:42:00.002-05:00

Rutger Hauer's tremendous soliloquy from the close of Blade Runner:

One of my favorite moments from one of my favorite movies. I think Roy Batty's observation here sums up the problem of mortality (what I still basically believe to be the essential problem of all of human existence, despite the various reasons I know not to) in an elegant and memorable way.

I drop this here because I was thinking of this scene today, and when I found the clip embedded in a BoingBoing story this evening I decided the random nature of the universe had dictated I say something about it.

I had been having a bit of a moment of my own, but unlike the ones Batty wants to reflect on, this moment was totally ordinary. I had gone to Staples to make some photocopies for my job applications, and realized I had forgotten some papers I needed to Xerox in my office. I had to drive back to campus to get them. It was, strictly speaking, a waste of time - but I found (as I so often find) a great deal of pleasure in this moment. The sky was low and slate colored, a perfect November overcast. The air was still warm enough to leave the window rolled open but had begun to taste of Winter. A DJ at the college radio station was playing hip-hop, small label but hardly underground. Driving slowly back to campus, I was stuck behind one of the University's buses. The distinct note of school-bus diesel exhaust and the low, gray light called to mind all the falls of my childhood, the hope and energy of each beginning school year. The anticipation of holidays. Best of all, my mistake had made for me the perfect alibi for my reverie. I could do nothing else but spend my time in this moment. I had not choice but to make this drive. The papers were in my office. Nothing could be done until I retrieved them.

These moments pass perhaps even faster than those remarkable moments that Batty eulogizes in his speech. It seems ludicrous to even try to record them. Who wants to know about my joyful encounter with overcast and bus exhaust? But, for me, these useless and mundane moments are a tremendous source of life's joy and even its meaning.

Which of course, makes me think critically, and perhaps a bit apprehensively, about the project I am involved in as a New Media scholar. In a conversation the other day, a colleague paraphrased Clay Shirky's hope for the possibility of the Internet connected masses. If we contribute to Wikipedia or Free Software, he said, we are no longer wasting time like we would watching television. Instead, our idle moments can be harnessed, can be made "socially useful." All these moments will be used - like processor cycles in the SETI@home cluster.

I am being a bit unfair to this argument here - TV time is not usually a source of reverie and joy, more often a source of consumer-zombie stupor. I've been an advocate for FOSS and Wiki for years now, I'm not condemning them. Still, I wonder. Do we leave the door to the Social Factory, to the Taylorization of Everything open if we implement our Participatory Culture in the wrong way? Does there need to be a voice to defend the idle, the useless, and the wasted moments - in a culture that seems ever more interested in making every moment count, every moment produce, every moment matter?

A fitting quote

2008-11-11T22:34:00.003-05:00

Alongside the modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead.

-Marx

Maybe, just maybe, last Tuesday night we finally made some progress in putting down a few of our inherited evils. Maybe a few of the specters that have haunted us have been dissipated in the light of day.

Let us steel ourselves then, to do battle with the living.

Campaign Season

2008-10-28T00:47:00.002-04:00

First really solidly cold night here. Went out to have a cup of tea on the walkway and found everything with a light coating of ice. Another winter approaches.

And the four year cycle of government grinds on in the last week of this endless campaign. As a Democrat, of course, I watch the persistence of good news in the polls with a superstitious disbelief, sure that as soon as I turn my back they will all shuffle numbers around and we'll have lost again. I stare at the thin blue line of the Pollster.com composite obsessively, trying to make it hover above the 50% mark by sheer force of will.

And, of course, if Senator Obama manages to make it through the election, we still have clowns like these to worry about.

I am not a person of faith. I do not pray. I wish I could now. If you can, please do.

Good Night, oh you handful of friends who tolerate my pompous and self-important prose

And Good Luck.

Thomas Friedman is the wrongest man ever

2008-10-26T22:20:00.002-04:00

I'm sure someone has pointed this out already, but I haven't seen it anywhere, so I thought I would point it out.

I was reading this post over at the Anthropology blog Savage Minds, which brings up Friedman's so called "Mcdonald's theory" which posits that no country with a Mcdonald's restaurant will invade another country with a McDonald's.

At little late, I know, but just to point this out:

Mcdonald's Moscow (one of many)

annnnd

McDonald's Tbilisi

So much for that theory.

Brilliant

2008-10-24T19:30:00.001-04:00

Someday we'll look back on this...

2008-10-09T23:41:00.009-04:00

A few years ago, when I was living in Elmira, New York, the building next to mine burned.

It was a two-story wooden apartment house, long and narrow, with green wooden siding. It was separated from the only slightly less ratty apartment house I lived in by only a narrow driveway, barely a car width across.

And, of course, it was flammable as tinder.

I was awoken early Sunday morning by the shouting of my neighbor, who had started a kitchen fire while fixing breakfast. A thin thread of smoke issued from his back door. It didn't look too serious. Just to be safe, I went and gathered up a few papers and things from my apartment, things I couldn't afford to lose, and moved them to my car. Of course, it being my apartment I wasn't sure I had found everything in the mess. Then I waited in the street to watch the excitement as the fire department arrived.

Arrive they did. They attacked the fire with an extinguisher, but it wasn't enough. Then they ran a hose to the nearest hydrant for water... only to discover this hydrant had been disconnected because of work on the water main. They had a small supply of water in the tanks of the truck. It gave them a small spray like something out of a large garden hose. The smoke grew thicker and blacker, and started issuing from my neighbor's window. They began to evacuate the other tenants from the building. I asked one of the fire fighters if it would be safe to return to my apartment and gather a few more things.

"Yes," he said, "but hurry." And he motioned for one of the police officers on the scene to accompany me.

I remember standing in my cluttered apartment, the police officer at the door, thinking how strange it was that everything was completely normal, utterly unchanged in my small, cluttered living room, even though I might never return there again. I gathered all of the student papers I could find, a few cherished books, not in a panic but in a surreal state. Everything was so normal, I was in my own living room, it seemed impossible there could be any danger. And yet I knew, I knew that next door a fire was starting to burn out of control. I could smell the smoke. From my bedroom window I could just see flames starting to lick through the window of the other building.

Sometimes I am struck by that feeling now, the feeling of cognitive dissonance between the danger we are hearing about, this impending recession or depression or what have you, and the way our lives are continuing on as if nothing was happening. But not that often. I think it is because the danger is not yet as real to me as that fire was. I wonder if some day we will look back on these days and have this same surreal feeling, remembering how we lived in such comfort while the system that sustained us burned.

That day in Elmira, the building next to me burned to the ground. Nothing remained but blackened beams that stunk of sulfur and ash for weeks. It still wasn't cleaned up when I left town months later. My building was spared, though the heat was so bad it warped the vinyl siding. Small blessings, I guess.

I made a big batch of pintos and rice tonight, a taste I acquired while in the Southwest for a while last year. Simple food, tasty. A small blessing. Hopefully the supply of canned tomatoes, dry pinto beans, and onions will not go away any time soon.

Palin Q+A: The (even) Short(er) Version

2008-09-25T15:58:00.002-04:00

GOP Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin just answered questions from reporters for the first time as VP candidate (for the record, Joe Biden has met with and taken questions from national and local press 86 times since his nomination). You can read the transcript here. For those of you unwilling to read 4 short questions and answers, here is the short version:

Q: Governor Palin what would you do differently than George Bush with regards to fighting terrorism?
A: Nothing
Q: Will you endorse Sen. Ted Stevens?
A: I'm gonna wait and see how his trial goes first
Q: Will you vote for Sen. Stevens?
A: [does not answer]
Q: What do you think about the bail-out package?
A: I'll support it only after John McCain fixes everything with his magic!

Ok, that last one was LONGER than her actual answer...

Why Fringe Doesn't Work

2008-09-24T08:37:00.003-04:00

And I'm truly sad it doesn't. I like many things about the set-up, and I think the performances being given by Anna Torv and John Noble are actually pretty good. That said, there are several problems, which I think all stem back to one basic issue.

JJ Abrams has clearly never played a role-playing game.

I don't just say that to be a nerd-supremacist. When you play a role-playing game, you learn what makes a character too powerful for the story he or she is in. In role-playing parlance, such a character is called "broken."

Dr. Walter Bishop is very badly broken.

He knows the answer to every mystery, and furthermore he knows these answers based on special knowledge available only to him. Why the hell am I, as a viewer, supposed to be interested in the mysterious substance-on-the-bus or hypergrowth baby or whatever if I know he's just going to look at it and say, "ah yes, I invented this in 1984 and here is how it works."

Compare this to the X-files' Scully and Mulder, who were as much in the dark (if not MORE in the dark) as the viewer was. Hence we could have some connection to them as they solved the mystery.

I also think Fringe proves once and for all that William Gibson's pronouncement on JJ Abrams, that he is not "a native science-fiction mind." The technological melange Fringe presents doesn't make any sense, share any central theme, or tap into any key anxiety about the path of our contemporary society. The anxiety that "science and technology are getting out of hand" doesn't cut it. If that were the thesis of an undergraduate essay turned in to me I would hand it back marked "too vague! revise!" Mary Shelly was concerned about "science and technology getting out of hand" so was William Gibson, but they wrote very different (and equally great) books because they had much more specific concerns based their particular historical moments, and personal interests.

All THAT said, I may well continue to watch the show. Why? I'm a mystery junkie. Show me a weird macguffin and I'm likely to just watch along to see where you are going with it, even if I think you are full of crap. In fact sometimes that will make me even more likely to watch, as I attempt to answer the question "will they really go there?"

And this, dear readers, is probably how JJ Abrams got to where his is today.

Networks and Narratives

2008-09-23T11:33:00.003-04:00

Someone I went to high school with died this week. He was a Marine, killed on convoy duty while serving in Afghanistan.

He was no one I knew well. I have only a vague memory of him, and of the girl who, the article marking his death in my hometown paper tells me, became his wife.

The article in the paper, which I will not link to here, since I don't know if the deceased or his family would approve of what I am about to say, gives a short outline of the dead Marine's life over the decade since I was acquainted with him. I could not help but be struck by how sharply our lives had diverged over the course of those ten years. He had three children, the oldest of which would have been born when he and I were both twenty years old. I, at the time, was drinking too much, playing Dungeons and Dragons and Half-Life for hours on end, and trying to learn how to become a fiction writer. The most difficult thing in my life was probably waking up for my 9:30am Spanish class, which I earned a C in because of my absenteeism. Meanwhile, my former classmate was training to be a Marine, and becoming a father.

The wars my classmate served in (he was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan) were for me largely media events. I remember the shaky video images of bombers over Afghanistan in the first days of that war, the triumphant reports of our warlord allies sweeping the Taliban from power in what seemed a classic, lopsided American victory. I was in a class on Faulkner at the time, taught by a complete blowhard of a professor who shall remain nameless. The professor was actually much like Faulkner, a man frustrated by the fact that he was a man with only scant experience with violence living in a culture that equates violence with masculinity. He loved to repeat stories to the class about his few fleeting encounters with physical confrontation. In particular, he claimed to have once been shot at - though he wouldn't give the circumstances - and to have confronted what he believed to be a ghost with a loaded shotgun. It took me a long time to realize he was a windbag and a very sad and incomplete man, probably because I shared many of his insecurities as a 22 year old manchild who had never so much as thrown a punch in anger, though I had spent countless hours in dazzlingly detailed simulations of armed conflict. The professor and I traded quips on war, violence, "human nature." Sometimes I corrected his military nomenclature, "no, no Professor, that would be an assault rifle, not a submachine gun."

Meanwhile, my classmate would have been in Base Housing somewhere, with his wife and his 2 year old, knowing what all this meant for them. I wonder, what did he feel? Was he excited to be called to do the duty he had volunteered for? Was he afraid? Would I really have been able to understand his feelings, if he had told me about them?

I remember watching the first day of the Iraq war on the dorm room floor of a young woman I was hopelessly, unrequitedly in love with (still a victim of unrequited love! how childish! my classmate's second child had been born by then) as the great sticks of bombs fell on Baghdad, sending spouts of fire into the sky. The young woman and I talked about politics, history, the great waste of it all. My major concern was demonstrating to her how wise, carefully considered, and impeccably humane my political positions were, in the vain hope this would win her heart. A few days prior to this, or perhaps it was afterwards, I can't remember, I participated in one of the handful of Anti-war protests that was held at my school, a mid-size liberal-arts University in the SUNY system. At one point, I accidentally threw up the heavy-metal rocker's devil horns instead of the hippy's peace sign. Later, I would find myself leading the chorus of chanting, booming out the ancient, overused call "What do we want?" and receiving back from the crowd around me "Peace!" I remember sensing the power and pleasure that came from using my voice this way, the ease with which I discovered I could project my words through the small crowd and the electricity I felt when they responded to them. It was then that I began to sense that I wanted to teach (and loudness, sheer force of vocal presence, remains a primary tool of mine in the classroom, to this day).

I cannot be sure where my classmate was during all this. The brief newspaper article does not give me enough enough information to say for sure. Since he was a Marine, and served two tours in Iraq, there would seem to be a good chance he was in Kuwait, waiting for the Air Force to do its job and the ground war to start. Would he have been speaking or listening while he waited for the orders to cross the border? He attained the rank of Sergeant by the time of his death. Would he have already had a position of responsibility by the Winter of 2003? Would he have been responsible for organizing a platoon or a squad, reassuring them and advising them as they faced uncertain times ahead? Or would he have only been sitting and listening while generals boomed out orders and enthusiasm, and Lieutenants presented assignments and objectives.

I do not compare my life to my classmate's life, now ended, to criticize my own academic life as shallow shallow, cynical, or "unreal" while romanticizing his family life and service as "authentic" and meaningful. Only to point out how we built our lives out of (and were ourselves built by) two profoundly different networks of deeply interlinked things, ideas and people. In my case, the academy, my colleagues, a great raft of books, a thousand forms of media. In his case, many of the same things (note the iPods so often present in videos and pictures sent by by troops in Iraq) but all connected with the institution of the Marine Corps, his family, and of course the opposing network of people, ideas and things (call it what you will, international terrorism, Afghan resistance, whatever) that ultimately took his life.

These networks are complicated, and vast. Everything in them is profoundly active, nothing is passive, just transmitting effects from point A to point B. (To give credit where credit is due, without junking things up with unneeded academic-ese, I'm drawing here off of the "Actor-Network theory" of Bruno Latour). Neither my life, nor my classmate's, was entirely determined by technology, by politics, by the economy, nor by the stories we as humans tell ourselves about these processes in order to make sense of them. Rather, all play a role. A sudden trauma, like death in wartime, makes it easier, perhaps, to recognize the complex play of interlocking networks. Who can doubt that the roadside bomb, that the sniper, speaks? Who can refute that technology, society, human agency, all help to compose their utterances? Is it not clear that both I, and my classmate's family, will try to make meaning of this, and that our meanings may be profoundly different?

A few day ago, I wrote about a political blog started by a colleague of mine, a project I still hope to contribute to. He has called his blog, Its the Narrative Stupid. As a fellow humanities scholar, he wants to make salient the central role of narrative, that key process of meaning-making, in our political life. I agree completely. I only want to point out, through this long and probably far too wordy exercise, that narratives are always located in networks, and that while they touch every part of that network (and vice-versa) they are not synonymous with it (Baudrillard not withstanding). The map may be the only way we may know the territory, but it is not the territory.

This is something I think we are generally aware of as scholars, I'm certainly not accusing my colleague of making this mistake, but only pointing out that we must walk a careful line. We are right to argue for the importance and power of symbols, but we must guard against letting them float free from the Networks they always circulate in. When we forget that Narratives have networks attached to them, we lose resources we need to understand how those who exist in Networks quite different from our own may be making meaning. This, I think, may have dire political consequences. I am not saying that we must bow to the meanings others have made, only that we must understand what those meanings are and how they are working within their networks if we are to be able to talk to them, to share our ideas with them, and to expand our coalitions. This, ultimately, is the only way (IMHO) to successfully advocate one's position within a Democracy.

If You Know Union Members who are thinking of Voting for John McCain

2008-09-23T11:17:00.001-04:00

Please show them this:

Things Andy Finds Fascinating Chapter 1,493

2008-09-22T11:04:00.003-04:00

In which a Japanese shipping company gives a Panamax Roll-On-Roll-Off of car-carrying vessel a name which would seem to befit a country-western Album.

Presented for your approval: the Texas Highway a 17,000 ton vehicle carrier in the service of Taiyo Nippon Kisen Co. LTD. of Kobe, Japan. Her sister ships include the more internationally flavored Tianjin Highway and Baltic Highway as well as the Indiana Highway and Kentucky Highway which sound like they could be a Springsteen album and a Bob Denver album, respectively.

I just find all of this a fascinating example of the multicultural melange of mixed-up symbols our late-capitalist culture serves up in the even in the most mundane and under-examined spaces. A mix of symbols in which even historically powerful "western" culture can be re-mixed and re-contextualized.

Oh and when the container ship in the next lock over pulled forward two frames after this one, she revealed herself to be the Maersk Dallas.

Hypertext formatting a Public Domain document

2008-09-19T10:19:00.005-04:00

I've taken a stab at starting the project I described in my last post: creating a hyperlinked version of a public domain text. I've added the text of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government to the wikibooks project where it can have links to wikipedia articles and other gloss material added to it.

You can check it out here. Any help would be much appreciated.

Project Idea

2008-09-19T10:19:00.003-04:00

Does anyone know of any project working to convert public-domain e-books (like those available from Project Gutenberg) into a wikipedia-like hypertext format? That is to say, into a format where proper nouns, references, and terms the reader might not immediately know are linked to some resource (wikipedia entry, original source, etc) that might help the reader gain a better understanding? I love how this has been done with the Orwell Prize online adaptation of Orwell's diaries. Just think of how useful it would be with a dense philosophical or historical text. We all end up searching wikipedia for the references anyway.

If no one knows of a project like this already ongoing, would anyone want to help start one?

Blog Bifurcation

2008-09-17T14:56:00.002-04:00

Actually more like trifurcation. I'm trying to sort out my academic, personal and political blogging. Personal stuff, my take on various bits and pieces of pop culture, reflextions on quotidian existence, will remain here on greatconcavity. I'm biting the bullet and starting a dissertation blog with the same title as my dissertation, Hackers, Cyborgs, and Wikipedians, where I will be posting fragments of my ongoing dissertation. Finally, the next time I have something I think is worth saying about the current election cycle or US electoral politics in general, I'm going to try to put it up on It's The Narrative, Stupid a new political blog organized by a colleague and twitter-buddy.

See you around the internets.

Dumb Like a Fox

2008-09-11T22:27:00.002-04:00

I assume by now we've all seen this:

and we're ready to get to work spreading the meme.Sarah Palin is unready to be Vice President! She didn't even know what the Bush Doctrine is! What a dummy.

I'm not sure that's going to work. Here's why:

What it looks like the Republicans are going for with the Palin love-fest is the same sort of identity politics they always play. They want white suburban, exurban, and rural America to look at Palin and say, "hey she's a member of my community, she's like me!"

Thus, when media outlets and liberal commentators pick out Palin's flaws, a large, powerful segment of the electorate hears the media picking on them. Race, religion, and other crude markers of identity are clearly central to this trick, but when the criticism pertains to issues of knowledge or intelligence, I think there is an additional factor in play that renders this trick particularly effective. Forms of knowledge, skill and intelligence possessed by great swaths of the electorate have been devalued by the corporate de-skilling and outsourcing of work. Thus, these voters are already primed to react defensively to the proclamations of "elites" possessed of knowledge that the market, and our larger society, still grants some value and tokens of respect.

The great trick of the GOP, of course, has been to turn this defensiveness into a weapon to bludgeon exactly those people who might try to blunt the worst effects of this capitalist process of de-valuing the knowledge and skills of working people. The Dems try to point this out, but of course, since the corporations ARE the media, they are always fighting an uphill battle (and the fact that they themselves dare not directly confront capitalism doesn't help any).

My suggestion? Leave the gaffes alone. Concentrate on the war with Russia stuff. By next week the Obama campaign should have ads in heavy rotation repeating Palin's statement that she would "go to war with Russia" and playing it over stock footage of the Crossroads-Baker Atomic test. Basically the "Daisy" ad all over again. Would it be a little dirty? Sure, but to hell with it, they've been waaaay dirtier than that and paid no price for it. If Obama's goal is to lose with a clean conscience, he should think about the very real, very terrible effects a McCain/Palin administration ticket would have on the country.

I'd just like to point out

2008-09-09T18:59:00.002-04:00

That by Heart's own admission, the titular character of the song "Barracuda" is not really supposed to be a good person. Submitted into evidence, these lyrics, the only ones repeated during the course of the song:

If the real thing dont do the trick
You better make up something quick
You gonna burn burn burn burn it to the wick
Ooooooh, barracuda?

Yes, the GOP has stolen a song about a habitual liar to brand their VP candidate. Who is a habitual liar. Wow.

Kick-Ass Obama Ad

2008-09-08T17:56:00.002-04:00

YES! Its like my point 4 below with the Unhealthy Politically Induced Rage(TM) removed. Nice! I want to know if anybody see these up on the air. We gave 'em the money, now they better spend it.

Dear America: WTF? An Open Letter

2008-09-08T10:55:00.004-04:00

Yes, time for another open letter from me. Because I'm very fond of my own opinion. This one goes out to the Electorate to the US of A

Dear America*,

The polls currently suggest you are responding to the recent ad campaign (referred to in the press by its trade name "convention") staged by the Republican party. I would like to ask you one, simple question:

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!?!?!

I have always prided myself on standing up for democracy, for advocating for popular sovereignty, but this really shakes my faith to the core. Here's why. The McCain campaign is based on a number of lies totally removed from anything resembling reality. Lies so stunningly untrue that if you believe them, voters of America, I will be forced to seriously reconsider the notion that you are capable of making an informed decision about where to go for lunch, much less who should control the nation. Let me enumerate these lies here:

1. Non-existent American Oil: Ok seriously folks, seriously NO ONE believes there is enough Oil in the US to make even a teeny-tiny dent in Gasoline prices. Even the Republican politicians admit that, when they aren't saying misleading things about "energy independence" in front of cheering crowds. Furthermore, continuing Oil consumption at our current rate endangers the global climate and ensures continued dependence on that political bug-a-boo "foreign oil." See, even if we did increase domestic production in the short-term, in the long-term those supplies run out (remember they aren't very big) and, since price incentives never drove us to reduce consumption, we're back at the Saudi spigot. "Drill baby Drill" is the most blatantly false mantra an American political party has embraced, possibly ever. It promises you, the American voter, that you will be able to continue your way of life unchanged if we just sweep the environmentalists out of the way and let the Oil industry off the leash. This is untrue. The Gasoline economy is coming to an end, the hard physical limits of size of existing oil reserves and the ability of the atmosphere to absorb CO2 make that an inescapable reality. Our only choice is to run off the edge of this cliff full-speed or start thinking about how to make a controlled landing. Furthermore, how much less of a leash do you think we can really give the Oil industry. Have you not noticed the Oil-Man-In-Cheif we've had for the past 8 years?

2. Non-Existent Tax Cuts/Non-Existent Tax-Hikes: Let me make this perfectly clear. Barack Obama will only raise taxes on people making $250,000 a year or more. How many times does he have to say this? And he'll only raise them back to the level they were paying taxes under the Clinton administration, you know, those 8 terrible years of peace and prosperity. So the next time you hear McCain say "Barack Obama wants to raise your taxes" I want you to ask yourself "do I make $250,000 a year?" and if the answer is "no", just tell yourself "he isn't talking to me, he is talking to some McMansion owning rich fuck I can't stand." Either that or he is, you know, lying.

3. Non-Existent Job Creation Plan: McCain insists, insists that his plan to give giant tax breaks to Very Wealthy People(TM) will "create jobs." Newsflash America, this is the exact tax scheme we've had for the last eight years. The same one! With the same plan, let the rich become ultra-rich and they will bestow their prosperity on all of us through the magic of trickle-down economics. How well has that been working out for us so far, eh? Am I the only one who noticed that unemployment jumped UP recently? Cutting taxes on the rich is not a job-creation plan. Scratch that, it is a job creation plan, but it isn't one that will work.

4. Non-Existent Reformer Credentials: If I hear a major media outlet call John McCain a "maverick" one more time I'm going to hit my head into a wall until I pass out. I swear to God, America, you watch me. John McCain has voted with President Bush 90% of the time during his administration. He has endorsed all of the President's major policies in his own policy proposals. Sure, he has his name on a major piece of campaign finance reform legislation, but that was only AFTER he was investigated in a major scandal involving a campaign donor that apparently tapped senators he had given multi-million dollar contributions to for favors. Handy way to clear your name after being caught with your hand in the cookie jar, huh? Don't even get me started on why calling Sarah Palin a "reform" candidate is a laughable notion. Ok, now I'm started, so how about this list: her close relationship with corrupt Alaska senator Ted Stevens, her blatant gaming of Federal earmarks to win $12 million in federal money for an Alaska town with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, her support for the so-called "bridge to Nowhere" before it became a political hot-potato (she literally had a T-shirt supporting it), her blatant cronyism and disregard for professional employees while running Wasilia... see! I told you not to let me get started.

Well, there you have it, America, a few of the Big Lies of this election cycle. Could I enumerate more? Probably, but I really need to get back to work now.

Please, don't buy into this crap. Show me democracy is not a horrible, farcical mistake? Please?

Sincerely,

Andy

*Sorry Canada - it just has a better ring to it than "Dear United States"**
** Additional apologies to Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, South Georgia, South Sandwich Islands, Falkland Islands, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela - props to Colin, who apparently has been playing that "name the countries" game on sporacle.com

Andy's Linux Hacks for NOOBs - Phun with screensavers edition

2008-09-04T14:32:00.002-04:00

I'm more-or-less a novice user when it comes to linux. I'm pretty proud of having put together the little hack I'm about to describe, but I realize it is kid stuff for those of you who administer commercial grade servers and write kernel patches and stuff. Still, I thought I would share what I did for the benefits of my fellow NOOBs who might find the information useful. Sharing is what FOSS is all about, right?

I've always been fascinated by the variety of real-time and near-real-time information you can access with a networked PC. I remember the first time I found a Full-Disk GOES image on the web. I was amazed, there was the "big blue marble" of the earth, just like in the famous images from the Apollo Missions (except in black-and-white and higher resolution) and I was seeing it as it appeared just a few hours ago! Since then, I've discovered a variety of live or almost-live feeds of interesting images, like the Kennedy Space Center launch pad, or weather radar images, images from traffic cameras on local highways, or from the SOHO satellite monitoring the sun.

Yesterday it struck me that I had all the tools I needed to set up my Linux desktop box (running Ubuntu 8.04) to automatically download images from these feeds and display them as my screensaver. Here's how I did it.

Ubuntu ships stock with a screensaver called glslideshow that displays a slideshow of image files on the screen. I decided to use this to display my images. First I had to modify the settings for the glslideshow screensaver to pull images from a directory other than its default and to forgo panning and zooming the images it displayed. Sadly, Gnome doesn't give you an easy way to do this from the GUI just yet, so I had to go in and edit a couple of config files. First I had to modify the glslideshow config file to get it to display the images the way I wanted to. This file is located at:
/usr/share/applications/screensavers/glslideshow.desktop

The line of this file beginning with:
Exec=glslideshow
gives the options that the glslideshow screensaver program will be executed with. I set mine to:
Exec=glslideshow -root -duration 5 fade 1 -zoom 100
Which basically tells the program to show images for 5 seconds at a time with a 1 second crossfade between them, and to display the images at 100% screensize, which prevents any panning or zooming effects. You can read the man page for glslideshow to learn more about the options if you want.

For some reason, to set the location the screensaver will use as the source for its images, you have to edit a different file. This file is called .xscreensaver and is located in your home directory. You may or may not have one. If you have one edit it. If you don't have one, create one. In any event add this line to .xscreensaver:
imageDirectory: [Path to Files]
Substitute the location you want to use to store your files for [Path to Files] I used a subdirectory in my home directory so I used
imageDirectory: /home/MyUserName/Pictures_For_Screensaver

Once you get that set up, throw a couple images into the directory you are going to use and go to the "screensaver" entry under the "preferences" menu and enable the glslideshow screensaver to give it a test run. It should randomly display your test images on the screen.

Next, I set up my machine to download images from my sources at set intervals. To do this I used the program crontab, which tells the computer to execute a specified command at a specified time, to automatically run the program wget, which fetches a file from the internet.

You set up crontab by writing a text file with entries that tell the computer when you want it to execute a given command. This can be a little tricky to understand at first. I'm not going to go into detail about how to use crontab. It is a very powerful little program. If you want detailed instructions on its general use, go here. For our purposes, all we need to know is how to set it up to issue our wget commands at regular intervals. You do this by creating a text file and adding lines in this format
*/[Number of Minutes Between Downoads] * * * * wget -O [Path_to_File/Filename] [URL of File to Download]

Ok, what does all that mean? It means that to tell crontab to have wget grab the file at http://www.goes.noaa.gov/FULLDISK/GEVS.JPG and save it to /home/User_Name/Pictures_for_Screensaver every 30 minutes you add a line reading
*/30 * * * * wget -O /home/User_Name/Pictures_for_Screensaver/gevs.jpg http://www.goes.noaa.gov/FULLDISK/GEVS.JPG

What's the deal with all those "*" symbols? Its complicated. Seriously, read this or take my word for it, you need 'em.

Add a line to the file for each of your image sources. Have the computer grab more frequently updated images more often, and less frequently updated images less often. I ended up grabbing images from the following sources:

http://abclocal.go.com/three/wtvg/cams/henscam.jpg
http://cmhimg01.dot.state.oh.us/images/tolair-AirportHighway-WB-Large.jpg
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/eit_304/512/latest.jpg
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/countdown/video/chan3large.jpg
ftp://ftp.glerl.noaa.gov/realtime/tol2/tol2-1.jpg
http://webcam.princess.com/webcam/star_bridge.jpg
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/FULLDISK/GEVS.JPG
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/pmap/gif/pmapN.gif
http://i.imwx.com/web/radar/us_fwa_ultraradar_plus_usen.jpg

Which gives me an interesting mix. Some local webcams, some silly stuff, a couple of satellites, weather radar...

Once you have your text file done, save it as a plain text file under any filename you like. I saved mine as "cronfile." Then issue the following command from the command line:
crontab [filename]
Replace [filename] with the name of the text file you created.

And voila! Your own auto-updating webcam screensaver! I'm watching mine right now. It is showing me traffic on I475 in toledo and the slow march of the "crawler" vehicle bringing the space shuttle to the launch pad at Kennedy, as well as the most recent GOES and SOHO images, local weather radar, and the current Aurora activity forcast from the space weather center.

Useful? Time will tell. A nerdy thrill from having a "magic window" out on various parts of the Earth and Outer Space? Hells yes.

Post-Modern Meta-Irony

2008-09-03T11:38:00.002-04:00

Art collective monochrom continues their attempts at culture jamming:

The thing that makes this really interesting is the context. BoingBoing.net has been one of the most visible sites distributing monochrom's work. Yet BoingBoing is a site with a strong libertarian bent - sometimes trending towards anarcho-capitalist. So the video above - which is a monochrom project distributed via BoingBoing's "BoingBoing TV" - ends up being a truly weird hybrid: art collective members commenting on the difficulty of being subversive under a late-capitalist regime that relentlessly transforms speech into commodity, interspersed with ads hawking the Microsoft corporation's new "crowdsourced music platform."

What I can't decide is, who wins in this exchange?

Amy Goodman Arrested

2008-09-02T00:11:00.003-04:00

They arrested radio journalist Amy Goodman in Minneapolis today. This, after days of random raiding of homes and meeting places of peaceful protesters. What has this country come to? Do we arrest journalists for the crime of covering the news now? This is unacceptable. As has become my habit, I wrote the Obama camp to complain and ask for action. I doubt I will get any, but I had to try.

Here is what I wrote:

Dear Senator Obama,

I know, you get too much mail from me. This one is important.

Senator, they just arrested an independent journalist, the well known and widely respected Amy Goodman, in Minneapolis. The actions that have been taken by the police in that city in the days leading up to the RNC: rounding up peaceful protesters on vague warrants, raiding meeting places in force with guns drawn, and now arresting a journalist who was covering a news event, are unacceptable. Senator, you have the eye of the media. You can speak out against these excesses and the nation will hear you.

Senator, I understand that the conventional wisdom is that you must stand silently by while the Minneapolis police shred the first amendment by disrupting American Citizens trying to exercise their First Amendment rights to free assembly and freedom of the press. I understand that politics as usual would say that speaking out against these excesses would make you look "weak" on crime, or terror, or something...

Senator, saying nothing here makes you look weak on protecting our constitutional rights. Are we to understand that this is what we have come to in the United States of America? That we now arrest journalists for the crime of covering the news?

Please speak out. Please reassure the nation that this is not your vision of what the United States should be.

Thank You.

Fellow Gentlemen of the Democratic Party

2008-08-29T20:48:00.003-04:00

Please do not attempt to attack Sarah Palin in the following ways:

- Making innuendos about her appearance (ex: a friend of mine's away message "sure she's hot, but is she ready to lead?")
-Snide comments about her beauty pageant experience (ex: Paul Begala on CNN "she seemed very poised, probably got that from her beauty pageant days")
-Any observation on clothing (the only acceptable outfit for female politicians is the pantsuit, its not their fault, its the society)
-Suggesting she is a vapid ditz (http://sarahpalin.typepad.com/)

Sarah Palin, on her own, will not draw many democratic women away from the party. The sight of male democrats dusting off a suite of sexist tropes to attack her, might.