A True Name, A Name To Conjour With

There is a line from Neuromancer, I can't remember it exactly. Case is talking about names with one of the AIs, Neuromancer probably. At some point the idea comes up that if Case had the AI's name, he could wield some power over it.

An idea Gibson probably gleaned from watching early computer operators playing with command line interfaces on old time-share mainframes. The operator traces a thin green string of characters in an arcane language, maybe something like "ls -al|grep config," unreadable to those who have not been trained in the art, across a black screen, and in response to his utterance, his magic spell, the machine-demon jumps to life, does the bidding of its master. A magic language for postmodernity. Words made electrons made actions. A semiotic conundrum.

And nothing new. After all, in the beginning there was the Word...

Command lines are buried now, lost behind the flash of modern graphical operating systems. Windows, especially, has only the faintest traces of old DOS - its command line ancestor - left. My little MacBook, with its spiffy OSX, actually has a bit more command line there if one should want it, and it even responds to incantions in UNIX, the same ancient magical tongue (more or less) that the mainframe operators of yore summoned their creatures with. But I rarely invoke this feature. The graphical age does all I need it to. Sometimes I play with the command line, just for fun. Just for the feeling (an illusion, in my case) of having "bare metal" mastery over my machine.

But the age of Google has brought about a new form of the Digital True Name. The search string. Take for example, my search this evening for a long lost old friend. I tried to google his real name, but to no avail. Then several pseudonyms I knew him to write fiction under. Still, no dice. Finally, I entered the name of an old cable access television show he and another friend had produced, long ago.

And there he was, or at least, some aspect of him, conjured into being by my utterance of his name. One of his names. The right one. He had, as I suspected he would, succumbed to the temptation of dropping his old cable access show onto YouTube. He had also uploaded some more recent work.

So, despite the years and miles between us, despite our long ago falling out, despite my terrible suspicion that sending any message to him would just reveal there was nothing for us to say to each other anymore, I was able tonight to see the current face and hear the current voice of my old friend. Just by guessing the right name to call him by.

McLuhan said that communications technology would both "extend" our nervous systems and expose us to "auto-amputation" of senses and other capacities not carried by the media we relied on for this extension. I am reminded by this by my episode with my old friend tonight, and even more so by my experience lately with some more recent friends, who have just moved some distance away and thus retreated into the electronic ghost-hood that characterizes long-distance friendships in our electronic age.

I'm grateful for the "magic" technology that allows us to remain, at least in some tenuous way, linked to each other, but at the same time frustrated by the high-speed, instrumental, capitalist system that seems to insist that we must all remain in constant motion, always shedding our friends, never having the chance to build lasting communities, if we wish to "succeed."

What to do about it, though, is a question I can't find a search string to answer.

Belated Video Blog

Its ain't real time, but here is the story of my trip across the southwest, as told in video clips!

Being Creative

On a regular basis is hard. Without fail, even those who are the best at it have bad days. When one of my favorites, like Garrison Keillor, has a string of bad days - or even just "less than perfect" days - it gets me down, because I worry that maybe that source of beauty that I loved, their creativity, may be in decline (because of old age perhaps) and maybe it will never come back.

With Keillor, however, my worry was clearly misplaced. His latest column for Salon.com
knocks it clear out of the park, a welcome change from his last few at bats, which had been a little lackluster IMHO.

The best part, his handy inversion of the usual logic of illegal immigration. I'd been looking for as tidy a way to do this for awhile now. He writes:

"[Karl Rove's] last big assignment was to get the immigration bill passed. It failed in large part because Congress is tired of Mr. Rove and his boy-genius high-handedness. Instead, Homeland Security announced a new crackdown on illegal immigrants, which aroused protests from farmers who said that 70 percent of farmworkers today are illegal -- a stunning fact, if true: Most of the people who pick our beans and tomatoes are men and women forced to sneak across the border, and why? Because they're a security threat? No. So that we can get them cheap, that's why."

Exactly. The usual rhetoric sneers at undocumented immigrants for wanting to "jump to the front of the line" of folks waiting to get into the United States. No one ever seems to ask why there is such a long and complicated line in the first place.

Summer Wrap-Up

Classes start in 3 weeks. I have to work for those 3 weeks if I want to be ready, so vacation is basically over. But what a summer vacation! In the last 30 days I have:

Traveled almost 9,000 miles by road.

Visited the following states:

Indiana
Illinois
Missouri
Arkansas
Texas
New Mexico
Arizona
Colorado
Nebraska
Iowa
Pennsylvania
Maryland
Delaware
New York
Connecticut
New Jersey

Crossed or visited the following water bodies:

Mississippi River
Arkansas River
Pecos River
Red River
Rio Grande
San Antonio River
Missouri River
Seneca Lake
Hudson River
Susquehanna River
Atlantic Ocean
Long Island Sound

Reconnected with some old friends.

And, last but not least, I've started dating a remarkable young woman.

Now I just need to do all the work I was going to do during my "quiet summer."

Last On The Trip Post : Gallup

I've had a great time these last two weeks. The last few days have been amazing. I can't post much now, I've gotta crash out here at the Gallup Super 8 (on historic route 66!) so we can start back for home eeeearly in the morning. I'll post more pics and other stuff soon, probably the week after next. I have some things to attend to this next week :) Good things.

Here's one picture from our time in Arizona to tide you over.

Update: Trip Cyber-connectedness

I went ahead and upgraded to a flickr pro account. Lots more pictures coming up. I also managed to massage youtube into accepting a video upload today, so I have a few videos to share. They are silly, but folks might like 'em.

On the Trip Post 5: Las Cruces and New Mexico Adventures

The image above is about the best representation I was able to make of what I'm looking at right now, sunrise over the valley where Las Cruces, New Mexico is located. The picture is lousy, the actual view is insanely better. Waking up to this the last two mornings has been a real treat.

The climate here is also a treat, after San Antonio's muggy oppression. The air here is dry, and feels comfortable well into the 90s. At night, things cool off dramatically, and there is a breeze off the valley. It's quite wonderful.

The drive out here was fun. East Texas was neat, but still looked somewhat familiar. The trees and foliage weren't the same, but there were plenty of trees and foliage. Once you cross the hills west of San Antonio and head into West Texas, however, things become more arid and the flora becomes the sort of scrubby desert plant life you expect from the stereotypical "west." We also saw our share of mountains and canyons. That drive is fairly well documented on the flickr page.

Yesterday we took a side roadtrip and went up to Roswell, New Mexico - site of the supposed 1947 alien saucer crash. They were having a convention to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the crash, and there were lots of brightly costumed folks about. We also stopped in White Sands to see the national monument and missile base there, and in Alamagordo so I could buy a T-shirt with the name of the first Atom Bomb test site on it. I posted a few pictures of that trip on Flickr, but I'm running out of bandwidth on my flickr account!

Today is Carlsbad Caverns and El Paso, Texas. El Paso is of interest because it is closely connected with its counterpart city immediately across the border, Juarez, Mexico - so it becomes a site to investigate US/Mexican relations and Chicana border culture. Carlsbad is mostly of interest because it is home to a species of massive, man-eating bats. I am unafraid, however, because I am extremely brave.

On the Trip Post 4: Finishing Up San Antonio

We leave San Antonio, Texas in the Morning to drive to Las Cruces, New Mexico. We've decided to take a smaller highway and stay off Interstate 10, the better to see some area towns and sights. Our new route bounces us off the US/Mexico Border several times, which is appropriate for a class devoted to the study of border culture. I'm looking forward to the trip. Some more pictures of San Antonio are up on my Flickr, mostly they show the Spanish Missions here. I'll be uploading more, sending pictures to Flickr through these KOA wireless connections is like sending them through a tin-can telephone. Some key moments here in San Antonio:

-Hanging out with Chicano artist Joe Lopez, checking out his studio and his work and hearing his stories about growing up here and becoming an artist. Then heading out with him and a friend to a local restaurant where they served about the greatest chicken-fried steak ever.

-The constant presence of flights of egrets, which always seem to arrange themselves in these staggered V formations, like a checkmark, in the sky especially at dusk.

-Watching a rock band composed of 3 anglo air-force master sergeants, in full dress uniform no less, play "867-5309" to a crowd of folks from the west-side Barrio here before the fireworks on the fourth of July.

Fun stuff. More as soon as I have connectivity again.

On the Trip Post 3: A bit more from San Antonio

Check the flickr for a whole bunch more photos from here in San Antonio, Texas. Normally I try to do a bit of photoshop work before I upload and clean things up a bit. No time for that now. I just thought I would share.

Most of the photos in that set show the students checking out Say Si!, an after-school community art program here. It was a really interesting program and the man introducing the students to it, a former student of one of our faculty, was really great and friendly and informative. I also took some shots of an interesting looking factory that I think was producing sugar for the pioneer sugar company.

After that, we brought the guys to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, where we talked about resisting war and oppression with some of the folks there. Esperanza is a center for the queer community here, and that was a bit of a challenge for some of our kids who come from rural communities, but it was a great experience and really broadened their horizons.

After that we went by the San Antonio Riverwalk, which was crap, but I did see the worst lounge act ever at this silly "Irish Pub" there. Mike L., if you are reading this, he was like some bizarro world version of you playing the piano.

On the Trip Post 2: Briefly from San Antonio

For Chris, who likes pictures of plants.

More Soon.

On the Trip Post 1: Driving West

I took a lot of pictures from the car, but uploading files here at the San Antonio KOA rather taxes the limited wireless internet connection I have access to. Also, many of them are crap, as pictures taken from a moving vehicle so often are. Here is one kinda decent shot of the mighty Mississippi, as we crossed it near Cairo, Illinois.



Otherwise it has been an uneventful trip thus far. We covered parts of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas during our drive, which took up 20 of the last 48 hours. The interstate never changes. The strip-mall that effectively extends from Austin to San Antonio could easily have been mistaken for a strip mall anywhere else. I do find it kind of cool that the radio stations have gone from the "w" prefix to the "k" prefix, thus indicating we are officially in "the west." But mostly that just shows that I am a nerd.

Today is our first day checking stuff out in San Antonio. More updates to follow.

Pre-trip pics

Checking Out Gordon's Place 2.jpg
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

We haven't left yet, but here's my first trip post. Here's some of our students, getting to know one another and exploring the still-under-construction home of one of the professors on the trip. More pictures on my flickr.

And One More

I just want to post this one so I can find it for my own reference. Often, when I explain to my students that I expect their writing to tell me not just WHAT they think, but their reasoning in reaching those thoughts I will exclaim, in the voice of a seasame street cowboy "I wanna know why!" And then I'll end up explaining this sketch to them, and looking like a dork. At least now I know I remembered the sketch properly.

Not on the road yet

Just sitting at home, watchin' the youtubes. Here's a classic seasame street sketch.



I suppose the appropriation of reggae and the use of a faux-Carribean Black dialect "de" for "the" makes this part of America's long history of minstrelsy. Muppet-face, shall we call it? But, on the plus side, Ernie has the whole neighborhood in the bathtub with him! Pretty transgressive sexuality that.

I mean think about it. This was a mid 80s early 90s sketch if I remember correctly. Certainly part of the Sesame Street line up of my generation's youth. What was the fad of our college years?

Yeah, you guessed it, foam-dance parties... coincidence, I think not!

Watch This Space

I'll be on the road from June 30-July 15, driving a van for an undergraduate class taking a trip to the southwest. Stay tuned for pics and text (and maybe video) on my roadtrip.

Useful Exemplar

In my Ethnic Studies class, I teach my students that "Race is a social construct." That's basically all I try to teach them. It takes most of a semester to explain those five words. Mostly they mean that society tries to use biology to explain differences between people that are actually imposed on them by the social structure itself. Getting the student's to believe that and see how it happens is what takes the time. In a commencement speech this weekend, Gloria Steinem provided a useful example of the socially-constructed nature of the related concept of Gender. I think its a pretty good one.

"In my generation, we were asked by the Smith vocational office how many words we could type a minute, a question that was never asked of then all-male students at Harvard or Princeton. Female-only typing was rationalized by supposedly greater female verbal skills, attention to detail, smaller fingers, goodness knows what, but the public imagination just didn’t include male typists, certainly not Ivy League-educated ones.

Now computers have come along, and "typing" is "keyboarding." Suddenly, voila! --- men can type! Gives you faith in men’s ability to change, doesn’t it?"

---Gloria Steinem at Smith College:

I especially like her use of the term "public imagination" here. Shows how the way a group of people's shared means for imagining the world has a real impact on how that world happens.

The Problem With June

This was not, as they say, a productive weekend. That's the problem with June. Finding motivation. A month with fair weather is a month with contentment too close at hand, easy peace too readily available. I've spent the last four days reading easy, fun books of no academic use to me whatsoever (namely, Philip Pullman's excellent "His Dark Materials" series) listening to music (often Richard Buckner's "Dents and Shells"), riding my bike, and staring up at the sky. Quizzes have gone ungraded, research projects have stalled in their forward progress. Instead, I watched a turkey vulture and a pair of swallows circle into the sky on the updraft from the parking lot, and followed the story of a young girl's adventures with witches and armored bears. It felt good, but I know there's so much more I have to do if I want to make a difference, or even a living.

In any event, the upside is this, I am reminded again that anyone who needs more than a meal, a book, a sycamore tree and a decent sunset to feel happy is just stark nuts. Which is important to remember, as it suggests the world is currently being run by people who are absolutely batshit insane.

I Love Penny Arcade

If you don't read it already, and you have any interest in comics, video games, or the interwebz, read Penny-Arcade.

Frankly, I'm not sure anyone with any of those interests doesn't already read Penny Arcade. I mean, with material like this, how could you not?

I Had Posted

An obscenity-filled rant commemorating the death of hate-monger Jerry Faldwell, wishing him a variety of tortures in the afterlife and calling himself and his mother a variety of terrible names.

But now, I am sitting with my front door open, watching the first big thunderstorm of the year sweep into my little ohio town to the (very appropriate) accompaniment of Tom Wait's Rain Dogs, and my prior post seems rather childish, and not terribly useful. I have removed it.

A man has died. He wasn't a very nice man. We all die someday.

hi ho

For now, there are thunderstorms.

Notes on "Notes on A Scandal"

I wasn't terribly well prepared for last year's Oscars. When the award ceremony rolled around, I had only seen "The Departed" and a few minor movies nominated for tech awards. As it was the night of Scorsese finally getting his due, I was able to follow along somewhat. However, I was particularly intrigued by the clips of the Judi Dench / Cate Blanchett vehicle, "Notes on a Scandal," which took me completely by surprise... I hadn't seen it even advertised. I watched it tonight, and was fairly pleased.

SPOILER ALLERGY WARNING - REMAINDER OF THIS MESSAGE MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS OR HAVE BEEN PROCESSED ON EQUIPMENT THAT ALSO PROCESSES MESSAGES CONTAINING SPOILERS OR TREE NUTS

Annyway. I thought Judi Dench was just terrific. She really brought her character to life and made you see her the way she sees herself, later in the movie, when it becomes clear that the rest of the world thinks of her as a silly old crone, this comes as a genuine surprise (though obvious once you think of it). I suppose the way her character threatens to resurrect a certain stereotype of the predatory lesbian is very problematic, though at the same time I think the movie shows her character with enough complexity to disrupt the simple stereotype. I also found the way the film took her "impossible desire," if you will, seriously to be brave and interesting. I must confess, I was rather cheering for her because A) Judi Dench on Cate Blanchett action seemed really hot in an odd sort of way and B)because I had some sympathy for her desire for the unattainable, and her frustration at being trapped in a body that made it difficult for others to understand her desire and take it seriously.

And then, I suppose, there is the issue of class. This movie reminded me quite a bit of Fowles' The Collector in its portrayal of a sort of nightmare of the predatory lower class monster, morlock-like, stalking the upperclass, though I think Notes on a Scandal does a better job of indicting the upper-middle class for its own decadence and snobbery. Again, I think the complexity for Dench's character and the sympathy she evokes does a lot to defuse the stereotype. Issues of exploitation proper are absent, though perhaps outside the scope of the picture...

But, yeah, all in all, I really liked it.