searching for the ineffable
Angry Squirrel rocks my socks.
Why do we hate Santa, he asks? Because he’s “fat and happy and perfectly content with his image??”
“That’s why I LIKE Santa!
“Because he’s a fat bastard
“who works one day a year
“is actually happy
“and eats all the cookies he wants!”
Rock on. Here’s to happy fattitude.
(I dislike and don’t celebrate the Day of Consumerism. Any gifts I give tend to be for New Year’s. But this is just too good.)
Cribbed from, like, everywhere. My web browsing habits, presented in alphabetical order for your delectation, some rather obvious, some perhaps not. Of course, this is the most recent browsing history, and is thus tainted by things like gift shopping and travel planning. Still more or less representative.
a: amazon
c: coastway (my credit union)
d: dartmouth dante project (which I in no way recommend! it’s broken in so. many. ways.)
g: an all-too-appropriate .gif!
h: paradiso del perverse (R-rated; hilarious)
i: ifMUD
j: jews against circumcision, a truly odd one
l: my livejournal friends page
n: netflix
p: nifty pic of transparent concrete (2, 3)
q: nada
r: rand mcnally
t: telecharge, for all your nyc ticketing needs
x: xchat site (it’s an irc client for mac os x)
y: yarnivore’s blog post on anatomically correct knitting
z: zipcode.com
And you?
you just want to put your head through the wall.
Good god, I have the thinnest skin of any human I know.
I have been interacting with some people about some work they wanted done. They thought I was their guy, I thought I was their guy, then we all separately started having our doubts, and in the end it didn’t pan out.
But it didn’t pan out in the worst way possible. In the way that makes me doubt that I’ll ever improve my diplomatic skills. In the way that makes me doubt whether I’m good enough at interpersonal politics to make it in academe. In the way that makes me angry because they contacted me and then failed to read the detailed explanation I was sending them at their own request. And, immediately after feeling angry, I feel stupid and inadequate and childish, and it’s all irrelevant anyway because although I won’t be doing this project (a good thing, if the past two weeks are any indication), I’m left with all this frustration at myself and others.
But mostly at myself.
It’s not all that bad, of course. If I am to believe my coworkers and immediate boss (and I have no reason to disbelieve them), my main job is going quite well. But, see, there nobody questions my competency, implicitly or explicitly. Nobody interrupts me every second sentence. Nobody ignores lengthy emails and asks me the questions answered in those emails. And, for the most part, I seem to be getting along with my team – and with my boss – just fine.
Of course, they all have known me for years. Surely that helps. But, damnit, I have a thin skin because I care about my coworkers and my work and the humanities and humanity. Diplomatic skills be damned; although I like to think that I am improving those. What you get is unadulterated me, throwing all my knowledge and energy and passion at most things I touch.
Now, just to figure out a way to harness this passion and not be hurt by responses to it. Simple.
YAWP.
“I didn’t see anything godly about that church. I didn’t see anything Christ-ly. All I saw was a bunch of bullies.”
Just finished watching The Magdalene Sisters and the documentary found on the same DVD, called “Sex in a Cold Climate.” Not an uplifting way to spend an evening, I’ll tell you what. It’s about the Magdalene asylums, institutions found up until 1996 all over Ireland, where women were sent for having children out of wedlock, for having been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted and so dishonored…
…or just for being pretty.
That way, they wouldn’t go astray.
A CBS News article from 2003 is chilling: the atrocities of those places were not discovered until 1998, and not reported until 1999. Up until five years ago, Ireland didn’t know that up to thirty thousand of its women were imprisoned and forced into slave labor in the Magdalene laundries. They were beaten into submission, scarred by being announced sinners who had lost heaven, forced to work “six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year” (documentary) for no pay. Many had lost their children to foster homes, adoptions, orphanages.
Some of the Magdalenes were sexually abused by the priests who came to take confession and give Sunday masses. Some women escaped, some went mad, some lived out their lives in the laundries from the time they were girls barely into puberty until the day they died. What kind of church, what kind of religion breeds such cruelty?
The same religion that institutionalized the abandonment of children born out of wedlock, babies dying by the thousands of neglect, lack of nutrition and syphilis – but at least they’d be baptized. At least, they’d go to heaven.
People genuinely believed this, and operated anonymous infant drop-offs until only a century ago.
Until less than a decade ago, women were imprisoned and enslaved by the thousands in Europe.
Don’t forget for a second. We are not out of the dark ages yet. Read this article, read it carefully, and then do me a favor and make an offering to the goddess of fertility.
Love and lovemaking are the reasons we are. A curse on those who profane that.
A December 2nd editorial in the Nashville Scene:
No doubt some might think it heresy for us to suggest how Jesus himself would come down on the medical marijuana issue, which state Sen. Steve Cohenpromises to bring to the legislature in the new year. But we’re going to do it anyway. Frankly, we think he’d offer a light to sick people who can’t get pain relief any other way.
And related, by Rev. Steven B. Thompson:
Cannabis was not only known, it was widely used in biblical times. Jesus would have been familiar with cannabis; it was used at the time in healing unctions and temple incense and was fed to both man and livestock. In fact, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the Blessed Virgin Mary used it to ease the pains of childbirth. There is a wealth of documentation attesting to the safety and efficacy of this natural, healing herb stretching back over 5,000 years. It’s mentioned repeatedly in the Bible. Yet, nowhere does Jesus caution against its use. Alcohol yes, cannabis no.
Look out, Mr. President. There are thinking people in the Bible Belt who do their research and have their priorities straight. Booga booga.
There’s a meme going around on LiveJournal. Generally I do not participate, but I haven’t posted anything in a while, and this is too strangely fitting to pass up. The rules are:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.
Removed from the flat space occupied by the formalism, we find ourselves in the sweating world of the aircrew.
How perfectly pomo-slipping-into-surreal. This is from a collection of essays called Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices. The specific article from which the quotation comes is by John Law, “On Hidden Heterogeneities: Complexity, Formalism, and Aircraft Design.”
My laptop has been back for a week now, with a hard drive that works. I’ve been catching up on work (mostly done with that!), making further backups, digging myself out of bills and sundry paperwork, taking some badly-needed alone-time, rediscovering the depths of my soul and drinking more tea and coffee than usual. No wonder I haven’t posted much.
There are some personal projects that I would very much like to pursue. A possible freelance gig is still up in the air, and may not come through – but no matter, there is plenty to occupy myself in off-hours. I’ve got half a mind to print up this list and put it somewhere visible in the house. Here’s what I’d like to do over, say, the first half of the next year:
That’s quite enough, don’t you think?
My hard drive’s dead. Long live the hard drive!
Luckily, Ethan had the foresight to sit me down to make a bootable backup a couple of months ago. Most of the important information from this semester has been recovered; my browser bookmarks, though, have not. I’ll survive, for sure.
This comes on the heels of Thanksgiving, which was a challenging time in itself. We were three, my mom and Ethan and I, and although we love each other fiercely, mom and I don’t actually get along very well. We managed to get through it, and now there’s a clean and orderly apartment as a bonus.
It’s been a hectic week-and-a-half: conference, then immediately mom last week, then a weekend of recovery, clean-up and hard drive woes. I’ll be picking up again both here and at okno shortly.
Jenna Wells, a student at McMaster, is presenting a site that hadn’t been on my radar previously, but is actually somewhat similar in concept to RolandHT. The site, written entirely in French, is Hyperlistes, and treats a body of medieval French poetry. Apparently, listing things in your poems was a popular thing to do; the project’s participants have encoded items in these lists and cross-referenced them by theme. Nifty.
EDIT, with notes to self: just talked to Madeline Jeay, originator and brain behind Hyperlistes. She mentions that street poets in Brazil did something called poésie de cordel, in which… I think they hung sheets of paper off of ropes in sequence and then sang the songs. Or something. I must research this further, because Madeline seems to remember some of those stories being about Roland. She says that Paul Zumthor’s Introduction a la poésie orale may mention it; she vaguely remembers Zumthor talking about it when she studied with him. (!)
I’m at The Face of Text, a conference at McMaster University in Hamilton, near Toronto. Only half of the first day has passed, and already I could spend the rest of the day blogging my thoughts. Luckily, I’m taking careful notes, and plan to write more later on tonight, or this weekend (although the fun over here lasts through Sunday).
Meanwhile, a short comment on John Unsworth‘s keynote, titled Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation. During the thought provoking, hour-long talk, he has mentioned what he sees as a problem with visualization of knowledge in the humanities. The prettier it gets (think QuickTime movies showing the reconstruction of a temple from blueprints or archeological data), the harder it is for the viewer to know what is actually known, and what is hypothesized. That’s a fair criticism, and it seems to me that the problem is easily remedied. More than that: there already exist a number of ways to remedy it.
The simplest is documentation. Humanities computing projects suffer from appallingly sparse documentation. Tell me what is known and what is hypothesized, before, during and/or after I view the pretty movie.
Then there’s the CAVE. These 3D modeling environments are gorgeous but hugely expensive to build and maintain. There are, I think, six publicly accessible CAVEs in Europe (one of them at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria). None of the several CAVEs in the States are publicly accessible. So, even though there are at least a couple of humanities projects being done there, for now there remains a problem of dissemination and real dialogue based on these projects.
At least one of them, however, addresses precisely the issue of what is known vs. what is hypothesized. The ARCHAVE, based on a temple excavation project in Petra, Jordan, takes as a central premise the idea of modeling as a way of making an argument. They’re excavating, they find a shard of pottery, and they reconstruct what the vessel must’ve looked like. Then they place that vessel in the same place, inside the virtual reconstruction of the temple, where the original shard was found. The idea is, when they’re done, to invite archeologist colleagues and encourage them to play around, pick up objects, contest their placement, etc. Modeling as argument at its best – at least it seems that way. We’ll see if it works.
Until CAVEs are at least as accessible as personal computers, there are ways (besides documentation) to make your pretty model transparent with regard to that crucial difference between what is known and what – debated. John kindly pointed me to a proof of concept they did at the University of Virginia: the Pompeii Forum Project. Apparently, it involves layers of images that make certainty differences more obvious. I’ll have to check it out later: the next session has already begun.
Apologies accepted. This was obvious before, but it’s nice to have sweet confirmation that the world doesn’t unequivocally hate us.
I was in Dobbs Ferry, NY for most of this week, helping out with some family logistics in the mornings and evenings and getting mad amounts of work done in the daytime. I’m pretty satisfied, all told. Now it’s back home with my love (oh, reunions are sweet)… and more work. Good stuff, though. I’m happy with how the week has gone; got to spend a decadent amount of quality time with my brother, hang out with the best nephew in the world, and, uh, miss my sister-in-law, whom I saw only briefly before she left on a business trip.
It’s hunkering-down weather. Frozen rain is scritching the air conditioner’s metal butt outside my window. More work to do today, and this weekend I’ll catch up on the world’s happenings.
