Off to Burning Man in 8 hours. Before then, shower and sleep. See y’all in a couple of weeks, when I regain access.
Falling out of love with Amer… the United States.
Someone called my attention to this article. Very much worth reading.
All packed up and nowhere to go.
Untrue, of course. In 28 hours, I’m driving out from Los Angeles toward Reno. There I pick up friends and, after a shopping stop, we drive on until Burning Man.
To say I’m excited doesn’t begin to cover it. This is my first, and likely only, time there. I’ve been told to plan nothing, so I’ve planned nothing — except for making an extended trip to a copy shop, and packing survival gear. I’ll be there with friends who matter.
I am oddly more sad about leaving here than I ever thought I would be. Mom and I will miss each other; overall we had many more good days than bad.
I’ll miss granny, too, and am sad to think that she may not recognize me when I see her again in a few months. Memories will keep me company, though, the most recent among them from yesterday. Driving over to the doctor’s for what turned out to be a four-and-a-half-hour visit, I was flipping through radio stations and eventually settled on one playing classic rock. Grandma was indifferent to the music… until I noticed her tapping her fingers along to Sunshine of Your Love.
Photo memory
All the cool kids are doing it, especially of late. Looking at others’ photos, I realized that the 381 diigtal pictures taken by myself and Talan on this summer’s Providence –> Los Angeles road trip are still sitting around mostly unsorted. That’s just the digital, too: haven’t developed the Real Film yet, so no count on that.
Here’s one, anyway. I was playing with the macro feature on Talan’s camera, and got into photographing flowers. The light specks in the center of this one are… well, I’ve my own theory as to what they are; but wild speculation is encouraged. Click on the image to get a larger version.
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Mostly a trip report.
Hello, technology! After years of stereotypically resisting, I finally got hello-technology: a mobile phone. I’ve claimed lack of need for ages; but the need has become very real, what with driving across the country alone in September, so what the hell. Family plans are a sound financial investment, and peace of mind (not to mention convenience, and the fact that I might just turn off telephone service in my home later on) is worth the cost. Plus I get to play with cool beepy talking machines. After a few days of testing out the equipment and service, we’ll be sure whether we’re keeping this set-up; then I’ll publicize the number to those who are likely to want it.
But this isn’t even what I’m writing about. Today, a certain scholar-at-large left a comment on one of my previous posts gently prodding me to write up a trip report on ACH/ALLC 2003. That François Lachance is reading my Web log at all is flattering and unexpected, so now I am giddy and finally eager to summarize this year’s experience. For the record, I’ve been meaning to do this every year, if not in blog then over on Humanist. But I’ve always found it difficult to write a coherent account of everything important – there’s so much. This below, then, is an entirely personal perspective which will never approximate the actual experience. If you’re a computing humanist, make plans and go there. It’s worth the trip.
Continue reading “Mostly a trip report.”
Cranes Flying
The war movie is a 1957 film by… shame on me for having already forgotten his name. It’s called Cranes Flying (? – Letiat Zhuravli in Russian), and is about the second world war. It won all kinds of awards all over the world when it came out, including Cannes, Vienna I think, Canada, USA — was relatively well-known in the West.
In with the herd, and other politics.
Around midnight tonight, I drove to a local Barnes & Noble for the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. When else was I going to be around Southern California, which most of me detests, surrounded by people to whom I mostly cannot relate, participating in a real American fan frenzy? This had to be witnessed.
Continue reading “In with the herd, and other politics.”
Pole Chudes
Then there are good days. Today, Grandma and I started up a new activity: I read Russian classics to her. This benefits both of us, as I’ve been meaning to read more of these but haven’t had time. On her part, Grandma seems to be happier and doesn’t call us over to her room quite as often as usual. At least, that was the case today; we’ll see how long it lasts. Today’s reading was a short story by Chekhov and some poems by Pasternak at bedtime. Can’t say I’m complaining; besides being generally pleasurable, this also trains me to speak for long periods of time. Since I’m planning to conduct a few sessions of my humanities computing course as more or less lectures, this is great practice.
We had her a foot bath; we ate tasty food; she even let me work for over an hour with surprisingly few interruptions. (Today my imaginary monkey and I learned about lists and arrays in Perl.) Mom was relaxed when she came home from work, we ate more good food and watched Russian TV. Usually I tolerate it and/or try to tune it out (hm, funny; I’ve been reading DeLillo’s White Noise lately). Today, however, I enjoyed watching not only a film based on Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, but also – to my surprise – a game show.
I don’t know, does Disney’s Pinocchio have the Field of Miracles in it? In the Italian original, as in the Russian version named Burattino [“puppet” in Italian], Pinocchio meets a deceitful Fox and Cat, who tell him about the Field of Miracles, located in the Land of Fools. You bury your money there and pour some water over, and overnight it grows into a biiig tree full of money! Then you’re rich and can buy Geppetto (or Papa Carlo) that new jacket and all.
Well. Pole Chudes is the name of the Russian take on The Wheel of Fortune – with four important exceptions. First, everyone gets a participation prize. Three-times-three people play in each half-hour show, and they all get the same prize, although the prize changes show to show. They’re all practical prizes: microwaves, vacuum cleaners, what-not. Second, this must be a tradition that has evolved over the show’s near-decade-long run so far: the participants bring gifts to the charming host. Gift-giving has taken on a life of its own; sometimes a whole town or village (if it’s small enough) from which the participant hails participates in the gift. For example, some of the gifts brought out today were:
– two live rabbits and some Armenian cognac;
– a drop of crude oil encased in glass, from a town near the Baikal;
– homemade Ukrainian vodka-like drink;
– children’s drawings of Moscow done specifically for the occasion;
– a full assortment of non-perishable products from a dairy factory, including powdered soy milk;
– homemade smetana (thick Russian sour cream, tasty stuff, and homemade it is well loved) – this was specifically for the beautiful helper girls on the show, as they were proclaimed too thin;
– a beautifully-done icon of some saint or other;
– and a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember now.
The host cracks jokes, lewd to a greater or lesser degree, and never lewd with children. That’s the third thing: many people, participants and audience members alike, bring along children, who announce commercial breaks. The fourth and final difference is that this isn’t really about money so much as it is about prizes and banter. The puzzles are all single words, never phrases; and the clues given to them are not, say, “thing” or “sport” but rather interesting trivia questions. For each show, there is a theme to the questions; today’s was symbology. (Is this the right word?) For example: what did the walnut mean in ancient Greece? What was the meaning of this other particular nut (I think it was hazelnut) for the ancient Germanic peoples? What does the almond tree symbolize most often all over the world? Finding out the answers is left as an exercise for the curious reader.
All of these particulars make the show homey, interesting. Nobody seems to care how much money they’ve won, it’s not about that. Fun stuff.
Yesterday
Brainstorm, word game, internet cafe with expensive pricing…
Yield on the interstate, eventually, when Louisiana cars politely keep their distance until you can fuckin’ free up the passing lane already. Drenched down to the essence, linger not in the hotell room, escaping into the nighttime streets. Bouncers full of vigor to allow no-cover access to Toulouse St. bars with overpriced onion rings. Slapstick blooze wench transports you back into the northeast, with Tracy Chapman covers. Her little orchestra is so chill, you forget your road-rage.
Me, I will wake tomorrow to find opalescent sky and restrained registration desk clerk endearing himself to me with.
No decisions before chickory coffee, our noggins soaked in the torque of humidity. Intending to take in all aspects of N’awlins life, we entertain our ignoble, transparent minds by paying religious attention to caffeine intake and investigating the possibility of a nap. Deliberately avoiding enamelled, saccharine tourist-trap taverns, intense in our lack of nativity to this town, we anticipate the totality of this idiosyncratic, ominous negation of access to lucid archives of memory’s bias. Anarchy masters all, in New Orleans. Yet we yawn, writing this epic travelogue.
Mark and the ELit, or: Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Sounds like a good title for a children’s book, no?
I write the following as a person only marginally related to what they call electronic literature. But, hey, electronic writers and electronic scholars are finally coming together in significant ways, so I write down some thoughts on a conflict.
Mark Bernstein recently resigned from the Electronic Literature Organization. ELO’s president Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink wrote an open letter to Mark in response.
Wow, the political strife. From a deeply subjective perspective, I found Mark’s letter too vague and… impolite? bitter? spatteringly spiteful? The ELO letter I found, if nothing else, rather more precise, speaking to specific issues and fully acknowledging the significant contributions Mark has made to the electronic literature field.
Part of me refuses to take an unequivocal side, though my doing or not doing so would not matter to anyone actually involved in the conflict or in ELO’s work. Besides, I am certain that my impressions have been influenced to some extent by the several friends and acquaintances I have who are active in ELO. But the whole thing strikes me as wholly unnecessary and generative of more spite than absolutely necessary. It’s been clear to me that ELO and Mark Bernstein have had different ideas about promoting electronic literature, but to promote one side by stating that the other is an active hindrance does nobody any good. People will continue to participate in ELO, and they (or other people) will continue to attend eNarrative roundtables. (That I won’t go to any more eNarratives is a matter of finances; the first two were actually quite enjoyable.) But ideology is a funny thing, prone to being expressed to the exclusion of opposing ideas. Only time will show whose approach to the promotion of electronic literature is the better one; this is true regardless of whether venomous remarks are made in the meantime. Me, I’ll balk at the staggering price of a recent Eastgate publication and hope to take a look at it sometime without breaking my graduate-student’s bank account.
