6/29/2001

A frustrating day, with its good and bad side. The good side: went to the doctor and found out that I can have the next surgery as an outpatient. That means there shouldn't be anywhere near as much downtime involved.

On the bad side, my computer died. So I'm back to the dinosaur machine, and a dial-up connection. All the work I was doing isn't lost, I hope, it's just delayed until I get it back from the shop. The log was getting too long anyway.

So, updates may be a little less frequent. I'm hoping it will only be gone a few days, but we'll see. It isn't so much the loss in speed that bugs me, but this puts me back to notepad for writing. It just isn't as conducive to spontaneous ranting.

6/28/2001

Jack Lemmon died today. There always seem to be groups of celebrity deaths; I didn't mention the death of Carroll O'Connor on the same day that John Lee Hooker died. I remember how irritated my dad would get when people would accuse him of looking like Archie Bunker. My dad is hardly a bigot, though he is quick with a one-liner. He is also an alcoholic; he hasn't had a drink for at least ten years now, but at the time I took the photo you see here he had quite a buzz on. He was out puttering in the garden. He drank a lot back then, and was in the middle of a crisis of sorts. It is sobering to think that he wasn't much older when I took this photo, than I am now. Life has been a lot easier on me; for all my complaining I haven't been beat-up nearly as bad as he was.

I'm terribly afraid of dad not being there. He's been like a rock to me, always doing what was right and always helping out anyone he could. There isn't a kinder or gentler soul on this planet. When people die, I always think about him. I'm not sure why. Home moved away from me when I was about 23; Dad wanted to leave California for Oklahoma to be with his friends and relatives. But soon after he got there, everyone started to die. He and mom ended up on 60 acres in the middle of a national park; but within a few years, all the people they wanted to be with were gone. They relocated closer to the city several years ago; there have been several scares. First there was a bleeding ulcer that nearly killed him; that's when he quit drinking. Just a couple of years ago, there was a gall bladder attack. Life is so fragile, so precious. I just want him to live forever.

I didn't realize the history behind the institution depicted in Girl, Interupted. It seems that McLean Hospital has a long heritage. The Mad Poets Society explores the stays of Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell in this particular loony bin. What I found curious though, was the revelation that Anne Sexton was desperate to get in:

"If only I could get a scholarship to McLean," Sexton confided to her longtime friend and amanuensis Lois Ames, as if she were talking about a fellowship to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sexton certainly had the qualifications: two suicide attempts by the age of thirty, and extended stays at the Glenside and Westwood Lodge sanatoriums. She wrote about her mania in her first poetry collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960). She reveled theatrically in her madness, and was not above using her shocking mood swings to manipulate her friends and family. But her therapist, Martin Orne, wary of the cost of extended stays at McLean, refused to commit her there.

I suspect I lack the requisite insanity to be a truly great artist.

I wrote yesterday's entry before I realized that the Salon article had been commented on by virtually every independent content provider out there; the consensus was pretty much the same as my opinion. Crisis? What crisis?

6/27/2001

Reading Assimilating the Web on Salon provided another opportunity for rhetorical analysis:

In fact, the Web today, in this grim summer of 2001 -- seven long years after its first flush of popularity -- faces a paradoxical and perplexing impasse. It's still too anarchic to be made a completely smooth, convenient, ready-for-prime-time experience; but it's also losing the vital ferment of its "let a hundred flowers bloom" youth to the gray monotony of corporate control.

We're reaping the worst of both worlds, networked chaos and monopolistic consolidation. The least common denominator of individual behavior multiplies, while the least common denominator of mass taste prevails.

In other words, we're screwed.

Impasse? As defined by whom? It seems to me that the fluidity, though it faces challenges from corporate domination, has hardly been stopped. Luke noted that there are now over 200,000 personal web logs passing through Blogger. It sure sounds like "vital ferment" to me, though it also may constitute "networked chaos." This craving for structure and railing against corporate control presents the oddest sort of paradox. Just what is this author hoping for? Because he is the managing editor of Salon, a mid level content provider, the whole notion of impasse suggests that he is frustrated with the inability of mid-level commercial content providers to be the vital force they once were.

I'm not sure if this is a typo or not: "The least common denominator of mass taste." If it isn't, it's certainly an oxymoron. Resisting universality, the trend seems to be clique tastes. There is the plain vanilla, Nielson usability taste. There is the throwback modernist designer obscurity taste. And there is the crusading middle manager taste, which craves innovation but not at the expense of profitability. It's okay if the Internet is filled with millions of small businesses competing. It's not okay if the Internet is filled with individuals forming their own networks of taste or monopolies try to infringe on the shakey business model of places like Salon, filled with banner and pop-up advertising. Salon may be screwed, but the rest of the Internet is doing just fine.

I think Terry Eagleton's article last Saturday in the Guardian really points at the problems of the Salon editor's centrist stance:

These days, centrality is distinctly uncool. The centre has been marginalised, and marginality, like Bohemian Manchester or Cornish fishing villages, is the place to be. With so many groups muscling in on them, from sexual and ethnic minorities to dog-on-a-rope anarchists, the margins have grown so crowded that there is now standing room only. Indeed, they have bulged to spread over most of the page. Like elitism, marginality isn't possible if too many people want to do it. It is an uncomfortable place, yet, oddly, it is where a lot of people want to be.

The majority of weblogs I read are a form of shorthand, a code meant mostly to communicate with a small circle of friends. The entries are often incomplete sentences, lines of reflection, which make almost no sense out of context. Sometimes a link is added, to let a broader public in on the joke. In this way, it's all margin with no center. Mindless chatter that doesn't care if it communicates. Worse than this are the designer sites that roll in their impenetrability. As if being obscure, in and of itself actually said anything. As Eagleton says, the margins have grown so crowded that it's standing room only.

Nodes develop; in a real sense they are "massed" tastes rather than mass ones. Rebellion against the "mass" becomes a taste all its own. But unless it says something, it has little to offer. I hope the Internet will not be high school forever. There are voices out there; they are sometimes unsure. I tend to think of the present state of the Internet as a heady sort of modernism that undermines its aspiration to be post. The problem is one of communication. As Eagleton observes:

The modernists were nomadic, in-between, adrift between cultures. Their home was art, not Birmingham or Bonn. Most of them were inside and outside their native language at the same time.

The Internet is dominated with the desire to be both inside and outside itself. "Netizens" are forming a world culture, in much the same way that Modernism sought to reform literature. It remains to be seen if they will fail as badly. Some things seem sure to me: If the insistence on obscurity and design with no end continues, it will fail. There is no "net for net's sake". It is equally sure that if it becomes an extension of the "shop at home network" the Internet will become as unimportant as the invention of the twist-off top. Real reform doesn't come from an unscrewed beer bottle; if it fails, people will always resort to a bottle opener.

6/26/2001

After reading many books on the taste-wars that raged in the mid to late eighteenth century this article from the BBC has a familiar ring.

Psychiatric consultant Dr Raj Persaud of Maudsley Hospital in London believes his studies of dementia patients show a link between taste and "hard-nosed intellectual function" - in other words, appreciation of classical music may require more brain power.

Persaud has observed that, as brain power diminishes in dementia patients, they sometimes go from liking classical to pop - but not the other way round.

The same sort of studies used to support the inferiority of women, are now used to support the superiority of high culture. This reminded me of Walter Ong's thinly veiled privileging of written discourse over oral. "Hard-nosed intellectual function?" How do you quantify such a thing? If it means coping with the abstract, stylized code then it means you've got to be conditioned to like it; culture teaches you the code. But at what price? Valuing reason over emotion is so Lockean.

I view this study from another angle: people with over-developed intellects lose their primal, tribal ability to connect with music of a more universal culture. They become alienated from the world, finding it harder to connect with things outside their social code. I like classical music, but only in small doses and preferably live. It is too removed from present experience otherwise. It's like setting your mind back like a watch, to a time where reason and order were most important. Yes, great classical music is emotive. But the emotions are distilled, concentrated, formalized— removed. Abstracted, rather than raw. It's the old oral vs. written argument in a new disguise; one isn't better than the other— just different. The argument is as silly as connecting breasts with brains.

Another take on the same subject from the BBC claims that the same "diminished brain power" causes a desire for "novelty". This provides an interesting counterpoint to the arguments about diminished discernment of musical quality, which conflicts a bit with the findings of earlier research:

Another study by neurologists at the University of California-Los Angeles released in 1998 reported that dementia brings out artistic talents in people who never had them before. In that study, it was observed that patients developed artistic talents, including music and drawing, which flourished while the dementia worsened

The persistance of the "madness" of art. Revised a bunch of stuff; put the search engine on the front page so it would be more accessible. Trying to bring everything up to W3C standards; it's painful looking at pages I wrote only a few months ago. What was I thinking? I feel like leaving a few of them up though, as a shrine to really crappy web design. The really hard one to cope with is the Descriptive Catalogue; it's one of those invisible pages, and I'm not sure what to do with it yet. Most of those pieces are old; I'm much better now!

6/25/2001

I keep tinkering, and I've finally got the blog frame thing working okay. I discovered a weird quirk in Netscape. It retains the screen size information that it loads under; if you change resolution, it still thinks it's at the old one unless you reload it. It's been fun looking at things under different browsers. Netscape 6.0 is kind of sexy looking, and it doesn't crash every few minutes. It's sort of a shame that they are getting out of the browser wars. In deference to those who like Netscape, I'm removing most of the Microsoft specific code to make things look more uniform cross-platform.

The main reason why I'm wrestling with the coding so much is because I need frames in order to keep the core pages dynamic while still having static locations for content that won't foul-up search engines. The problem is, screen real estate becomes a problem. So, I've reverted to JavaScript in order to switch style sheets and image sizes for different resolutions. I hate pages that are designed small, so they get lost in higher resolutions or pages designed large that require miles of scrolling on smaller screens. So I'm attempting the fools errand of designing for both.

Text is no problem, really— it's just when you want to use a lot of pictures that it becomes more complex. And I'm really a visual person, I just write a lot.

*

I made the mistake of installing Opera 5.11 and Netscape 6.0. Even though most of the pages here validate just fine, it seems that they were largely invisible or otherwise screwed-up on these browsers. It has never been my intention to be a stooge for Microsoft. I've spent the last few days trying to figure out how to fix things. It's going to be a long haul.

I found out the hard way that what I really wanted to use for a layout was completely unworkable. There is no such thing as vertical positioning that is consistent in the slightest. This forces a new mindset: web pages are scrolls; there is no way to treat them as a rectangular space without resorting to tables, which are weird and will disappear in the future as a layout device, or frames, which cause major headaches for searching and updating. So, I'm left with becoming a conformist, adopting the "hip" dashed borders and Mondrian style web design that is all over the place. This sucks.

It becomes harder and harder to change things I've already written to the new style; as I was sitting here with the smoke rolling out my ears at 1:30 AM it dawned on me how I can fix the blog "frame". I'm going to have to do more work with graphic menus here; I hate for the rest of the place to be a shambles when I put the Invisible Light show online. It should generate some traffic, more than my whining about being a freaking shut-in who can only walk for short periods of time. But at least it beats not being able to walk at all.

6/22/2001

Kind of an angry day. I decided to try to fight the cycle by staying up through it; it's been 30 hours now since I last slept. Occupied myself with the endless mindless photoshop work of putting together the Invisible Light slide show thingy. A hundred images. My foot suddenly developed a large blood sore on the bottom, probably from too much walking. It's back to the chair for now.

I hate being driven back to nostalgia. For the last couple of days, I've written a few short conversational things on the Rain Dogs mailing list on a variety of issues skewing off a rather silly political debate. The backlash there when someone brings up any of the "taboo" topics, has become ridiculous. A list which used generate fairly lengthy and well thought out posts is back to cool one-liner of the day status. It makes me sad. I think it's perhaps because the more talented writers there have been seduced into other pursuits, and just don't want to take the time to discuss anything except where the "cool" eateries, bars, and attractions are in cities, or what the current flavor of the week is in bands. Yawn. If it's a serious topic that might cause dissent, it's taboo. While it often devolved into silly pedantic bickering in the past, I'd take that over "what's in your CD player?" But I'm in the minority. There are a lot of smart people there; it's sad to see them go to waste.

I don't want to put the slideshow online until I'm in a better frame of mind; I was sort of doing it partly for the enjoyment of the people on Raindogs. There isn't a much more "Waitsian" subject than bars.

6/21/2001

Watching the sky around here often beats watching TV. It was a particularly good day on that score today. Spent most of the day with the Diaries of Henry Crabbe Robinson while taking breaks to explore news and magazine sites on the net. It's pretty dismal. I notice that the content doesn't turn over very quickly; there is a lot to choose from, but most of it seemed fairly stale. That's sort of the opposite of news, now isn't it?

I had to take a bunch of pain pills yesterday. I keep pushing the ankle further and further, and it pays me back with pain. The pain was really bad. This crews me up, both because it keeps me up and because it makes me fuzzy. It has shifted me into a purely nocturnal creature. The noise in my head becomes a drone, and endless avalanche of unrealized ideas. I got up at two p.m. today, after having gone to bed at 7 a.m. Karen calls it reverting to my natural schedule; I find it hard to resist my vampiric tendencies. Too many late nights watching people at bars.

The view did a weird thing when the sun went down; it turned pure magenta. It was eerie, particularly since it happened shortly after I read that John Lee Hooker died today. Boom Boom Boom Boom. A post-nuclear looking sky. The photos are unaltered; I didn't skew the color balance. This is a natural Arkansas sky.

I remember my first John Lee Hooker album: This is Hip, which was on the Charley R&B label out of London. I remember thinking then, in the early eighties, that it was so weird to have to turn to England to find American music. He was largely out of print in the U.S. My favorite tune was House Rent Boogie. It's less of a song than a story; and I was doing the "house rent boogie" a lot around that time. In memoriam, an inscription from that album cover:

But this is hip: that voice, at once menacing and diffident, the crawling king-snake guitar poised and lurking, ready to lash out, that obsessively tapping foot. Prime John Lee Hooker, playing that boogie that's been mashed into the ground over and over again by dumbo gruntcake bands from the US stadium circuit, but still fresh, alive, and danceable in the hands of the main man.

I can't tell you how many of those "dumbo gruntcake" bands I've heard. Everybody always got it wrong: too fast, not mean enough. Too many bands just choke the blues to death, as if a surfeit of notes could cure their lack of soul. John Lee Hooker was hip; I don't give a shit about the commercials. I'm going to miss him.

Wrapped around a Lexus ad which claims possession of the sky, is Camille Paglia's essay containing my favorite sentence of the week. I'm not saying that it's an important thought, mind you, just a fun sentence.

What gay ideologues, inflated like pink balloons with poststructuralist hot air, can't admit, of course, is that heterosexuality is nature's norm, enforced by powerful hormonal cues at puberty.

6/19/2001

Bentley's book is a real treasure. Besides reminding me of things that I already knew but lost in the muddle of memory, it contains many quotes from Blake's contemporaries which are a joy to read. I'm most of the way through it now, and I'm glad that this book arrived after I finished studying more of the contexts involved. Lady Charlotte Burly recorded this observation in 1818, after one of Caroline Lamb's parties which Blake attended:

Mr Blake appears unlearned in all that concerns this world, and from what he said, I should fear that he is one of those whose feelings are far superior to his situation in life. He looks care-worn and subdued; but his countenance radiated as he spoke of his favorite pursuit, and he appeared gratified by talking to a person who comprehended his feelings. I can easily imagine that he seldom meets with any one who enters in to his views; for they are peculiar, and exalted above the common level of received opinions.

A shudder ran through me as I read this; similar things have been said about me in the past few years. But the setting of the remark is what startled me the most. Caroline Lamb was what might be impolitely called a "star fucker." How the hell did Blake, then 61, end up at one of her parties? He had some influential friends and it was no doubt a shmoozing kind of thing, but the thought of Blake thrusting himself into this sort of public is astonishing. It just goes to show you how far people will go for conversation.

That's what I miss the most about being laid-up— conversation. I realize that my opinions may seem "exalted" to some, but they are hard won, even if they are more adjustable than Blake's. I suppose I started worrying about it a bit when people started accusing me of being detached from the "real" world. I'm hardly naive, it's just that I don't care about most of the crap that seems to dominate other people's railing— economic and consumptive issues in particular. I suspect the same was true of Blake; while commerce is on the tip of everyone's tongue, it's hardly the most important issue on the planet. Since I moved here, I've had to range far and wide to find people who might talk to me. Some of my favorite conversations have come from unlikely places.

I remember driving to Hot Springs one day to see some of Warren Criswell's paintings, and talking for hours to a parking lot attendant. We talked about poetry, and California. She had just come from there, and was going back. I don't want to go back, but I must admit I've been reading with envy a few blogs from the SF Bay area, where people speak of going to the park for conversation. Returning to Warren's work, let me recommend his new drawings on the pages of Frankenstein. Warren and I like to observe people in similar dark situations. But I don't share his affinity for strip-clubs. I suppose I'm just thin-skinned musically; I can never stand the music they play in those places.

I was just reading an article by Susan Sontag that sums up a modern reasoning about writing which I think carries over to blogs:

Wisdom in the contemporary novel is more likely to be retrospective, intimate-sounding. The vulnerable, self-doubting voice is more appealing and seems more trustworthy. Readers crave the display—the intrusion—of personality; that is, of weakness. Objectivity is suspect; it's thought to be bogus or cold.

6/18/2001

Amusing myself with self portraits today, trying to find excuses to endure the pain of walking around. Another nice day; I really wish I could go for a drive, but my car is a five speed, and not being able to apply pressure with my ankle makes that a bit impossible. Hopefully, it won't be that much longer though.

Mike, this coke's for you. I ran across this bizarre ad surfing, and it neatly coincided with a discussion of Shelley's gayness that has been flaming along on the NASSR list. A distinguished lesbian scholar wrote a paragraph that I can't help but preserve here:

SEX IS A DISCOURSE, and a rhetoric, one among many languages through which we express an aspect of our experience. It is a language, like all discourses, that not only describes but does. Sex has a peculiarly strong relationship to power; power can itself be an effect of the discourse of sex. Sex demands the truth, produces the secret, threatens to overflow its own categories and forms. Sex can interrupt, dissuade, rupture. (The discourse of) Sex can validate, empower, get people killed, and even impeach a United States president.

Amanda Berry

I'm trying to figure this frame of thinking out. Sex is a language? This would mean it has a grammar; that would explain a lot— I've always been crappy at grammar. While I'm comfortable with thinking of it as a conversation, an exchange of feelings and fluids, I find it difficult to believe that there are rules to it.

The approach does make a certain amount of sense; society applies prescriptive rules to confine people's sexuality. But the rules don't work, and it follows its own natural grammar. I'm uncomfortable with queer rhetoric though; John Laurentson, who started the whole thing, attempted to define "lover" as merely someone you feel love toward. If you feel love toward another guy, you're gay— sex has nothing to do with his definition. By this definition, everyone is gay if they've ever had a close friend of the same sex. Huh? This removes all meaning from the word, and makes discussion of "gayness" sort of silly.

The Rhetoric of Sexuality would make a great theme for a class. It's all so loaded, from both sides. I enjoy reading feminist critics; they are quite often proud of their equally silly redefinitions and inventions. I suppose I always stand at risk of being labeled "hetero-centric" or "dead-white-male-centric" when it comes to my tastes in literature. To tell you the truth, I don't think of it much. If I like an author, I could care less whether they are male or female, straight or gay, or Martian for that matter. If they deal with issues I want to read about, great. A bunch of rhetoric about "oppression" of a narrow and specific kind is far less interesting to me than broader issues of human consciousness. And we all have that, whether we are straight or gay, male or female.

However, the oblique (in my opinion anyway) approaches of feminist and queer theory often provide new ways of looking at texts. As long as it brings something fresh to the party, rather than a load of empty rhetoric, it's great by me. I don't think texts are inherantly "gendered." Jane Austen is a great writer; not just a great woman writer. Byron is a great writer; not just a great gay writer. To draw these catagories as exclusives, really screws things up for me.

6/17/2001

Sometimes I'm easily amused. It's hard to get into gear; I spent most of the afternoon playing marbles. Found an interesting new place to sample blogs: Linkwatcher. I like the concept; I get tired of reading Blogger generated logs, because there is a certain sameness to the interface. Occasionally, I think that I might try using it when I get tired of handcoding each day, but I've never been one to join the crowd. If there's a hard way to do something, that's the way I choose to do it.

Of course, this means I make a lot of mistakes. These pages may not look great on all browsers; I'm working on it, but not having access to a Mac to check things out on is a problem. I suppose I could fall back on "This page looks best when viewed on my monitor," but knowing that few people visit and no one has commented one way or the other in months makes me worry about it less and less. If I get the code to work for me, I don't think about it much further. I can only search for bugs if someone comments.

Regarding errors of a different sort, Common Errors in English is an interesting site. The owner concedes that "errors" is a fuzzy term, but also sometimes provides a history of where these "deviations from standard usage" came from. Nice to know that we have Eisenhower to blame for the mispronunciation of nuclear.

I've been chugging along on a new slideshow. I've wanted to do an archive of sorts of the Invisible Light work. So far, I've got about 40 images and the coding worked out. I've been thinking a lot about the integration of words and pictures; being a Blake guy will do that to you. Every one of these pictures has a story; but in most cases that story is best left untold. With the latest injury to my ankle, I suspect that I won't ever be quite so athletic in my pursuit of photographs ever again. It was a very happy time; reading about the progression of Blake's life, I can't help but project my experiences on him. Invisible Light was my first effort at illumination.

6/15/2001

The weather has been glorious. Tall thunderclouds sweeping the sky, but no rain or disturbance; it's like a dress rehearsal. Or just a glorious summer day. Got a bunch of new books today, including G.E. Bentley's The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. I read about 150 pages this afternoon; it's fairly massive. The ideas keep collecting, I'll have to vomit them soon.

Found a really interesting site: Living Art. While the photographs aren't my style, I really liked the structure of the site and the melding of journal and photography. Sadly, it isn't being updated anymore, but the four year archive which it represents is well worth a visit. Catherine's essay Web Journals and Print Publishing: A Collision of Format is quite insightful, and it is the first that really identifies them in the way that I think of them: as a sort of dress rehearsal for a more permanent form. I'm outside the loop of their social aspect, whether I like it or not— at two visits so far this week, I'm hardly an attraction. So I write little essays, practicing, hoping that maybe one day I'll see print.

Playing with this little digital camera has made me remember something about myself that perhaps I managed to forget. Photography always makes me feel better. Writing doesn't do that. I remember well the constant pressure to write self-revelatory essays in class, as if reliving moments might make me feel better about them. It didn't. Usually, the effect is quite the opposite of cathartic. Making pictures does change the way I feel; the abstraction of an object and an object are never the same thing. The abstraction can be personal in a way that the object never is; writing is just too tied to the real for me. I can never fantasize when I write anymore; a relationship forged through e-mail destroyed the fantasy of writing for me. I made the mistake of believing in a dream. But I can still dream when I photograph. I suspect it's always been this way, I just never realized it before.

Walked today. Still hurts like hell. I was using the walker, but then I decided to just carry it instead. It's nice to feel like this won't last forever.

6/14/2001

Hopped out on the patio to watch the sun come up. My foot is aching because for the first time in six weeks, yesterday, I put about half of my weight on it and did an imitation of walking. Of course it became even more swollen, but I suppose I'll have to put up with that for a while. Couldn't sleep. I wouldn't want anyone to think I made it a habit of getting up early. Nothing could be further from the truth. I like to get up when the sun is warm.

Talked to Mike P. on the phone for a long time last night. I don't talk on the phone much usually, but today became a big exception. I got a phone call from an investigator in Dallas. Someone had stolen my personal information and used it to apply for credit in St. Louis. They rejected him, but called to warn me so I could place a "fraud alert" with the credit reporting companies. It had to be someone at the hospital. No one besides the school has had this information, and it seems to be too much of a coincidence that this would happen now. Thankfully, the fraud people were on the job.

A nice photo rolled up to my door. I have often marveled at the logic of "Top to Bottom Construction." It seems to me it would be hard to construct the roof first, before you frame the walls or foundation. Nevertheless, they do a lot of maintenance around here and the place hasn't fallen down yet.

Zeldman had a nice link to a flash animation called Writer's Block. Though it's quite web specific, it does describe how I feel today. Lots of rain and thunder this afternoon. It reminds me of Sokrates explanation of lightning in The Clouds:

Let us hypothesize a current of arid air ascending heavenwards. Now then, as this funneled flatus slowly invades the limp and dropsical sacks of the Clouds, they, in turn, begins to belly and swell, distended with gas like a child's balloon when inflated with air. Then, so prodigious become the pressures within that the cloud-casings burst apart, exploding with that celestial ratatat called thunder and thereby releasing the winds. These, in turn, whizz out at such incalculable velocities that they catch on fire.

Result: lightning.

No lightning out of me today.

6/12/2001

A conversation of one. I don't know why I keep looking at the site statistics when I know the answer to my question: I'm talking to myself. I don't think of it as masturbation; unless you're particularly kinky, masturbation is a private activity. Blogging is public, even if in my case it has only a public of one. I have thoughts all the time and it helps me to write them out. It forces the ideas from an internal state into an external presence. Sometimes it seems ritualistic; an almost daily rehearsal of transforming abstract thoughts into a concrete representation for an undefined public. I do try to stay away from the incredibly obtuse, though sometimes I can't help myself. It's a different sort of language game from writing a private journal, dressed in sexy new technology. Is web logging a sort of fetish activity?

I was watching an old episode of True Hollywood Story on E! today. Bettie Page, according to the blurb on their site anyway, "expressed no regrets about her days as a sexy model." This isn't exactly true. In the show, she expresses regret for posing nude, but no regrets about participating in the fetish photos. She said the seven years she modeled was the least sexual time of her life. There is no real connection between sexuality, nudity, and fetish; it relies entirely on the singular conversation inside the audience. We see what we want to see, shaping it according to our internal needs. Fetish is only a game, it's safe. Page treated modeling like a commissioned acting job; other people's fetishes had nothing to do with her. Fetish is external, objectified, removed. There is a distance involved in any fetish object; a safer game is played. Nudity is dangerous and subject to regret.

Public journals can be naked, but this quality is rare. Mostly, I think it has more in common with fetish than exposure. On FuckedWeblog, a listing of sites that have failed, I was really taken by the logic of the obituary for a site called "inner workings of a slacker's mind":

The point of this for me was for people to get to know me if they chose. I think I'm about to enter a phase in my life which is going to really showcase the side of me that is fairly unattractive. The angry, immature, spoiled, mean person that at times I have to struggle with to keep it from taking over the rest of me. I've seen this person before and it isn't pretty. This person is not really me and I don't want people getting to know her thinking it is. Now is just not a time when I can deal with this and try and keep it reigned in at all times. I don't have the energy to censor myself or constantly worry about the things I'm saying.

If weblogs were a "conversation" with no audience, as Doc Searls observed, why would this woman be concerned about being "unattractive"? Why would she "worry" about the things she's saying? Perhaps it's because web logging is a form of dress-up, of role playing, of fetishistic role playing that only scares us when we become naked in brief moments. Some people are more confident in nakedness than others; some people who are confident with it for a certain time in their lives, like Bettie Page, become regretful of it later.

Fetishes are stylized, removed, and safe. Thinking about the constant emphasis on design on many logs (including those not written by web designers) and the adoption of a sort of hip persona, really makes the fetish connection seem correct. Rather than opportunities to share something with the world, something real, they can become dramatic tokens, fetish objects of the part of your personality that you want to emphasize. I was reminded of a comment by Dr. Murphy regarding the progression from Romantic individualism into Victorian dramatic monologues— How else could you follow these incredible personalities except to invent new ones? Without drama, why would anyone care to listen to what they had to say? In times of uncertainty, people find drama more comforting than truth and fetish far safer than nakedness.

Where do I stand? As long as the traffic here remains light to non-existent it seems like I'll be able to feel comfortable being naked. Fetishes aren't my thing. However, the most striking theme that ran through the program on Bettie Page was that she had both the appeal of someone honest, a girl next door type— her true self, according to most who knew her— while at the same time flaunting her acting ability while tied to a chair being spanked. Bettie lived in two worlds, and there was very little crossover audience between them. Perhaps there is a lesson there for writers; it's a thin line between person and persona.

6/10/2001

I've been reading a lot of blogs recently. Some things have started to bother me. Mostly, it's the fashion, and the air of exclusivity. This trend is distinctly parallel to the rise of the "indie" phenomenon. Does this emphasis on what is rapidly becoming a discernible "indie fashion" pervert independence into a renewal of the caste system?

There is no such thing as fashion in a society of class and rank, since one is assigned a place irrevocably, so class mobility is non-existent. . . . If we are starting to dream again, today especially, of a world of sure signs, of a strong "symbolic order," make no mistake about it: this order has existed and it was that of a ferocious hierarchy, since transparency and cruelty for signs go together.

Baudrillard, Simulations

Blogs often seem like extensions of high school judgments. Is it cool? Is it uncool? This level of rating is most apparent in forums. Questions are posed to prod a concensus on issues of cool. In a recent entry, Badger reflected on a couple of forums, closing with the comment: "Who am I to judge?" I had a look. The forum he preferred, I Love Music, was filled with binary judgments framed by the query "Classic or Dud?" The new forum, I Love Everything, is pretty much the same thing, albeit with a broader focus. Love has nothing to do with it; dividing things up in terms of how much the respondents hate them seems to be the main order of business.

A particularly incisive thread was "Fake breasts: Classic or dud?" The logic exercised by the respondents was just hilarious: "Fake breasts are like, so 80's . . .This question is so two weeks ago. Get with it, a way better thread would be Shaving Your Ass: Classic or Dud? . . . Well, I say if you're gonna get them get them so huge that at least you can make some money off them. . ." Expulsions like these are the norm on the school playground, but they become part and parcel of any "scene." A scene, or clique, is built on judgments measured against the consensus.

Badger labels some of his links as "Indieish Sites." It made me wonder just what "indie" was supposed to mean. Cambridge has a definition, but it just doesn't seem adequate. Like it's precursor, "alternative," the word is pretty much meaningless, except as a display of allegiance to a fashion trend.

If things continue in this way, there won't be any words left for things that don't fit the fashion. I like to take the root of "indie" seriously: independent. If you're selling ad space, you aren't very independent. One of the Cambridge Dictionary definitions is: "not taking help or money from other people." Of course it is possible to defend support for independence as long as it doesn't violate another definition: "not governed or ruled." But the trickiest definition of all is: "not influenced or controlled in any way by other people, events or things." This seems ludicrous to apply to the current "indie" scene: it's fashion on parade.

In the largest sense, I begin to doubt if anything can ever be independent. Every generation wants to think they will be different; that they won't be bought and sold. But they all are; they are damned by their fashion sense. The need for a sense of belonging always stratifies into cliques, preserving the hierarchy of caste which stifles independence. Baudrillard anticipates the "end of the obliged sign, reign of the emancipated sign, that all classes will partake equally of." But there is a slavery in this emancipation: "the modern sign dreams of the signs of the past and would well appreciate finding again, in its reference to the real, an obligation but what it finds again is only a reason." Right now, it seems like the Internet is a trip back to high school.

Classic or Dud? The reason of fashion seems to be the concensus of the playground; the term "classic" does not imply any real value except that it's cool to like some things that are dead. We feel no reality, or obligation, in signs from the past. This seems so transparent, so cruel. Welcome to the new dot-com caste.

6/09/2001

Mike P. directed me to a cartoon site that's fun: Diesel Sweeties. This one reminded me of Luke's recent troubles. I can always count on Mike for a different appraisal of things: he said that my web log sounds "like another white guy who needs a blowjob." There certainly isn't anything particularly unique about that. You can always count on your friends.

6/08/2001

Stayed up until 4:30 am reading Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. I have major problems with "Postmodernism." Following assorted bibliographies, his work is the source of many of the assumptions that I love to rail against. Reading it makes me a lot more sympathetic to this mode of thought though; it seems utterly self-conscious of the problems it raises. The paradoxical task of destroying narrative structures by writing narratives is amusing in its boldness: Destroying the concept of revolution by being a revolutionary?

Oh, one more thing. The paradox that bothers me most is that of judgment. How do people rate things? What makes some things good and some things bad? Lyotard sets up some interesting divisions there between "scientific" knowledge and "narrative" knowledge. Narrative knowledge has a built in authority, but ambiguous truth.

I was watching a Peter Falk movie yesterday called Vig (also known as The Money Kings). Interesting cast, interesting characters, tragic end. I liked it, and the violence didn't bother me because it was pointless, rather than didactic. The ending was perfect, as far as I concerned; there was no real way to resolve this slice of life. The director avoided creating any heroes when he drew things to a close. It was a twist from the typical moral tale: no real moral. But at the same time, it was a conceit: everybody dies, end of story. Some people are bothered by this; I think that's the narrative drive kicking in once again. One reviewer was particularly upset, citing "the poverty of the narrative" because there was no way out. People crave a way out.

The Onion's review reveals its bias in the closing summation: "an actor's showcase for a slew of very bad actors," conceding only that Peter Falk was "predictably nuanced and subtle." The review's consistent slam of the actors never deals with the story's arc, nor its resolution. The one dimensional reduction of the characters in Vig in this review sums up my review of these reviews: "poor but proud."

A more "scientific" approach is taken by the review on kids-in-mind.com It's a catalogue. I was seriously amused. Here's the abstract:

A kind-hearted bookie/bar owner (Peter Falk) is given a young, tough-guy partner (Freddie Prinze Jr.) to help him collect his clients' outstanding debts before he retires. Also with Lauren Holly, Timothy Hutton, Tyne Daly, Paul Lazar, Tony Sirico, Steve Sweeney, Roger Robinson, Frank Vincent, Colm Meaney, Tonya Tyann Tullis, Pamela Bel Anu and Billy Strong.

This describes the first ten minutes, and inaccurately at that. Falk was slated to be retired in mob fashion, permanently. Tony Sirico, who is quite adept at playing mobsters (Pauly on the Sopranos), gives the order and then disappears for most of the rest of the movie. Most of the film explores Falk's character as social worker. He's a textbook hero from a war, medals on the wall and all. A viewer expects him to do something brave. But he defers for most of the film, preferring to let things take their course. And the course is one of humiliation for Timothy Hutton and Lauren Holly in particular. Hutton is a drunk and a gambler, hardly "poor but proud." His wife, played by Holly, seems proud but her spirit is broken and she is forced to submit to sex to keep her husband alive. Falk tries to help, in a subtly heroic fashion, but for most of the film he looks the other way and prepares to try to get out of the mess, and help Hutton and Holly along the way.

The patience and subtlety of Falk's character is not of interest to most reviewers. On kids-in-mind.com the defining aspects of the film are:

SEX/NUDITY 3 - Lots of sexual innuendo (including references to fellatio). A kiss. A drunken man gropes a woman's clothed breasts. A man forces a woman to repay part of her debt in sexual favors: in one scene it's implied they have intercourse (before the scene ends, we see him kiss her neck and unbutton her shirt, revealing a bit of her bra) and in another scene, he kisses her neck and face, licks her forehead, unzips her pants and fondles her bra-clad breasts. We see a few women in cleavage-revealing shirts, a woman wearing a towel and a shirtless man taking a shower.

VIOLENCE/GORE 4 - Three men are shot and killed (we see some blood on their shirts). A man is slapped and another is spat upon. A man is physically thrown out of a bar after he tries to punch someone. A man is thrown to the ground and slapped repeatedly. Some verbal threats and one instance of threatening with a gun.

PROFANITY 10 - About 46 F-words and lots of anatomical references, scatological references, mild obscenities and insults. A couple of racist remarks and a racial slur.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Gambling, organized crime, arrogance, cocaine use, alcoholism, unhappy marriages and loving marriages, revenge.

MESSAGE - Ruthless situations call for ruthless solutions.

Most of this is "objectively" accurate. The judgments which close their rating are suspect. Revenge? The close of the movie has nothing to do with that. Falk has finally chosen to take action, to kill Freddie Prinze Jr., his "associate." However, he is interrupted by the arrival of Holly to pay another installment of her debt. She is degraded and desperate; she makes the impulsive (not premeditated, as in Falk's case) choice to shoot Prinze. Falk sends her away, calls the next boss up the ladder, and shoots him— because he had threatened to kill an illegitimate son if Falk rocked the boat. In the process, Falk is shot. All the mobsters except Sirico die. Revenge has nothing to do with any of it; it's just reaction to stimuli.

Solutions? There weren't any. Lauren Holly still has a drunk and a gambler for a husband. Falk didn't heroically save the day. The envelope of money he meant to give her remains in his drawer; her husband still owes money to the mob. Falk and Tyne Daly were fabulous in this film. It was as much about their relationship as anything else. But that relationship was left behind because even kindhearted mobsters get killed. Ruthless? Hardly, Falk sacrificed himself for the safety of his illegitimate son. It was never revealed if his wife even knew about it. Falk was doomed from the beginning, though it was not made boringly obvious.

No moral message. No didactic preaching. No denouement. Just situations, mostly unresolved, until the main character dies. This sort of thing doesn't seem to be very popular with those who judge. My judgments, particularly about movies never seem to agree with anyone else. I suppose that's why I seldom place much stock in reviews, or voice my own opinions except when it's in service of another point. I try not to judge, or be judged, whenever possible.

*

On an obtuse tangent, I signed in to be judged tonight by an Online IQ test. As usual, I fell a bit short. I scored 129, just shy of their 130 "absolutely brilliant" mark. I guess I could blame it on the fact that I was watching TV while I took the test; that's guaranteed to shave points off your IQ. These tests really don't mean much, though I enjoyed the qualifier they placed on the results. In case you're curious, I only "might be significantly above average." The specific sub-scores (on a scale of 1-100) were:

• Pattern Recognition (Series): 87
• Classification (Odd one out) : 66
• Analogies : 72
• Arithmetic : 88
• Logical Reasoning : 100
• General Knowledge : 66

The classification score shows how much difficulty I have casting out odd things that don't fit. It's possible to be logically strong, and still have difficulty in that area. I'm most depressed by the "General Knowledge" score; this looks more like a readout for a math / science guy. I tried that once, but I like people more than things. So I force myself into things that I'm not that good at.

As Cobain said: "I think I'm dumb, I think I'm dumb, I think I'm dumb."

I'm always sticking my nose in something; lately, it's communications theory. I become increasingly obsessed with the changes brought about by technology. Being shut-in, I find that the act of writing every day cuts into the time that I used to spend reflecting, but at the same time my understanding of complex issues is increased when I try to commit them to electrons.

Journals have long been a tool to increase the awareness of life, and of writing. Web logs are a step in the evolution of that. I was thrilled to find Rebecca Blood's "Weblogs: A History and Perspective. " Though it is a bit dated now, I didn't know most of these facts. Her analysis is pretty insightful as well. I found it through the STC's (Society of Technical Communicators) weblog, ID Blog, which was found courtesy of New Breed Librarian. The chain of connections is bizarre, considering that I'm on the STC mailing list and I've never even heard it mentioned. It just goes to show you how fractured things can become.

ID Blog also had some links to interesting stories from USC: Blogging as a Form of Journalism, which sees web logs as "a grassroots movement that may sow the seeds for new forms of journalism, public discourse, interactivity and online community." The second part, Weblogs: A New Source of News, is a bit more reserved about the "news value" of blogs, but still seems to rave: "Blogs tend to be impressionistic, telegraphic, raw, honest, individualistic, highly opinionated and passionate, often striking an emotional chord." However, looking at the opinions of journalists about blogs, particularly journalists who keep blogs, is not really all that illuminating.

I've known lots of journalists; most are not very bright. Note this statement by Doc Searls: "I don't want an audience. I feel I'm writing stuff that's part of a conversation. Conversations don't have audiences." Well respected as he is, it seems like he ought to be smart enough to realize that any utterance is always directed at someone! Even talking to yourself is a conversation. Conversations don't have audiences? Huh? On which planet? Every speaker models and modifies their language to fit some conception of audience; this is MOST important in personal conversations. Would you like to talk to someone who insisted on making generalized speeches that have nothing to do with you?

As a final note on this blah and grey day, I was a bit encouraged to discover an article about new legislation that would ban talking on cell phones while driving. Personally, I think the web is quite social; it's cell phones that are anti-social. There is nothing worse than turning the world into a giant, non-private phone booth. I hate the damn things, and I hope I never own one.

6/06/2001

Went to the doctor. It's always so demoralizing: "Yours is a really bad injury. You really messed it up." The latest news is pretty scary; there are two options. One of the really huge screws he put in my ankle has to either come out surgically, or I have to break it and live with it. Neither option sounds very exciting. Surgery is expensive. Walking around with a broken screw in my ankle doesn't seem like fun. He said I'd have to break it first, and then see if I could tolerate it being there.

Just in case you're curious, this is what my ankle looks like right now. Compared to a few weeks ago, it's pretty. The doctor says I can start putting weight on it now, but it's hard to trust it very far. It's like standing on a pillow of flesh. That's the minor incision, by the way. It's much more lengthy on the other side. Truly a Frankenstein sort of thing.

The Increase of a State as of a Man is from Internal Improvement or Intellectual Acquirement. Man is not Improved at the Expense of Foreigners. Bacon has no notion of anything but Mammon.

William Blake Annotations to Bacon

I could use some internal improvement right now. This quote does remind me of something that has been bugging me lately. I've got a lower and lower threshold for heroic violence as time goes by. Gladiator was on last night, and I managed to watch only part of it. Is it healthy to celebrate glorious retribution? I suppose it works, as long as you can think of the victim of that vengeance as pure evil. But is there really such a thing in this world? Of course it's easy to think of a few prime examples, Hitler for example, but real choices are seldom that easy. We have to make these distinctions by making the "evil one" somehow foreign to us. That's how Hitler did it; and in turn, we do it to him. He ceases to be a man, and becomes a symbol.

I just don't find violence entertaining anymore, unless it is cartoon-like. The trend toward didactic violence bothers me. The Patriot bothers me most of all. It takes on an especially dark turn when presented in German. We've got to make our enemies symbolic, present them as an "other." The colonists were British, you know. Many of them, first generation British. The movie makes little sense. The stakes of the American Revolution were mostly economic; to gloss over this in favor of treating the Americans as somehow something more than the second sons of Britain in order to vilify the British is totally absurd. Some things are worth fighting for, indeed. Yes, the almighty wallet. But in the movies, they are foreigners who must be stamped out, kicked out of our business. However, I won't be grinding anything beneath my heel any time soon.

6/05/2001

Into big stinky things? Try the Amorphophallus titanum. Also known as "Corpse flower" or "Bunga Bangkai," the giant phallic flower is about to bloom in Wisconsin. Of course it must be the subject of a webcam; the BBC says that it spreads its putrid smell for miles, so be thankful you're not close. However, a flower a meter in diameter can't help but be impressive; though as it stands now, well, it looks like asparagus on steroids.

Got my new Dolphin Pocket Digital Camera today. It isn't as if I don't already have too many cameras, but I thought it would be a fun little toy. It's really just a portable web cam; nothing fancy. Since I often give sky reports, I snapped a quick one today to give you an idea. This is what it looked like out the sliding glass doors at the end of my cave around noon today. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Mike McKenney about why he chose to live here. He just pointed at the sky.

The apartment complex is really like a large, quiet, antfarm. Miles and miles of vinyl siding and sparse landscaping. It must cover around 15 acres; it's not the largest in town, but it bears a distinct resemblance to a box farm. I suppose that its not surprising that I would seek out the most Southern California-like place in the city, but its not the same. You can see the sky here, instead of just miles of grey. And it is not a simulation, especially when the thunderstorms roll through.

The great simulacra constructed by man pass from a universe of natural laws to a universe of force and tensions of force, today to a universe of structures and binary oppositions. After the metaphysics of being and appearance, after that of energy and determination, comes that of indeterminacy and the code.

Baudrillard The Orders of Simulacra

I suppose that's part of what draws me to Blake; he lives in a universe of energy and determination, and also in a universe of indeterminacy and code. His code is a human one; ultimately, I think there is energy and determination to the genetic code. The perserverance of structures cannot be ignored, but neither can randomness. It's Heisenberg again; it all depends on your point of view when you evaluate it. Though Disneyland may surround me, it's the patch of sky in the middle that holds a deeper fascination.

It seems oddly appropriate the Heisenberg's research was funded by Carlsberg. Beer has funded a lot of my research as well; it breaks down the structures of thinking, though others take a different point of view. Check out Beershots for micromolecular views of beers around the world. I found it very interesting to compare Bass with Old Milwaukee. It certainly explains the difference in internal effect. Though in the long run, you just can't seem to beat Guinness. If you want to find structure, you can find it anywhere you look.

6/4/2001

Watched the premiere of Six Feet Under, the new series on HBO from Alan Ball, the writer of American Beauty. It seems promising so far, though I was disappointed by the lack of music beyond background. I suppose the Sopranos had me spoiled. The parody commercial breaks were a nice touch, though I suspect if they use them in every episode it will get tedious. I'll never forget Ralph Dumain lamenting Ball's usage of "death as an aesthetic object," as if this were something new. Death is not a distinctly postmodern concern; it's the a very popular aesthetic trope, and it goes hand in hand with angst.

It amazes me how these films turn into totems. There is even a copy of the script of American Beauty online. The film seemed to me to be an astute restatement of John Keats agenda: crushing joy's grape and all. Death is a pervasive subtext in writing; everything leads up to it. It's nice to see it treated with humor, and not the arcane symbolic humor of past trendies like David Lynch. There are no meaningless extended close-ups of common household objects in Ball's work. The reaction shot closing the opening episode of the new series had the effect of a meditation on mortality. Drawn out with the same sort of tedious intensity as Lynch, it was far more effective. Nevertheless, it seemed almost canned in the shadow of American Beauty. It's hard to say if there is more left to be mined. While not as tired as the Pulp Fiction trend, it could become just as boring. Jokes are not funny when they are told too often, and without humor everything falls apart. Keats was particularly astute on that score:

The Gothic looks solemn,
The plain Doric column,
Supports an old Bishop and Crosier;
The mouldering arch,
Shaded o'er by a larch
Stands next door to Wilson the Hosier.

[On Oxford: A Parody 1-6]

6/3/2001

The search engine follies are done. My first choice, SiteLevel, was recommended for the accuracy of their results. When they crawled this site, it picked up 107 pages and only indexed 200 words. Huh? Needless to say there are more than that around here. The only thing it managed to locate was the captions of photographs, and Javascript! It seemed hardly worth having, especially since the advertising filled half a page. So I tried Atomz instead. The wordcount was too huge to remember, on 178 pages. They are great, check it out on the new Prospectus page. It did a great job of indexing, so now I know I can find anything I might want as the site grows, and I only have to advertise their service instead of a ever cycling menu of vendors.  Technology can be great sometimes.

However, the technology surrounding music puzzles me. At the onset of MTV, it seemed clear that attention spans were shrinking and soundbytes were replacing any sort of extended commitment to a type of music. Everything seemed oddly randomized: bits of this and bits of that in no particular order. With changes in compression and storage media it seems to be swinging back. I listened to 178 songs yesterday; they were on one MP3 disk. This included seven albums from a single band; a band I hadn't heard of until a few days ago. It was an exercise in depth, not randomness.

For all the hype, trends don't always translate. Nirvana changed a lot of things musically; but in the end, everything always falls apart again. Angst can't stay on the main stage for long; it's a private thing, self destructive and distracting. It's the most recurrent theme in all of the arts; we always que up to purchase a dose of someone's suffering. When it becomes commercially viable it ceases to be angst and sinks to the depths of mediocrity. I was listening to an audience recording of Alanis Morissette in Ottawa from 1999 today that I downloaded from SHN files. I don't like her much; she lost all appeal for her horrible misunderstanding of the word irony. But I wanted to see what this slicked-up chick angst sounded like onstage. It sounds suspiciously like late 70s arena rock; booming and overly indulgent. It doesn't sound angry. It sounds pathetic. Sometimes, the medium IS the message.

Thinking about Baudrillard again. For all my knocks last month, there are some interesting things in Simulations. Pondering the shrinking gap between media and message, he poses an interesting way of thinking about media:

We must think of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal, just as the other, micromolecular code controls the passage of the signal from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic sphere of the programmed signal.

This model makes a great deal of sense to me. My problem with Walter Ong's approach was that he seemed to attribute the whole of consciousness in a culture to a simple binary division between literate and preliterate. Rather than using such an arbitrary divider, I think it is better to think of each particular mode of expression as following its own sort of coding; it's the message that changes, not the mind. Humans have a big need to communicate; saying that how we communicate shapes who we are is hardly revolutionary. But both Baudrillard and Ong seem to share an unspoken bias that reality is entirely socially constructed. This leap makes it easy to fit the evidence to a predetermined outcome; your social agenda determines your prognosis for society. They both share the hypothesis that communication is the root and the cause, the flower and the effect, of being human.

Language and its extension, media, seems to me to be just an organic tool; we learn to use it in the same way we learn to feed ourselves. Underlying it is a social drive; a reality behind the image constructed from it. Humans have a need to communicate. Most of the research I've read concentrates more on the genetic code of the media, rather than the need to communicate itself. I suppose if you dispense with the concept of reality, adopting the Platonic stance that we live in a land of shadows, trying to figure out the nature of the need becomes unimportant. Idealism, in this sense, really means that we can know nothing but our ideas. I feel shakey about that. If media have a code, and that code can be known, then that implies that there is something real behind it. It's not just shadows shifting about on the walls of the cave.

Following Meg's lead, I tried the Kiersey Temperament Sorter. No real surprise, I'm an Idealist (NF) too. I must confess, I'm a bit curious what the "NF" means. Nut factor? See if this description rings true, based on what you've read and seen around here:

Idealists, as a temperament, are passionately concerned with personal growth and development. Idealists strive to discover who they are and how they can become their best possible self--always this quest for self-knowledge and self-improvement drives their imagination. And they want to help others make the journey.

It would seem as if I'm making the right choice, career-wise, albeit a bit late. Life got in the way. Being poor, and valuing social knowledge over academic dogma has taken its toll as well. Too many lines on my face, too much sadness after all this time. But I don't stop trying to turn it around. Psychologists always give such glowing strokes to my "type":

Idealists are incurable romantics who prefer to focus on what might be, rather than what is. The real, practical world is only a starting place for Idealists; they believe that life is filled with possibilities waiting to be realized, rich with meanings calling out to be understood. This idea of a mystical or spiritual dimension to life, the "not visible" or the "not yet" that can only be known through intuition or by a leap of faith, is far more important to Idealists than the world of material things. . . . Idealists are rare, making up no more than 8 to 10 percent of the population. But their ability to inspire people with their enthusiasm and their idealism has given them influence far beyond their numbers.

The last observation is questionable in my case, unless you count the ability to influence people to run away.

6/2/2001

I laid down for a few hours around 4am, but sleeping was futile again. Around six, I was listening to Art Ensemble of Chicago when I noticed that the percussion was a little odd; looked outside the window and those huge Arkansas raindrops were hitting some cardboard on my patio. Sometimes you've just got to love it when nature chimes in.

Little by little I can move my ankle again. It still won't flatten out, so walking is still a ways away. It's been a month now of this boring shut-in life. Finally got an e-mail back from Dr. Nahrwold; I'm really starting to look forward to grad school. I love talking about stuff; this sitting here in delirium is getting old. I wish I could give up on this coding junk for a while; computers are the greatest time-wasting appliances in the modern world. But I can't think straight, still, and at least this stuff is not all that intellectually challenging, just tedious.

Speaking of things that are not all that challenging— but fun nonetheless, I've really been enjoying my $9.95 per month unlimited access to emusic. I can remember how much fun I used to have trolling the cut-out and used bins at record stores; I discovered many great things that way, including Roy Harper. When it was just a dollar or two, a person could take chances. At 15$ a CD you can't. While Napster as a social phenomenon interests me, I just can't bring myself to mess with it. There is too much free music on Usenet that doesn't come from commercial releases, and I've merrily started downloading these as SHN files which preserve the quality of the CD. But its not quite the same as sampling the commercial product, and I'm a bit morally opposed to depriving artists of their royalties. Besides that, MP3s are music completely devoid of context; it took a long time for me to start collecting them. At least with the better quality communal trade in "bootlegs," you get some sort of notes or cover art. When you capture a stream of electrons, what you don't see is what you get. It's not as intrinsically interesting as other forms of music collecting, but it has the grand advantage of being the cheapest of thrills.

Just to take a break from the regularly scheduled whining, a few words about some things I've snagged from emusic, things that I probably never would have bought. Chi-Chongo by the Art Ensemble of Chicago is a head album; think Sun Ra and Eric Dolphy. I can't say I listen to it a lot, but it's great as the sun comes up after no sleep. Perhaps my biggest binge so far has been on the Brian Jonestown Massacre. I would have sworn that I saw the band name connected with one of my hometown bands that I liked, but it could just be that it sounded a lot like Brian Jones was Murdered. I'm relatively sure there's a connection somewhere. Anyway, I've downloaded seven albums from them so far, and I like them all. Methodrone is my favorite at the moment. There is no similarity between them and another band of Bakersfield natives, Videodrone. Now my mind is really starting to wander. It happens anytime the subject gets near Bakersfield; I lose all sense of focus and responsibility.

Took a bath to wash the buck off. Made another revision; now there's an option at the upper left to remove the menu frame. And, through the magic of JavaScript and CSS, the page knows how its been loaded and displays a get or lose option for the menus. The bath was the biggest of the two accomplishments though. I have been afraid to lower myself into the tub, for fear of getting out, so for the past four weeks I've been just sitting on the edge and hosing myself off, which is hardly satisfying. Really, I'm a shower kind of guy though. I suspect it will be a few more weeks before I can stand erect and manage that.

Now I'm really embarrassed. In the past few hours while I was working on implementing the search engine, someone visited from the UK. The blog page was totally screwed up because of one missing quotation mark, causing the menu to go careening off into cyberspace. The search engine doesn't work yet because I haven't been crawled (sounds kind of fun, except what does the crawling is a spider). It is on the prospectus page if you're curious. I thought it might be a good idea since I'm piling up the pages of rants these days.

6/1/2001

Another day, another design change. I've decided to take a more free-form approach to the journal. While the table format was handy and quick, doing away with it will give me the chance to play with coding a bit more as I embark on my fifth month of writing online.

It seems great to embrace all the neat stuff you can do with coding provided you give up on the idea that you can please all the people all the time. My biggest problem in dealing with this stuff is not being able to precisely tell how things will look to everyone else. That's a big one for me; I'm used to thinking of how things will appear in the carefully measured area of a photograph. Given the lack of traffic and response, it's hard to keep plugging away at it. I'm thinking about the impressions others might have of these pages less and less since no one has really taken the time to write me and tell me what they think anyway. It's mostly a learning exercise, but there are pieces of me scattered all over this place.

After all, I'm just a second-rater, as Slim would say. I shouldn't give it that much thought. But it's really fun when someone visits from across the globe. Writers have to picture some kind of audience in their heads in order to write anything, and my conception of who I am writing to changes each day. Sometimes it's just me; just taking notes, recording passing thoughts and such. But that's always a vain assertion— which me do I think I am? Sometimes, I really hope that it might be possible to make someone like me through my words and pictures. Vain hope; I've tried that most of my life and it hasn't worked out very well.

But enough of that whining. I didn't get to sleep until 8am, getting frustrated by little typos that naturally increased as time went on. Got up at three, and managed to get enough of the changes done to put it online. Some of the sections may look weird for a little while, until I get them revised. Soon, I will have such things as a search engine and slideshows put together for the new look, though I must confess it's not as much a new look as a new effort toward standardizing the old look for different resolutions.

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