John Stands in “Timber” in Cheyenne Memories concludes a tale about the seven stars of the big dipper thus
It was a story supposed to make us go to sleep, but I would lie awake thinking about those seven brothers for quite awhile, and what happened to them. I never did hear what became of the girl.
And so we are left to wonder too.
And so for day 161
24.05.2007
Tony Peake in Derek Jarman: a biography offers a description of an aspect of the film The Tempest:
For the costumes, a sense of timelessness was aimed at […] Jarman was equally keen that the costumes reinforce character. The way Miranda’s dress is festooned with shells and feathers, so that it looks as if she carries the island about her person, is a precise indication of her upbringing, just as Prospero’s rumpled but once magnificent velvet waistcoat and breeches hint at a richer, more cosmopolitan past.
There is a touch of Jungian treatment here as character, theatrical, slides into character, psychological. French has “caractère” for psychological character and “personnage” for the theatrical role and both are different from personality.
Costumes may reinforce character but they also make role codable.
And so for day 160
23.05.2007
The narrator of Robert Silverberg’s Those Who Watch describes the mores of the Dirnan:
Vorneen was by nature a seducer. That was his role in the sexual group: he was the predator, the aggressor who initiated the matings. Mirtin would never take an active role, while Glair provoked sexual activity only in the feminine facet of the healer, the consoler, the soother. Vorneen sought passion for its own sake. That was acceptable, and moreover necessary to the continuity of the group. Within the group he kindled, he galvanized. If
sometimes he found it needful to go outside the group, neither Glair nor Mirtin objected. Why should they?
1967 science fiction offering a mirror to remind 2007 readers that primate behaviour can be quite complex even within its simple bounds.
And so for day 159
22.05.2007
Somewhere I culled this anecdote because it reminded me of Jerome Bruner’s concept of “going meta”. In the 1980s Scientific American included some practical joke in the April issue. One went like this:
The AI lab at MIT was working on a computer that engaged in conversations and imitated human intelligence. After several years of training and improvements to the software and hardware, the system improved to the point where the researchers debated whether it really thought like a human. They decided to ask the computer, and typed in (voice recognition was not available at the time) “Do you think like a human?” The computer responded after a pause “That reminds me of a story!”
The pause adds such a human touch 🙂
And so for day 158
21.05.2007
In December 1999, I sent out to a distribution list the following wintery lines
Through and past the powdery snow
Through and past the wet slush
Kathleen Beall responded:
into the spring and the returning songbirds
into the spring and the persistent blackflies
Two lines for summer and fall each and one line for a timeless moment and the circle of call and answer will achieve a poetic completeness.
And so for day 157
20.05.2007
Artist Alastair MacLennan:
Art is the demonstrated wish and will to resolve conflict through action, be it spiritual, religious, political, personal, social or cultural.
I read and reread the sentence and if I am correct all those adjectives are modifying “conflict” not “action”. I think that is what the comma is doing there: guiding the interpretation. Or maybe the “it” refers to the wish and will and sets all modifiers to a characterizing.
Art in a non conflictual perspective may just be about the demonstration of the undemonstrable. No enumeration suffices.
That there is tension between the expression and what escapes expression granted. That that tension is a conflict. Not. Conflicts imply termination. Art is unending.
And so for day 156
19.05.2007
Brent Ledger in a column about collecting culture (a review of an anthology of Canadian gay poetry) in Xtra! May 10, 2007, invites us to meditate on the means of self-creation:
As much as history creates us, we create history. It’s an act of force, determination and imagination. We make ourselves exist.
The last paragraph of the column references an anecdote about a missing library book but it can serve to reference the above paragraph about making ourselves exist:
It’s a valuable reminder that culture doesn’t happen by accident and a single careless accident can cause a major loss. If you want a culture and a space in which to belong, you have to coddle, curate and even create it.
Incubating, transplanting, and selecting are other tropes for the coming into being of cultural selves.
And so for day 155
18.05.2007
In his 1970 Turing Lecture, “Form and Content in Computer Science” (Journal of the ACM 17.2 April 1970), Marvin Minsky makes a number of observations which I like to gather under the rubric “the social impact of the how”.
It will help the student to know something about computational models and programming. The idea of debugging itself, for example, is a very powerful concept — in contrast to the helplessness promoted by our cultural heritage about gifts, talents, and aptitudes. The latter encourages “I’m not good at this” instead of “How can I make myself better at it?”
I like to read this less as a call for continuous improvement (which partakes in large part of the discourse of grace and the wages of sin) and more as as an invitation to honest engagement. Sometimes making oneself better at a given task or activity involves breaking away from that given task or activity for a little while. And “going meta” to use the parlance of Jerome Bruner is a skill to be acquired and renewed.
And so for day 154
17.05.2007
I have been basking in the pleasant prose of the The Cluetrain Manifesto. The following segment sums up both the horror and beauty of being human – the joys and tribulations of being open to information overload.
I am reminded of the central insight from my doctoral dissertation (that at a certain level of abstraction the operations of perception and communication can be modelled by machines… apparatus, sense, orientation…)
We of genus Homo are wired to respond to each other’s noise and commotion, to the rich, multi-modal deluge of data each of us broadcasts as we wade through life.
Rick Levine “Talk Is Cheap” chapter from The Cluetrain Manifesto
And so for day 153
16.05.2007
Augustine’s Rule Chap 8.5
Should anyone conceal a gift bestowed upon him he shall be judged guilty of theft.
Begs for an ontology of gifts. They are concealable. Not necessarily so. Gifts unbestowed are not yet open to concealment. There is a greater evil concealed in the rule. Bestow: to confer, to devote. To burden without consent?
The to-be-given has to be carved out of the continuum. The having-been-given will return to that continuum. Theft is an interruption. Or it is experienced as so.
And so for day 152
15.05.2007
