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The men who planned and carried out the bombings in Bali in 2002, the ones that killed one of my oldest and dearest friends (but only after he suffered with burns over most of his body for nearly two weeks) along with 201 other people, were executed last month.

You'd think I'd be happy about that.

Let me tell you a little story that may not seem to have much to do with this, but does, somehow, in a way that's not entirely clear to me. Maybe in the telling, I can work it out a bit.

It was the mid-70s, I think, another glorious short clean summer in Northern BC, one of the ones that stay with me in my memory, and my aunt, uncle and two cousins were visiting us.

We had taken our river boat ten or fifteen kilometers up the lake, up to one of the rocky beaches under the ridge of Mount Pope, inshore from Battleship Island. We set up our outpost on a long expanse of thumb-size pebbles rattling under a broad unclouded vault of sky, stands of jackpine and spruce at our backs clustered beardlike around yellow stone cliff outcroppings. Clear deep dark green water, hot dogs cooked on whittled birch sticks over a fire pit. It was the kind of day that makes you feel glad to be alive, especially when you're 8 or 10 years old and all is right with the world.

I remember at one point my cousins and I were ranging up the shingly beach, just exploring, when we came across the biggest snake I'd ever seen. It was glistening and black and in the water, and it took off like a shot as soon as it saw us, undulating frantically as it headed along the rocky verge, trying to escape.

We were curious, or at least I was, and we started throwing driftwood and rocks in its path, trying to get it to turn around, or slow down, so we could get a better look. I'm not sure, of course, what my cousins were thinking, but I don't think they had any more malicious intent than I did. We were curious. The missiles we hurled at the poor beast got progressively larger and we got more excited, and the inevitable happened. One of the rocks or sticks landed square on the snake, and killed it. It uncoiled and floated, light belly up.

As we'd been hollering and chasing the snake, my uncle, presumable alerted by our excitement, had come up behind us just as the fatal stone did its work. All he saw was hooting boys killing an innocent creature.

He wasn't furious, he was disgusted, disappointed. I still remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the look on his face. I don't think anyone had ever looked at me like that before.

Several people have sent me links to news items about the execution of the Bali bombers in the past few weeks, and each time, I've had to tell them that I just didn't know what to feel about it, much less what to think.

I find as I grow older that every year I am certain about less and less.

I've said to some folks who asked that although I do not believe that more killing is a good response to killing, if I were handed the gun, or set down in front of the switch behind the one-way glass, or just put into a room with the bastards, I wouldn't hesitate to exact vengeance for the death of my friend. Pull the trigger, press the button, beat them with my fists. I've said to my friends that I am an ape masquerading as a man.

I don't know if that's true or not, I really don't. It sounds good, I suppose, and I've always been about the dramatic pronouncement over the measured interpretation.

Is the world a poorer place without my friend Rick Gleason living in it? Yes, it is, and the same is no doubt true for the friends and family members of each and every of the other 201 people killed in the bombings. Is the world a better place without their killers living in it? I think it probably is.

We tell ourselves a lot of stories about 'the sanctity of human life'. We seem to mean the lives of those we know and love when we talk about it, and that's not surprising or wrong. We find it hard to care about strangers, and harder to care about strangers whose tribe is different, and even harder to care about those strangers who would do us harm if they could, or leave us to die without compunction. People get all misty about their Jesus and his injunctions to love one's enemies and turn cheeks.

But we don't really believe that human life, in the abstract, is sacred, even if we're willing to go the extra mile and define what we mean by sacred, do we? Not really. We make war, we ignore the roots of violent crime and turn away, we spend millions on blood-fiesta movies and video games and tell ourselves that it's about catharsis. The best we can reasonably claim to believe is that some human life is sacred.

We're not bad people, of course, most of us. Actual, personal violence we find shocking, unacceptable, abhorrent. We are traumatized by the headless corpse behind the steering wheel sitting in the puddle of blood and piss in the twisted plastic and metal of the Friday night wreck. We're dutifully frightened by the TV news items about violent crime that are intended to keep us dutifully frightened and at home watching the sponsor's messages. But we do love our serial killers and the movies about them, we love our torture porn, we love our Schwarzeneggerian one-liners before the shotgun skullpop, even while we guard our vulnerable citizens against violence domestic and corporal and sexual and even emotional. We righteously and rightfully do our best to end the social conditions that allow such things to happen. And we support our troops. You know, if we have any. We compartmentalize.

I don't think most of us are all that clear on these things, and I suppose I'm no better than anyone else.

See, if we admit that by executing those bastards, and we accept that violence has its place in our attempts to make the world better, we have accepted that violence has its place. This has consequences.

And if we're not trying to make the world better, then we're just acting out another episode of the woeful old Jehovahriffic vengeance.

I'm not against vengeance, though I'd rather be a man than an ape. I have to admit that there are times when I want to bare my yellowed fangs and rip out a throat and feel the hot pulse of blood wash across my cheek.

Thirty years later, having returned to the memory many times over the years, I don't think I wanted to kill that snake. But I'm not certain that that was actually the truth at the time.

11:27 AM | 7 comments and no trackbacks yet

I've been downloading and cycloptically watching the new series Californication because a) I quite like David Duchovny b) he plays a hard-drinking writer c) the pilot episode was so chickablock with prettily wobbling breastflesh that, well, how could I say no?

Since then, sadly, the per-episode count of nipples'n'bottoms has dropped precipitously, perhaps because Australian grannies spit the proverbial dummy, and they want to play nice. Or it was just a cynical attention-grab ploy. So it goes. The series hasn't lived up to the promise of the pilot, but it's something to play up in the corner of my monitor while I'm metafiltering or fiddling with design stuff. Lets me vicariously be that guy that I'd already tired of actually being by the time I was 30, but who I still miss, sometimes, a bit.

Anyway, all that's preliminary to a plot thread from a couple of episodes ago that left me scratching my head a little, wondering if either I was out of touch with what's actually happening to the language in America, or if the writers are.

See, Duchovny, playing boozehound and improbably-lucky-with-the-ladies author Hank Moody, is impelled into spasms of disgust and despair at the decline of Culture (the backstory being that he is blocked, thus drunk, and whoring himself out to a corporate blog for cash) when one of his recent conquests actually says 'LOL' out loud. In, if I recall correctly, barefaced unironic response to some bon mot he comes out with in the sack.

Do people actually say LOL now? Out loud? (And by people, I mean, you know, adults.) Do kids even do it? Am I that old?

See, the thing is, I'm almost willing to believe it, because listening to the quite entertaining Totally Rad Show podcast the other day, Alex, whose giddy wordplay I usually enjoy, came out with '[Name of somebody] FTW!'

FTW means 'for the win', for those of you even crustier and more clued-out than I.

But he didn't actually say 'for the win!', he said 'FTW!' 'For the win' has three syllables, even after a dozen beers. 'FTW' has five. The combination of vowels and consonants are bumpier and harder to say. It just doesn't make any goddamn sense.

WHAT DID YOU SAY MY CATS ARE NOT FREEBALLING GET OUT OF MY KITCHEN YOU KIDS WHO TOOK MY MEDICINE OH MY ACHING BUNIONS

I don't know. I guess I'll just go and have a nice glass of Metamucil or something.

[Update: I'd just like to say that after watching the first season that that Californication show is pretty much crap, with only sporadic flashes of brilliance. I've got to guess it's either written by committee or by dartboard, because it veers from well-written to laughably bad, seemingly at random. Too bad.]

5:32 PM | 10 comments

When I was a teenager, I thought a lot about the end of the world. In particular, the rain of nukes that always seemed just around the corner. I was fascinated and terrified. I suppose that's not an unusual thing for kids that age, and might even have been the usual for m-m-m-my generation.

I grew up in the 70s, came of age in the early 80s. I was convinced that nuclear war was near-inevitable. I had no doubt that doddering dimwitted Ronald Reagan (read 'his handlers') and whichever doddering Soviet supremo was currently being propped up and jerkily animated with electric current (read 'his handlers') were going to blow the crap out the world. I dreamed about it. I can remember a grand total of one wet dream from my pubescent years; I can remember literally dozens of atomic holocaust dreams.

I remember Helen Caldicott and her Canadian-made If You Love This Planet. They showed it to us in high school. I remember the TV movies Threads and The Day After. Two and half decades after seeing Threads, I still remember the camera lingering on the puddle of urine at the woman's feet as the mushroom clouds rose. I watched The Road Warrior when it was first released. I remember reading A Canticle for Leibowitz. I sucked up all the '50s bomb-shelter paranoiac sci-fi juvenilia I could get my mother to buy for me at the bookstores on our shopping trips to the nearest city. I read what little I could find about the growth of the Cold War arsenals. It was... a hobby of mine.

Not that I was the archetypal Weird Kid or anything, muttering head-down through greasy locks about the 'end of the world'. I had normal hobbies, too: comics and computers, swimming and biking, booze and friends' fast cars. Girls. I showered regularly. But I did dream a lot about the end of the world.

And they weren't all nightmares by any means. See, I grew up in a tiny town more than 1000 kilometers north of Vancouver. I was completely confident that when the bombs fell, we'd be safe and secure. When I was in Grade 5, my gifted-group teacher had had a meteorologist boyfriend who'd lent me (and the other smart kid they'd cut from the herd to study what and how we liked) his weather maps. I'd learned about the prevailing wind currents of north-central British Columbia. We'd be all good when the balloon went up. The nearest mushroom cloud might sprout and rain its deadly ash 500km away, at worst, accidental mistargetings notwithstanding, and leave us basically unscathed

We had moose and squirrel salmon, we had farms and ranches, we had endless forest. Fruit might get a little scarce, but hell, I didn't much like fruit anyway. My house had a deep well, and the lakes and rivers were sweet and clear. Nuclear winter? No worries. We lived through -45°C spells every damn year. We'd get by. Let the mad bastards down south kill each other off en masse. We'd be the inheritors of the earth, us hardy northern canucks, ululating our diesel-powered ways down out of the arboreal wastes, antlers strapped to the hoods of our Barracudas and pickup trucks, to rebuild things in our own Royal Reserve-powered image. Proud Canadians. There'd finally be some kind of payoff for living 40 miles up the asshole of the earth for so many years.

Armageddon didn't seem like such a bad thing. Not the best result in a lot of ways, sure, but Ouroboros the world-turd was spinning at the bottom of the bowl, anyway. Time for cleansing holy nuclear fire! It'd be a shame, all those innocent people getting torched, but we kept reading how overpopulation was going to kill the planet even if the nukes didn't.

So talk these days of a coming economic armageddon with Ground Zero in America's bubble have actually put me in a nostalgic mood. Headlines like China threatens 'nuclear option' of dollar sales take me right back to 1982. Media tidbits like Jim Cramer's recent howling monkey-boy histrionic meltdown -- 'It's Armageddon out there!" have fascinated me in the kind of way that (metaphorical) nuke-porn did back in the day.

It's far from certain, of course, that the blow up is going to happen, or even that things will fall apart. But I've been watching the whole thing for years now, after decades of conditioned ignorance about economics, and the New Great Depression feels as likely to me as nuclear tennis did back in the early '80s.

Then again, that didn't end up happening, did it? There's some comfort in that, I guess.

A comment from the perspicacious Malor in a recent Metafilter thread (among many others about the subprime mortgage mess, the yen carry trade, the liquidity dry-up, and all the rest) lays out genesis of the worst case scenario pretty well, I think. Is it a Minsky Moment? Yeah, probably.

Malor said:

We should have gone into a horrific recession after the stock market bubble popped in 2000. The size of that bubble was far bigger than the one in 1929, so the consequences should have been even more severe... something on the order of severity of the Great Depression, although I think a 1970s-style stagflation writ large was the likeliest outcome.

What happened instead is that the Fed panicked and hit the liquidity button, flooding the system with incredibly cheap money. New money chases inflation, and causes more of it, so it went into housing, and then people started leveraging themselves up into massive debt to buy more of it.

Bubbles have been called the fiscal equivalent of a nuclear weapon; the only way to avoid the fallout is by not having one in the first place. The stock market bubble was a huge deal, though probably survivable.

But the Fed, which set off the original bubble with easy money, tried to fix the fallout with more of the same medicine that got us sick in the first place. To stop the fallout from one atomic bomb, they set off two fusion weapons instead.... and we didn't even dodge the fallout from the first bomb, we just delayed it. The explosion of the other two bombs just sent the fallout into orbit, but it's still up there, and we're still gonna eat every rad.

At the very least, we're going to have a full generation of very hard times, tougher than anything in living memory. I think we will be exceptionally fortunate if the United States continues to exist as the same legal entity.

In terms of likely outcome, my operating theory is that we'll go into a short-term deflationary crunch, but the Fed will open the floodgates and send us into an inflationary death spiral. Not just nasty horrible stagflation for two decades like we would have had from the Y2K pop, but an actual hyperinflationary death spiral for the dollar.

With fiat currency, I just don't think a true deflationary collapse is possible... although with the unbelievably massive leverage in the derivative positions, I suppose it could happen. Money could be destroyed from debt default faster than the Fed can lend new dollars into circulation.

There's one name you should remember in the coming crisis: Greenspan. This is all his doing. His refusal to ever allow a recession, ever, led us directly into this mess. He never met a problem he couldn't cover up with liquid paper.

I think Malor might be overstating the case when he talks about a generation of hard times. On the other hand, if China pulls the economic trigger, he might be understating it.

Anyway, the winds taste the same to me because as the tension builds I'm once again far from the places where the corpses will litter the ground if and when the hammer falls. Two and half decades ago I was in the far north of Canada, confident that we'd be able to sustain ourselves while the rest of the world went to hell. Now I'm in Korea, and if economic armageddon happens, once again I'm not directly in the line of fire. Once again, if it all goes to hell, I'll feel sorry for all the people (even the stupid ones who went for their two year no-money-down teaser-rate no-declare ARM mortgages for a McMansion they knew they couldn't afford) who lose it all. The rich will make it through, as they always do, this time with Bushy legislation and offshore accounts rather than hardened bunkers and hidey holes.

Well, I like to say I'll feel sorry about the end of days. I said to myself when I was 17 that I'd be sorry about all those crispy corpses down in CanadAmerica South. But not entirely sincere the sentiment, I have to admit, then or now. The truth is, of course, in some ways, on some days: I think I'd feel like pumping my fist, taking a deep breath, and shouting 'That's what you get for shortsighted greed and systematic stupidity, you bastards!' Or more succinctly, 'cause my wind is not what it once was, 'Suck it, dummies!'

I'm a bad man that way. Or part of me is and was, at least.

Bad things are going to happen to the Korean economy, certainly, if and when America's economy goes tits-up and takes the rest of the world with it. But if I lived in North America, if I was mortgaged to the hilt, if I was living from paycheck to paycheck, I'd be a lot more worried about it than I am here in Korea with my life savings in won and no debt.

Maybe we ought to buy some gold, though.

So I am back where I was when I was young -- a cleansing fire might just be what's needed to clean out the corruption and cauterize the wounds. Part of me almost looks forward to it. I'm not sure if I really believe that, or if it's just the romantic teen I was surfacing again for a last misanthropic gasp before he goes down into that dark cold water for the last time.

Either way: armageddon schadenfreude. It's not just a good name for a postmodern superhero.

[Update: more background material and some excellent explanations of the IMPENDING DOOOOOOOM in this MeFi thread.]

6:36 PM | 9 comments

[Some of this seemed to crystallize for me after listening to Bruce Sterling's excellent talk at SXSW 2007. So thanks to him, and you know, grain of salt.]

We grew up watching. If you're 50 or 40 or 30 or younger, you've spent thousands of hours watching. You still watch -- you watch on YouTube, or you watch your DVDs, or you watch the TV. Maybe you use a PVR to timeshift yourself so that you can watch on your own schedule, congratulate yourself on cheating the advertisers, denying them the eyeballs they crave. Maybe, like me, you fire up bittorrent on boot, and swarmload all your video automagically from the RSS feeds of illicit darknet bulletin boards.

Howl Twitter (with abject apologies to Allen Ginsberg)

I saw the best posters of my generation destroyed by politics, commenting hysterical naked,
scrolling themselves through the n-word threads at dawn looking for a snarky fix,
trucker-hatted hipsters burning for the cheapest DSL connection to the bitwise dynamo in the datastream of night,
who pizza and tater-tots and poopsocking and high sat up typing in the supernatural whiteness of rented condos surfing across the tubes of internets contemplating porn,
who bared their breasts on MySpace under fake names and saw Mohammedan bombers threatening in video streams illuminated,
who played through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Second Life and Warcraft tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were banned from the websites for crazy & posting batshitinsane on the Windows™ of the Bill,
who farted in unshaven rooms in underwear, tossing their tissues in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror on CNN...

Watching and being watched has started to feel like the default human state in these mediated days. You know how characters in video games will go into their idle animation if you wait too long to interact with them? Yeah, like that. Unwatched, they nonetheless go through the motions as if they were.

The last half a century or more is remembered, at least by me, as a succession of moving images -- lumpy raspberry red Kennedy brains sprayed out across the trunk of the convertible, phallic twin towers collapsing like nationscale erectile dysfunction. Watching makes manifest our reality, makes more real our memory. Two or three generations now, we've been immersed eyedeep in it. Hawkeye Pierce and Fonzie, they're signifiers of my childhood as evocative to me as cold lake water and the northern lights. If you spend as much time on the internet as I do, if you're one of the geek-approved flavour of obsessive-compulsives we call 'early adopters', if you've bought a big flat panel TV or covet HD video, if your appetite for bandwidth is insatiable, if you feel compelled to buy ever more complex mobile phones, you're probably in the same boat as me. You swim in the same advertising cesspool in which our media meals float -- eyeballs watch, watching is intentional, intention means awareness, awareness is all when someone wants something from you or when you want something from them. Tree falls in the forest, but it doesn't matter shit unless somebody's watching. We're Schrödinger and his cat, both at the same time.

If you live in London, your picture is taken 300 times a day, but not because someone want to sell you something. You're being watched, and you're meant to feel safe.

We've had another lesson drummed in to us, too, it seems; one that cuts in the other direction. It's a weak inverse solipsist lesson we felt in our bones from the time we were toddlers, of course: you've seen it on America's Funniest Home Videos, maybe. The child falls, howls while the parents with the camera are looking at him and pointing the camera. They move off, out of sight -- the observing eye umbrated -- and the child quiets, sniffs, draws shuddery breath, and follows. As soon as he knows he is once more in the range of the observer's gaze, he busts out into full wails again.

Here: It's easier for you to watch the video than for me to explain it. Watch.

Our thoughts, our feelings, our selves are never as real as when someone else is observing them.

So we used to make home movies, we took Polaroids, we sent cards to distant relatives at Christmas so we'd be alive in their minds. It's a natural and a human impulse. Hell, we painted on the walls of Lascaux. With the technology at hand, we were only able to do it occasionally. We laughed at the Japanese tourists back in the 1970's who lugged cameras around and photographed everything. Remember those jokes? Me, I'm in some Japanese family's album somewhere because they asked me in pantomime to pose with them, back in 1976 in Banff, presumably because I was wearing a sweatshirt with a big red maple leaf and Olympics logo.

We're rubberneckers slowing down to peer at the wreckage flung from the dizzying welter of 'reality TV' programs, where it is purported that we are watching ordinary people raised up or struck down by our collective whim or their own strengths and failings, willing participants watchers and watched alike, sanctified and made flesh by the power of our collective gaze. American Idols are made of people! Barechested rednecks are hilarious and a little sad, reminding us of what me might have been, at least on Cops. Oh, man, that's clever: those fat bastards on the Biggest Loser aren't really losers at all, are they? It goes on and on.

[ripper] I told u I was hardcore

Larger than life as we bask in the collective gaze starts to feel like a necessary platform of life services to achieve Normal, to stand out from the undifferentiated herd in the way that we've been told we should by companies who want us to buy their products. But buying those jeans whose commercials identically mass-marketed the promise of individualist flair to everybody just doesn't carry the same cachet any more for us media-steeped folks. We've gotten too smart and self-aware for that, some of us.

Bud: Look at 'em, ordinary f--king people, I hate 'em.

And so online journals like this very one you're reading right now, and the canonical cheese sandwich post. So weblogs, where what we've seen is posted, so that others can see it, and then go and see the thing seen. So audioscrobbling. So Second Life. So YouTube. So MySpace. So Flickr, where we can upload cellphone pics minute-by-minute, if we want. So Odeo and Twitter. So new, so immediate: so we spread the minutiae of our minute-to-minute existence out over the wires, so that others -- someone -- will notice and pay attention. We are alive to reality when we watch, we feel more real when we are paid in the attention-currency of attentive eyes.

I'm thinking it's a new pornography of the self. We willingly prostitute our privacy, and we accept payment in the form of attention. We always have, of course. But the slickly sexy 2.0 toolset we have makes it so effortless, and the reward such a crackpipe hit of Warholian fame, that it's hard to know when to stop. We become gleeful self-pornographers.

The word originally signified any work of art or literature depicting the life of prostitutes. Though pornography is clearly ancient in origin, its early history is obscure because it was customarily not thought worthy of transmission or preservation. Nevertheless, in the artwork of many historic societies, including ancient India, ancient Greece, and Rome, erotic imagery was commonplace and often appeared in religious contexts. The Art of Love, by Ovid, is a treatise on seduction and sensual arousal. The invention of printing led to the production of ambitious works of pornographic writing intended to entertain as well as to arouse. In 18th-century Europe, pornography became a vehicle for social and political protest through its depiction of the misdeeds of royalty and other aristocrats, as well as those of clerics, a traditional target. The development of photography and motion pictures in the 19th and 20th centuries contributed greatly to the proliferation of pornography, as did the advent of the Internet in the late 20th century.

And as we do so, we live less in the actual moment, perhaps, less with the actual people around us. We don't need to seek out people to be with us here, to be our audiences: if we post, they will come, or at least their eyes will, we hope. Do we lose more than we gain? I don't know the answer to that.

Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon. I don't use instant messaging and other 'presence apps', I don't carry a cell phone. I have no desire for people to know what I'm doing and when, and I don't care to be at anyone's beck and call when I am enjoying being alone. Or any other time, for that matter.

I certainly don't think that it's all bad, all this Twittering and Flickring, all this eyeball mongering. I have nothing against prostitution, in principle. But we may underestimate what it's done to us, and what it's doing. And I wonder what it will mean for people who have never known anything different.

[Update: Hey, Bruce liked my Ginsberg repurposing! And so the circle is complete.]

6:02 PM | 10 comments and 1 trackback

I agree that Dave's "What are five things I don't know about myself" is more interesting than "Five things you don't know about me". Not that there's anything wrong with that. Hell, any meme in a storm, in these root-withering Latter Days of Blog.

So here:

1. I don't know if my growing suspicion that reproducing is in some important senses what we are for, and my feeling that my reluctance to do so has been to say 'no' to life (something I swore decades ago I would never do) are enough to overcome my bowel-loosening terror (and unusually for me, I do not exaggerate for effect, here) at the very idea of having children. Or if they should.
2. I don't know if the childhood demons I thought I'd exorcised long ago have been defeated as completely as I had hoped.
3. I don't know if I'm a good man, or just a (garden variety enlightened) selfish one with people skills. I'm not sure what it means to be a good man, anymore.
4. I don't know if I'll ever write the things I've always wanted to.
5. I am 41 years old, and I don't know what I want to do with the rest of my life.
   

2:29 PM | 5 comments

I have Adam Greenfield (whose recent book I still haven't read, in part because I've re-immersed myself waist-deep a couple of decades since last time in Gene Wolfe's richly rewarding Book of the New Sun) and coffee to thank for kickstarting me into thinking about some of the ideas I threatened to write about here. For some more background, Anne Galloway has a working bib(?)liography here, if you're interested in the subject. I haven't read any of that stuff, I'm just pointing to it in case, unlike me, you like to be informed before you gas up and start running your mouth down to the riverbank.

In his speech at Etech, Bruce Sterling militated against the idea that trying to settle on a name for a node and nexus of emerging ideas -- theory objects, which he describes as 'idea[s] which [are] not just a mental idea or a word, but a cloud of associated commentary and data, that can be passed around from mouse to mouse, and linked-to [...] a concept that's accreting attention, and generating visible, searchable, rankable, trackable trails of attention' -- is necessarily a good thing.

After admiring Adam's (and I merely assume without force of authority or any research at all that it's actually his coinage) euphonious term 'everyware', he goes on to say

Adam pushes back, saying "But the naming of things is a matter of primary importance [...] ...people have always understood the power of names, and of naming - that naming things is a way to shape reality. This is one big reason why an Internet of Things is a problematic notion to me."

There's all sorts of rich veins to be (data-)mined here. Let me give it a wonderchicken once-over.

Bruce is right to say with qualification that in some sense, literature is taming reality with words. Hell, everything that everyone could possibly say about art is true, because 'art' itself has become a term so diffuse that we can defensibly apply it to any human activity. We've both gained and lost something through that, and depending on how your daddy treated you (that is to say, whether your mind is of a 'conservative' cast or not), the process has been one of either evolution or erosion. Both can be equally true, simultaneously, and are, I think.

But I think the sense in which Bruce is right is a very limited one -- the reality that is 'tamed' by the writer is not the objective one that is some approximation of what Is and what we acknowledge to exist through spoken or unspoken consensus, it's the writer's own reality. To what extent that subjective reality overlaps with or canbe superimposed on that of the reader, and to what extent the work then has meaning to the reader, is a function of the writer's skill, perhaps.

When the theory object is named, variously and haphazardly, through both the work of someone mining the literary vein, and through "the contentiousness and the definitional struggles [....] associated with those viewpoints, institutions, funding sources, and dominant personalities" reality is not being tamed, though. Taming is not naming, and neither, as we'll see Adam Greenfield suggest, I think, is naming taming.

Bruce says "the words are the signifiers for a clash of sensibilities that really need to clash," and that, I can agree with. Without conflict, the story goes nowhere, and bores the tits off of all of us.

Now that's all probably old ground in literary theory or something, except maybe for the tits part. I've never studied it, and this is just my butt talking, as usual. Anyway, onwards!

Bruce then makes a leap that I can't follow from "There is no permanent victory condition in language. You can't make a word that is like a steel gear" to

He gets there by way of acknowledging that his neologism 'spime'

So, if I've got this right, he's saying that there is a 'victory condition' in language, which is that a neologism or new phrase to describe some emergent theory object becomes 'obvious, everyday, and boring', but that there is no permanent 'victory condition' -- "you can't make a word that is like a steel gear."

Juxtaposing these two quotes would appear to me to reduce what he's saying to the idea that language is constantly changing, which is, it must be said, trivially true. And it smells a little like an excuse for coming up with a crappy word like 'spime', which reminds me of SpumCo, a felicitious mental href, but probably not the one intended. In this case, the Author's done a piss-poor job of taming his reality with words and handing it off, to me, at least. But I'm more than willing to cut him some slack, because he does kick a fair degree of ideational ass.

I'm not going to be able to go all the way down the path to the riverbank with Adam either, though, because, while Bruce seems to be proposing (on this admittedly minor point) the trivial conclusion that language mutates constantly but First Logos Movers Get Mindshare (or second movers, pace Winer), Adam seems to place inordinate importance on the 'rightness' of names for things, although his focus is outwards. He looks at the spectre (or boon) of a bit-chirping silent cacophany of embedded-arphid objects interpenetrating our daily lives and rightly suggests that calling it an 'internet of things' leaves out the whole reason that it might be called into existence - us.

Well, again, I think he's right and wrong. There is no such thing as the right word or phrase, or the Best One. That would not even be true if there were only one language our species shared. There is the one that wins, and it is true -- and I think both Adam and Bruce would agree with this -- that whatever word or phrase achieves that temporary victory condition will shape both our thinking and attitudes about the element of our loosely-joined consensus reality to which that word or phrase points. Now and in future. This can be a bad thing, or a good one, or both. Bruce talks in his speech about the cerebral fallout from out adoption of the word 'computer', and he's bang on in his discussion of it, as is Adam when he says "people have always understood the power of names, and of naming - that naming things is a way to shape reality." Even though they're paddling their canoes in slightly different directions.

Words are poor things, but they have power. But there is no best, just as there is no 'best writer', for reasons I talked about up there a ways.

Right then. This leads me out of the vale of words to the Thing Itself, and I thank Adam for helping to crystallize the ideas that fill me with some fear and not a little loathing for an 'internet of things' (or whatever the hell you want to call it).

That, again, is this: an 'internet of things' leaves out the whole reason that it might be called into existence - us.

Adam describes it this way: "Things may well have autonomous meaning in and of themselves, but my primary allegiance has to be to the meaning that things derive as a consequence of their use by human beings."

This is right and true, and reaches far deeper than language to touch the core of how we experience and shape our experiences of whatever external reality may actually be. A rock becomes a 'chair' when we use it as such. A plant becomes a 'drug' or a 'food' when we use it in certain ways. A child makes a concave object out of clay in his art class, but his father may not know it's an 'ashtray' until he is told that is the intended function. I date myself with that example. Ah well.

You can guess that I actually go further than Adam, maybe, if you've managed to follow along this far. I am inclined to believe that the idea that 'things may well have autonomous meaning in and of themselves' to be contradictory to the meaning of the word 'meaning'.

Which is all a little too much, no doubt, and the coffee is wearing off, so I'd better get to the bridge.

Here's the meat, finally: an 'internet of things' can serve us -- individuals -- about as much as it references us, which is 'not at all', or perhaps at best 'not much at all'. Yeah, sure, I'll be able to find some useless crap that went missing in my 800 square foot apartment (whose front door sends a ping and a doorshot jpeg to the local police each time it's opened and closed), shit that I probably lost because I didn't need it in the first place, but was brainfellated into buying by some stealth guerilla-marketing asshole in a miniskirt at the bar the night before. Sure, my fridge'll be able to talk to the food packages, or note their absence, and talk to the grocery store to order more, and the packages'll be able to talk to the stove so my cooking gets better, and my doctor'll be able to subscribe to my fridge's RSS feed and know that I've been eating too many goddamn eggs again and text-message instructions to my microwave oven, or whatever gleaming Jetsons future you can spin out of the coming welter of ubiquitous data. There might be some benefits for those of us who like the idea of being part of the hive.

But what small good I might see in our daily lives I see dwarfed by the massive benefits that would accrue to the Usual Suspects in that future world -- governments and corporations, our employers and our creditors, our health-care providers and law-enforcement agencies.

Here's today: if you live in London, you get photographed an average of 300 times a day going about your daily business. If you live in America, you can be wiretapped without warrant on the thinnest of pretenses. Data about where you spend your money and who you talk to is available for a price, and a mighty low one. If you live in Korea, the government can get records of text messages you've sent on your mobile phone, just because the want it, and then send you a text message to tell you you've been indicted. Search engines hand over their records when asked. ISPs rollover for the RIAA and MPAA as a matter of course. Use a credit card and leave a snailtrail of your cashfree life in the databases, and you can't do much without picture ID, including travel domestically. Total Information Awareness didn't go away, it was just rebranded.

The forces that created this kind of culture are the same ones pushing this technology out, because they have the most to gain. You know, the invisible hand of the market and all that. These are the same forces that made barcodes ubiquitous, and Bruce, at least, is of the opinion that RFID-tagged objects will achieve the same universal penetration of our daily lives in a few decades, profligately pouring out their data all the while. The volume of human data now is a stream of bat's piss compared to the dataAmazon™ our internet-of-things ubiquitous arphids will push out. And then? Our ability to get lost -- not just our things, but our selves -- disappears in a wireless byteburst. When we live immersed in a thunderous and silent torrent of raw data generated by everything we touch, so ready for mining, will there be anything we do that is not recorded in some way? There's no sacrifice involved for the companies and the governments; pretty clearly there's opportunity for a massive payoff in their abilities to sell to us, to monitor us, to datamine ever cleverer ways to give us what we want, and to keep us in line. Edward Bernays would be pitching a pants-tent over this stuff. Are we prepared to sacrifice what little remains of our ability to be free autonomous actors for the minor gains we might see as individuals? Me, I say 'f--k, no'.

That's all a little orwellian-apocalyptic, I know. But the future we're talking about looks like a corporatist dictatorship-by-the-advertariat stealth-totalitarian wet dream. And it's the kind of dystopia writers in Bruce Sterling's tradition have warned us about, over and over again. I'm a little confused at his apparent enthusiasm for it.

We could go blackhat and hack it, those of us with the skills and the will, of course, like Paul Ford suggested a long time back, about something related-but-different

but that would take too much damn energy.

I'm willing to be schooled to the contrary, but I don't see much light at the end of this particular tunnel.

2:17 PM | 8 comments

Writer of some excellence Bruce Sterling gave a talk at Emerging Technology 2006, and the transcript of it is here. I think he's coyote-into-the-brick-wall wrong about many of the things he has to say, and he sucks pretty badly at inventing neologisms, but it's fascinating to watch the arc and spatter of the fountain of ideas he throws off, and there's light there, aplenty. About his ideas, more, later, maybe, when my brain has time to percolate for a while. Perhaps it's just that the future he describes isn't one in which I have a whole hell of a lot of desire to live.

Then again the present is not one I'm all that thrilled with, either.

Anyway, one of the reasons I found it interesting, beyond the thoughtprovoking superball boing! of his ideas, is that if you squint and tilt your head the right way, he's exploring the opposite end of the teeter-totter from the one I perched on here, recently. That I mentioned Neal Stephenson and William Gibson in that post, and that Bruce completes with them a neat authorial trio in my mind, is just a pleasant serendipity.

Not only that, but he mentions my net.friend Adam Greenfield, and Adam's new book 'Everyware', which I am pleased to recommend highly even though I haven't actually read it yet (but will, by god, soon).

2:22 PM | 7 comments and 1 trackback

I wrote that a couple of months ago about something else, but what I was really thinking about was the rise of folksonomies, of tags and clouds, of the structuring of shared knowledge becoming something less Aristotelian and more synaptic. I was wondering if, sometime in the not-too-distant future, hiveminds will dream of folksonomic tags. If the palimpsest of our daily reality with its layers of information every day denser and more rococo will eventually clarify, and out of that will be born a new facet to awareness and the way we live inside our data. And, as usual, I waited until the hubbub had died down, because my brain works glacially when I drop to the command line and type in C:\THINK. Not that I actually read much of what anyone else said about the whole thing, of course, so if what I'm about to yammer on about has been suggested before, well, whoops.

The whole thing was brought back to my attention today by this, linked by Dave Weinberger, and I realized that my brain had finally finished its background processing, and had spit out a punchcard with the result.

The result is this post. I'm going to wander a bit, but there's a punchline at the end, trust me.

In William Gibson's Idoru, Chia McKenzie and Zona Rosa have never met physically, but meet with each other and other members of the Lo/Rez fan club in virtual environments, as avatars whose sophistication is limited only by the amount of money or time spent constructing them. Chia's avatar is "only a slightly tweaked, she felt, version of how the mirror told her she actually looked," while Zona chooses to represent herself as a "blue Aztec death's-head burning bodiless, ghosts of her blue hands flickering like strobe-lit doves [with] lightning zig-zags around the crown of the neon skull". Some of the virtual environments Gibson describes (like the Walled City -- a virtual city located beyond the pale of the public net) are described as deliberately designed, some are not. That may have been meant to imply without bothering to make it explicit that some were generated on the fly, or it might just have been detail left out as unnecessary to the story. Regardless, I'm going to chase down and leghump the former idea.

So far, the only difference between the environments in Gibson's work and (to choose an example) Second Life (whose creators explicity reference Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others), other than the level of immersion, is that in Second Life, everything is explicitly created.

In Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash, the Metaverse is a virtual globe with a 10,000km radius, featureless and black except for the portions that have been 'developed'. Its equator is girdled by the "the Champ Elysees of the Metaverse". Downtown is the most heavily developed area, and its streets are populated by about 120 million avatars. The sophistication of avatars and environments is limited by the bandwidth and computational grunt available to users, and to their wealth and coding prowess. Status is perceived accordingly, with many settling for the lowest common denominator of off-the-shelf Walmart avatars, the 'Brandy' and 'Clint' models. Interaction within the metaverse is also variable in veracity, with some areas being coded by their residents and habituees to simulate collision modelling, for example, and some not.

As in Gibson's virtuality, it can be assumed, I think, even if it's not explicitly stated, that procedural programming methods might be imagined to be the glue that fills in the gaps between designed environments and interactions and ones that are generated.

Procedural programming is not a new idea, but it is one that is beginning to leak from the demo scene to gaming, and will, in time, begin to make its way into the massive multiuser environments that so many people already spend so much time living and playing inside.

If you're not familiar with the power of this kind of coding, have a look at kkreiger, if you have relatively grunty PC. It is demo of a first person shooter game, more sophisticated in its visuals than the state of the art that was crowding the limits of a 600Mb CD a few years ago. It is 96Kb.

96Kb. Seriously, no tricks, 96 freaking Kb. That's got to melt your snatch hairs if you're even half the geek I am. Two seconds to download on that 56Kb/s modem you're using in that bullet-hole pocked bar in Kinshasa. If nothing else, have a look at the screenshots, and boggle a bit at that number. The whole thing weighs less than the webpage you're currently reading. The environments are procedurally generated, on the fly, and more than anything I've seen so far, kkreiger demonstrates the Power of Algorithm.

If you're someone who enjoys trippy visuals and sounds more than gaming, then have a look at this demo instead, which is perhaps my all-time favorite output from the demo scene. It's a few megabytes-- not much bigger than the mp3 file which comprises the superb soundtrack. This is art, and it continues to stick in my mind, a year after I first saw it.

If those examples of the power of this kind of code doesn't do it for you, watch Will Wright's presentation about his upcoming game, Spore. If it ends up being anywhere near as impressive as it looks, and it's actually fun, it's going to blow this stuff wide open, in terms of technology.

"OK, so what does all that have to do with folksonomies?" you might quite reasonably ask. I do think that there is utility in tagging and non-heirarchical metadata, but I dream that the real payoff may not be in terms of helping us to organize and mine information, much as it could be a boon for those purposes. The pros and cons have been batted around with great vigour by those smarter than myself, and I'm not going to add to the noise, other than to note that spammers and marketron scum have been as quick to colonize the tagspace as they have every other channel we have for movement of data.

What interests me, and makes me hope I live long enough to see it emerge, is this possibility: if it does happen that environments like the ones described in Idoru and Snowcrash and many other works of fiction become as big a part of our daily lives as the river of text we now swim through, those environments simply will not scale if they're designed entirely by hand. Spaces like Second Life, though not as clunky and difficult to enter and participate in as the early VRML environments from the early 90's, are still designed, by users and the programmers who provide the tools and primitives to work with. User-generated content is an idea that generated enormous feedback-loop value, from forums and community websites, to tagging itself, to the environments, objects and avatars in virtual spaces like Second Life.

But what if virtual spaces were generated as much on the fly as they were hand-crafted? What if they were generated as habitable spaces in which we did the things we do now in text and flat image and numbercluster? How would the code know what environmental cues to generate? What contextual metadata clues could be used to generate and 'design' those environments?

Well, folksonomic tags, of course. What if we could build not only metadata in the form of folksonomies, but meta-meta-data (both shared and public), in the form of a sort of Rosetta Stone to translate the conceptual clouds of our tags into visual metaphors, into textures and imagery? What if hunks of procedural code could take that and in turn generate the visual glue and intersitia to hold our designed environments together?

That might sound like singularity-fanboy handwavery, and to an extent I suppose it is. But you've got to admit, it'd be pretty cool.

And if that node-network of virtuality generation later spontaneously and automagically achieved a kind of synaptic awareness, deus ex folksonoma, well, that might be cool too. At least until the AI noticed the parasites -- us -- and the systematic genocide of the human species got under way.

So tag carefully, friends. If you're lucky, the coming tagmind might just look upon you and smile.

11:37 AM | 2 comments and 1 trackback

Now, I usually do make a token attempt not to follow up one mock-apoplectic rant with even more negativity and waving of the stiff central digit, but sometimes resistance is futile.

I wish this was satire.

Or maybe I don't. One of the things that keeps me from losing my sense of humour these days, from metaphorically climbing the clocktower and metaphorically mowing down some motherf--kers, is that reality continues to gear up, rev up, and blow the ad-decaled doors off of satire and parody and all those other words whose meanings I'm a little fuzzy on. You don't have to dig very deep to bring up some rich, loamy laughs.

Those of us who like to tell a funny joke once in a while (and some do it better than others) to keep the eyeball pressure down so that goo doesn't start jetting out in waxy spurts all over our kith and kin, we're hard-pressed to say much that tops the news of the day, though. Flipping on CNN for a few minutes yields more black-souled yucks than when we try and fail to wax Swiftian, let alone wax Brazilian. There's no payoff, and nothing's sadder than a failed Swifty.

Well, OK, dead babies are maybe sadder. I'm playing this fast and loose, as usual.

Anyway, this was supoosed to be one of my usual curmudgeonly contrarian screeds that veers from quixotacular tilting at the capitalist machine, to random cursing and mumbling, to alienating and insulting my weblog comrades, so I'd best get on with it.

In case you didn't follow the link, Blogonomics is a conference dedicated to the lofty goal of cashing in on weblogs, on board a cruise ship from Florida to Cozumel. You couldn't make this up. I couldn't, at least.

Check it out: they've even hidden the fine print at the bottom of this page by making it almost the same babyshit colour as the background. Oooh, that's clever! Very business-y! Tells us a little about who they're pandering to, too.

Screw Blogonomics in its speedo-clad afterdeck-hottub authentic-voiced bum.

Better yet, somebody take up a collection, and get me and Rageboy and on this f--king boat, load us up with speed, rye and cigarettes (or some coffee for Mr Boy, I suppose, since I seem to recall he's left the Joy of Intoxication behind), and let us write open some new blogholes for these people.

That'd be some kind of fun. And hell, even if the Quintana Roo coast has been thrashed to a Jose Cuervo-flavoured pulp, we can still make a few bucks off it, right? It's only business, after all.

Update: for some very much related thoughts that aren't just ranty wordplay, go read Dave, who has said what I would like to about the background to this with, as always, more light and less heat than I throw off.

5:53 PM | 6 comments and 1 trackback

You know when people say, "I turned 40 a little while back, and it got me thinking..."? and how you just want to smash 'em one in the face?

Well, I turned 40 a little while back, and it's been f--king with my mind.

I don't think my only problem is the artificial midlife milestone hanging millstone around my neck, though. And I don't suppose -- much as I admit to being overfond of myself and much as I am wont to declaim while in my cups in a way that would lead you to think that my problems are unique in this world -- that I'm alone in this.

I think your mind is probably twisting in the wind, too, dear reader, and there's cool piss dripping from your boots, too, and that rope is creaking above you too in the coming dark. I hope not, but I guess so. It's one of the few things we all share; we share the knowledge that we'll die, and we all fabricate elaborate strategies to face it, that or we turn our faces away from it. We dangle on the gibbets we build out of the decisions we make, until the sun sets on us.

You know the drill: cowboy, steel horse I ride, all that shit.

I used to say to people, people who often regretted asking me whatever innocuous question it might have been that launched me into my rant about death and taxes and the ineluctability of extropy or whatever rocks that evening's torrent had been bouncing over, I used to say that the biggest guiding principles by which I had lived my life thus far were two-fold. I'd say it just that way, too: "...they're two-fold..." Maybe I'd throw in a 'hellshitdamn' or two for spice. People must have really hated me, sometimes.

Anyway, this hand was that in some geriatric future I'd rather regret something I had done than something I hadn't, and that other hand was that I always wanted to have as many choices before me as possible, because once the game becomes a rail-shooter, it just isn't much goddamn fun anymore. Knocking those two rocks together with my two strong hands struck off the sparks that lit the fire in my belly every morning, huzzah!

And both hands, of course, were just heaped with prettyword bullshit. The first was a way to justify living always like a 22-year-old on a tear, and the second was a way to justify the 'external locus of self-control as a result of childhood bereavement' I'd self-diagnosed myself with back in university, and sumo'd out of the ring only to watch the f--ker waddle back again, pulling up its diaper and grimacing intently.

I love those old declarations of mine, I do. They still sing to me, sirens luring me limbs akimbo onto the rocks of rye, cocaine, hookers and tropical isles. I deftly navigated those shoals when I was young and clear of eye, but I'm not so sure I'd make it through safe this time. No, I've tied myself to the mast, have I, and it's the first mate who steers the ship these days. She's immune, you see. And she mostly steadfastly ignores my shouted commands, my entreaties and panting demands to be set free when the siren songs call me again. In this way, she keeps me alive, and I know that my struggles against my bonds are carefully gauged to be almost but not quite violent enough to free myself from them.

And so it goes, as the cliffs seem to rise around us, as we sail onward, me bearded and wildeyed calling for mead and wenches, bound to the mast, her drawn and sympathetic to my madness, but unshaken.

The death of some my convenient lies about myself has not in itself been enough to f--k me up. Barely enough to write about, to be honest, much as I lie about the awe with which I regard my magnificence. There's got to be more. But I guess I'll figure that out later. For now, it's good to be stringing words together again.

I hit post, now, dear lost readers in their thousands, not sure if this is resurrection or coda, but hoping a few diehard outliers of the wonderchicken army are still out there, and when their newsfeed ticks over from that limp and dusty (0) over to an erectile (1), that they'll put the word out: 'Wonderchicken returns, brethren and sistren! He returns! Dance dervish, and spill the blood of politicians in tribute and walleyed joy!'.

But having turned my back on the webs and the logs, on the adsense whores and their corporate pimps, having peed in the pool and pooped on the flag, having committed the unpardonable sin of dissing the digerati, I'm probably on the ignore list again.

Ah well.

Update : special reopening offer! Here's a poultrycast™ of this post, in user-friendly shrinkwrapped mp3 format. One per customer; available for a limited time only. Act now!

Update again : same crap, newfangled shiny package!

10:40 AM | 35 comments and 5 trackbacks.

Dave Winer says: "...all creative people must have some right to the work they create, or else, truly, the incentive to create will disappear. "

Now, I have no dogs in the fight, as they say, when it comes to copyright and the creative commons and Lessigophilia and all that revenue-generating jazz. I have no creative works, despite decades of making things because it amused me, either of words or pixels or pencil and ink or the ongoing ballet of the moments of my life, that are making me any money at all. More's the pity, I guess.

And I must admit that I have little but contempt for the law. I live the way I choose according to the dictates of my conscience, and where my choices conflict with the laws in a place I'm currently living, I make as an informed a decision as I am able as to whether conforming to the law in a given situation is something that it's more sensible to do from a strictly utilitarian perspective. Jail sucks. I know. I've been there. Ironically, it wasn't for breaking any laws, though.

For the most part, I am a law-abiding citizen, but not because I have any innate respect for the laws, or for those who made or enforce them. Where my choices do not conflict with the laws of the land, no worries. That's the way things usually are, because many laws, if not most, are relatively sensible. I understand some may find this kind of stance offensive, or sophomoric. I am unconcerned, if respectful of their opinions.

I regularly break laws by downloading copyrighted material. I have my reasons.

My argument with the phrase I've quoted from Dave above, finally, the one that a fortuitous combination of a good sleep and strong coffee has roused me from my customary lethargy to make, is this: I believe what he said is only correct if we alter 'the incentive to create will disappear' to 'the incentive to create things for money will disappear'. I risk going all broken-record, here, I know. But this fits mortise-and-tenon with some of the things I've been saying recently, about money, about monetarization, and about what some (most?) have been doing in this textspace of ours.

At the risk of committing the unpardonable sin of accidental synecdoche, I think that the phenomenon of weblogging, and the ways in which it has changed in the past couple of years as The Stupid Money rushed in to coca-colonize the new frontier, gives us our perfect example. Of the hundreds of thousands -- millions, if Technorati tells us the truth -- of people who have jumped all over this, and who are using the tools to do any of the heartcasting human constellation of different activities that we've drawn together under the 'weblogging' umbrella, only very recently have more than a tiny handful of them done it for the bucks.

Some are retrofitting revenue streams, sure. That's their prerogative, of course. Some people wear clothes with company logos plastered all over their chests, unironically, for free. They aren't as stupid as they are greedy and clueless, in my humble, but that's just me being a playa-hata, or whatever it is the kids are saying these days.

See, what I'm saying here is that most of these people had no 'incentive to create' other than the burning gods inside their foreheads, clawing to get out. Or merely the mundane urge to share photos of their cute kitties. Or their travel anecdotes. Or their code. Or their jokes or dreams or fantasies and half-baked ideas. Or links the neat websites they've found. They did it out of loneliness, or love of craft, or anger, or the carefully buried ludic urge we all share. Out of a desire to emulate their god. Because they wanted to.

I challenge you to think about the creative output of artists and artisans whose work has touched you. Think of your favorite books, your favorite paintings. That piece of handmade furniture or that gloriously handtooled little application. The music you listen to or the writers-on-the-web you read because they get into your heart and fill you with the ineffable, simple joy of being alive and having a mind. I wonder how many of them would have done their work whether or not they eventually got paid for it. My guess is 'most'.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be paid. Hell, if I could get paid for making the things I make because there's something inside me that impels me to do it, I'd be thrilled. It'd be a dream come true, by crikey. But I do it, regardless. And so do you, probably, if you're reading this.

Money is a very useful thing, but then, so is defecation. Or, if you prefer 'How anal sex got to be THE ticket to blogging fame and fortune I don't fully understand...'

Take away the money, and you will still have people who are driven to create. This is what it is to be human. And, I'd submit, we'd have a lot less soulless sticky media poop clogging our minds and our souls if all of the hacks out there who oxymoronically ennoble their paid efforts by calling them 'creative product' would just do something useful instead for those sweet dollars. This is why I am in love with the idea of the 'mass amateurization of nearly everything', and it's why I push back against those who are snapping like bloody-snouted hyenas at the weblogging carcass in their unseemly urge to Get Noticed and Go Pro.

If you make money by selling the things that you are compelled to create -- writing or music or design or code or ceramic ashtrays or whatever it may be -- then good on ya. I'm genuinely happy for you. But if you would stop merely because you couldn't make a buck at it, well, tough shit. We don't need you. This is probably an unpopular opinion. Ah well.

The incentive to create will never disappear. But I would hail the departure of a world in which the incentive to create (for some) is predicated solely on one's ability to sell those creations, sure I would. When those who were left standing were there because they did it out of love, maybe they'd get a few more bones thrown their way.

And that's all I have to say about that, for the moment.

[Update: OK, that's not entirely all. This is interesting, and most definitely on-topic.]

1:26 PM | 15 comments and 2 trackbacks.

I can't stop thinking about this guy.

He's dead now, this guy.

Look at him, so calm, amidst the fury. But the water looks so clean, doesn't it? So much like the pure salt surf that I've always loved. Who was he? Did he make his living from the sea, there in Phuket? Was he a dive instructor, or a bartender? Did he rent umbrellas and chairs on the beach? Was he a tourist himself, from somewhere else entirely?

He looks so calm.

I've always had a relationship with water. My brother died in the water, and I spent all the years after that, in my subarctic hometown, snorkeling back and forth in that same water from a couple of weeks after the ice broke up until well after the leaves had all fallen. Looking for something.

I almost froze to death, on purpose, naked out on the ice of that same lake in the snow, one stupid teenage New Year's Eve long ago after I'd fought with my girlfriend, who I thought I loved enough to die for.

I've always been drawn into the water, in the sea, wherever I've been, from Wales to Fiji, when the waves were big. Stood there, always, pounding my chest, literally, and shouting into the teeth of it. Challenging it. You can't kill me, I was saying, every time. I love you, you can't kill me. Your power is my plaything.

Maybe this guy felt the same way, as he rode the chaos, as the tsunami washed him over the pool, across the grass, into the focus of some tourist's camera. Confident, exhiliarated.

But he died.

Him and what, today? 60,000 80,000 120,000 150,000 other people.

Words are.

Update : Apparently, he's alive![login:vanitas password:vain]

Mike Diack gives us more information inside. Thanks, Mike! It's silly, but somehow this guy became iconic for me of the whole incomprehensible tragedy. Holy sh-t. He's alive.

7:22 PM | 8 comments and 1 trackback

Shelley says over here that 'there's something impersonal and dispassionate about anger." I know how well she writes, and how carefully, and so I've been turning over what she wrote, looking at it from different angles, trying to puzzle out what she meant. Can anger really be dispassionate? Is that what people mean when they talk about 'cold anger'? Could that be a bad thing?

I'm pretty sure anger is an energy, cold or hot. I remember being an angry punk, once upon a time. Well, more of a drunken yahoo of a punk, perhaps. Angry though, in between episodes of skipping around like a loon shouting about 'joy'. Regardless, I can't remember a time when I didn't feel rage welling up in me the moment I stopped to think about the glories of our civilization, and the wonder of our achievements.

Call in the airstrikes.

Still, I've always been the eternal optimist, sifting through the dung looking for a diamond, and I wandered all around this planet, wide-eyed, pushing myself to be childlike and unangry. A real hippie twat, basically. Trying to see the god within each and every person I met. Failing too often, succeeding far too rarely, flying my freak flag high. Peace, love and vegetable rights, man. Anger? Love! Rage? Peace!

That worked pretty well for a time, but the drugs probably helped more than I cared to admit.

I'm still expatriate, of course, and I still am unfailingly kind to people, until they cross me. Then, well, then I puff up and turn all the colours of a sunset, and browbeat them until they submit or go away. And then I get quickly unangry again. I'm like that.

I have never stopped being angry at hypocrisy and hate and stupidity and cupidity, either. And yeah, angry at the sinner as well as the sin. Turning the other cheek's all well and good for the meek, but I'm not going to be around to inherit the earth. I just don't have the patience. So, model citizen, me, right? Going around with a big red 'W' on my chest, fighting for the common man, righting wrongs and kissing babies.

f--k no. But the other thing that Shelley said, that 'anger is the ultimate camouflage for what's really going on in our heads and our lives' doesn't make sense for me, at least. Anger is the the natural and consequent reaction to taking a good hard look at our lives and the lives most of us are shoehorned into, through our own weakness and through the strength of others and through random dumbf--k chance, and realizing that we're going to die. Much too soon, each and every one of us. Ashes or wormfood, or, if maybe scraps for the birds to tear at. In anger, we reveal that we know there can be more, and wish for more, for better, for ourselves and others, and we also reveal that we are too bound by our own chemistry or history to do more than pound the bones and screech like apes before the monolith.

But that's OK.

Because the coin of anger rotating in the air, reflecting those glints of sunlight, has an ouroboros head as well as a tail. There is no anger, for me, at least, that is not backed an impulse similar to the one that some buddhists express when they perform a wai -- palms pressed together, fingers pointing skyward, with a shallow bow. I acknowledge the god within you.

Anger is peace, thwarted. Love, unrequited. The face of god, almost touched. The heartbreaking awareness that you (and so, all) just might not get there, wherever there might be. And ranging as it does in denomination, like our coin flipping up there in the air, the anger can be fire banked against the coming night, or a bolus of flaming tar catapulted at those who thwart the good.

But what the hell do I know? The written word is a lie, and it's possible that I'm just stringing together justifications for my rage, popcorn-garlanding words, holding up another mask, more for the fun of it than from any necessity. I found my own path. Quite possibly not the right one, but it's the one I found, and so that f--ker is holy to me.

There was a time when I was one of those Seekers After Truth that the hip, ironic-McDonald's kids tend to laugh at, often with good reason. Looking for some kind of truth outside myself, raging against the machine. Now I'm a model citizen, older and less convinced that any truth that could have any meaning for me lies anywhere outside myself and the threads that bind me to other people.

But I remain angry, and I maintain that that is the outward sign of my attempts to be honest with myself. It's my honesty with the rest of the world, and it's both personal and passionate.

I only speak for myself. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. That's cool.

5:22 PM | 2 comments

It's hard to get your balance these days. Turn over a bucket, hop up on it, perch there precariously, look around as the cascade of chitinous black beetles surf in on surges of liquid sh-t. Pull up your pantlegs as the wave breaks around you and the brown spatters fly, squeak a bit, pray that the bugs (and the rats whose glowing eyes you see in the murk around you) don't know how to climb.

Which is a melodramatic way to say that I don't quite know what to say. Got some outrage? Get in line, sucker. Got something to say about rapin' and torturin', about beheadin'? So does every other Right Thinking Citizen, and by crikey, they're making sure that those somethings are heard.

Let's roll. Stay the course. Bring it on. Cut and run. Never forget. I'll be back. Duck and cover.

Wait, that last one doesn't fit in, does it? At least not yet.

It's getting hard to stare unflinching into the actinic glare as the doors of hell swing open these days. The impulse, even after we've been bombarding ourselves with images like goatse and tubgirl and Daniel Pearl and Michael Jackson's face, graveyard-joking all the while to show how tough and desensitized we are, is to turn away. To stop tattooing those horrible pictures on the sensitive cauliflower folds.

But each new iteration exerts its sick fascination, and the rays of doomlight -- shining from Lynndie England and Nick Berg, from Madrid and Kabul -- glitter over our mental horizons, lighting up the whole mediated clusterf--k as it whips itself into ever-bloodier froth. The tender-fleshed, bright-eyed Friends-consumers we were only show up in the quietest moments. Our shell-shocked outrage-fatigued palimpsest faces are hanging out in the wind, just like our asses. Can't really make out the old stories of who we were on our faces anymore, and can't make out the new stories either, scrawled in blood and filth, littered with copyright and trademark symbols and viagra ads and homemade porn and watermarked photos of piles of naked bodies.

Not piles of corpses. At least not yet.

The impulse is to turn away. But we tell ourselves that it's weak and unworthy to avert our gaze. We've been told that it's our ethical responsibility to bear witness, to see with eyes clear the evil that's done in our names or otherwise, to understand and remember it, to prevent it ever happening again. Possibly at the risk of losing the chance to stop it, but pay that no never mind.

We love freedom. They hate freedom. We love liberty. God bless America. Down with the Great Satan.

We're gonna shove democracy up their asses until they love us, just like Mike Tyson.

But not turning away can lead into an addictive room of mirrors. Bearing witness changes from a duty and a rite to a habit and a vice. The feed only gets notice when we unhook it, and we're not fed the world by our umbilicals, we're pulled further out of it. Schroedinger's cat doesn't die unless we see it happen, but if we're watching it on video, it doesn't really matter which way it goes. Kill 'em all and let god sort 'em out.

So we watch. We stagger from table to buffet table, dyspeptic and enervated, mildly turgid under our loosened belts. We snap and grin with our cams and camphones, and our photos are products that refer to themselves, not us. Our kaleidoscopic images proxy the world, and let us maintain the illusion that we aren't really a part of it, and that the bad things are happening over there. That those chants and tribal signifiers that make us feel so good and so strong and so right actually mean something other than 'go team'.

Smoke 'em out. Read my lips. No blood for oil. Support the troops. Rock the vote. Not in my name.

It becomes easier when everyone else is Them. We didn't saw off poor Nick's head, it was those scum, those vermin, the evil-doers, those others. We didn't stick blunt objects up prisoners' asses, either, or rape them or set dogs on them, we didn't rip those kids apart with our amusingly-named ordinance. That was other people, a few bad apples, and they're not us! We're consumers of the images, don't you see? We didn't make this world! We didn't maim that boy! It was them. Them! We didn't slit Daniel Pearl's throat, we didn't knock over the gravestones, we didn't fly airplanes into the World Trade Centre! We didn't sell arms to Saddam, we didn't sell arms to Iran, we didn't ask for the double-anal pissporn, we didn't do any of that sh-t. We are watchers. Watching makes it real, and watching keeps it separate from us. Watching is a noble act, at least until it gives you a hardon.

The basic truth gets obscured. What's the difference between Osama bin Laden and George Bush? There isn't one. What's the difference between that f--ker Amrozi who set the bomb that killed my friend Rick and me? There isn't one. What's the difference between the animals that sawed off Nick Berg's head and the animals that beat prisoners to death at Abu Ghraib? There isn't one. Between the Pope and Saddam? Between that old lady in front of the TV in a trailer in Alabama and that old lady digging up roots in a field in Kazakhstan?

We are one. We are all meat and electricity. And if there is more than that, we are all equally a part of that divine More. Or none of us are.

These ones go to 11.

I remember standing when I was maybe 14 in a circle of faces in the icy parking lot of the only arcade in town, out in front of what used to be Sonny's hardware store. It was snowing, and I was in my shirtsleeves. Someone had yelled fight! and we'd all tumbled out past the steamed-up windows, out of the humid warmth into the snow. I can't remember the names of the two combatants, but I can remember their faces. And I can remember the faces of the people watching. They were avid. Grinning. This was different from the clumsy, reluctant pecking-order school fights I'd seen (or been a part of) before. This was the real thing. One of the two was already down on the ice, on his back, eyes unfocused, by the time I took up a position on the outer edges of the ring of spectators. He was clearly finished. That didn't matter, apparently. The victor hauled back his heavy winter boot and kicked the prone one in the head. I remember most clearly the sound, and the way that the head moved on the slack neck, and the colour of the blood on the ice. One kick, two, three, then someone at the front of the ring stepped in to stop the fun.

The look I saw on many of the bright tight faces was disappointment. That was the first of many fights I saw in my violent little hometown over the years, and the pattern was never different, except that in later years the fights were always fueled by alcohol. You go down, you get boot-f--ked. It was a thing common enough that we had created a special name for it. Some people died, some needed reconstructive surgery, some were barred from entering the village limits. Being big and strong and stronger still of liver, and having good friends around at all times, I never got bootf--ked. Being me, I never bootf--ked anyone, though lord knows I there were times that I wanted to. In a legendarily violent town of 3000 people, you quickly understand the rules of retribution and revenge.

When I was in 17, I read Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. It hurt. It put images in my head that I didn't want in there, that are still in there more than 20 years later, and I hated him for it. The abstraction of brutality, the matter-of-fact articling of such utterly transgressive violence twisted my melon and started me wondering where it might lead.

Well, now we know.

Even back then, even as a callow teen, I defended his right to have written it, though I was inclined to want to punch him in the face for having done so, were I ever to meet him. Growing up media-starved (and smart, drunk and angry) in a town where you could choose between two CanCon television channels, where there was no movie theatre, no bookstore, only a tiny library and not even the dream that such a thing as the internet might ever exist, it was a rapid education I received in those three years between my freshman witnessing of my first bootf--king and the graduation ceremony of reading Ellis's deadpan fantasia of dismemberment and death. The first lessons stay with you the longest.

Today I can find movies and photos and paintings and stories of the same and worse, three clicks away, without even breaking a sweat. And as often as not, these things really happened.

My impulse to turn away usually wins out these days. This may be the wrong thing to do. When a puppy sh-ts on the floor, we rub his nose in it (or at least we used to, in less kind, gentle days) for a reason.

But I guess I realized at some point that there is something I can do about a man who starts a war, perhaps, but there is little I can do about a man who kills and dismembers another person, unless that person is me. And there's still less I can do about a man who aquires money or fame writing about it.

Or, you know, a woman.

I also realized somewhere down the road that whether it's fiction or photo, documentary or gore-flick, fake or genuine, no representation of violence is anything like the real thing. Our frisson of revulsion, our predictable and pointless anger at the perpetrator, our self-serving hollow vows of 'never again', our demonization of the other who would so transgress those ethical standards we hold out as self-evident, our self-congratulatory conviction that we'd never do anything like that, and our complacence in the face of the indisputable fact that everyone, everywhere seems to be doing it anyway.... well, what are you going to do? Cheer the killer monkeys on? "We are nihilists, Lebowski. We believe in nothink!" Been there, done that, and it's a dead end too.

I haven't got any answers. But I am pretty sure that regardless of whether you have nightmares about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (or the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre) or the horrors of Abu Ghraib, no matter how accurately and horribly that fact or fiction is captured and portrayed for you, these things are to the real experience of violence as American beer is to the real thing. f--king close to water.

No wait. I mean - 'a weak approximation'.

But the killer monkeys just won't stop. And sometimes, you just have to turn away, all the while realizing that if you haven't got the stomach for the imagery, you would be destroyed by the reality.

6:27 PM | 17 comments and 9 trackbacks.

I was making croutons for the ceasar salad, for the lunch I'd invited my new colleagues to at our house this morning, damp tea-towel flung across my shoulders, when I said 'f--k' to myself. Just before that, I'd been inscribing and addressing Christmas cards to a few friends, for what was basically the first time in my life. In a couple, I'd added as a postscript 'When the hell did I become this adult?' and now here I was, puttering and polishing the grime off the salt and pepper shakers.

I'm trying to age gracefully. I'm neither Updike's Rabbit, nor the amusingly and serendipitously named Charlie Stavros

but I surprise myself sometimes, that a rough-cut boozehound like myself, all scarred and grizzled from mapcap adventures a-plenty, veteran of cliffhangers and close shaves galore, can find himself so happily domesticated, whistling the Montovani Orchestra's version of 'Uncle f--ka' as he whips up some salad dressing in the kitchen.

At least until he realizes what he's doing, balks briefly, and then as a sort of sympathetic magic, while the wife is off at the shops, cranks up Black Flag's Damaged, and continues his happy homely activity, with just a bit more animation.

10:28 AM | 4 comments and 1 trackback

After much deliberation, after pondering, both weak and weary, after tugging my beard like the retro-sage in a technical age that I fancy myself to be, after eating a couple of eggs boiled in spiced soy (oh, yeah, baby), I have come to the inescapable conclusion that 'Uncle f--ka' is possibly the greatest song ever written. A brief reminder of the powerful and affecting lyrics :

From the opening strains to the final testicular injunction, this piece of music speaks of humankind's chthonic impetus to understand its place in the world, to rend the veils that separate us from a direct apprehension of the divine. Perhaps Terrance and Phillip are telling us that through the f--king of uncles, a sacred understanding may be achieved. William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, said :

The road of excess is the road upon which Terrance and Phillip gambol and fart prodigiously, boner-biting their way to the palace of wisdom. Uncle f--kers, yes indeed, they embrace all within the scope of their gaze, with both love and scorn. Their joyous farts and caustic abuse remind us of the Rabelaisian island of Ruach,

and point with gleeful loathing thereby at our folly and failings. They f--ked their uncles yesterday, our hyperkinetic flatulent Canadian duo, reminding us of the gloomy conclusion of Ivan Karamazov: "If God is dead, all is permitted."

Is there a god who would allow uncle-f--king? Is the god who would have prevented such things indeed dead, and is all, in fact, permitted? Terrance and Phillip have no answers for us, as they caper and cut the cheese, only questions, questions with which the great minds of our civilization have wrestled for centuries, fruitlessly.

In the end, perhaps, like Neitzche, they hail the dionysian, as the true source of art, and as deliberate affront to the illusory appollonian order imposed by our minds on a chaotic universe.

Either way, as Walter Kaufmann said of Neitzche, so can we say of Terrance and Phillip, our foul-mouthed flatulent flip-top-headed Canadian friends :

Suck my balls.

7:32 AM | 5 comments

What are you?

No, really. What are you? If you stop to ask yourself the question, let it roll around behind your eyes for a minute, what kinds of answers do you get? Go ahead, I'll wait.

Well, friend wonderchicken, I hear you say, I'm many things. I'm a human. I'm an American. I'm a writer, I'm a painter, I'm a mother, I'm a husband. I am my children. I'm a big fraidy-cat. I'm an alcoholic. I am a philanderer. I'm a survivor. I'm a thinker, I'm a lover. I am a Christian. I'm a woman. I'm a miraculous fowl. The possibilities are limitless, I know. We're all many things all the time, and as selves die, new ones are born within us to take their places. That's what makes life worth living, what keeps us from going snake-raping bonkers from boredom while we scamper madly around in our hamstertopias.

So, what are you first? What is the facet of your being that stands before -- or behind, if you wish -- all the others? What, to put it another way, is the part of you, of your self-perceived identity, that you cherish the most, that you would be the least willing to have cut away like a tumor, or wiped from your present or your past?

To be fair, I suppose I think of myself and define myself, if forced to do so in a phrase, as a wanderer, a seeker, a lover of the new and the outlandish. As a meat machine for saying 'yes'. These are all the same thing for me. Were these things to be taken from me, I don't think I'd be myself any more, whatever that actually is. Or even a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Your answers will differ, no doubt. This is as it should be. But I'll bet that in response to my question above, none of you who took a moment said to themselves 'First and foremost, I am my weblog'.

It is possible, though, that some chose as their centrepiece 'I am a woman.'

Recently Shelley initiated some discussion about women in the digital world and whether and to what degree they (or more properly, the persistent textual avatars that are their weblogs, avatars that seem so often to be mistaken for the actual person in weblogging discussions) are or are not undervalued or pushed aside or whuffie-starved on the New Frontier. Not being ogled enough -- non-pruriently of course -- in our eyeball economy, not linked-to enough, despite the fact that they have just as many important and useful things to say as the wrinkly old Y-chromo dangler-waving oligarchs like myself.

I'm not sure I understand this, to be honest, and so my response may be off-target. I answered at the time she brought it up, off the cuff, that

I mean, I do understand that some women feel that some not-women are somehow unfairly barring them from the prominence they deserve, and that Women As A Group are under-represented in the Link Market, and that it seems natural to think that since we have a clear duality with women on the one hand and not-women on the other side of this Weblog Gender Gap, that it must be the not-women who are to blame, especially since we're talking in the context of Power (if not power laws) here. As much as I am able with my feeble faculties, I do follow the train of thought.

But there's a reason I asked the questions I did, above.

Although I grant that many women who read this may define themselves first and foremost as a woman, there is no real reason for anyone else, male or female, to look at them through that lens. In other words, I may think of myself primarily as a Pundit (like all these assholes), for example, while the vast majority of people I interact with, on the IntArwEb or elsewhere, may well think of me first and foremost as a f--kwit.

Now, if I am shunned and ridiculed because most people (rightly or not) think of me as a f--kwit, I can hardly accuse them of discriminating against Pundits, of withholding their sweet linky love because they are set on unfairly restricting the rights of Pundits to punditize! They're denying me because they think I'm a f--kwit (or a Cheesehead or a WonderMonkey or something), regardless of how I want them to think of me.

Now this example was not intended to accuse anyone of being a f--kwit, other than perhaps myself. My point is this, and I apologize for the tortuous path by which I've reached it : on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, or cares. Unless you tell them, and even then, not much. That is, regardless of what you perceive yourself to be first and foremost, or fifth and hindmost, and quite probably regardless of what facet or facets of your identity you strive to push to the fore in your online persona in your weblog (which, to belabour the point, is your avatar and not your self) others will more often than not react to you based on what they perceive you to be. Not what you wish them to think. Would that they did.

And, further, out here in Textistan, I think it may be fairly said that your gender is less important as a cue for the way people treat you than it is back in the office, or on the bus, or on the street, even if you do make it a point of order. We are all more brain than gonad out here. Well, most of us are.

So, does being a woman (or a homosexual, or a juggler, or a drunk) come first for you? Fine. I have no problem with that, and I applaud the self-awareness that has led to that understanding. Does that apply for your internet presence as well as your Real Life Persona? That's a fine thing too. But expecting me to interact with you in ways that are constrained or defined by the fact that you have made that choice? Don't bother.

Shelley asked

My answer, then, is that asking about women just doesn't make much sense to me. Not much of an answer, perhaps, but the only one I have at the moment.

About a year back there was much discussion around the neighbourhood about 'identity'. I think of the above as a coda of sorts to that discussion. I was intending to come out guns blazing, but I have not, in part because I'm too busy for a fight, in part because I don't think it's something starting a fight over is going to help, and in large part because all that crap above notwithstanding, I actually do think that Shelley's probably right.

The dominance of males at the Big End of The Hockey Stick in our extended weblogging family is a symptom, not of deliberate exclusion of women, for the most part, I'm certain, but of systemic undervaluing of the contributions of women out there on the streets and in this other place, this place which still bears the imprimatur of the button-and-lever gearbox mentality that men have made their domain, to the slightly disdainful laughter of most women, since the first wheel rolled out of control, bounced down the hill and ran over Og's favorite goat.

I suppose the balance will change as the machinery becomes more irrelevant and the men less proprietary, as more women wade in and kick a few asses around the block, and the phallerati will lose some of their dominance. I suspect it is an inevitability. But for my part, I won't be paying any more attention to anyone's gender -- even if they ask me to -- than I do now.

7:05 PM | 4 comments and 1 trackback

It's been exactly a year since the bombing in Bali that killed my old friend Rick Gleason and 201 other people.

Is there a statute of limitations on mourning? Should there be? If we stop feeling that skip in the heartbeat and stab in the gut when we think of someone we loved who was killed, have we stopped caring? Should guilt then rush in? Should we try to leave behind our grief, and get on with it? What is left of the dead one, a year after they've gone, in the world? What do we learn from their lives, what can we learn? What have I learned?

A year on, I wish I could say confidently that I've consciously changed my life for the better after Rick's death, taken the lessons his life and his sudden death taught me, plowed up some fertile ground. I wish that in the decisions I've made in the intervening twelve months, a reflection could be seen of some nebulous tribute to him, and the things we both believed about life. Maybe it's there, and I can't see it. When you're too close to the mountain, you can't see how high it really is.

I've lived my life with death all around me -- not in the way that the billions of poor people on this planet do, perhaps, with family members dying slowly in the corner of the shack, or ripped apart under American bombs -- but with frequent visits from the reaper, until he became a familiar presence in my life, neither feared nor hated. I have no fear of death, but I resent it, and the curtain it throws around our brief little lives.

My father died when I was about five years old, my younger brother, right in front of me, a few years later. Aunts and uncles, great- and otherwise, died with regularity through my teens, as did my dearly-loved maternal grandfather. The rest of my grandparents were gone by the time I was in my mid-twenties, and then my step-father, who'd married my mother not long after my father's death 20 years before, also died. I have friends who never lost a family member or dear friend until their mid-thirties, for whom Rick's death was a shock more singular, and I always wondered how they thought about death. Did they fear it? Do they hate it more now, or less? Do they put it from their minds, and go on with the humble daily things, keeping the stink of terror well hid?

Scars were left on me in the wake of those deaths in my young life, furrows and welts in my brain some of which are even now just working their way into the light. This is as it should be. My great and abiding love for the drink, moderated and benign as it has become in my later years, as much passed on genetically and nurtured environmentally as it may be, certainly has some roots there. My fear and loathing of the very idea of having children, absolutely. My carefully-chosen expatriate existence, yearning contrapuntally as I sometimes do for the deep, cold coniferous forests of my youth. The vigour with which I counter those who I perceive to be attacking me, yes. All of these and more. I have made my peace with the ghosts, made it many years ago, and carry my wounds with awareness and a quiet understanding that what happens is good by virtue of the sheer fact that it has happened, and that to claim otherwise and rail against our experience is to refuse life, and shrink from it. To say no, rather than yes.

But Rick's death marked me, more than I could have expected. I still feel that weightless skip in my heartbeat, that stab in the gut, when I think of him. One year on, there are more questions than ever, about what my life is to mean to me, and what it has meant. About what is important, what is indispensable, and what is good. About how to reconcile a love for individuals with a deep, heart-squeezing loathing for humanity, and particularly for the sort of people that knocked down the World Trade Centre, that set the bomb in Bali, and that ordered the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. About the preachers and the haters, the ideologues and the god-fearers, the killers and the martyrs, and about how deeply stupid and damaged, greedy and afraid they must be.

And in the end, of course, I'm left with more questions, and I'm left with a rising knot of choking rage and resentment that I consciously push down, squeeze back, and try to transform into something useful, into words and actions that don't feed the killer monkeys, that keep the bloody chaos at bay, and I'm not usually very successful.

I said this, about 18 months ago, long before my friend's death :

and I suppose I still believe it to be true.

But Rick's murder marked me, more perhaps and nearer the surface than any death I've lived past since I was very young. I suppose I am a better man because of that mark. I would be a happier man, and one less uncertain and questing, if it had not happened. Would that Rick were still walking around in his loose-limbed way, falling in love at the drop of a hat, laughing and drinking and seeing. Would that he could share a drink with me tonight.

But that is not the way it happened, and I'm still not sure of how to live with that.

11:45 AM | 13 comments and 2 trackbacks.

There's some lovely filth down here, Dennis!

Some more fun stuff I found today. Bob Black is my new main man :

RU Sirius is, as always, a most excellent individual as well :

11:56 PM and 1 trackback

This piece on the attacks of September 11th and their aftermath was a link offered in this equally interesting (if slightly wanky) discussion at Metafilter, and although the two only seemed tangentially related at first glance, the more I think about them the more they seem to be rooted in the same piece of fertile ground.

My next stop was Baudrillardville . All aboard who's getting aboard :

Make of that what you will, friends.

6:48 AM

"Actually, there's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity. And it's an instant in which God is posing a question, and that question is basically, 'Do you wanna be one with eternity, do you want to be in heaven?' And, we're all saying, 'Nooo thank you, not just yet.' And so time is actually just this constant saying 'No' to God's invitation. I mean, that's what time is.
It's no more 50 A.D. than it's 2001. There's just this one instant, and that's what we're always in. And then she tells me that actually, this is the narrative of everyone's life. Behind the phenomenal difference there is but one story, and that's the story of moving from the 'No' to the 'Yes.' All of life is like, 'No thank you, No thank you, No thank you.' And then, ultimately, it's, 'Yes I give in, Yes I accept, Yes I embrace.' I mean, that's the journey. Everyone gets to the 'Yes' in the end, right?"

Watched Waking Life again this evening - I've been waking up mornings these days with conversations from my dreams fresh and vivid in my mind. The people in these dreams have been telling me things that are astonishing, in ways that stagger me and leave me agog for the few minutes it takes before the memory fades, things I can not understand how I could possibly know, and I'm determined to find out how that could be.

The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream...

6:10 AM | 2 comments

Language Hat points to this strangely timely article in the New York Times, which not only mentions the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but mentions it in the context of East Asian languages. How interesting, thinks I to myself, as I follow the link, hoping it will be germane to all the fascinating and erudite discussion in the neighbourhood that's sprung up around and taken off in a multitude of interesting directions from my brain dump last week.

In it are described the ideas of a certain William C. Hannas, "a linguist who speaks 12 languages and works as a senior officer at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service," author of a newly released book which claims that Asian science has suffered because the main Asian languages are written in "character-based rather than alphabetic" systems.

Not to get off on a rant here, but : in and of itself, this seems to me to be the most vile form of egregiously wrongheaded bullsh-t, and I suspect Mr Hannas is precisely the sort of person that I'd take great pleasure in pummelling until he whimpered like a frightened infant (a reaction that may reveal to some extent why I left academia many years ago, having dipped no more than a toe in its calm waters). But that's not the thing that bothered me.

The article states, presumably parrotting Mr Dipsh-t, that "Western specialists are better informed today [...and] now recognize that the writing systems of East Asia, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean, are "syllabaries," in which each character corresponds to a syllable of sound."

Now, I can't speak for written Japanese (for which I think this may in part be true, depending on which way of writing the language one chooses - Jonathon may be the better person in the immediate neighbourhood to address that), and I'm only semi-certain it is true as far as my knowledge goes for Chinese, but this is completely and laughably wrong in the case of Korean.

I've been promising for over a year now to write a piece about the Korean language and alphabet, and this may have me riled enough to actually do it.

"Mr. Hannas's logic goes like this: because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity," says the New York Times.

Replies the wonderchicken : Mr Hannas should take his head out of his ass, because having one's cranium so firmly lodged up one's rectum can hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for actually making some f--king sense.

A googlesearch takes literally about 5 seconds to find a multitude of sites that describe hangul, the Korean alphabet, and make Mr Hannas look like the idiot (or at the very most gracious, 'mind-bogglingly poor researcher') he would seem to be.

What is also distressing to me is that Sapir-Whorf (to the weak formulation of which, as I've mentioned, I have a degree of sympathy) is being talked about in connection with such worthless, badly thought-out crypto-racist twaddle.

Here's a rude bit of English, sloppily and phonetically rendered into the Hangul alphabet in 5 letters and two syllables for Mr Hannas, sounding something like 'puhk kyu!'. Wonder if he'd be able to read it...

[Gah! I thought I had all my ranting out of my system for the week. Ah well.]

1:38 AM | 10 comments and 5 trackbacks.

[Warning : this is long.]

An email exchange with Kevin Marks a few weeks ago got me thinking more about one of the theories of linguistics that I've always taken for granted as a given. Only now as I am about to begin graduate level work in the subject am I realizing the degree to which various researchers in the field disagree about it. Of course, as is undoubtedly the case in most academic fields, there is disagreement about pretty much everything.

The following is probably of little interest to those not interested in linguistics (although may be of some small interest to those curious about the Korean language), and may best be skipped entirely. I am, however, keen to hear what people think, if they are interested in this field at all, so rather than keep my response restricted to email, I've decided to post it here. I suspect that it doesn't even answer the question that Kevin put to me, which was 'I'd like to hear a cogent argument for (the validity of linguistic relativism),' if I understood it correctly. More of a wee survey for my own interest. Ah, well.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is variously referred to as the 'Whorfian Hypothesis,' 'linguistic relativism,' and 'linguistic determinism' (a description of the strong formulation meant by implication to be a bad thing, I think) concerns the relationship between language and thought, and suggests in its strongest form that the structure of a language determines the way in which speakers of that language perceive and understand the external world. This formulation is generally understood by many to be untenable, but the hypothesis also exists in a weaker form : that language structure and content does not determine a view of the world, but that it shapes thought to some degree, and is therefore a powerful impetus in influencing speakers of a given language to adopt a certain world-view.

A possible opposite claim, from a sociolinguistic viewpoint, is that the thought (and thus culture) of a linguistic group is mirrored in the structure and content of their language, that because they behave and understand things in a certain way, their language reflects those behaviours and understandings - the idea that language is molded, if not determined, by culture.

Two quotes from the linguists whose names are most closely associated with this idea, the first from Edward Sapir (Language, 1929b, p. 207) :

Benjamin Lee Whorf, who was a student of Sapir, went further than the 'predisposition' suggested by his teacher, and proposed that the relationship was a more deterministic one :

Whorf does not go so far as to say that language structure totally determines the world-view of a speaker here. He does add, though :

This last is where the argument runs off the rails for me, at least the argument in which I have any interest. It is also the portion of the idea upon which most critics focus, and which was fueled by the Great Eskimo Snow Silliness set off in great part by this :

and which has been discussed at length in many places, including, cogently here, for example.

To most people, particularly those with little knowledge of Hardcore Linguistics, including myself, the weaker form of Sapir-Whorf seems self-evident. Of course the words we use, the words we know, have some influence on the way we think! The very fabric of our cognition is language, it might well be claimed (but of course that would be a claim that would meet great opposition as well). There is, predictably, great argument about what constitutes 'mentalese,' the native language of our minds, as it were). Do words determine the shape of our thoughts? Well, it seems equally clear that that's nonsense, and though it may and can be argued, it must be said most people don't bother to try.

Steven Pinker, who was the entry point to the brief exchange between Kevin and I a few weeks ago, calls the idea 'linguistic determinism,' and argues as most do that the strong version is nonsense. A student of Noam Chomsky, he works from Chomsky's idea of 'Cartesian linguistics,' that the brain has a 'hard-wired' built-in language acquisition device with an understanding of 'universal grammar', and suggests that language acquisition is an instinct. If we accept that language is an instinct, as Pinker and his mentor Unca Noam argue, it seems as if we must reject the proposition that language shapes thought. Some consequences of this :

In this, Pinker seems to be arguing not only against the idea that culture shapes language, but also the against idea that language shapes culture (by shaping thought). The use of the pejorative 'insidious' is a little unnecessary, but I'm not one who should poke people with sticks for using flowery language.

In his discussion of the idea, Pinker suggests three possibilities for interpretation:

(a) identicality: that language determines thought precisely, word-for-word;
(b) concept determinism: language determines (to an unspecified degree) what we
can think (doubleplus ungood!);
(c) linguistic relativity: that the form of our language (merely) influences what we tend to believe.

In Chapter 12 of The Language Instinct (quoted to me by Kevin), it seems that Pinker does concede the weak form :

Some commentators apparently do not take this as evidence that Pinker is admitting the weak formulation (c, above) of Sapir-Whorf. As I do not have access to a copy of The Language Instinct (no English language libraries and no damn money!), I'll have to take their word for it.

The amount of time and energy that's been expended on arguing about how vocabulary effects cognition surprises me, frankly. I think there's a much more interesting discussion about grammar and deeper structures here that often seems ignored, at least in what reading I've managed to do.

The effect of such things on language users seems to me to be more pervasive and more subtle than simple differences in richness or breadth of vocabulary, on which most work and thought has seemed to focus.

One reason I believe this to be so is as a result of some of the fundamental differences in language structure between Korean and English (and to a great extent, the other European languages with which I have some familiarity). Please note that I neither claim to be a expert in Korean language (more of a lazy amateur), nor have I conducted any experiments or formal observations. First, some background. There are three ideas with some circulation about the earliest genetic relationship of Korean with other language families : 1) the traditional view that Korean is an Altaic language, sharing its origins with Manchu, Mongolian, and Turkish, amongst others; 2) the proposition that Korean has its origin in two language families, Altaic and Polynesian; and 3) the view that because of insufficient evidence to support a definitive relationship with other languages, Korean is a language isolate.

Regardless of its origins, Korean does share a number of features common to Altaic languages : words are built by agglutinating affixes, vowels within words follow certain rules of harmony, and articles, relative pronouns, explicit gender markers, and auxiliaries are not found.

Although Korean is not related to Chinese, as a result of history and geography more than 50 percent of the words in the Korean dictionary are of Chinese origin. Most legal, political, scientific, religious and academic vocabularies, as well as Korean surnames, and increasingly at present given names, are based on Chinese borrowings and can be written with Chinese characters, although meanings and pronuciations have often shifted as they have been adopted.
Although some basic words for body parts, clothing and agriculture are shared between Korean and Japanese, and other similarities exist, including grammatical structures similar enough that word-for-word translations between the languages is relatively easy, it is still uncertain whether the similarities are genetic or come as a result of historical borrowing between the two. Many features of Korean separate it from English and other Indo-European languages. Some of the most important of these (for my discussion here, at least) are the use of honorifics, relationship words, and different levels of speech (others include articles, plural markers, pronouns, adjectives, verb forms, demonstratives and so on).

Honorifics are markings for nouns and verbs that express the speaker's attitude toward the addressee and the person who is being spoken of. Relationship words are blanket nouns denoting relationships between people that are commonly used in informal conversation between people, rather than given names - older brother, younger sister, uncle, auntie, grandmother and so on. (In the slummy, thin-walled building I used to live in in Busan, it was de rigeur on Saturday nights to hear sounds of passion and female cries of 'Opa! Oh, opa! (older brother)' from the playboy-next-door's apartment.) These extend to the common practice of referring to a woman as 'so-and-so's mother,' rather than using her given name.

There are four main levels of speech - polite-formal, polite-informal, plain, and intimate style - from which a speaker chooses, generally unconsciously, in everyday speech. The rules which determine the appropriate choice in conversation derive from the arcane art of knowing the ins and outs of the complex sociocultural fabric of Korean. It is equally inappropriate (in general) to address an older non-relative informally as it is to address a child with the polite-formal style, and mistakes like this may constitute a social breach (although it is generally understood that non-native speakers might make such mistakes). Depending on the relative status of the speaker, the person spoken to, and the person or thing that may be spoken about, the speaker can choose different words and forms to express intended meaning. For many basic verbs like eat, sleep, or give, at least two Korean words are available, each reflecting a different status of the subject or object of the verb. Each verb in Korean is further altered by a choice of grammatical affixes, adding not only grammatical information (such as tense), but carrying different levels of respect, deference, or politeness. Many nouns that refer to kinship or the household alsohave plain and honorific versions, the latter of which are used speak of another's house or relatives, and the former of one's own.

How does all of this relate to my earlier discussion of Sapir-Whorf, and considerations of how much and in what manner language may shape thought, and whether culture (loosely) determines language stucture, or vice versa? Don't worry, I'm getting to that.

Korea is widely acknowledged to be the most Confucian nation in the world technically neo-Confucian, but there's no need to split that particular hair here). Confucius focused on the need to maintain social order though willing or unwilling submission to the five primary relationships :

1) Ruler and subject
2) Parent and child (teacher and student)
3) Husband and wife
4) Older and younger person
5) Friend and friend

All of these relationships are explicity hierarchical, excepting, significantly perhaps, the last, although friendship of a Confucian bent is a considerably more meaningful proposition, it may be argued, than 'buddies' in North America might be.

Appropriate behaviour is expected for participants in each of these relationships, and the language used must be similarly hierarchical :

Although as in many nations, the strength of these traditional beliefs is fading, Confucian tenets still underly a great deal of the conscious and unconscious expectations of social behaviour, and deeply influence the relationships between the sexes and the generations.

The question that interests me, then, is this : do structures and forms like these in the Korea language shape the way in which Koreans think, particularly in terms of their relationships not so much to the world but to the people in it, to such a degree that we can say that language has given them a world-view substantially different than, for example, my own, as an English native speaker? It certainly seems so, to me.

Language is a tool for communication, a social construct, and it seems somewhat pointless to argue about what nouns one uses, and whether the presence or absence of a given bit of vocabulary in one language or another either permits and limits one's ability to think about it. This may be so, but I don't think it's very interesting, except in the abstract.
More interesting to me is the idea that the structures of a language - in this case Korean - may expand or limit the way in which one thinks about something much more important than snow (for example) : how one fits into society, and how one interacts with other humans. That Koreans really do think differently about these things, and that this may spring (entirely, partially, as much or less so?) from their language.

Is this a valid argument for a weak form of lingustic relativism? Is it even something that comes under the Sapir-Whorf rubric? I'm not sure. An opposite, equally important question is this : is it the case that the language has come to have the form it does as result of culture and belief, rather than the opposite? Confucius was Chinese, after all, and from an entirely different language group!

Again, I'm not sure. The correct answer is usually 'a little from column A, a little from column B', I know. Like I said, though, I'm an amateur who hasn't taken a single course in this stuff (yet!). So I'm curious about what you might think, dear reader, whether you're a full-fledged linguist (like languagehat) or just, like me, an enthusiastic dabbler.

9:22 PM | 23 comments and 16 trackbacks.

Some context for the George Lakoff article recently noted here and elsewhere around the traps : a one-hour discussion from NPR [realaudio, 52 minutes] with him, rooted in linguistics, on metaphor as core to our cognition, and why he thinks that neuroscience has proven philosophical method to be flawed. Useful perhaps in understanding where he was coming from with this.

Special SuperCaliFragiLinguistitastical bonus audio : Steven Pinker on Words and Rules [NPR realaudio, 56 minutes]

You like that? Hmmm, you liiiiike it? You want more, baby? OK, here's the motherlode. Enjoy.

2:26 AM

Ed has said some interesting things about the latest conversation we find ourselves blogging our way through, including this :

which is excellent and with which I agree quite emphatically, but to which I must reply 'Not the wonderchicken, muthaf--ka!'

2:37 AM | 1 Comment

Linguist George Lakoff talks again about the metaphors that have been and are continuing to be used to sell this war to the public, the very same metaphors that were used back in Gulf War I (and many other times as well).

He also has some points to make about the anti-war movement, which echo what some friends in the neighbourhood are discussing at the moment, and in which they may well be interested.

[via Mefi]

8:16 PM | 1 Comment and 2 trackbacks.

From the three years or so I recently lived in Sydney Australia, my primary olfactory memory is of stale pee. At least twice a block, on my daily walk downtown from my apartment in Surrey Hills to my job at Town Hall, my tender nostrils would be assaulted by a cloud of piss-reek so terrifying, so staggering in its ability to claw its way up into your sinuses and perch giggling behind your eyeballs... well, let's just say it was pretty damn whiffy. This stink would taunt me, mock me, appear and disappear willo-the-piss, then turn a corner and pow! there it would be again.

The odd thing, though, was that although there was an almost constant smell of downtown pee, I almost never saw anyone actually, well, doing it. A city of ghost-whizzers.

Here in Seoul, it's almost impossible to walk down the street in the evening, particularly on a Friday or Saturday, without spotting two or three teetering drunks fumbling at their little weiners and tinkling on a wall or car or doorway or small child too slow to escape. One particularly enthusiastic gent a while back was on the subway platform at about 5 pm, canted at a 60 degree angle or so, pants around his knees, squeezing out a sadly unimpressive stream toward the opposite platform, where I was standing. It was difficult to tell for sure, but I was under the impression he was trying to hit me, and was frustrated that he was falling short by a good 50 feet or so.

But for all the determined urban micturation here, I almost never smell pee. It's odd.

I have concluded as a result of this painstaking scientific study that the urine of Korean men does not smell. Your mileage may, as they say, vary.

4:36 AM | 7 comments and 1 trackback

A thought this morning that is a follow on of sorts from my Anti-America piece a couple of days ago, that I don't have time to flesh out right now, but that I want to remember. This idea is in part why my little Anti-America post was not called Anti-American. It smacks a little of pop-psychology crap, and may be obvious to many, but the more I think about it, the more I feel it.

It seems de rigueur when people think and talk about themselves that they answer the question "What are you?" You know - I'm a Man, I'm a Democrat, I'm an American, I'm a Dyke, I'm a Rotarian, I'm a Patriot, I'm a Mother, I'm a Christian, I'm a Programmer, I'm a Liberal. (I'm a Woman, I'm a Republican, I'm a Korean, I'm a Heterosexual, I'm a Shriner, I'm an Activist, I'm a Father, I'm a Buddhist, I'm a Teacher, I'm a Conservative) And so on, in endless permutation.

I reckon this is a sure way to shred the last few tatters of one's soul - defining oneself, and thinking about oneself in terms external and collective. And for many people, if my collective noun isn't the same as your collective noun, you can easily be categorized as Other, and claws-out monkey shrieks and feces-flinging may well ensue.

Better to know the answer to the question : "Who are you?" Granted that this one is a hell of a lot harder to answer, perhaps.

The best answer has got to be "That's for me to know, and you to find out! Nyah!"

3:47 PM | 7 comments

Shelley speaks, in pellucid and evocative language, of the tensions between the individual and community, conflicts between the strength of uncompromising individuality and the sense of responsibility to others, which are often expressed in ways contrarian and discordant. If you read her words often, you know that she cherishes this part of herself, and is proud to be the one who pushes back, who questions, about matters political and gender-related, about issues social and relating to the blogosphere, and this is one of the things many other people cherish about her too. I'm glad - more than glad, I'm indebted in a multitude of ways and even if I disagree with her on the details deeply grateful - that she is around to kick against the pricks, as exhausting and demoralizing an avocation as that is.

One of the many reasons I feel indebted to her (and to others around the ever-more-loosely-joined virtual neighbourhood of which I feel a part) is that she kickstarts thoughts in me, and if I'm at the precise juncture where the caffeine has overcome my natural lethargy (like right now), I'm liable to write about them. The exercise of deciding whether this is a Good Thing or not is left to the reader.

The following is long and personal, and no doubt philosophically suspect. So sue me!

Particularly in these difficult days, people accuse me of being anti-American, and I invariably admit that I am, although perhaps not in the sense in which they mean it. The phrase anti-American almost certainly means different things to different people, and in different languages (long ramble about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis excised - I'll leave that for another day). Occasionally I'm even asked why, although this is rare, and like dg here, it's usually as part of a low-intensity injoke that bounces around Metafilter occasionally : 'Why do you hate America so much?'

I wish I were able to trace back to the beginning my first stirrings of anti-American sentiment, way up there in my Northern BC village. That sort of thing is a fool's game, though, particularly when your long-term memory is as wildly inaccurate as mine. We only got two television channels up there - CTV and CBC - and so there was no nose-upturned pseudo-intellectual pooh-poohing of American entertainment, though you can be sure I affected a whole range of other arrogant smartboy behaviours, feeling as I did a lone island of brilliance in a sea of millworkers and fetal alcohol syndrome genetic sports.

The second album I remember buying was The Clash's London Calling - perhaps that was the trigger.

With lyrics like

it fired me up in a way that I still feel, bowel-deep and still burning decades later. But really that album, political as it was, had very little in the way of attacks on America itself - it chose broader targets, and knocked them over with rakish, snarling aplomb.

Like Shelley, I read Ayn Rand as a teen too, and everything else I could get my hands on, which, thanks to a mother visibly relieved that I was more interested in books than cars, was almost everything I could think of, but it didn't leave much of a mark on me, I don't think. Similar expressions of libertarian ideals in Heinlein's juvenilia and other SF novels did leave their mark, though. I remember quoting him, sneeringly, over the years : 'specialization is for insects.' But I was too interested in individuals (which I mentioned in another context, in a post of which I'm particularly proud, here) to care much about -isms. This decision, this disdain of politics, has stayed with me to this day.

So how does a disdain of politics and a Clash song jibe with a repeatedly-reiterated anti-Americanism? I'm getting to that, honest.

One of the things that Shelley's piece today started me contemplating was how my feelings on individuality differ from the ones she expresses so well, and how imagining myself as a contrarian (if people-loving) curmudgeon all these years has molded my life. When I think about it, lyrics from another song bubble up into my mind, and I suppose they express the root of my feeling as well as anything else :

All my life, I've fashioned myself as the Outsider, the exile, the individual, rugged or otherwise. I feel little to no obligation to any sense of community, other than that which is mandated by my own sense of what is right. It has roots, no doubt, in childhood bereavements, and first saw the light when a psychologist diagnosed me as a kindergarten sociopath. It matured with the fingernails-ripped-out clawing at the well-walls of my hometown - let me out! - and has evolved slowly since. It's led to me to live as an expatriate all over the planet for most of the last 15 years, complaining about my new hosts, wherever they have been, and equally kept me from returning home. It's made me unwilling to consider myself part of any group larger than a self-selected circle of close friends, virtual and otherwise. It's led me inexorably to spending a significant portion of my waking hours in front of a computer, typing my life out for people I have never met.

But it's also made me a better man, in many ways, I think, if a somewhat solipsistic one. I do believe that all you have is your soul, and that, absurd as it seems, is true even if there is no such thing as a soul. That's an argument I'm not interested in, as it simply doesn't matter. But I believe that once you have done your best to detach, in best buddhist fashion (though I hasten to add that I am no more a buddhist than I am an evangelical christian) - detach from political or religious affiliation, from outmoded and useless labels like 'left' and 'right', from exhortations to patriotism and considerations of race, from fretting about whether this group or that is disadvantaged or exploited - and tried to live according to the dictates of your conscience and love and do what good you can for those you know....well, we all want that, in one way or another, don't we?

At the end of the day, ignoring the clamoring of the crowds to join in and be a part of something is the strategy of the hermit, and I am no hermit. I partake, joyfully or furiously, depending on the provenance of the brain chemicals circulating intraskull, with as much enthusiasm as someone might who defined themselves by their job, or their religion, or their gender, or their sexual preference, or their nationality, or their political affiliation, or their race.

So why do I hate America so much, though I've said over and over again that I love many American people? Because America does evil, and I cannot help but hate that which does evil, all the while knowing that it is evil. There's no need for me to recite the litany of Terrible Wrongs that America has done - no matter how you sit on the love/hate/fear/security map, you know those things of which I speak.

This is not to say that other nations, other governments, other groups political or otherwise, today and in the past (and no doubt far into the future) have not done great evil. Cambodia, Germany, Japan, Rwanda, Russia, El Salvador, Guatemala.... any of us could go on, endlessly, and point to massive evils that, in sheer scale if nothing else, dwarf the worst that anyone could accuse America of.

For me, though, disappointment is the key to my dislike of America. Deep, weary, beaten-down disappointment. Disappointment at the massive disconnect between the way that America portrays itself, and the way that many Americans who are ignorant of both history and geography perceive America. Regardless of how shocked people may have been at the million corpses littering the ground in Rwanda a decade ago, I believe that were the blood of those multitudes on American hands through action rather than inaction, the shock and outrage would be many times more powerful. When I was young I expected - and many people, American and otherwise feel the same - that America would always be a force for good in the world. Americans are supposed to be heros, damn it! That's what their movies tell us, and their television, and their news agencies and their government. That's what their duplicitous sold-out scumbag of a president keeps repeating in halting tones when they trot him out to read another script about 'smoking out the evil-doers.' And nothing, we all know, is as disappointing as a fallen hero.

(Of course, you can probably guess that I directly blame George W Bush and his administration for the death of one of my best friends, as much as I blame the sack of sh-t who set and detonated that bomb in Bali. They loaded and cocked the gun - that little Indonesian just pulled the trigger. Their bumbling PR-driven war in Afghanistan drove al Qaeda members to Indonesia, the nation with the largest Muslim population on the planet, where those escappes were no doubt instrumental in the murder of all those people in Kuta. My resentment of the abject stupidity of the conduct of the little Bush-te revenge-war has only honed my anger and resentment and disappointment to a fine edge.)

But to people not dependent on their politics or their nationality to define themselves, to someone for whom identity is not built on ideas and groups outside of him or herself, the words of Official America are at so far a remove from the realities that anger and disappointment are the only responses that seem rational. Anger that wrong is being portrayed as right, to the apparent unquestioning satisfaction of many who would fight evil if they recognized it. Disappointment because America, the great power of our world, could do so much good, and instead has been locked into a path that will bear bitter fruit for everyone for as far as the mind can see into the cratered, smoke-shrouded wasteland of the future.

I love Americans, many of them. I hate America because through those who lead that powerful nation, it seems to be hellbent on making a world that is worse in every way that's important for most of the people in it. And I feel this way not because I am Canadian, or 'lefty', or religious, or anything else other than who I am. I hate America because I want so desperately to love it.

7:22 PM | 33 comments and 2 trackbacks.

Like everyone else, I noticed Dr Weinberger's and Doc Searls' World of Ends this morning, linked from Bb. I have taken the liberty of making a response, of sorts, in the form of a satire fetchingly entitled - in true profane wonderchicken style - 'World of Assholes'.

Although I do disagree with many of their points, I recognize the good will in their intention, and intend this in turn as good-natured if pointed ribbing, not ideological warfare. Manifestos by their very nature invite a kick in the ass, though, and I'm willing as always to step up to the plate. (And mostly I was just annoyed that I didn't get one of those emails Shelley mentioned. Heh.)

6:26 PM | 18 comments and 3 trackbacks.

A read of this thread at MetaTalk just might reveal to those of good faith something of significance for weblogging and for journalism, being born all a-squall. It's an exciting idea, and an inspired way to leverage the enormous number of Smart People who are connected to one degree or another to Metafilter (and kuro5hin), and if it really does amount to something, will be a great gift from MeFi to the wired world to commemorate The Mothership's upcoming fourth birthday.

10:44 PM | 1 Comment

About a year ago, I squeezed out the following brainfart

And today, as weblogorrhea reaches epidemic proportions, Dr Pepper's soulless, clue-deficient marketing shills are actually giving it a go, boys and girls.

*Takes off tinfoil helmet*

Doc Searls is quoted as saying in response to this : "In my view blogs are the antidote to viral marketing."

In my view, this clumsy teentastic attempt at manipulation - more likely to attract attention to itself (which, let's face it, has got to be the real goal here, rather any genuine attempt at marketing juice thanks to the efforts of some cadre of hiphop dipsh-t teend00d bloggers pimping their avatars for some gear - it's a metacampaign, kids!) and spawn subtle and inventive imitations as a result of the MSNBC article and other media attention - is the first salvo in a coming war of web words. Blogs aren't the antidote to viral marketing, they're the petri dish where the virulent brain-colonizing memetic equivalent of Ebola will be grown. Call it wEbola, and reach for the mental prophylactic of your choice. At stake are our very souls!

That's complete bullsh-t, of course. I'm just flinging hyperbole around to make this all seem a little more interesting, you know, 'cause I can. The truth is, even if I do disagree with Doc's quotable quote there, if I should happen across a weblog pimping some craptacular, pointless and inevitably unnecessary new product ("Buy this crap! Buy it you f--kers, or we'll lose our jobs and have to whore out our children!" - now that's a marketing campaign I could respect), well, *click*

Heck, I even refuse to read weblogs that perfunctorily link to Amazon, for christ's sakes, never mind ones that are busy flogging some sh-tty sugar drink. But this sort of thing is going to get more sophisticated, mark my words, brothers and sisters, and more insidious. The marketrons will continue to colonize the new frontier. I have seen the enemy and he is us.

4:38 AM | 7 comments and 1 trackback

Friend Adam Greenfield has been doing some thinking about emergent democracy, and has come up with a 'conversation starter' called "The minimal compact: An open-source constitution for post-national states".

Essential reading, and packed full of ideas that resonate very deeply with this particular wonderchicken.

Edit : I am both honoured and pleased that Adam has told me via email that "a lot of this was catalyzed by reading what you wrote about Rick. As a former NYer, I shall know 09.11 in the bone for the rest of my days, but when I read about Rick on MeFi it was my most immediate experience yet of...of...of everything to which I want to offer future generations an alternative."

I believe Rick would have loved these ideas, and it's a beautiful thing if the tragedy of his loss may in any way have helped this kind of dream reach more people.

Go, read, think.

10:58 PM | 1 Comment

Three random thoughts that ambled through the wonderchickensian mind this evening, ideas that to be honest I'm just too damn lazy to flesh out into real posts. Quality is therefore not assured.

1) How much do I hate that everytime someone mentions a goddamn book, they have to link to Amazon?† When did a glorified shopping mall become the primary maypole around which our discussion of books must dance? (I tried to like allconsuming.net, but it gives me indigestion.)

2) 8 Mile = Quadrophenia strained through a Rocky Balboa cheesecloth.

3) Before radio and television, we are told, people entertained one another - told stories, sang, did little skits, whatever. Nearly a century of the glass teat and all that, electronic opiate of the masses, yadda yadda, passes. Us bloggy types are just returning to a long-lost tradition of making our own damn entertainment for each other, thank you very much, just amped-up, sped-up and woven from a spectrum of sources so kaleidoscopic as to blow the muttonchopped or maidenly minds of our forebears.

And, for a limited time only, a special bonus thought, free with every purchase : reading a Kerouac biography the last few days - 'Subterranean Kerouac' (and no, I'm not going to link to the thrice-cursed Amazon page for it) - I found myself wondering how those Beat types found any time to actually write when they were so busy sucking each other's dicks all the damn time. Crikey.

† the answer, of course, is 'one hell of a lot'.

5:31 AM | 9 comments and 2 trackbacks.

This is going to be one of those posts that starts : "So, I...."
I usually hate those kinds of posts.

So, I get an EGR send in my inbox today. Rageboy - or Locke, or whichever mask he was wearing when he hit 'send' or 'go' or 'cry havoc' or whatever the button said (assuming that both personas are masks, to one degree or another, and assuming that it was an actual button he pressed) - included a couple of quotes in the header, and I got as far as

before I got distracted, as seems to happen so often to me. All that youthful experimentation has left me with an attention span that is somewhat unreliable, I'm sad to report. Don't worry your pretty heads, though, dear readers : I make do.

So, this Jung quote (I did read a lot of Jung when I was young - har!) is one that I've never run across before, oddly, unless of course I did run across it, but forgot about it because I was in the middle of one of those youthful experimentation sessions I mentioned above. My memory has a few holes in it too, unfortunately. Again, though, I make do.

It resonated in the echo chamber behind my nose and I was keen to see what had been said, and when, and by who. It seemed to apply to something I've been turning over in my mind lately : one thing that a filthy foreigner in Korea who spends any time watching his hosts will learn quickly is how inspidly sentimental these folks can be. I loathe sentimentality, but I'm keen to understand more about it, 'cause, you know, I'm such a groovy guy. The other bit of data is the fact that Korean soldiers, in the Vietnam War and elsewhere, were universally feared for their 'casual brutality'.

So, off to Google. Shiver me timbers, boy wonder, who should be at the pole position for this interesting phrase, gunning his virtual engines, but the excellent Jonathon Delacour!

He was talking about warbloggers in his post, which interested me not at all at that moment - "We're on a mission from God, ma'am." - but he does quote the equally splendid Joseph Duemer :

Now this sounds like the kinda dirt I'm trying to dig up, here, tonight. This sounds like words I can get behind, and apply to something that at least has the odor of insightfulness.

But then, I notice this in the comments :

and I wonder if that's true. Does sentimentality have a positive connotation for most Americans? And how about for Koreans? And am I unusual in hating it so?

Back to Google I went, feeling the need to dig some more, and came up dry. Serried ranks of quotable quote pages, with no commentary to sink my nose into, truffle-hunting webpig that I am.

Then I tried a bit of wiggling with my search terms a bit, and found this :

This set me back for a minute or two, and led me to remembering my wife's stated reason for sticking with me, when asked why she had a couple of years ago, despite her parents threatening to disown her, in the face of her friends' avowals that she was nuts to shack up with a nasty foreigner, ignoring the stares we got when we walked arm in arm down a Korean street. She said that she remembered me saying one night not long after we first got together something along the lines of :

Love is love is love. Mother for child, friend for friend, lover for beloved. It's all one, even if it is different in the ways that it is shown and shared.

That simpleminded belief of mine dovetails micron-close with this 'jeong' idea, doesn't it? Not that I had the faintest idea at the time that such a belief existed and was so important to so many Koreans. It's not particularly insightful, certainly, but it's true, or true at least for me, and that's more than enough. It was enough for her, too, it seems.

So. At this point I kind of ran out of steam. I lost track of what I had been thinking about when I went off searching for some background on the Jung quote (which was probably going to end up in something mean-spirited anyway) but I ended up remembering something that has made me a better man.

And Rageboy? Well, I guess I gotta thank him, for starting me wandering down that track this evening, which ended for me in a happy memory and a cuddle with my woman. And feel 'jeong', a bit, for the guy, because the very public road that led him to his pressing that 'send' button today hasn't - at least as far as I know - as happy an end as my short road did tonight.

5:49 AM | 4 comments

I wish there were some way that some sort of reliable device for parsing out and evaluating text could be created, one that was capable of remotely applying painful shocks to the testicles based on the results.

This device - let's call it the Fiery Parser of Comedy Justice™, for lack of anything else that comes to mind - would deliver the scrotum-singeing amps say 7 out of 8 times that it caught someone posted an 'amusing' one-liner to Metafilter, just to help them be certain that they were indeed posting Comedy Gold and it was worth the risk.

(I feel comfortable in choosing the testicles, as I'm pretty certain this is a Boyzone phenomenon.)

Ideally, it would be 6 or 8 metres high, with a huge On/Off lever, be topped with buzzing Tesla coils, and throw off random crackling bolts of electricity through the darkness. A tiny almost circular 50's-style cathode ray tube would sit at its foot, connected to the main apparatus with monster alligator clips and greasy, wrist-thick cables, casting a small, comforting, #006699 glow on the broken concrete and piles of skulls nearby.

I'm aware that this probably won't happen. Pity.

I am also fully aware that (pot, kettle) probably 80% of my MetaSchtick for the first year I was there was rubber-chickening and merry pranksterism, but that was before it became an epidemic. The monkey house (and god bless its every byte) was created to siphon away all that stuff, but now there's a whole new generation in the blue, this growing and seemingly unstoppable crapslide of quipsters who seem bent on being The Wackiest MeFite, and they're beginning to give me the sh-ts.

OK, I'm done now with my little rant now. Just had to vent. Back to the (much-beloved) 'filter I go.

Edit :

Things like this, over at MeFi, are part of the reason I keep going back there, even after I have a little half-serious spaz-out like I did earlier. It may be a hoax, but if not, I am fascinated in equal measure with being repelled. It's a strange, wonderful, horrible new world we're building ourselves.

Another Edit : See, this MetaTalk discussion about the previously mentioned thread is a great thing too.

2:37 AM | 6 comments

I was a little let down, as the taxi pushed through the rain into downtown Vancouver, at how little had changed. This feeling intensified over the next few days : other than a few new buildings scattered here and there, and a new colour scheme on the buses, it seemed to me as if nothing much had changed in Vancouver in the five years since I last set foot in the homeland. In fact, not much that I could see had changed in the 20 years since I first moved there as a thirst-bedeviled freshman.

After living in Korea, where the entire country reinvents itself every five years or so, and the one constant is change and ferment and fresh concrete flowering skyward fast as bamboo, it was a little disconcerting. I had never thought of Canada as...well, stodgy, until now.

But over the next couple of weeks there, I noticed that at least one significant thing had changed, other than the amount of grey hair on friends and family.

I had read that the drug companies were getting more aggressive with their carpet-bomb marketing in North America over the past few years. Read about the scattershot Ritalin-dosing of children, read about the emergence of the Prozac nation, read about the drug companies inventing 'female sexual dysfunction' in order to manufacture a market for more of their pills. But I wasn't prepared for the fact that there wasn't a single commercial break that I can recall on network TV over those couple of weeks that didn't have at least one drug advertisement. When did heartburn become 'acid reflux disease'? How many cold medicines do people actually need? 'I love my Tylenol PM'? How putrid is that? f--k you lady, why don't you try loving your children instead (yelled I at the television screen, much to the long-suffering chagrin of my lady love). There were ads flogging drugs for conditions I haven't even heard of, ads with happy grinning families running across manicured green parkland with their lassie-like dogs, free of the ravages of anal warts or whatever the hell had been plaguing them before Smithcline-Beecham showed up on the scene.

Now, I'm not one to claim, ever, that drugs in and of themselves are a bad thing. Better living through chemistry, say I. But I've always been more inclined to think that the body should be allowed to deal with minor illnesses on its own, and that drugs are better employed in the context of recreation than medication. Indefensible position perhaps, but I don't really give a sh-t. Unless I've got Ex-lax™ to ease the way, of course!

I also have a strong tendency to think that the habit of medicating for every minor complaint is a sign of weakness, and creates and fosters weakness, and weakness is bad. Weakness in mind or body invites the triumph of evil men, evil deeds and thoughts. But that's a whole other rant, perhaps.

So, anyway, unprepared as I was for the constant deafening barrage of druggy blandishments on the TV, I was substantially less prepared for the fact that half the f--king people I know are apparently now on SSRI's : you know, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Prozac™ and Zoloft™ and Paxil™ and I don't know what-all else. When did this happen? When did all these people decide that they couldn't handle their lives anymore without being constantly medicated? Or when did their drug company whore-doctors convince them of it?

Now, look, I know (based on extrapolation from what I've seen amongst friends and relatives recently) that probably half of the people reading this are on scrips for one of these drugs, too, and I don't want to antagonize or insult unduly. There are, certainly, some people for whom these 'miracle drugs' (given us by the gods) are a means by which they can live a normal life, overcome the ravages of aberrant brain chemistry, fight clinical depression.

But I've got to think that there are way too many folks out there who are just too goddamn lazy and irresponsible to take responsibility for their own mental states, just like there are too many people who think of themselves as victims, who blame their parents or their spouse for their problems, who refuse to take responsibility for their actions, who don't vote and then complain about the government they get (and so richly deserve), who drive an SUV because, hey, if I get into an accident, it's the other guy who'll get hurt, who dismiss concerns about environmental degradation with a wave of the hand and a demand for incontrovertible proof...

Sorry, I'm ranting again.

But hell, I've taken just about everything there is to take at one time or another, and I didn't do it to escape, I did it to explore. Hooray for me, right? Well, sure, why the hell not? I reckon that if your life is bad enough that you have to stay perpetually medicated, you need to change your life, change your doctor, get off the SSRIs, and get the hell out of the house. Find some people to drink a beer (yes, I see the irony) with and dance in the rain on a beach somewhere. Find someone new to have sex with, if that's your thing. Climb a mountain, sail a boat, or if you're too fat or lazy or poor to do that, find someone who loves doing it, and ask them about it, and watch their eyes as they describe the joy it gives them, and find something that makes you feel that joy too. Something other than chemicals.

You know, unless you really are f--ked up. In which case, pop those puppies like gummy bears, I say.

11:32 PM | 11 comments and 1 trackback

It's all about the hopeful hymn-humming tension between the Two Things, life is, so often. Suspension, floating as long as possible, in that sweet gravitationally anomalous spot between bum and wage slave, between drunkard and saint, between drop-out and rebel, between breather-of-mountain-air and dead-eyed technophile. 'Course, it may just seem that way after a couple of beers. f--ked if I know.

See, I've been a geek, biting the heads off digital chickens, from way back when. I'd spend endless hours at the age of 14 or so, back in 1980, tweaking the math and the BASIC code to make prettier shimmering patterns on the 147x47 pixel black and white monitor of my TRS-80 Model III. Only 16K RAM and 16K ROM on that sucker, with a tape drive for saving my handiwork, a tape deck that I played audio on - Life of Brian taped by leaning it up against the speaker on my little B&W TV and pressing the Play and Record buttons at the same time and being very very quiet - while trying to figure out by trial and error how subroutines were supposed to work. Hours, days, weeks alone upstairs in my lair, hunched over, in the dark.

I hated that machine and loved it in equal measure. It captivated me, hypnotised me. Red-eyed monomania, as the hours died overhead and dropped their dust in my hair. It almost ate my life, that f--king machine, before I discovered booze and women and dancing on the beach with a bottle in my hand and a song in my throat. Before the world opened its legs to me.

The monster is back, and it's trying to eat my soul this time. I don't quite know what to do about that.

3:08 AM | 8 comments

It tastes like one of those sad strange stories that one stumbles across occasionally on the web, and in real life too, by golly. Definitely the sort of thing that you'd research and write a long article about for some reputable magazine if you were so inclined, but since you're a blogger with an attention span of approximately six seconds (and unless you're Mike Golby and core dump tens of thousands of words a day) you don't.

Kitten Natividad appeared in such fine films as Tittilation, Tittilation 3, Big Busty 3, Bodacious Ta-Tas, Famous Ta-Tas, Best of Big Busty, Thanks for the Mammaries, Ten Years of Big Busts 2, Big Boob Lottery, Wild Wild Chest 3, The Double-D Avenger, and Fresh Tits of Bel-Air. One gets a sense of where she (or more convincingly the eeek! evil! Hollywood Movie Machine) perceived her primary talents to lie.

I see a long wistful but critical look, the magazine equivalent of Boogie Nights meets Almost Famous (isn't that how you're supposed to pitch stuff : "It's like X meets Y, with Tom Cruise as the lead! Come on, you gotta love that!"), at the titty-film industry of the Seventies. We're not talking gun-to-Linda's head hardcore Deep Throat nastiness, here, we're talking the campy (but equally reprehensible (or is it? you leave that to the reader, kimosabee!)) oeuvre of Russ Meyer and his brethren. Interviews with the aging thick-eyeglassed silk-kimono-clad Hugh Hefner wannabe lotharios, and some of the now-grandmothers who shook their moneymakers in blockbusters like Thanks for The Mammaries. A portrait of Kitten growing up in the fifties. Pop-psych pointers to the so-obvious traumas that led her to a life in the softcore industry.

Then, the kicker. After decades of paying the bills with her breasts, she undergoes a double mastectomy for treatment of breast cancer in October 1999. The piece is about surviving breast cancer, you see, and now it becomes clear that we're talking about more than just titty-films here. This is a piece about the equality of women, about empowerment, about not letting the bastards grind you down, about triumph in the face of adversity and sisterhood and all that good stuff! The crowd goes wild!

Finally, the oddball, unexpected clincher, of the sort that life provides to the observant, making truth once more (and by now it should be predictably) stranger than fiction : in 2001, two years after her double mastectomy, she reappears on the silver screen (or silver disc, probably) in The Double-D Avenger.

You close out the piece with a wry observation from Kitten herself on the curves that life throws you, and fade to textual black.

[lifted from d/blog]

7:33 PM | 1 Comment

As Kent recently intuited, I've been rereading Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher and Bach recently, in part in hopes that a rereading will illuminate corners that I missed the last time through, and in part because good books in English are very difficult to find here, and prohibitively expensive when I do find them. There are no libraries of which I am aware within a two hour radius of my home, and even if there were, they would not have any books in English. This situation is particularly unhappy because I am and always have been a voracious reader, getting through an average of two or more books a week. Needless to say the tomes that comprise the meager collection I brought with me when we moved here from Sydney are well-thumbed and dog-eared by now.

Bitch, moan.

Anyway, this anecdote from GEB struck me, and I thought I'd share it with you.

Johann Bolyai and Nikolay Lobachevskiy independantly and to all appearances simultaneously discovered non-Euclidean geometry in 1823. Euclidean geometry, of course, is based on five postulates, four elegant and one perhaps a little less so, and had stood proudly for about two thousand years.

The first four postulates :

(1) A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.
(2) Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.
(3) Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one end point as center.
(4) All right angles are congruent.

and the fifth, which lacks a little of the concision and elegance of the first four

(5) If two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the two lines must inevitably intersect each other on that side if extended far enough.

Over the intervening centuries, dozens of attempts had been made to prove that the fifth postulate was in fact part of 'four-postulate geometry', all unsuccessful.

One of the people who had attempted to do so was Bolyai's father, Wolfgang, who was also a mathematician and a friend of Gauss (who is part of Graham's mathematical family tree, synchronicitously enough). The elder Bolyai wrote to his son, in an attempt to steer him from the black sinkhole of depair that was Euclid and the Mathematical Life :

This passage astonishes me. Even allowing for floweriness of language, that a man could so deeply feel his life ruined and wasted as a result chasing a mathematical proof somehow sets me back in my seat, a-wondering about how we have changed, or if indeed we have. It may not have a similar effect on you, and if not, I beg your indulgence.

12:09 AM | 1 Comment

I posted this over here a few days ago, to resounding silence, which could be due to the fact that a) it's bollocks, b) no one cares, c) no one read it or d) a combination of the three. But since I'm nothing if not pigheaded, and it gelled a couple of things for me in my mind about both the questions of identity that were doing the rounds recently and the cross-blog conversations idea that I've gone on about before, I'm going to cross-post it here. Because I can, and because I like feedback, even though I am a little gunshy tiptoeing through the backdoor back into Smart Person Land. Still, forward!

I'd add to what Shelley and David have said about ThreadNeedle and blogs, just off the top of my head, my take on it : that in the online 'asynchronous discussion communities' that Dan mentioned below in /m106, you have represented yourself through the things you say and have said in that community. There may have been an additional body of work, but this was secondary to the text-representation of yourself that accreted, word by word, as a result of your participation. My personal example of this would be my participation at Metafilter over the last couple of years.

This is a trivial observation, I know. But your avatar was effectively yourself as you chose to represent yourself via your comments and conversations.

When we talk about a weblog, though, I think it's profitable to talk about two separate entities created as an adjunct of our online presence, at least the one that derives from the weblog itself : the (for lack of a better word) publication and the person.

Now certainly, the 'publication' is a mirror, to whatever extent, of the person writing it. We see many weblogs that stop here at this point, that have no commenting systems enabled, or that pay little attention the 'community', that are traditional web logs (ie collections of links with minimal commentary) or diaries or photoblogs or warblogs or god knows what...but that are intended less as manifestations of the person behind them than publications about that person or their interests.

Another dimension, though, comes in with weblogs that have comment threads, that encourage and participate in conversations with other weblogs/webloggers. In this situation, the weblog not only becomes a publication about something (which might, in the case of more diarist-type blogs, be the person who is writing it) but a representation, an avatar of that person. The weblog itself becomes an active extension of the weblogger's identity (I wish I'd thought about this during the recent conversations around the blogs about 'identity'. Ah well.) The weblog is something that is carried with them (or is an extension of their identity online...? I'm not sure about this bit at all), and the cross-blog conversations that occur as a result of this, in posts and their comment threads, are in a way a new and larger version of the sort of discussion types we're historically used to, that Dan mentioned in his earlier post. A version that carries a body of work, a more deliberate one, along with the community member.

Does this make sense? I'm riffing here, and I have to admit that I haven't read David's book yet, so the sort of thing I'm trying to get a handle on (and communicate at the same time) might be old news.

Anyway (*takes a breath*) - I see these weblogs, the blogs that are not only 'publications' about something but also representations of the personality behind the words (and are this way because the weblogger has comments threads and/or engages in cross-blog conversations in their main posts and/or blogrolls people (the use of the word 'people' here is deliberate) as an acknowledgment of community), avatars that engage in conversation, to be the audience at which Shelley's ThreadNeedle is aimed. And I think (hope) that the service might be a major step forward, if it reaches critical mass.

(Also, don't forget to add your two bits to the conversation about Threadneedle still going on here.)

6:27 PM | 3 comments

You've probably heard of Epimenides' Paradox. Epimenides was a Cretan, and the paradox that bears his name goes like so :

Of course, if the statement is true, then Epimenides is a liar, and thus the statement is false. If it's false...well you can see where that one's going. The same paradox is manifest if you say "I am lying" or "This statement is false".

This is simpleminded stuff, the kind of thing that was intellectually thrilling when we were ten years old. I know. The self-referential frisson. Bear with me.

Let's stretch out old Epimenides a bit into something that's also very familiar :

Taken separately, each of these sentences is perfectly fine, potentially useful, unremarkable. Taken as a unit, though, we're back at the bar with old Epimenides, swilling wine and scratching at our verminous beards in bemusement, back in Paradox City, Arizona.

It would be possible, of course, to build a group of 3 or 4 or more sentences, each of which in isolation is perfectly acceptable, but which as a group leads us into botheration again. The way in which these sentences point to one another spawns the whirling core of chaos from which the paradox emerges. The way in which they refer to one another generates all the heat.

There's a quote, or just a bit of homespun wisdom, I'm not sure which, that surfaces from time to time, one that I seem to recall deploying here sometime in the last year or so, in relation to something or other. It's also something most of us have experienced at least once, which is why it's juicy. It goes like so :

I used this, as I think most do, to poke fun at people who 'can't see the forest for the trees' or 'can't see past their own noses', or just to make myself feel clever. I don't recall, exactly.

But I've been thinking this morning about Epimenides, and my growing dissatisfaction with a whole range of things in my life, and I realized that I've been completely wrong all this time.

You see, the dog is right.

It's the act of pointing that deserves the attention. The actor, who by pointing, attaches significance to that at which he points. It's the relationship between the pointer and the pointee, if you will, and the fact that the pointee is frequently pointing back - this is where the Good Stuff comes from.

Now that I've gotten out of the bathtub and written this down, I realize that what I've been saying here applies in good measure to this weblogging stuff as well.

I really was only thinking about my own life, as I tend to do. Your results may vary.

2:48 PM | 3 comments and 1 trackback

Koan :

A monk asked Nansen : "Is there a teaching no master ever taught before?"
Nansen said : "Yes, there is."
"What is it?" asked the monk.
Nansen replied : "It is not mind, it is not Buddha, it is not things."

Mumon's Commentary :

Old Nansen gave away his treasure words. He must have been greatly upset.

Mumon's Poem :

Nansen was too kind and lost his treasure.
Truly, words have no power.
Even though the mountain becomes the sea,
Words cannot open another's mind.

10:11 PM | 5 comments

Rory hits the Identity Question currently #1 on the Blogosophy hit parade (with a bullet), tacking close to one of my personal ports of call, too, Metafilterolonomomo, and does a fine job of separating the sh-t from the shinola.

Also : "I woke up in a Soho doorway, a policeman knew my name."

4:32 AM

[Further to my not-terribly deep musings about anonymity here and this discussion linked here...]

AKMA is toying with thoughts about identity, integrity, accountability, and anonymity. I know I am probably getting into water that's deeper than that in which I normally care to wade, or hotter, or something, but let's press on my mental zit and see what pops out, shall we?

He says :

Here, before we even get to the parts that I wanted to talk about, I have to stop, scratch my noggin, spit and ponder a bit. There is something to be said, certainly, for the idea that 'identity functions as a principle of continuity'. I understand this to mean that the primary persona that the world-at-large identifies as me (and mark that word 'primary - I want to come back to it) exists and is generally agreed upon as a result (if not in whole, at least in part) of the fact that it has been to some degree consistent over time. In other words, people have certain well-founded expectations and assumptions about me based on the behaviours I have publicly exhibited over time, and are reasonably safe in basing guesses about my future behaviour on those observations they have made.

This public identity is unitary and unique - the very word 'identity' seems to point to that. And this is as it should be : if we could not make reasonable guesses about the behaviour of the people with whom we interact, if we were totally unable to predict their actions and reactions, we'd be in a fine mess, now wouldn't we?

But it seems to me that the leap from this to discussion of integrity, accountability, and anonymity misses an important step. I am strongly drawn to the idea that we harbour a multiplicity of selves, of personas within us, any one or more of which may be our current interface to the world, rather than a single 'identity'. I'm reminded of the quote from Antonio Tabucchi's Pereira Declares Jonathon used back in February :

I'm not sure if I'm willing to go all the way to 'Confederacy of Souls', but hopefully you see what I'm getting at here.

Now, although I will grant that continuity is a principle of identity, I'm not sure that 'identity' is the scab we need to pick at here. Taking as seriously as I do the possibility that there may not be a singular me as much as a multiple one, AKMA's connection from 'identity' to 'integrity' feels tenuous to me.

It's possible (or, given my track record, likely) that I am misunderstanding, here, in which case see! look at my ass hanging out there in the wind!, but, like Jonathon, the me-as-multiplicity explanation meshes better with my lived experience than any other. I am a boozy wild-eyed country-boy, yes, but I am a reasonably urbane univeristy professor as well. I am a tender and considerate husband, but a merciless opponent to those who attempt to harm to me or mine. I am an occasional misanthrope who donates to charities. (I am the wonderchicken!) I am a multitude, integrated better on some days than others.

Am I displaying less 'integrity', in the sense that I think AKMA is using it, when one of those people that is me is temporarily to the fore, as opposed to another? For some people who know me there is more continuity, for example, in the 'stavrosthewonderchicken' persona, which first appeared on Metafilter in November 2000, than there is in the 'Real Me', the corporeal one, which has lived here in Korea since August 2001.

Are these two people identical? No, not precisely. But then, none of the 'souls' swarming within me are coterminous at all points, either. There is overlap, there are spiky bits that stick out and poke you in the eye, if you're not careful.

The question becomes : is the 'wonderchicken' subsumed within the 'real me', and if so, which 'me', or vice-versa? Or is stavros just another of the continuous, predictable, real elements of myself, the one which is my primary interface to the web, in the same way that ProfessorMan is my primary interface to the world at work, and AngryGuy is my primary interface with people who try to f--k with me?

The next question that pops up is : does the fact that I do not use the name that I was given by my parents, in my writing here and elsewhere make me 'anonymous' for the purposes of my interactions with people on the internet, in any real sense?

I don't feel that it does. Although AKMA is right to suggest that "we may want to take a few minutes to ponder whether pseudonymity doesn’t involve ethical hazards that we conceal when we take them for granted," and to observe that pseudonymity opens a door for "the malevolent blogger who uses pseudonymity as a device for trolling, flaming, baiting, and generally propounding outrageously offensive codswallop†", I suggest that these behaviours, like any others, would through their continuity over time lead to an 'identity' every bit as valid as the one that the Evil Blogger used in his or her real, corporeal, life.

Of course no one would be listening by then. If an Evil Pseudonymous Blogger blogs on a website and there's no one around to read it, does it still make a sound?

† I'd just like to mention that I love the word codswallop. It sounds so dirty...

2:28 AM | 1 Comment

An interesting recent discussion at MeFi. The last few days have been good, there. My favorite comment from the thread, courtesy of vacapinta :

6:50 PM

[A Lucid Dreaming FAQ] [Another][Dreaming and Reality][kuro5hin - Hacking Your Wetware][Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep][Dream Yoga][A Buddhist Perspective on Lucid Dreaming][More]

4:17 AM | 1 Comment

When the movie Wayne's World was released in Latin America, a lot of the film's American idiom and idiosyncratic language didn't translate well, if at all. As a result, many of the phrases and expressions were translated into something very different in the subtitles or dubbing.

For example, when Wayne exclaimed (much to my amusement, which is a shame with which I must forever deal) "Shyaaa! And monkeys might fly out of my butt!" it got changed to, "Yes, when Judgment Day comes," or "Si, cuándo llegue el día del juicio."

What I don't get is why it was felt that Spanish speakers would find the image of monkeys flying from someone's butt any less comprehensible or immediately interpretable as indicating a highly unlikely event than Anglophones would. I'm enormously curious now about how that phrase got translated in other languages when the movie was released elsewhere.

Most amusing, as really dumb things frequently are.

10:00 PM | 10 comments

Cory uses the phrase 'mind-croggling' to describe Ray Kurzweil's writing. I've used the phrase repeatedly over the years. It appears all over the web. But it's not Real English. Of course, that's never stopped me before.

Will 'mind-croggling' eventually become a part of the language, or can it be argued that it already is?

The first time I recall ever seeing the phrase was in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy books. I suspect he just made it up, on the fly, as a natural descriptor for the next step beyond being boggled.

I remember with great pleasure sitting on the beach beside the cold cold lake one summer, out back of the house, in my hometown, reading and re-reading a copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide, laughing out loud. One of the first long pieces of writing I ever did, back in my early teens, was in emulation of the gymnastic language and unbridled silliness of the Guide. I've gone back to those books every couple of years since, and they're still dear to my heart.

I loved that Douglas Adams. He had a huge influence in molding the WonderChickonian sense of humour. I guess that he might have preferred more substantial legacies than these, but maybe they'll do just fine.

1:30 AM | 5 comments

I just had a brainfart, and wondered how many warblogs are actually written by employees of the Office Of Strategic Mind Control as sub rosa propaganda tools.

Has my natural predilection for paranoia gone over the top this time? Are the American propaganda machines really that clever? Are they just the bumbling-halfwits-that-always-seem-to-get-away-with-it, Gilligan-stylee? Or something else entirely, something less reassuring to believe?

You tell me.

5:00 AM | 9 comments

There's a strange eerie silence out on the wires tonight. It feels like the hush before Something Big happens - it feels like the brief interregnum of silence between the doctor's slap on the ass and the first juddery indrawn breath and full-throat wail. It feels like the puff of air that precedes the flash flood. It smells like blood, and piss, and it scares the hell out of me.

Then again, it could just be that slightly elderly spaghetti sauce I had at dinner coming back on me.

3:10 AM | 1 Comment

[more...]

I'm not sure I agree with Mr Odlyzko, entirely, but that may only be a matter of semantics. My feverdream defense of 'content' a couple of days ago took as its launchpad an understanding of the word that is broader than the one Mr Odlyzko uses (and in some ways is actually diametrically opposed to it, but that's a side-issue, I think). Blogs as open letters, as content rather than Content....

One of the things Mr Odlyzko is saying is that the internet is not a broadcast medium. As obviously wrong as it seems, thinking it is was one of the core dumbass mistakes that businesses were making before the bubble burst, one of the dumbass mistakes that's still being made. AOLTimeWarner indeed. LOLTimeWarner, maybe. (Ba-dump dump tish! Thank you, you've been a great audience. I'll be here until Thursday!)

One-to-oneness is where value (questions there are aplently about the word 'value', too) lies, more than one-to-manyness (Mr O talks about letters and newspapers, about email and the web). The bridge between the two concepts is (ta-daaa!) the weblog, of course. It's not email, but it shares much of the intensely personal nature nature of correspondence. It's not 'Content', at least not in the way that Big Media regards it, as a 'non-recoverable expense'. But it is true that blogspace contains some of the most compelling writing and imagery and pure fun that's available on the internet or elsewhere, 'content' that's constantly renewed by the passions of thousands of individuals singing their individual songs for the pure joy of the singing, and for the comradeship that comes from finding people who hear similar music in their heads...

This message of Mr O's reminds me very much of the sort of thing that a certain Mr Locke (quoted recently here: "You can broaden the pipe as far as you want, but if everybody can play, it's not broadcast any more. There isn't that control of the passes. The channel is out of control and that makes it a different game...") and his cohort of merry cluesters have been saying for a while, and are still saying.

I like it when things come together like that.

1:26 AM

[via AccordionGuy]

From 'The Philosopher's Magazine on the Internet', it's Battleground God! Give it a whirl. Just don't do it after a few beers, like your humble host. That was a bad, bad idea.

The instructions - "the aim of the activity is not to judge whether these answers are correct or not. Our battleground is that of rational consistency" - threw me off a bit, dammit. I think this may be why after a couple of years of university philosophy, I deemed it all a big wank, and henceforth focussed with laser-like intensity on holding forth from barstools. More fun than parsing out logic, 'twas, by golly.

Regardless, an amusing diversion. Enjoy.

1:03 AM | 3 comments

As someone who received 4 years of intense training in mathematics, precisely none of which he is able to recall, I am aware that raw numbers like these are sometimes deceptive. I have not verified these numbers. Nonetheless, I will put a few here, and I suppose if you are so inclined, you can go and have a look at their source, and draw your own conclusions.

Forgive if I don't burst into spontaneous songs of praise, OK?

[link via abuddhasmemes]

5:29 AM | 31 comments

Learn something every day : the number 420 is freighted with significance for dope smokers.

I've always been aware of pervasive networks of signals and signs, not conspiracies or the illuminati or anything of the kind, mind you, just a background hum of information being passed between people who know how to decode that information, on the streets and in the bars, everywhere. Communication indecipherable, silent, to those who don't know of its existence. These things have always fascinated me, I think because I've always enjoyed experimenting with personas, talking to people from other tribes and taking on protective colouring that exploits those secret signs and passwords. When someone thinks you share at least some elements of the secret language of their tribe, they open up to you in a way they cannot do when you're the outsider. It's a way to learn more about people, and something I've always instinctively done.

This 420 stuff is an example of that context-hijacking dialogue that goes on constantly under the noses of the uninitiated. Fascinating stuff.

12:20 AM | 4 comments

This latest semi-coherent rambling comes in response to the comments at BurningBird's place here, and some comments made by AKMA here. I apologize if it is facile - I just wanted to get some partly-formed ideas off my chest.

In the comments at 'Bird's place, Mike Golby mentions something about Mike Sanders redubbing 'warbloggers' 'lifebloggers'. I couldn't find any reference to this phrase at Mike Sanders' blog, so I won't pursue the dissonance of that equivalence (*ting* the tiny echoes of the phrase 'moral equivalence' might now be playing about your mental shell-likes) any further. It may have just been a brainfart on Mike Golby's part. (But if a warblogger is somehow a 'lifeblogger', then mark me down as a deathblogger. Tangentially, does anyone else notice the slow shift of the meaning of the neologism 'warblogger' to mean a blogger who supports and cheerleads military killing, by someone or anyone, rather than just someone whose main topic of blogging is things to do with the current American War on Terra? Or maybe that's just me...)

I don't say 'deathblogger' simply to be contrarian, though such is my tendency. I regard death as less of a Nemesis than many, for reasons stemming from experiences in my young life rather than religious faith, and I do think that some large component of the irrational, deeply-felt response people have to things like the current sh-tstorm over in the eastern mediterranean comes directly from a horror and fear of Death. Isn't that odd?

Apologies to AKMA may be in order, but : if these people, in the middle east and Ireland and elsewhere, who are killing one another as much because of their religious beliefs as mundane matters of territory and bloody revenge, if they are indeed so devout...well, it strikes me then that their respective religions teach them that their bloodthirsty righteousness will be rewarded in an afterlife of some kind, no?

AKMA says :

This may indeed be the case, but it seems to me in practice that the 'thou shalt not kill' edict has often been, and still is relaxed, by the man (and woman) on the street, is it not, when it comes to killing in the name of God? Leaders both religious and secular invoke the name of whichever almighty they imagine to be their benefactor, to strike down the enemy, to lend strength to their killers out on the bloody plain. The people who listen to these leaders take up their guns and cudgels secure in the knowledge that smashing the skulls of their enemies or putting bullets through their hearts are actions mandated and approved by their deity and his representatives on Earth. We're talking about the reality of belief here, not the ideal. I assume this is somehow mystically reconciled in their minds with the 'God is Love' mantra of more peaceful times - call it Tough Love, I guess.

I say this not to ridicule Christian belief. I find the metaphors embedded in the faith, as in others, to be rich and rewarding. Though countless lives have been lost in the name of God and Christ, Mohammed and Allah, countless deeds of mercy and kindness have been performed, as well.

But back to the Fear of Death. I've always thought it odd, and it's always been one of the things that I couldn't really get my head around, when it came to Christianity : it seems hard for a devout Christian to justify anything other than feelings of joy when a presumably heaven-bound relative makes the Big Swan Dive into the abyss. There's self-pity, of course, or fear for a more lonely, or poorer, future here amongst the living. These grief-triggers I understand. But I have a little difficulty understanding grief unleavened with what should be happiness for the deceased, for the spirit drawn unto the bosom of the Lord, among the devout.

The ritual wailing and moaning, the tearing out of hair, the sackcloth and ashes that some cultures indulge in as a ritual response to death : these, I understand, too, as catharsis, as closure. Ritual response to events of great magnitude in our lives help us to cope with those events without thinking too much about them, and help to incorporate those events in the fabric of our community.

I catch a scent of the ritual response to death in the response to the killing in the Middle East at the moment.

There is, as always, division into camps amongst the not-very-clever : Side A is right! No, you bastard, Side B is right! Amongst others, there is a weary acceptance that both warring sides are right, and amongst a subgroup of those, an awareness that both sides are also equally wrong. But even within this camp, there are those who call for warfare and those who call for 'peace'. There are also a large number who, through laziness or bodhisattva-like equanimity, through utter misanthropy or through dirt-stick-stone stupidity, via 'good' or 'evil' intention, modulate their outrage, or accept what is as inevitable and thus good.

There are some who believe that the raging, naked ape in us will keep the tribes at each other's throats for a good long time, if not until the last of our species stands over the lifeless body of the unlucky penultimate one, triumphant. There are some who would welcome 'peace', who would work for it each day of their lives, who are also certain that it is a chimera.

There are those who see the arguments among the observers as fractal, self-similar meta-examples of the bloodletting amongst the combatants, and grow more pessimistic about there ever being an end to warfare.

The question is this, perhaps : whether a life spent working for this idea of 'peace', always aware that such a goal may never be reached, in one's own lifetime or beyond, is a life well-spent.

7:35 PM | 4 comments

This is tacking much closer into the Sargasso Seas of blogly circle-jerking (from which few emerge!) than I usually like to venture, but : Tom Matrullo deftly and pyrotechnically weaves my post about an oceanic metaphor for the web, which was mostly just a late evening braindump while drinking beer, into a tapestry much deeper and more vital than I could have anticipated. My thanks to him, and to Jeneane and Jonathon also, for taking my thoughts a little further, and helping me better understand this crap that seems to emerge sometimes, unbidden, when I put hands to keyboard.

3:15 AM

Famous last words : In the spirit of refusing to get involved (as I have nothing to add) in all the gonads and strife floating around lately (eek! floating gonads!), and striving for a laugh or two, I present to you the dying words of two great poets :

I can but hope, in my terminal moments, as I lie (-in a feather bed, on pure white linen, surrounded by my loved ones / drunk and drooling, unnoticed on a barroom floor, in a puddle of my own urine-) that I can come up with a legacy for the world as touching, as illuminating, as perfectly revealing of the deeper nature of our existence on this planet.

[via this amusing Metafilter thread]

Your famous last words? comments.

6:18 PM

Jeff at Visible Darkness led me through to this piece about the Dark Side of Blogging. (Insert "Use the blog, Luke!" and related unfunniness here) Questions about how marvellous and whiz-bang this new medium really is, and indeed how "stupid and repellent, sometimes crypto-genocidal" some warblogs can be, for example. Pushing back against utopian paeans to the organic growth of communities that even I, surly wonderchicken, have been guilty of propagating :

My only addition at this point is to tangentially woolgather : is it only a matter of time until Hollywood starts regularly hiring hundreds of blogtemps to fire up new weblogs, post furiously and praise to the skies the latest piece of crap opus by Jerry Bruckheimer or some other purveyor of soul-destroying cinematic garbage, interlink to themselves and a few 'a-listers', start offering large cash incentives to Kottke and Rageboy and other high-traffic blognodes to link back to the rent-a-bloggers, and watch the Google rank for their new Product soar? Or record companies to promote their wares? Or governments? Are recent, highly-successful experiments in spiking the GooglePunch like the recent one by Matt Haughey the tip of the iceberg? How soon before big business catches on, before the Office of Strategic Mind Control realizes the subtle power (if they haven't already) of the interconnectedness of blogs and begins working blogspace like the infopimps they strive to be? Before this 'place', too, becomes branded and corporatized? (Forget the stone-knives-and-bearskins, bandwidth-wasting crudity of banner ads - savvy marketers will work the medium, pimp the actual hyperlinks, and tickle Google till it quivers, moans, and page-ranks, gratefully. Linkwhoring could become a serious business. Perhaps we could form a mafia, a Blogga Nostra, and skim a little of that corporate cream off the top, broker linkage deals, extort flame-protection money.)

Of course it may become moot, if Google fine-tunes their page ranking system for blogs. For now, though, please hold my hand. I'm a little scared.

(Edit : I see that Doc talked about this, recently, grumpily, kinda. Whoops.)

This blog entry has been brought to you by the new film from Tom Green : "Somebody Kill Me Now". In theatres next week! comments.

7:57 PM

There was a point, not long after I finished university, and spent 10 months or so holding forth nightly, Ouzo-and-water in hand, for the entertainment of the patrons on the porch of Stavros' Irish Bar in Mykonos, Greece (where I spent some time writing software for a small hotel and making sure that the owner's VIP gun-running buddies and their mistresses had clean sheets and plentiful champagne) that I stopped thinking that I actually had anything to say. Or that there was any point actually saying it to anyone. Well, not exactly that, perhaps - I made a deliberate decision to Stop Thinking So Goddamn Much. I think it had something to do with the fact that the other straight guys (of whom there weren't really that many on Mykonos during the Season) were by and large not the Thinking Type, and it seemed to me that they were perenially achieving much more demonstrably significant levels of romantic success with the Swedish stewardesses, French public servants, and other maddeningly delightful examples of European femininity that constantly littered the beaches and bars, confident of their hetero groovethings amidst the heaving seas of Mykonian man-on-man action.

Ka-chunk - spurious causal connection made : reduce cerebration, increase fornication. But with my regularly scheduled rocket-fuel rants on the porch of Stavros' place on the nature of life, the universe, or why the hell the Man in The Moon scared the sh-t out of me so badly, and my almost complete lack of wonderchicken-booty shaking disco action, the young ladies I tended to attract, if any, were more of the cerebral variety, who, without putting too fine a point on it, tended to be less carnally-inclined. Or English, which was worse. At least that's how it seemed to me, sad, mad, alcohol-soaked bastard that I was. My tendency after a certain point in the evening to stagger over to the bar and do stately (if somewhat legless) sirtaki dances with portly, 50 year old Stavros put even them off. Stavros always had one or two young women under his arm, a fact looked upon with an amazing lack of remonstration by Effi, his long-suffering wife. Didn't do me any damn good, regardless.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah : there was a whole nexus of things that made me turn from the life of the mind ("I will show you the Life of The Mind!") to a life lived in the moment. Not that I stopped reading, or thinking, or even talking massive quantities of sh-t to my friends while drinking beside bodies of water and trying to figure it all out, during my twenties and early thirties. But I did consciously do a trade-in of introspection, bookishness, and analysis for random danger, booze and swashbuckling, and spent the balance received on plane tickets to wherever it might be, eyes closed, that my index finger landed on a world map. And I'll tell you, my friends, I had one hell of a ride.

All of this, in sub-Mike Golby-long-story-long fashion, is meant to leave a minotaur-fearing trail of crumbs to the point of this post : I don't feel as if I have much to say today. Or for the last week, really.

'Cause sometimes the habits of a decade and more well up, lapping gently around my brainpan, and I find myself saying to myself, as of old, "f--k it. Crack a beer, sing a song. Let the accountants fritter away their lives on the details."

But blogging has been good for me, I suppose, and though I find myself logging into Blogger, ready to say : "Well, I'm tapped out. Go read Jonathon or Mike or Tom or Shelley (except she's also tapped out at the moment) or any of the other fine and fascinating folks in the neighbourhood," well, here I am, a long-ass post later, and I've ended end up talking about Swedish Stewardesses (oh dear lord, the Swedish stewardesses), and had an enjoyable time doing so.

That, from where I'm sitting, is a Good Thing. I hope you agree, gentle reader, but if not, well, the hell with ya.

(Oh, and the 'Me Tarzan, You Jane' stuff? Didn't work worth a damn. You just can't fake being good-lookin' and dumb as a post. Live and learn.)

Well, I was young, OK? comments.

4:24 AM

"Worldwide interstimulating inscription" : Who will be the executor of your e-state, the beneficiaries of your last blog and testament? If I kark it tomorrow (which is never outside the realm of possibility), of my few and meagre works in this life, these bits and bytes right here might well remain the longest. Maybe I should install that Dead Man's Switch after all, and rig up a script to make the bastard launch a Terminal Comments Thread, where my dearly beloved could hold a virtual wake, trash the place and pelt me with rocks and garbage one last time.

That's a little morbid, perhaps, but it is interesting to think that thanks to things like archive.org and the mighty GoogleBeast, our children and theirs and so on in serried ranks into the future will be able to experience the textual voices of their long-dead ancestors, us, and read about the minutiae of their lives, their thoughts, and the truth about which f--king member of Radiohead they apparently resembled thanks to yet another online quiz. I wish I were able to read the journals kept by my grandparents, or my father, when they were young (and alive), and learn what made them tick. They might be disappointingly puerile, but on the other hand, they might not.

It's a mind-buggering world we're building. There are big bobbing icebergs of implication to all this technology floating around out here, and I for one am still bashing my head against them on a regular basis.

Ouch! f--ktacular. Just did it again.

Eulogize! comments.

1:26 AM

There is no way I could say it better. Joseph Campbell, from Thou Art That : Transforming Religious Metaphor :

Comments? comments.

5:18 AM

Buddhist tradition calls this samvega :

[via a rather disappointing thread at Metafilter]

4:58 AM

This is perfect. According to the BBC News, South Korea wasted more food last year than the total amount of food available in North Korea. And it's not by any means a surprise, to me at least. I've noted a few times to my waeguk-in coworkers at my university in the faculty cafeteria that the sheer quantity of uneaten food scraped off the socketed plastic buffet-trays is staggering. I've thought it was odd that we three Canadians tend to scrupulously clean our plates, despite the fact that we all grew up in more-or-less affluent, middle-class backgrounds.

Post-modern Ironic Self-Referential Rockin' Musical Interlude (courtesy of Ben Folds)

Y'all don't know what it's like
Being male, middle-class and white
Repeat X 4

It gets me real pissed off, it makes me wanna say
Repeat X 3
f--k!

Conclusion of Musical Interlude.

Meanwhile, it seems as if most of the Korean teachers and staff habitually take much more than they can eat, and blithely scrape the uneaten excess into the hole in the dish-table. Elbow elbow, wrist wrist. With the famine in the North, and poverty only a generation or two in the past for many people, I thought it odd. Perhaps it can be explained by conspicuous-consumption boasting : "I'm rich enough to waste food - look!". I don't know.

(I've always wondered with a shudder if Korean restaurants recycle the leftovers from those dozen half-eaten side-dishes of which they are so proud, knowing deep in my heart that the answer is probably 'yes', once they've fished out the cigarette butts.)

What I do know is that Korea is nuts-deep deep into the terminal nightmare of consumer society - disposable, convenient, one-use-only, individually-wrapped, chrome-plated and dying of cancer choking on the factory smoke, lost in the middle of vast grey concrete plains littered with trash. Not enough room, too many people, too many cars, too much of everything except tranquillity and quiet contemplation, and the Faustian trade-offs that were made in the past few decades are coming back to bite them in the ass. Screaming for a bigger piece of the pie, possessed by a crippling obsession with the appearance of affluence, with appearance over substance in general. The sentimental tears shed over the televised temporary reunions of families separated by war for half a century dry up pretty goddamned fast when it comes to giving up your own hard-won wealth and comforts.

And this, at root, is why most Koreans dream of reunification deep in their hearts, but do not for a second want it to happen up in their minds, at least not anytime soon. The lessons of German reunification are not lost on people, and if there were a chance that the slowly recovering economy were to be derailed again, if there were the remotest possibility that I might suffer in the short term, says Mr Kim, well, no thanks. If it's not said in so many words, not something that is even consciously thought, what it still amounts to is : Let 'em starve. [thanks Lia!]

Cake? What the hell's that? comments.

2:21 AM

I'd just like to say that even though I try to avoid being a 'joiner' and the whole deliberate-meme-propagation exercise tires me and (as those wacky kids are saying these days) chafes my scrote, I am entirely behind Rageboy's 'f--knozzle' mission. The Register would rightly claim that RB is just doing some more self-promotion here, but even his blatant, throwaway self-promotion tends to be a hell of a lot of fun, so why not? At least he's back in fine form.

I am all for crude and offensive neologisms. I myself have often blurted such double-take-inducing gems of negativity as 'f--ktacular', 'f--knuckle', 'f--keriffic' and 'f--ksicle' in my always-erudite spoken discourse (to which my erstwhile workmates at OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet.com will gladly attest), and I warmly encourage creative obscenity. If you lean towards the profane anyway, why not have some fun with it, huh?

Edit : Waaahahahahaha hee hoooooooooo *hic* heheh. It may be an old Regular Expression Cowboy geekjoke, but it's a funny one, dammit.

Cry havoc and let slip the f--knozzles of war! comments.

9:17 PM

Meta-comments? comments.

5:43 AM

The Disinfo dossier on Canadian John Ralston Saul is a pleasant find, for me. Saul's Voltaire's Bastards, The Unconscious Civilization and Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century all had profound influence on the way I thought about ...stuff... in my 20s, and are intricately woven into the way I think about the world today (rants like the one below notwithstanding). [via wood s lot] "Recently Saul has been feeling the heat of the Canadian political landscape: he is the husband of the current Governor General of Canada. Saul has been intensely criticized for his newest book On Equilibrium (New York: The Free Press, 2002), in which Saul contends that the West must assume some responsibility for the motivations behind the 9/11 attacks."

Saul's thoughts on globalization and democracy from a talk he gave in Australia in 1999 are very much worth reading (and listening to), as well.

Comments? comments.

8:27 AM | 1 Comment

1:51 AM