Blog to Self

Thoughts on Michael Jackson (sort of, eventually): So Long

2009-07-25T23:44:00.009-05:00

I was travelling recently, and didn't have time before leaving to put music on my MP3 player. Actually I realized right before I had to go that I had deleted the software that my MP3 player came with (while clearing memory to defrag my hard drive), and then discovered that I couldn't use iTunes to add some recently acquired music to my MP3 player. (As a librarian specializing in music, video, and web 2.0 stuff, I should know/foresee these things, but I lose patience with it in managing my own music, so it's stayed fuzzy in my mind. All I know for sure is that it's complicated. I was using iTunes by default, even though I don't like it, because I decided not to buy the Media Monkey software that I had been using, and now I think I will, since the Yahoo Music thing I had tried before was also annoying me with some weirdness relating to DRM I think. The whole fact that this is such an issue at all gives me a headache.)

Anyway, the main point is that I took some blank discs since I knew I wanted to burn copies of the new music I had acquired recently. One was Belle and Sebastian's "Dear Catastrophe Waitress." Another was Michael Jackson's "Thriller." But mainly I wanted to burn the Belle and Sebastian. So there I am in the Detroit airport burning a disc on my laptop. I was in a little bit of a hurry since I had only just enough time before I had to board my connecting flight to burn the disc on my old laptop. Somehow when creating a play list to burn, I included some things I didn't intend along with the Belle and Sebastian. So I ended up with a disc (basically for use in my car) that opens with Simon and Garfunkel's tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright, "So Long," followed by the whole of Belle and Sebastian's "Dear Catastrophe Waitress, " capped off by Michael Jackson's "Baby Be Mine" from "Thriller."

Which brings me to the whole point of this post. When listening to the disc in the car, then, later in the week, the disc came to an end, and then replayed, with the result that immediately after the infectious Michael Jackson song, I heard Paul Simon singing "So Long":

So long, Frank Lloyd Wright
I can't believe your song is gone so soon.
I barely learned the tune

This seemed a very fitting bit of synchronous happenstance. To me the spirit of the song was touchingly appropriate to the memory of Michael Jackson in spite of the asynchronous elements. The lines above, certainly. Even "I barely learned the tune," apparently ridiculous given the familiarity of Jackson's many hits, I think is appropriate, since Jackson's public identity was so fraught with sensationalism, scandal, and an air of unreality. Who would Jackson have become if he had had a more normal childhood, or managed to grow up more fully, before being subjected to the degree of overwhelming success he achieved very early in his life? Did we really "learn the tune" of who he was?

The "talk of the town" suggests that Jackson's downfall was prescription drug-related, and it seems all too likely. The sadness this brings to me, as a partial explanation of such a tragic end, seems well expressed by this wonderful bit of songwriting.

So long
So long

Lovely Lieder, Leontyne

2009-03-16T12:55:00.004-05:00

There was a fascinating piece on the radio about a new musical production based on Langston Hughes poem/book Ask Your Mama starring Jessye Norman. I wrote about Langston Hughes for a high school report once and in the process discovered a beautiful copy of this book in the Worcester Public Library.

I thought the radio piece was toned down a bit. The work has a lot of anger in it. A section called "Cultural Exchange" was reused as part of "The Panther and the Lash." The most memorable bits of the poem for me came out of the following, from that section:

IN THE
IN THE QUARTER
IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES
WHERE THE DOORS ARE DOORS OF PAPER
DUST OF DINGY ATOMS
BLOWS A SCRATCHY SOUND.
AMORPHOUS JACK-O'-LANTERNS CAPER
AND THE WIND WON'T WAIT FOR MIDNIGHT
FOR FUN TO BLOW DOORS DOWN.

...

IN THE POST BEHIND THE
PAPER DOOS WHAT'S COOKING?
WHAT'S SMELLING, LEONTYNE?
LIEDER, LOVELY LIEDER
AND A LEAF OF COLLARD GREEN
LOVELY LIEDER, LEONTYNE.

...

YOU KNOW, RIGHT AT CHRISTMAS
THEY ASKED ME IF MY BLACKNESS,
WOULD IT RUB OFF?

I SAID, ASK YOUR MAMA.

The website for the event at Carnegie Hall tonight is pretty impressive with an elaborate flash introduction, and portrays more of the edginess of the original than the radio piece, in my (very humble) opinion.

Language of the Mid-West:

2009-02-13T11:53:00.002-05:00

It's a regional 'deal'

I notice that there are some subtle (and some not-so-subtle) differences in speech patterns here in Kansas:

On KMUW, Wichita's public radio station, when they give the temperature during the weather, they say that Wichita 'has' 56 degrees. Dodge City 'has' 39 degrees. If I remember correctly (I wanted to go online and listen to verify this but I just don't have the time), in Albany they would say that "It's 29 degrees in Albany, 26 in Saratoga," etc. (Actually when Mike Landon gave the weather I would have to stop what I was doing to marvel at how much information he gets into a "short" weather update, only to find at the end of it that the info that applied to me, about Albany precisely, completely eluded me -- I was left not knowing how many degrees Albany had, what temperature it was.
The name 'Arkansas" is pronounced differently within the state of Kansas than it is outher places -- like Arkansas, and the rest of the country. Here they say "AR'-KAN-ZUS", with the emphasis on the first syllable, so it sounds like "Our Kansas." The Arkansas river [Wikimedia Commons map via Wikipedia] goes through the center of Wichita, from north to south. (There's also an Arkansas Street.) Where it starts in Colorado, it's the 'AR-KIN-SAW' river. Then it's the "Our Kansas" River when it crosses the state line. When it gets to Oklahoma, it quickly (and sheepishly?) changes back to 'AR-KIN-SAW' in plenty of time before it crosses into the state with the same name, where they definitely do not say "Our Kansas River".
People use the word 'deal' here in much the same way people generally use the word 'stuff'. This is not unique, but I noticed it because of how often I hear it here. E.g.: "They got one of those social networking deals, where you can post pictures and annoy you friends with useless viral apps, and stuff."
People say "Y'all" sometimes here.

OK so #3 wasn't so interesting maybe. Does this post qualify me for "bonafide nerd"? It occurs to me that the significance of #1 is that it takes less time to say "It's 34 in Chicago, 46 in St. Louis." than it does to say "Chicago has 34 degrees, St. Louis 46." Or maybe it just seems like more of a short-hand. The "has" construct does seem (to me) to be the technically more accurate or plain-speaking way to put it -- though of course neither is "wrong" I suppose. It's just, y'all talk faster back East -- Generally speaking, dontcha know.

Origins of the Religious Right

2008-12-10T23:38:00.005-05:00

A friend writes:

The following link is quite interesting:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5502785

Both the radio segment and the book excerpt are enlightening.

The religious right coalesced not to fight Roe V. Wade but to fight IRS attempts to remove tax exempt status from reactionary schools that discriminated openly on the basis of race.

The link features an extended except from Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America by Randall Balmer. [Didn't listen to the radio segment due to technical difficulties. Arrgh.]

Thomas Merton, Diane Rehm...and Auden. again

2008-12-10T22:14:00.004-05:00

I caught part of the 2nd half of the Diane Rehm show today and it makes me want to read some Thomas Merton -- a name I have heard many times; but I never read his books.

The segment is about a new book (and film) about Merton. Here's the link if you want to listen to it:
Morgan Atkinson: "Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton" (DeChant Hughes)
I hadn't heard of Diane Rehm while living in Albany (though I noticed that WAMC now airs it on their HD2 (digital radio) broadcast. --Gotta get me one of those. Been hearing about it on my new local public radio station, KMUW.)

I do not consider myself a Christian, but I have serious respect for anyone who finds spirituality in religion of any kind (that's an vague turn of phrase but I don't know how else to say it briefly). I was raised as a Christian, and you could say that I try to live according to what I understand to be Christian values and principles. But I have been more inspired in my search for spirituality (meaning or purpose of life, higher truth) by Buddhism, though even in that sphere I fall short of actually calling myself a Buddhist. Neither am I an atheist. I like to call myself an agnostic (the Buddha was an agnostic in regard to the Hindu God(s) of his time), but I if pressed I have been known to admit to a belief in a well, let's call it a higher power. 'God' has too much baggage for me I guess (too much baggage to carry?) But I digress.

I think I had some idea that Merton was interested in Buddhism, but I didn't know that he was --well, a contemporary of W.H. Auden's in that he was also part of an intellectual trend towards Catholicism in the 1930s. (With, I believe, a disillusionment with Communism.) Auden is, I daresay, one of my intellectual heroes. I'm not that interested in his poetry as such. I just like his mind -- the Dyer's Hand esp.* -- but I digress) So this Merton character is pretty fascinating. Apparently, before his embrace of a monastic life, he was kind of a hedonist and ladies' man.

*[1st result of a Google search for "dyer's hand auden"]

Early Chicago Memory (before the trouble started)

2008-11-26T01:07:00.000-05:00

I laughed loudly just now when I remembered the time when I had my very first job (of very few) as a waiter. It was a fine-dining type of place way out on the northwest side of Chicago run by a young Polish couple. I had taken a year off from college. They hired me knowing I was inexperienced but trusting that I would learn quickly as I went along--being the smart, worldly young man of the world that I was. It was a pretty nice seafood restaurant, and they had some kinds of fish I had never heard of. So on my second day I had the opportunity to inform one of the regulars (very sincerely, and innocently) that the special of the day was "orange roughly."

That was a lunch shift. The first time I worked an evening (not long after that) they ran a special of all-you-can-eat crab legs, advertised in the Chicago Reader. I was the only waiter, and besides me there was only the 'matron' of the house, who tended bar, and the chef. High-jinks ensued. I couldn't tell you how many tables were going at once -- it's all a blur. Definitely in the double digits. Some customers waited 45 min (or 1 hr 1/2?) for 'refills' of the all-you-can-eat crab legs. I must have gotten more than a little panicky and excited -- OK I was freaking out. I must have gotten impatient for orders in the back. The chef, a short, stocky Mexican, shook his knife at me: "DON'T YOU EVER RAISE YOUR VOICE TO ME IN MY KITCHEN!"...

Myself, I prefer orange gently.

Feminism, Culture Wars -- and Civil Comments on Constructive Critical Commentary

2008-09-16T22:13:00.007-05:00

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon had a great post recently which caught my attention in part because she quotes an article which refers to Thomas Frank's Whats the Matter with Kansas? (which I never read. I own One Market Under God but haven't read it either -apparently he has a new one too). Anyway, she discusses an article on Salon.com that references Franks' argument about the republican strategy of using the three Gs (God, Guns, and Gays) to lure "Joe sixpack" to vote republican. (Basically the Salon article, by Gary Kamiya, is "about how McCain is reviving the culture war with Sarah Palin," by tapping into resentment of social change blamed on those elite, uppity liberals.)

Marcotte doesn't disagree with either Kamiya or Frank, except iona fine point -- namely, she wants to take a closer look at the three G's and "the tensions...underlying them":

“Guns” is a code word that has both aspects of anxious masculinity and racism in it---gun fetishists imagine themselves holed up protecting their female property from hoardes of grabby non-white men.

It gets better from there, as she explains the sexism at the root of homophobia, and how both can be seen as economic issues:

So much of the nostalgia for the mythical 50s is a belief that things were just better when women provided a disempowered, unpaid labor force.
...
When conservatives say that gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage, I suspect what they mean is that de-gendered marriage will start giving women more ideas about what marriage could look like between equals.
...
Get ‘em married early by making childbirth mandatory, putting women in a position where they have to marry. And make sure those marriages stay unequal by barring people from it who have a different model of marriage entirely.

...And this agenda is being underscored by Palin -- maddeningly. Worth reading the whole thing.

PS - A friend says I did good with picture blogging before (not a comment on what I'm doing recently, but I heard it that way). So here's the Arkansas River today, from my phone:

potitics shmolotics

2008-09-14T21:26:00.005-05:00

I have been looking again at some of the political blogs I had subscribed to via RSS (on Google Reader) for a while now, but stopped following due to information overload and the job search. One of them is a liberal feminist sort of thing called Pandagon -- an odd name that doesn't quite trip off the tongue, but memorable in its way. It's a professional blog, so the writers/owners make money from the ads on it. I really don't like the "secondary sidebar" full of ads to the left of the main content on the page. It's extremely obtrusive. Fortunately, I can 'filter' the ads by reading it on my aggregator/reader.

Anyway, a recent post called The beginning of the decline of McCain is interesting (in part, to me) because it manages to pay tribute to David Foster Wallace while linking to a This American Life broadcast (on the 2000 presidential primaries in South Carolina, featuring Wallace) as well as making me feel better about how the presidential campaign has been going lately (even more than the image/idea of Hillary as the Palinator courtesy of Ann Atlhouse). I'm a big fan of This American Life, and of the little I've read of David Foster Wallace, in re: there was an impressive "book review" of the new edition of the American Heritage Dictionary in Harper's awhile back that was rather mesmerizing.

While I'm getting into political blog territory (I wrote "bog" instead of blog, which is apt), here is another I'm really liking these days, currently with comforting graphic on the relative effects of McCain's and Obama's tax plans: A Tale of Two Graphics. This is Obsidian Wings, mostly by someone under the pseudonym 'hilzoy' who I gather is a female philosophy professor. Curious about her real identity, I tried to find it on Google just now, but couldn't. Apparently it is findable, but she prefers to remain anonymous in part because she teaches and would rather her political writing online not well, get in the way of her teaching. An admirable wish. So I leave it at that, though I discovered she guest blogs/commentates on "real" news sites like CBS News.

Important stuff probably

2008-09-08T22:24:00.002-05:00

from librarian.net by jessamyn:

thinky paper about facebook and privacy and the law

This will end this brief flurry of posts pointing to other people's blogs I have yet to read, and insist that others do so first. Let me know what you think. (or don't, but please respond if anyone is reading this!........ ;-P )

better* article on info overload

2008-09-08T22:11:00.004-05:00

Here is another article on information overload from Sarah Houghton-Jan, author of the fine library blog LibrarianInBlack:

"Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload."

from the online journal Ariadne.

*"better" for me because I am a librarian and so is the author

An extended excerpt from "4. Interruptive Technology Overload Techniques":

Use Interruptive Technology When Appropriate
IM, pages, and text messages are useful for short and immediate-need conversations, not for lengthy interactions or those with key emotional content. Moreover, do not use interruptive technology when you do not want a potential permanent record of your conversation.

Check When You Want to
Do not feel pressured to check your messages constantly. Set aside certain times of the day when you will check your messages. Post these times as events on your calendar, with a reminder, if that will help you stick to the schedule.

Do Not Interrupt Yourself
Do not interrupt one type of information inwards (like a meeting, conference call, or phone call) with one of these interruptive technologies. Give your attention to the task at hand and deal with other interactions later.

Yeehaw! She makes too much sense, no?

Hello again -- [links] on rednecks and information overload

2008-09-08T21:42:00.003-05:00

Ok well it's been almost 2 months so I guess I should proclaim my existence in cyberspace, and say something already. Doing this makes me frustrated. I don't knwo who my audience is. Sure I know some of the people who are aware aof and interested in what i write here (all 2-3 of you), but that's not enough for me to want to write here. I

On my Sitemeter statistics I still get hits for my discussion of Auden which started here.

Here is an interesting post I read on a political blog yesterday

Rednecks and offense

about the change in the connotations of the word "redneck" in re: "an onslaught of redefinition from the Republican noise machine (plus the redneck comedy stuff)":

Should liberals appreciate “redneck pride” as a reclamation in the same way that feminists reclaimed the word “bitch” or gay people reclaimed the word “queer”?

The author proceeds to offer herself as a fascinating case in point. Sher grew up as a "redneck" but is now a "latte liberal":

I’ve let dogs sleep in bed with me and I prefer the old-fashioned match to air freshener in the bathroom.

I confess I didn't read the whole post. These redneck liberals are so long-winded...

Ok that was an unforgivable bit of gratuitous sarcasm. Pardon my mood. And shame on me for not reading the whole thing. Sorry but I'm suffering from information overload (I bookmarked this post but have yet to read it). Us information professionals have it ruff. As you see I'm reduced to barking.

A/V Librarian, Esq.

2008-07-13T22:01:00.006-05:00

A friend in Albany has chided me, in effect, for not keeping up with this blogging business -- OK, so not so much for not posting as for leaving my last post as "Tornado Alley Pt.2" for weeks on end. What was one to think? It's been a month ago now -- going on 2 --but really, the first two nights I worked at the library --Thursdays both--we ended up in the basement for a tornado warning. But I'm not worried. I was never really worried. I just got fascinated with tornadoes and put it in the blog. But YES, I need to leave a different impression for the "folks back home" -- (Does anyone bedsides Roger read this? I'm not convinced). Anyway, here's the scoop.

I'm adjusting remarkably well to life in Wichita. I'm like an A/V librarian at the public library. Actually that gives the wrong impression. But somehow I like it as an ironic, self-effacing comment on my work. Or rather, something that sends up a smoke screen. "Pay no attention to the librarian west of the Mississippi River. West of the Missouri even." In fact I live just west--about 2 clicks, I'd wager-- of the Arkansas River. I heard someone pronounce it "AR-Kansas". How cool is that!? And don't you forget it.

Ahem. Got a bit sidetracked there. So I'm actually one of the AMV librarians (not really an A/V Librarian): ie, Art Music and Video. Yee-Haw! It's really great. Really. I'm very impressed with their collection -- CD- and book-wise especially, and DVDs too. (Also VHS-wise, which will change in the next couple years. They--I mean, WE are not buying VHS anymore but there is a large collection of them, especially non-fiction. And I have been given responsibility to purchase -- order -- non-fiction DVDs. Which includes Anime and Musicals and Opera but not TV except for Japanese Animated TV even though the American TV shows are shelved with the non-fiction at 791.45 -- more than you wanted to know? You must not be a librarian.) So I realized that with the collection this wonderful library already has, I will, inevitably ,--if I do my job at all well--learn an awful lot here. And grow and develop as a porfessional. It's scary, isn't it? --Yeah it is. Thank you for validating that.

The interesting thing right now is that I get to order non-fiction DVDs for ALL subject areas, even though the general collection and Business and Technology BOOKS are all on separate floors. (See, theres AMV, B&T, and the GC -- general collection -- three floors). ALL of the DVDs on any subject are in our department and so I get to order them all. And my dad could beat your dad up anyday, I don't care what you say. I get to order DVDs even for travel, language, computers, science, nature, anime, history, biography, music-, craft-, and dance-how-to, ESL, SAT, etc etc, et cetera -- if it's a DVD, I can order it. And nonfiction. You know what I mean.

I guess that's why I like to call myself an A/V librarian. I'm starting to peruse all these catalogs and websites for educational DVDs some of which seem scarily similar to the 1980s and 1990s VHS tapes that I will be replacing on our shelves -- and uncannily also like the 16mm films we watched in the pre-VHS days in grade school. But best of all, I get to watch and order Anime for my job. OK so I don't get to watch Anime on the job per se, but I can take it home for research and decide that we need to get the complete first two seasons of All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku! How many people can do that on the job and get an Attaboy! instead of just quizzical looks or worse in the staff lounge?

Actually that was a request from a patron. Hey cool! We actually buy stuff people request! interesting...

I'm like the all purpose cultural cat girl AV librarian guy. But really Wichita is not half bad and if i was writing a book about my life I'd say that I adjusted remakably well to its environs in an extraordinarily short space of time. Yes, remarkably well. Oh, and the staff lounge has an electric piano in it. Honest. I kid you not.

Tornado Alley Pt 2: Where's Wichita?

2008-05-26T18:33:00.005-05:00

Wichita seems to be outside of the pink area of this map, but inside the darker area of the following one.... (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.) I don't suppose I can argue that it's NOT in Tornado Alley, but it's a litter better off than most of Oklahoma, no?...

One more picture... Wichita is the red splotch in the southern part of the state, a bit east of center.

Welcome to Tornado Alley

2008-05-26T18:24:00.004-05:00

A friend expressed concern that they heard a tornado hit Wichita recently. But as far as I know there haven't been any tornadoes to hit Wichita itself, though there have been thunderstorms regularly the past week or so. There have been some tornadoes in the western part of the state. Last week there was one in Colorado that killed someone, and I guess Iowa had one yesterday -- both neighbors of Kansas. I was in my car about 40 minutes ago and it was hailing a bit -- less than marble size though, and just for a minute where I was.

The chances of one hitting wherever I'm at are probably smaller than that of getting into a car accident in any urban environment. Also consider this:

Kansas is about 50% larger than NY State by square miles.

NY: ~54,000
KS: ~82,000

--http://www.wisegeek.com/how-big-are-the-states-in-america.htm

South Seneca View

2008-05-20T18:23:00.001-05:00

From my balcony...

On Free* Will in Wichita

2008-05-15T12:09:00.010-05:00

I arrived in Wichita on Friday, May 9, 2008, at sunset (8:00 PM). It's been 10 days.

I needed to remind myself that I can make my own world. I control my own destiny* -- Yes, I am the master of my destiny!*

*(I can control and shape my own environment, world, life and destiny--if not entirely, at the least more than any other human entity in this life, that I know of! -- Is that enough of a disclaimer? Did I leave out any other contingencies? ...how about "Higher Power notwithstanding")

This thought comes from the anxiety I have wrestled with the last few days about the location of my new apartment here in Wichita. There are about a dozen fast food chains within 2 blocks of my apartment complex. South Seneca is a bit like parts of Central Ave (though less "ghetto") in Albany, or Western or Ashland on the north side of Chicago. The complex itself is thankfully set back from the road a good 50-70 yards or so (?). But every time I leave or come home I have to pass McDonald's, Pizza Hut, KFC, etc. -- and a XXX cinema place to boot just a block away. The useful gas station and Starbuck's w/a drive thru, though welcome, do not make up for the blatantly ugly consumer culture of the strip.

What I realized is that I can approach and leave my place via a side street, cut over to Pawnee near the river, get right on McLean along the (Arkansas) river, where there are no businesses whatsoever, just the river with a bike path and greenery along it.

I can choose my own path in this life.*

Here is a photo welcome to Wichita courtesy of S. Seneca.

Sad today / Nana the "call girl"

2007-12-14T12:54:00.000-05:00

I'm feeling sad today.

I just finished reading Nana by Emile Zola -- a pioneer of the naturalist school of fiction apparently. Completed in i think 1890, banned as obscene and denounced as "too strong." It's still strong, but most of all in its entirety -- the ending is its strongest part, though of course its effect can be fully felt only after reading the entirety of the novel prior to the ending (preferably the case with endings generally...)

In some ways it's too racy for today as well. Prostitution as an art, as a high society type lifestyle (the demimonde is apparently the word for this world in the France of the day), has never been more realistically and aptly portrayed. Flaubert summarized it with this sentence:

Nana tourne au mythe, sans cesser d'être réelle.
(Nana turns into myth, without ceasing to be real.)

(--Why not "Turns into a myth"? --I dunno, it's French to me...)
I think the French tolerance of this kind of decadence, (then at least, maybe now too? --I wouldn't know) is still "too strong" for the (hypocritically puritan) American Sensibility. You can't handle the truth, America! --Me neither. The truth is disgusting! (--and beautiful too!)

"Camille," La Dame Aux Camelias (Dumas fils), La Traviata (Verdi), give the romanticized version of the courtesan, or call girl / high society prostitute. Zola was reacting to this apparently, saying, here's what it really looks like. Much of it is glamorized in the sense of portraying high fashion (Nana sets the fashion in her society), success on the stage (due to physical beauty and charm rather than acting talent), etc., but the multiple partners and the bleeding of the the men dry financially -- ruining them, using them utterly (One immolates himself, another stabs himself twice in the chest with a pair of scizzors) -- gives the other side, the spiritual can of worms beneath the glamorous surface. The extraordinary ending shows Nana's circle reacting to her death (of Smallpox) in a light, cold, passing way, closing finally with a gruesome closeup of her deathmask.

Notice:
I'm going to start blogging at Thelonious Bosch (TB) instead of here, at least on this sort of topic. Perhaps I will continue here in another vein. This post belongs there, however. See you at TB! Perhaps I will double post for a time until my meager readership catches on...

Taking a Break

2007-07-25T09:08:00.000-05:00

I'm going to take a break from this blog for a while. There's a lot of pictures I could put up, but I'm preoccupied with some stuff that doesn't jibe with the tone of this blog. I've also been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with this format. Perhaps its situational and will pass.

The questions of anonymity, disclosure, boundaries and the nascent conventions of blogging culture, all have me a little confused as to whether I want to be a blogging presence at all right now. My professional identity is in question (ie, I don't have a stable job in my field). That being the case, is a pseudo-anonymous blog a liability in the job search? Such are my thoughts.

One last Auden quote, from The Dyer's Hand:

When I consider others I can easily believe that their bodies express their personalities and that the two are inseparable. But it is impossible for me not to feel that my body is other than I, that I inhabit it like a house, and that my face is a mask which, with or without my consent, conceals my real nature from others.

The (Conning?) Tower in the Sky

2007-07-17T23:03:00.000-05:00

On a cloudy day you can see the missing floors (on 15 and 30). The mystery deepens.

Two days a week I visit this place of wonder and beaurocracy. Behold! the tools of the information age:

Egad! I've been tagged.

2007-07-13T12:35:00.000-05:00

I don't really like this sort of thing -- It reminds me of (though I have to admit it's in a different category than) those emails that command you to Send this touchy-feely email to 10 people or something horrible will happen to you, because you're clearly just a horrible person if you don't join in. In any case, I'll play along - here goes...

INSTRUCTIONS:

Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot, like so.

1. Electronic Cerebrectomy

2. Byzantium's Shores

3. Tosy and Cosh

4. Ramblin' with Roger

5. Blog To Self

Next, select five people to tag.

Le Monde de Hulk & Baby is the only blog I'm willing to tag, but that should count for two...

What were you doing ten years ago?

Living in Chicago. Working at the UofC Science Lib (Crerar) in Tech Services doing serials binding stuff. Playing old-timey jazz with a singer in a group we called "the Ben and Pepper Show." Otherwise up to no good.

What were you doing one year ago?

In the process of finishing school. Doing an internship at NYS SBDC, where I worked with someone who has become a good friend and even contributed to their blog.

Five snacks you enjoy.
I don't want to answer this one. It gets into the guilty pleasure zone. But here goes, in no particular order: 1. Nuts. 2. Peanut butter -- on toast with butter and lots of cherry preserves, for example 3. Peanut butter-based candy bars or like Reese's 4. Dole's fruit and juice bars -- esp. Lime 5. Spicy Doritos with crab dip.

Five songs to which you know all the lyrics.

I've been playing the ukulele and learned these songs on it (I'm sure I know the lyrics, even if I can't always remember them all): She's My Best Friend (the Velvet Underground), I Will Follow (Death Cab for Cutie), All of Me (jazz standard), Everyone Says I Love You (from the Marx Brother's movie Horse Feathers)

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire.

1. Pay off my student loans and other debts. 2. Hire an investor. 3. Become a monk for a year or two. 4. Buy a house to collect things in, like instruments and electronic gear, including a DV (Digital Video) camera. 5. Go back to work sooner or later -- probably sooner than I'd like.

Five bad habits.

1. Coffee 2. I'm not telling. 3. Fast driving. 4. A pack rat approach to desk organization - ie, making piles rather than filing or tossing. 5. Collecting books - ie, acquiring books I don't intend to read, but want to have "just in case."

Five things you like doing.

1. Playing music. 2. Drinking coffee alone in a coffee shop with a pile of reading material. 3. Going to the movies. 4. Seeing films (not the same as #3). 5. Not having anything to do, to do something. (Also a bad habit?)

Five things you would never wear again.

There must be something I could answer this question with, but it leaves my mind blank. I suppose it's a set up to say bell bottoms or leg warmers or something. Here's an imaginary response: a teal green seersucker suit, a blonde Harpo wig, ochre suede wing-tips, mud-brown suspenders and brick-red tortoiseshell glasses.

Coleridge

2007-07-02T14:50:00.000-05:00

I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

More Auden - and a sonnet by the Bard

2007-06-27T13:58:00.000-05:00

Thanks, anonymous, for pointing out that

Actually, "the dyer's hand" is from Shakespeare's sonnet 111. Byron is
alluding to that, probably

in a comment on my Auden post. I do however maintain that Auden's primary reference is to Byron's interpretation or emendation of the metaphor as referring to the craft of poetry. Here is Sonnet 111:

O for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me then, and wish I were renewed;
Whilst like a willing patient I will drink
Potions of eisel 'gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance, to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye,
Ev'n that your pity is enough to cure me.

The dyer's hand, subdued to what it works in, is thus stained or branded. Shamefully. This is apparently ususally interpreted as referring to Shakespeare's work in the theater, "public means" being interpreted as the lowly occupation of the actor, if you will. Of course it is not a huge leap to go from acting to writing poetry, philosophically (Aesthetically) generalizing to "the Artist" in general.

In the three chapters of "The Dyer's Hand" section of the book The Dyer's Hand, Auden discusses the nature of the poet's craft as well as its relation to the world both now (in the Modern Age) and historically - "Making, Knowing, Judging," "The Virgin and the Dynamo," and "The Poet and the City." Among many other things in these - manifestos? - he argues (in the latter) that the nature of Poetry in the Modern Age is very different than what it was in the past, and certainly in Shakespeare's time. The Modern twist given to the role of the Artist in Society by Byron's re-interpretation or echo of Shakespeare's metaphor of the dyer's hand (Poets "are such liars") to Shakespeare's shameful "brand" of the dyer's hand (the lowly tradesman) is evidence of Auden's claim in "Making, Knowing, Judging" that Great changes in artistic style always reflect some alteration in the frontier between the sacred and profane in the imagination of a society (p.59).

Really, I do appreciate the emendation, even if my response is tainted with the indignance of wounded pride...

Half a geek, G-rated

2007-06-24T09:22:00.000-05:00

Inspired by my friend Roger, I took the geek test. Here are the results. And this blog is safe for your children apparently. Frightening, eh?

50%

Mingle² - Online Dating

Rediscovering W. H. Auden

2007-06-15T13:18:00.000-05:00

For a thesis I wrote for my BA in Music, I wrote about Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress (based on the series of paintings and engravings by William Hogarth). In the process I became quite familiar with the thought and poetry of W.H. Auden, who wrote the libretto (the play in verse which provides the dramatic and poetic skeleton for Stravinsky's music).

Hoping for a chance to appropriately blog about Auden on his birthday soon, I googled his birthday and discovered that I'm about 4 months too late for the centenary of his birth (February 21, 1907). It's a good year for it anyway. Then I happened upon this homage in the New York Sun from Feb 21 of this year, which made me realize something of which I was dimly aware at the time when I became enamored of him back in the day: To wit, the Auden who was collaborating with Igor in the '40s was not the Auden who had been famous in the '30s for his visionary political verse. This was the Later Auden, dismissed by critics at the time as a lesser version of his earlier, ostensibly more genuine self, the Early Auden. One critic quoted in the Sun piece said, "Auden, never a pompous poet, has now become an unserious one."

My favorite book of his is a prose collection of criticism, The Dyer's Hand. I rediscovered why when I happened upon his page of quotations on Wikiquote. For a more copious collection of epigrammatic gems and insights, one need look no further than this extraordinary book as quoted at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/W._H._Auden.

Just one example:

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs. ["The Poet and the City", p. 83, The Dyer's Hand]

This underlines the concept that a developed taste is an essential part of 'Culture' as well as of one's unique identity, as in his remark, "The surest sign that a man[sic] has a taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it." I love that one, of course, being notoriously indecisive.... But it also has a great bearing on the discussion of the early vs. late Auden, since elsewhere in his writings (I think in The Dyer's Hand) I remember that he makes the argument that the life's work of a writer (or poet or 'Artist') is in one sense to discover his/her true and genuine identity: that, indeed, finding out exactly what one's taste is is precisely the important Work of the life of the Artist, since Genuineness is the ethical equivalent in the Artist to Truth for the Scientist. Which lends poignancy to the title of this remarkable book of his critical excerpts.

The title The Dyer's Hand comes from the 87th stanza (CXXXVII)of the 3rd Canto of Lord Byron's Don Juan (which you must pronounce, by the way, so that it rhymes with "true one" - ie, Don "JEW-en", see the first stanza of the poem), one of the greatest comic poems ever written. This is, I think one of the discoveries of Auden's, I'd guess, that transformed him from his early to his late self. Lord Byron (who as the narrator - as Auden tells it - is the actual hero of his epic of young Juan's exploits) has just quoted a song entitled "the Ilses of Greece" not as one that Juan DID sung, but one that he WOULD sing ("some sort of hymn like this"), after 16 full verses of which, he concludes:

Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung,
The modern Greek, in tolerable verse;
If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young,
Yet in these times he might have done much worse:
His strain display'd some feeling—right or wrong;
And feeling, in a poet, is the source
Of others' feeling; but they are such liars,
And take all colours—like the hands of dyers.

PS - Christopher Isherwood, pictured with Auden in the 30's, was the author of Goodbye to Berlin, the collection of short stories which was adapted by Isherwood to become a play, I Am a Camera, which was adapted to become the famous musical Cabaret. There is an earlier film adaptation of I am a Camera by the same name and starring Julie Harris and Lawrence Harvey which I like better as an adaptation of Isherwood, but it's not a musical. Another extraordinary view of Berlin of the '30s, including the rise of the Nazi's, is his Mr. Norris Changes Trains.

a very funny comic called xkcd

2007-06-13T09:26:00.000-05:00

New post at Remora

2007-06-12T11:53:00.000-05:00

Miscellany and Stuff (or, 2 point - all!)

I've decided to keep the library stuff over at Remora, since it is quite different in tone to the other nonsense I spew here. Everything in its place...

The Blog People Are Coming!

2007-06-06T13:34:00.000-05:00

Terms which we unfortunately seem to be stuck with, or which have yet to be replaced by better options:

Blog (both noun and verb -- the latter being the more unfortunate).
Blogosphere, and its attendant culture.
Biblioblogosphere (the blogosphere of the librarians -- sounds like a subtitle of a B movie sci fi epic).
Web 2.0 - or Social Computing
Library 2.0 - or "Next Gen Libraries & Librarians"
...Add your own

Over at the ALA Techsource blog, Michael Stephens takes a look back at a relatively recent online fracas in the ALA (American Library Association) community regarding outdated attitudes towards blogs and blogging.

An Architectural Mystery

2007-06-06T00:41:00.000-05:00

There are three banks of elevators at the Coning Tower, as you can see from these photos. Why is there not access to floors 15 and 30? Are there any architects out there?
Perhaps the cafeteria on 29 takes up the space of two floors -- but then what's on 15?

I wanted to take a picture of the surveillance cameras but - I really DON'T wanna go to Gitmo! (Wasn't that a Dylan tune?...)

An interesting day

2007-06-05T22:24:00.001-05:00

[Note: this post has been edited from its original version]

By random twists of fate I shared a late dinner tonight with a monk, a senator, and a chef (all of whom happened to be gay). I know, I know, it sounds like some joke. I had dinner with a joke: A senator, a monk and chef walk into a (gay) bar.... And have dinner with a librarian, where they discuss movies, the diversity of sexuality in humans and the vagaries of Alzheimer's disease -- apparently I must go see Away From Her with Julie Christie at the Spectrum, especially recommended by The Chef. The Monk plugged Into Great Silence (as one might expect)-- apparently it helps to know that the motto of the Carthusians is "Stat crux dum volvitur orbis" meaning "The Cross is steady while the world is turning" to help lend meaning to some time lapse cinematography in the movie. I'd wanted to see that anyway. The Senator has apparently been too busy to see much lately, but for some reason brought up Clueless with Alicia Silverstone as a fine film, which I haven't seen. Why did I end up at the diner with this lot? It's a question for the ages, isn't it?

Filing on the Fortieth, revisited, featuring The Tower Building

2007-06-04T16:16:00.000-05:00

Here is the first actual portrait of the Corning Tower I offer, taken by myself before the weather became oppressively muggy. Some places in the concourse refer to it as "The Tower Building" which is not very helpful/specific if you're not already familiar with the plaza...

Also, a shot of the floor plan and another of the ceiling, revealing how they had to cut the ceiling tiles due to the funny shape of the building.

On the Poetics of Numbers, Or, All Work and No Play Makes Bartleby a du11 8OY!

2007-05-30T12:44:00.000-05:00

I have been checking invoices in the online database for my temp job for the last two days -- invoices from dozens of companies, each of which has its own style. It is very boring work, but my mind will find something to latch onto... (Warning: don't read this if you're in a hurry!)

I have a theory: (perhaps a "theory")

Even numbers of digits are more 'human', i.e., easier to remember, find patterns in, etc. than odd numbers of digits, especially as the number grows larger.
Given that fewer digits are easier to remember, there is an ideal number of digits for an invoice (or ID or other such number) which has enough digits to maximize the total possible unique numbers while allowing for easiest recognition and commitment to (short term) memory.

Phone numbers and SSNs are 7 digits [SSNs actually have 9 (Thanks Roger)--Ed.] -- not ideal by my theory. Eight and twelve would be preferable. Of course ISBNs have been 10 digits and now are 13 -- bad news by my theory -- or "theory". Silly -- but is it? ISBNs are for machines (computers) not people. And phone numbers and SSNs are dashes to allow us to comprehend them. I'm talking about straight numbers, no dashes. How does the mind organize them when attempting to "digest" them at a glance?

This line of thinking was compelled by noticing the difference between invoices for the copier companies Ikon and Xerox. Ikon's invoice numbers are 8 digits, Xerox's are 9. I like Ikon's better. (E.g.: 15151323; 15162728). I find that two 4-digit numbers are easier to comprehend in a glance than three 3-digit numbers. But there was another reason for my reaction. The invoice numbers from Xerox tend to begin with the three numbers 198. When not thinking about it, I could not help but group the first four digits together -- 1987, 1983, etc -- due to the suggestion of the year (the 1980s). However, when confronted with the last 5 digits, my tendency was to continue to see two sets of four --only with one extra lone digit in between -- which is harder to comprehend at a glance (E.g.: 198523085).

I know, It's crazy to be thinking much less blogging about this, but having been inspired by Douglas Hofstadter, I make no apology. Hofstadter is quite inspiring on the challenges of Artificial Intelligence, the complexity of human pattern recognition, and the analysis of the creative process -- all of which he finds are connected. (Letter Spirit was a program which attempted - with no little success, so far as it went! - to distill the essence of analogy in a computer program.)

But to return to my rambling, another company, Oce Imagistics, uses a 9-digit number but which more naturally divides itself into three 3-digit sets (e.g., 201899874). Image Integrator , a company out of Syracuse, uses a 5-digit invoice number. Very business-like (ie inhuman, machinelike due to the odd number of digits), but short for easy use. I think 6-digit invoice numbers are relatively common as well -- a nice compromise with 2 sets of 3. (E.g.: Ricoh Business Systems, 153006, 143699, 128266) Of course, one could also see these as 3 sets of 2, but that's not how I see them when punching them into the computer to check them -- 2 sets of 3 seems easier and faster for my mind (and short-term memory) to process. Efficiency and accuracy and ease of manipulability are the natural criteria as per function. The aesthetics of the business office lie in its efficiency, the smallest intersection of form vs. function. The beauty of form in a set of numbers is based in its internal patterns as suggested by repetition, patterns of even vs. odd, etc.

I think the worst offender of both aesthetics and utility is a company based in Schenectady, which I won't name, but whose invoice numbers use a combination of letters and numbers in a most annoying way. Some will use letters at the beginning or the end (Ikon: 1547919A) or just at the beginning (SDIN002356), but this company does both at once, and worse still, ends often with a number 'one' followed by the letter 'I', thus: MV070501I. How awful is that? The nerve. (Another bad one is Eastman Kodak: 243F05244. Putting a letter in the middle of a number like that! Very ugly.) I suppose the utility of recognizing one's own invoice number just from the number itself is the advantage in so annoyingly mixing letters and numbers.

Interesting that in aesthetics, an odd number is often more pleasing (like the number of flowers in a vase), whereas, according to my theory, an even number is more human because less machinelike, impersonal. Symmetry of odd numbers of objects is more aesthetically pleasing than that of even numbers (the latter is more 'square,' less round, less aesthetic, no?) Examples: 13531 vs. 24822842 (vs. 369363963 -- OR how about 24482448? So square! But more recognizable, more manageable in a business environment -- more 'human' for a clerk to utilize)

Is this interesting? Perhaps not. But I think so, vis-a-vis the dichotomies of utility vs. aesthetics, art vs. science, culture vs. business, etc.

I think the programs which create invoice numbers for Ikon must use numbers with patterns by some algorithm. 13909090. The patterns make it recognizable at a glance. There is some sophistication in that. Xerox's invoice numbers seem more purely random -- very inhuman.

For the scoffing skeptic: So what's a direct application of this kind of poetics of numbers? Music -- especially so-called "12-tone" or serial modern music (ie, Modern Music), a la Anton Webern...

Corning 2nd's legacy

2007-05-25T11:10:00.000-05:00

Thanks, Roger for the factoid of Corning's years -- I found out that though the building was dedicated to him at his death in 1983, it was actually completed in 1973.

A nice excerpt from Paul Grondahl's biography (apparently referred to as a "minor classic" in the NYT Book Review, according to Amazon.com) is here. (Via Wikipedia). The excerpt begins with a description of a cockfight -- which is offered as the link between the aristocratic Corning family and the (Albany Political Machine) O'Connells (esp. Dan O'Connell, who is credited with having placed Erastus 2nd in office). According to Grondahl, Albany GOP chief Joseph F. Frangella said (referring obliquely to Dan O'Connell), "Erastus Corning is an expert second fiddler to the oldest one-man band in America. "

The lefthand photo above is not Erastus Corning -- it's from the visitor's badge I have to get each day I work there -- they take your picture and give a printout on a sticker with a barcode which allows you access to the building. I've saved them all. I think I will make a collage...

Another interesting factoid: Erastus 2nd's father was named Edwin, and he died in 1934 at the are of 51. My great-grandfather Edwin Oliver died in 1933 at a similar age. But that was in Illinois.... Still, though -- coincidence?....

Camera Obscura lyrics wow

2007-05-25T10:47:00.001-05:00

I can't stop listening to this band Camera Obscura. Their retro (50s Americana pop), "Twee" sound belies their Scottishness. It's wonderful to discover ironic complexity and poeticism beneath beguiling music. With song names like "Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken" ("...'Cause I can't see farther than my own nose at this moment") and "Let's Get Out of this Country", I'm thoroughly charmed. Here is a highlight in a song called "Suspended From Class"
from the 2003 album Underachievers Please Try Harder:

You’re such a beautiful writer /that’s not all you are
I’m sorry about making a pass
It was subtle but I think that you grasped
The meaning intended

I can be a friend to you / I won’t pretend
I’m not interested in breaking a heart
It’s not love no it’s nothing like that
I’ll leave that to lookers like him

Oh he’s such a delicate thing
Now it’s such a fragile thing that we have

||: I should be suspended from class
I don’t know my elbow from my arse :||

We could go out dancing
But, in truth it is the last thing that I have on my mind
Please say if I'm way out of line
I won't need telling twice

Now he wants to kiss
Said he can't resist
You're going to have to keep it hidden inside
I've a feeling that pigs might fly, might fly

||: I should be suspended from class
I don’t know my elbow from my arse :||

See Remora blog for Library stuff (Bad idea?)

2007-05-10T14:03:00.000-05:00

Remora. I made a decision to place library related items in a separate blog, since the name and all are already there. I'm looking for feedback on this decision. I suppose it's the librarian in me that wants to put things in separate folders, compartments, boxes, pigeon holes. So my interest in Library- and Web 2.0, libraries generally and their future, can have a home there, and the more personal, goofy, and artsy stuff can stay here. But if I point to the other blog every time I post, why make it more complicated?
I confess I have a third blog name I wanted to use for more purely artsy content, which is "Thelonious Bosch". All comments are invited and welcomed.
Another thing is that those labels, tags, and monthly archives on the side bar are all there to provide structure. Perhaps I should develop alter egos, so that rather than placing different content on separate blogs I can sign in with a different name. That might confuse me, myself, and I -- All three of us would forget who is who....The Wild Alsatian, Edwin Oliver (actually my great-grand-father's name and my middlename'sake), and ... Thelonious Bosch! Perhaps?

Please, take my inventory...

Bartleby STILL not replaced by the Digital Revolution

2007-05-07T10:27:00.000-05:00

As I may havce mentioned earlier, my temp job at the Corning Tower is in the Office of Risk and Insurance Management of the Insurance Department of the Administraive section of the Office of General Services, which I think takes up more than just the top few floors of the building. (The organizationl chart is clickable!) I noticed an invoice for service in some office of "Space Allocation" on 28. Me, I just file invoices and claims for service to office machines for seemingly every state agency in NYS.

The State Police make a lot of copies, apparently. Ikon seems to be their biggest vendor for copy machines. Their folder needs to be replaced, it's so overstuffed.

The smallest accounts are the DOCS accounts (the Prisons)...

Xerox sends four copies of their invoices, conventiently labeled along the upper right-hand margin for easy disposal. We only keep one copy, though we do make our own copies later -- along with many other documents. The cost of making our own copies with our own machine is cheaper than the time and space which would be required to save their copies and interfile them later with the appropriate documents, all of which need copying as a group later anyway...

Isn't it fascinating? I love office work!

--the Scrivener, (AKA Sub-sub Librarian)

Filing on the Fortieth Floor, Pt. III: My Lunch, My Cubicle, and NYS Acronyms

2007-05-01T13:14:00.000-05:00

First off, here's a picture of a model of the Corning Tower so you can get a sense of what I'm talking about. The footprint of the building is like a long narrow diamond with the ends cut off -- basically. 'X' marks the spot where I work.

Next, here's the view from my cubicle:
This is the southeast corner of the building -- the one represented by the picture of the model, actually -- As I said, I've drawn an 'X' roughly where my cubicle on the 40th fl looks out on the world.

When you get up to the window to the right of the chair in this picture, here's the view:

It was suggested that I supply a lunch tray shot from, the 29th fl cafeteria. so here's my lunch on the 29th floor looking north. You can see the Bell tower of the City Hall a little right of center. In the second picture, the red-roofed building cut off on the left is , I believe, the Capitol building. And then the Mighty Muddy Hudson!

Bon Appetit!

I'm learning a lot of acronyms: OMH, OMRDD, DDSO, SEMO, GORR (I altready knew that one), NYSED CEC, NYSED VESID, DOCS, and of course, the department in which I work, OGS, the Office of General Services. If you can name four of the acronyms you get a free subscription to this blog...

OGS takes up up the top several floors of the Corning tower and includes the Department of Risk and Insurance Management for which the Remi group (for which I work) manages the office machine policies for most every agency in the State Gub'mint. I get to file (literally) claims/ invoices for copy machine repairs. That's the boring part of the job. The exciting part is taking pictures ou of the window while no one is looking, hoping you don't look like a tourist in the prevailing staid office environment. Golf and American Idol are the most commonly recurring themes of conversation. Now that I'm writing more, I feel like I ought to leave off with one last picture. This one is actually relatively informative, though it doesn't give Corning's dates, it gives his full name and tells you Cuomo was Guv'nor and that it was dedicated in 1983...

Filing on the Fortieth Floor Part II

2007-04-28T07:11:00.000-05:00

Here is a picture of the elevator buttons in the Corning Tower. Notice the font of the older buttons. I feel like the building is really old, like '20s - old. Art Deco.
But it was dedicated in 1983. Erastus Corning was a mayor of Albany.

Here also is the view from the window near my cubicle. The Hudson River looks dirty, though you may not be able to see it from this. Next time, I will present the lunch room on the 29th floor. Stay tuned

Filing on the Fortieth Floor

2007-04-17T09:49:00.000-05:00

My new temp job is on the 40th floor of the Corning Tower on the Empire State Plaza. It's just filing, but it's on the 40th floor. Lunch at the cafeteria on fl 29 is quite special.

First post to self

2007-01-12T23:54:00.000-05:00

This is my blog, and welcome to it.

My old [photo]blog (for school) is called Remora and is now hosted at http://remoraspot.blogspot.com/.