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26
August, 1999
A
list
of suggested reading material for a course that Marcus
Novak used to teach at UT. It's time to go back and reread
some of the basics... It makes me want to read Octavio
Paz again.
As
a going away gift, Kelly (the best QA lead to walk the face
of this humble planet) gave me a bouquet of Tower
of Sours with white roses glued to the top. What a woman!
My throat is raw and my tongue is a becoming compliment to
my bright blue dress... The stuff is fiendishly sour... It
can't stop (I say with flared nostrils and one eye all squinched
up).
Complexity
Online Journal. Yum. All the articles I've looked at so
far are rife with analogies and comparisons between systems.
My
hair now has direction.
I'm
off to conquer another time zone. Not so many updates until
I've recovered from the whole ordeal. Then, lots of notes
about that vibrant cultural wonderland-- the Interstate between
here and Manhattan...
Someone
told me today to "cease sarcasticating."
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25
August 1999
A
tutorial
for the wildly exciting Flash
4! I'm not being sarcastic.
We
watched My
Neighbor Totoro today at lunch (image
of Totoro at the bus stop). It makes me happy to see well-made,
intelligent media that is entirely free from the all-pervasive
vicious, pop edginess that used to be so startling and is
now so bleakly mainstream. It's tiresome... I loved the movie
Buffalo
66 because it was... sweet. It was also startlingly beautiful,
but that wasn't where I was going with this... But I'll go
there anyhow for a sec. I was fascinated with the way the
viewer's attention was choreographed between superimposed
images. Also, a number of the scenes (e.g. at the kitchen
table) are set up to present an amazing manipulation of the
viewer's perception of the space and the manner in which it
is populated. Peter
Greenaway does the same thing.
What
on earth am I going to do without my beloved massage therapist?
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24
August 1999
More
stuff
on learning
and gesture recognition using Hidden
Markov Models (one type of probabilistic representation
of dynamic phenomena-- was that actual English grammar?).
Les
enfants qui s'aiment
Hee-hee!
Lindsay
Marshall and I indulge in some nifty and gratuitous information
gathering (because we can). Check out his form
to enter your equivalent of "donkey meat."
What
friends I have! Winnie is getting me a Hair Plan tomorrow.
She will hold my hand at the salon and not let anything bad
happen to my hair. I trust her. She's chic as hell and always
has good hair.
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23
August 1999
I'm
very excited about the idea of plasma
propulsion systems... Contrary to the clichÈ, the
practical applications of applied knowledge often appears
incidental... Speaking of practical, Dr. Rajeev Sharma and
colleagues at Penn state have developed a rough prototype
(actually, it only sounds rough in terms of interaction) of
a responsive
/ interactive map... Tangentially, It would be interesting
to map users' gestures (three dimensional coordinates and
response times) to see how literally they describe or correspond
to the content of simultaneous speech. I wonder if more literal
is necessarily more evocative. Probably not, given the way
most of us apprehend space.
Another
opinion on the Anax-etc. question suggests that we may
have meant Heraclitus'
doctrine of opposites and flux all along... Sure, why
not?
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20
August 1999
I
just saw the loveliest thing.
The digital piece is based on the equally beautiful book
by Czech illustrator Kveta Pacovska, MitternachtsSpiel
(Midnight Play). The software is technically very
simple (Director 6 and Quicktime, I think), but the navigation
and the possibilities for open-ended, exploratory play are
very sophisticated.
-- an
image from Midnight Play
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19
August 1999
It
turns out I was talking about Anaximander... I think.
Does
Derrida have pop
star status elsewhere? My impression is that he's wildly
unfashionable lately, thanks to people like John
Ralston Saul (who is a very clever man but that still
doesn't mitigate my disagreement with respect to some of his
views on text and the dissemination of information) and the
aforementioned RJ
(who is also very clever but is responsible for the lumps
on the heads of far to many babies by letting them hit the
ground with the bath water) It is important
to resist the demand that everything be explained in five
minutes... So
here's Le
Facteur de la VÈritÈ.
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18
August 1999
Oh...
it was Anaximenes
or Anaximander...
(it turns out they are two different people, E. I'm sorry
to say I still don't know which one I'm talking about)...
If I'm not mistaken, he (one of the two) was also the one
who believed that the animation of the physical environment
is the result of the interaction of the set of opposites of
which the universe consists. Wet and dry, dark and light...
All animation can be reduced to a sort of friction. I wonder
if that implies a directional progress... toward order or
disorder? Is that why the Greeks eschewed entropy? Sort of
like the way evolution didn't take place in Kansas. The Kansasians,
like Athena, sprung fully formed from the forehead of God.
I imagine molecular sets: hydrophobic and hydrophilic; umbraphobic
and umbraphilic... Wait-- now I'm confusing Latin and Greek.
This
morning, I boldly applied silver glitter eye make-up in premature
celebration of not being sick anymore. Then I promptly forgot
about it and rubbed my eyes until I saw those blue-edged spots
that I used to think led to heaven. It was all over my cheeks
and under my eyes when I got into the elevator with one of
my less imaginative coworkers. "What's wrong with your
face?" he asked... I was imagining that I looked liked
a Victorian
faerie princess (a la Arthur
Rackham), but he thought not.
I'm
no purist. I love new
words (scroll down). Whatever best evokes a given meaning.
Sometimes the Queen's English is insufficient (my poor Mum).
Tener ganas is is a lovely phrase and I think engagÈ(e)
has a very specific implication that I just can't verbalize
in English in under a paragraph. Victor says, "Carne
de burro no es transparente!" when I or the Ume-the-Cat
stand directly in front of the TV. Sometimes he just shouts
"Carne de burro!"-- and we scatter.
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17
August 1999
Thank
you M., for the link to this amazing article: Koozin,
On Metaphor, Technology, and Schenkerian Analysis. I've
just glanced at it but I can't wait to go over it tonight...
Sleeping hasn't really been working out for me lately, anyhow.
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16
August 1999
Handwriting
is very intimate. Paging through the books of someone I love
and reading his notes in the margins is like reading love
letters.
I
devoured the novel, Why
the Tree Loves the Ax in a couple of hours... I love
the respectful distance around the protagonist... I read novels
completely differently than I do nonfiction... Probably most
of us do. Fiction (the kind I need) is immersive and inwardly
focused. I read it rapidly. The associations come afterward.
My favorite nonfiction though, is focused outward. It's full
of burrs that catch in my head and eventually send me scrambling
in pursuit of another idea. It takes me a long time to get
through a good work of nonfiction.
Don't
believe everything you read.
Are
we still having this
conversation? The same debate seems to run every week or so
on the CHI list despite Donald
Norman's intelligent and subversive attempts to elevate
the dialogue. Lately everybody is obsessed with sweating out
the "metaphors or not" question. It reminds me of
first year architecture students wresting feverishly over
crunchy little aphorisms like Form Follows Function
or the good old There Are No Straight Lines in Nature...
I say, "So?" ... Everyone desperately needs to distill
good design to a set of 3 rules that will effortlessly slice
through a tomato even after sawing a tin can in half. I roll
my eyes like I'm in church and go back to my book; which incidentally
is Bart
Kosko's Fuzzy
Thinking. As far as the book goes, I'm fascinated
and skeptical but mostly fascinated. Again-- the idea is lovely
enough for me to to suspend skepticism.
Oh
dear. I've discovered a diverting talent for devising snide
and poorly rhyming verse. Writing bad verse is easier than
one might imagine. Almost anyone can do it...
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12
August 1999
A
logistical hairball.
Empty
rooms and dark stairwells. I'm reading Amrita,
in which the protagonists are surrounded by the murmuring
clusters of ghosts whom I imagine to inhabit the stairwells
I've been walking.
According
to Edward Lucie-Smith's Sexuality
in Western Art, the client gave Fragonard
specific instructions upon commissioning The
Swing:
"...his
mistress was to be shown seated on a swing pushed by a bishop,
with himself lying on the ground, in a position enabling
him to look up the girl's skirts..."
Hmm,
I wonder how many times that particular work has been used
to illustrate Robert
Louis Stevenson's poem...
I'm
concerned that with all the drilling, repetition and emphasis
on "practical, real life skills," education is becoming too
specifically applicable and not sufficiently stimulating.
For example, the difference between consumer mathematics and
trigonometry is that a grasp of the latter subject scales
in order to be applicable both literally (real life) and abstractly
(metaphorically). Instead of teaching the real life application
of more abstract skills, schools are concentrating on real
life scenarios shorn of their larger theoretical context.
That hardly encourages the sort learning through exploration
that occurs when the learner is able to understand an idea
outside of the context in which she learned it. I remember
the first time I glimpsed the possibilities of physics. Hitherto
it had been no more than a devious contrivance designed to
provide Mr. Messina the opportunity to poke fun of me in front
of the class. However when the same flip-flop wearing Messina
starting rambling about the theoretical possibilities implied
by quantum physics-- I was mesmerized... Stephen Hawking's
work should be required high school curriculum... End dictatorial
Op Ed.
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11
August 1999
An
interesting dialogue
to print out and read (more thoroughly) this evening. It begins
to discuss the difficult topic of a narrative of space...
Herein should probably follow a series of semantic disclaimers
and definitions... Obviously, narrative doesn't have to mean
linear... nor does it have to imply a predefined, recombinant
set of events. If that were the case, we would be dealing
with the same ugly problem referenced (somewhere or other,
some time ago) in some notes I made on narrative in architecture.
I'm talking about the awkwardness of using a spacial medium
to describe a linear sequence of events... But that's not
what they are discussing... It's about describing or defining
the narrative of directional motion... A quote from Mary Fuller
(from NintendoÆ
and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue)
...Given
the inconclusiveness I've described, it was the ability
to move in space (rather than to arrive) that generated
and structured narrative; John Smith wrote primarily about
the times he was in motion, not the times he was sitting
in Jamestown. The resulting narratives were, in turn, organized
by elapsed time (sequences of dates) but also determined
by it. Henry mentioned that "characters" in NintendoÆ can
be described less in terms of learning and transformation
than in terms of resources gradually expended in the course
of the game. This sense of a trajectory dictated not by
change or crisis but by expenditure, the gradual running
out of a fixed quantity of time or resources, is an almost
universal feature of the narratives I study...
Packing
up and moving. I'm swamped by the quotidian. It's not unpleasant
but it does make me stupid. It also makes me bump into everything.
Mark
Twain's What
Is Man? and other
essays.
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04
August 1999
I
love the irony and pity conversation between
Jake and Bill in The
Sun Also Rises... I used to love that book when I
was thirteen. I'm not sure why. I'm pretty sure I didn't understand
the nature of Jake's injury or the implications about Brett's
male companions...
Wow! The
Online
literature library has a fascinating array of Stuff, including
my childhood favorite Edgar
Rice Burroughs. We had my father's old collection of science
fiction in a musty Gordon's gin box in the basement. I read
about John Carter of Mars (the greatest swordsman of two worlds),
Carson of Venus, and Tarzan of Pellucidor (and of everywhere
else). It's very nice that they are online (I s'pose they
probably aren't the Great Literature I recall as a nine year
old), but one of the joys of reading those books was stopping
every few pages to glance back at the lurid covers. They depicted
muscular, sword-wielding warrior men clasping improbably colored
but well-toned Martian princesses in various states of consciousness
and undress...
In NYC
'til sometime next week. No updates.
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03
August 1999
Last
night I dreamed of traffic / pedestrian fatalities... Dragging
bleeding bodies from the road, watching the moment of impact;
I felt warm blood spatter my face and dry between my fingers.
A
thought: It seems that most people desperately want a good
story to be true. It's more compelling if it really happened
(tabloid reports, miracles, improbable historical relationships).
Why must the content be verifiable? If the idea is sufficiently
beautiful (and true?), doesn't the literal verification or
belief become secondary? I s'pose that's rhetorical...
Obviously, for some of us, it does.
Speaking
of which, is it possible that the gene pool of modern humans
is "seasoned
by interbreeding with Neanderthals"?
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02
August, 1999
Over
the weekend, I read the fascinating, but intensely disturbing
Ferocious
Romance. I lack the author's capacity for amusement
and genuine empathy for both (or either) of the religions
examined... Mostly I'm still too close... too brittle.
Lots
of exciting stuff
by, about, and tangentially related to Donna
Harraway...
Juicy.
I
made a dress yesterday. I will dye it red tonight. It has
tiny, fluffy little sleeves. I have to dye it quick because
right now it looks like an Easter dress... A bit too wholesome.
Today's
Suck
is very funny... Hmm, of what does it remind me?
It's
so kind of Russell Jacoby to read and dismiss so much of contemporary
culture. It's saves us all a lot of time. We might well have
have been seduced into exploring and evaluating all that horrid
nonsense of applied semiotics for ourselves. Focus on the
Family is another munificent organization who will cheerfully
précis most of the twentieth century to save you the
trouble. Get thee behind me Baudrillard, Kristeva, Jung, Universal
Pictures.
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July
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