You are what you eat

If morning’s your time to do work (as it is, usually, mine), feed your brain accordingly. Oatmeal? Enh. Today’s breakfast: leftover cioppino from last night, with some pasta thrown in for carbohydrate goodness. Besides carbs, this takes care of protein (seafood) and vegetable matter (peppers, tomatoes, veg. broth). And caffeine but that’s from coffee, not the cioppino.

My brain had better appreciate this. I already feel more awake, and haven’t even had that much coffee. Must be the protein.

(San Francisco style, my nose. I believe this is a Roman dish; it’s certainly Italian.)

T minus one week

My prelim is in one week and two hours. There’s a symmetry to this one-two deal that makes me happy. Also, I’ve got an article due on the 30th. Consequently, I have been thinking Very Academic Thoughts. These are some of the things that have been on my mind lately.

Hypertext, the h word, is almost a bad word nowadays. Like Noah did, I went back to Theodor Nelson’s definition. “Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’ to mean a body of written and pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. [and then in a footnote:] The sense of ‘hyper-’ used here connotes extension and generality: cf. “hyperspace.” The criterion for this prefix is the inability of these objects to be comprised sensibly into linear media, like the text string, or even media of somewhat higher complexity.” (This is from his talk at the ACM proceedings in 1965.)

Nelson’s done with that definition, it seems, it’s mutated and so has the computer. But we still attempt to find a definition for hypertext, or else to coin better suited words.

I am not saying anything new, but keep coming back to this: the “problem” isn’t with the term, the term’s fine. In defining it, Nelson hit on a quality intrinsic to the human experience. Everything, the world, is a hypertext; this is a scary concept to academics, because it is too vague and imprecise. Still, it’s unproductive to deny this, or to shy away from it. The question shouldn’t be whether a set of data is or is not a hypertext, but rather whether it’s interesting or revealing to represent it as such electronically.

The electronic medium is the most suited one in which to define the Roland corpus, because Roland is a hypertext spanning different media. He is in literature, film, theater, music, painting, drawing, sculpture, stone carvings… I’m probably forgetting something. (Are sculptures and stone carvings distinct, or is it all sculpture?..) Combining them, viewing them through the codified electronic eye acts as an equalizer. Any critical discourse affects the way we view an artifact, and critical discourse of several media which takes place in an altogether different medium fails to skew perspective in favor of one of the constituent corpus media. Am I making any sense, and if so, am I full of nonsense?

In writing the to-be-published article (as opposed to my written prelim, which is more than twice as long and will only be read by my committee), I omitted heuretics entirely. It is the lifeblood of my research, but I omitted it, finding it impossible to explain what’s going on with Roland^HT, put forth some preliminary conclusions and defend the heuretic approach, all in 6000 words or less. Greg Ulmer suggests scholarship as creativity, “a generative experiment: based on a given theory, how might another text be composed?” (Heuretics: The Logic of Invention 5). This feels liberating and right, both in my own research and in my thinking about teaching. (I’ll get to implement the teaching next spring, in “Codex to code: an introduction to humanities computing.”)

This’ll be its own article. But not until after prelim. And the two term papers. And the article. And Electronic Cabaret, at which I am apparently reading. Woot.

Besides academia, I am thinking about the summer. For all its foreseeable (and foreseen) difficulties, it will satisfy my wanderlust like no summer before it… mm, save perhaps 2002. Road trip down to Athens, through Roanoke where we get to stay with a friend I haven’t seen since December. After the conference, on to Huntsville, Alabama, where I’ll meet an exceedingly cool laser physicist MUDfriend whom I’ve never actually met in non-digital space. Then Memphis, the Mississippi river, New Orleans. West to Albuquerque, where Scott and Rachel are young doctors in residency and in love. Then Grand Canyon, and Los Angeles. Two and a half months in LA to do work and be with family, then drive north to Nevada, hang out with thirty thousand community-oriented nutjobs for a while, drive back east through Madison and probably Chicago.

In-between, learn perl, encode a 700-page text, digitize all my primary Roland sources.

I can’t wait ’til summer.

Oh, also, I’m thinking of applying for a Fulbright, and to that end am looking for experienced guidance wrt the application process.

License plate

Seen on a station wagon today:

ABD

(y’think it was a hint?…)

Insomniac

And so we dance, only with our voices, filling the spaces in-between admission and action. The more insistently we attempt to fill them, the more starkly obvious these gaps become, beckoning.

Detached amusement is odd to observe in oneself.

I am sold.

This past weekend, I bought a PowerBook. It was about time: my Win98-running PC laptop is five years old; and Brown has a crazy .edu deal; and I’m tired of asking my friends to test Web site stuff with Macs… Not to mention that this new machine is half the weight of the old one, more compact, robust and has much better battery management. There were many reasons to get a new machine.

Not wanting to entangle myself unnecessarily with Bill Gates again, I checked out OpenOffice.org.

I’m completely sold. Not only on OOo, but also on OS X, the whole deal. When I was having problems with keeping the ‘net connection going and had to reinstall the OS, my heart sank: this is a big annoying deal in Windows. It wasn’t here, everything got archived cleanly, even most of the preferences. OOo checked for twenty million components that it needs in order to run (or that’s how many it felt like, anyway), and installed without a hitch. I finally have a Unix environment to play in.

It hasn’t all been entirely smooth, of course, as I’ve gotten to know this system. But here’s a huge difference between this and Windows PC: none of the problems I’ve encountered have corrected themselves as if by magic. Everything seems to be happening for a reason. If something seems to be going wrong, my gut feeling is that eventually I’ll find a solution that makes sense.

Current mood: geekhappy. (Though not blindly so: if you think of any issues I should look out for and want to let me know, I’ll cook you borsch and be generally thankful.)

Letter to a god.

(This is a sort-of response to something a friend wrote. It’s not critical to know the original piece.)

Janus,

Two-faced, you speak looking up, bury a box looking down. Green exhumed upright dead old man gazes straight ahead, holding your gaze up and away from the inside of his burying box. You never see him down looking up, unless you take the whole frame and turn it sideways.

Horizontality is decay. Unused muscles, skin, bones decay. Upright existence requires integrity of body, so isn’t frightening to look at. But this here is death made vertical: and so, since decay is not an option, apply color. Green, like a tree. Brown roots underground; above-ground—green. Trees with their double-liminal, ambiliminal existence remind you of the dead; this frightens you, so you teach schoolchildren of the life trees bring.

Lest we forget that green death is all around us, grass grows where trees don’t. Liminal death’s reminder, a low dense green fog toeing the line between above and below.

We’re frightened, so we reaffirm the line. Asphalt is hard fastening the gap between us and deathl; we look down and see no green. We are supported—but stifled, deprived of oxygen in our self-imposed separation from death. Soles become burned and numb and tough like leather.

Until an earthquake, or time, or tree roots, break the asphalt, and the dead surface. Subliminal roots revolt, become superliminal, obvious. Only part pokes out, tangling the spiderweb-thin sticky divide between now and never again. Once tangled, there’s no returning to order, never a full separation. Re-asphalting will only repeat the cycle. Roots like crooked fingers tear at the blockage of memory

and feed the green death’s reminder that makes poison into life for us.

Death dreaming.

People keep posting about personal things lately, and I’m wanting to record this dream.

I was in my homecity. I probably took a trolley bus. I remember where this set of buildings was in relation to where I used to live, in the Telecenter quarter.

I was delivering something, money? and books to someone I barely knew. Don’t remember why; this isn’t the important part anyway. The same set of buildings contained a morgue. I was in this woman’s apartment, leaving the delivery for her - there was nobody else there. Then, suddenly (or rather, I don’t remember the transition), my mother was there, and my brother too, and it was a morgue-cum-burial ground.

People were being exhumed. I didn’t want to look, but my grandfather insisted on speaking to me, kept talking until I looked at him. He looked familiar, almost exactly as I remember him - except that his hair was disheveled, he had a hyoooge belly and was completely green, everything the same shade of lightish green, clothes and all. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, the large checkers of which must’ve been other colors, but now they were different shades of green. (The shirt looked suspiciously like one I have that used to belong to my dad. Except this one is red.) He wasn’t frightening; we talked.

My dad was also there, but I do not remember him.

I remember being frightened, in general. Spooked. And here I am, wanting to believe that I am not afraid of death.

What I hate most is lack of knowledge of what happens after.

Well, what do you know.

The side links don’t work with Netscape 4.79 for Windows. At least, not on this network-connected Brown machine.

work ethic

Four weeks from today, prelim. If I pass it, I’ll be ABD. I should be nervous, twitchy, frantically studying, and I’m not.

There is a lot of work to do, but mostly it isn’t overwhelming. There are times, hours or days at a time, when I find myself unable to work, and put aside books and computer in favor of other activities. I’ve enough experience with my own work habits to know that if the time ahead doesn’t feel productive, it won’t be; so there’s no use in trying. So I read books, see my friends, then dive in again.

The question is always there in the back of my head: is this wrong? Am I overly cocksure, setting myself up for failure? Is this feeling of “there’s only so much I can learn in a given time period” an excuse to not push myself?

Perhaps it is unsettling that this research is not as difficult as the research I did in the Italian Studies track. Yet, I am learning more now. Perhaps it isn’t as difficult because I seem to have found my Subject. But there are no guidelines, except for what my committee and I have come up with. There is no trial by fire, no hated rite of passage, only work.

I push, when I need to. (It gets me in trouble sometimes, this toeing of the dead-line.) I sleep and work at odd hours. I navel-gaze in a public forum (this one) and then go back to work. The hard part is, work is never certain. There is little to compare it to, there are few standards. But then I shrug, and decide again and again that I am willing to make a fool of myself.

Crickets.

There are crickets outside my window. This bodes spring.

(Snow tomorrow, you say? Shh.)

TrackBack test

Hm, TrackBack didn’t seem to work last night. Let’s see if it does now. I was trying to reference MGK’s blog-documentary post from here: http://www.wordsend.org/log/archives/000017.html

Documentary

MGK says that “blogs seem to present themselves as a documentary genre.” A documentary of what? While typing that last sentence, I first typed “codumentary” – Freudian slip? Exactly what sort of document is this? I had another weblog going elsewhere, and moved primary activity to here, thinking that it feels better on many levels – but there’ve been no personal posts. It seems frivolous and unprofessional to talk about spring and my awe at having such generous friends. Would it be better to discuss the generosity of a Perseus Project staff member, who spent two hours talking to me about semantic encoding today?

What do you know about me, from this? What do you want to know?
</genre>

Gah.

LA Times: “Whoops.”

Like we needed more reason to be suspicious of our media sources.

dissertation’s daydream

*peers suspiciously*

Who are you, Roland’s reader? Why do you bother to come here, rehash a story a thousand times retold; you are in search of - what? Are you a student of literature, looking to fulfill some general requirement at university? Are you a seasoned scholar of the Middle Ages, weary of the laity’s constant misunderstanding of when the Middle Ages really happened and what was “dark” about them? (Do you take refuge in books and in your students, still open to the possibility of medieval intellectualism?) Are you a graphic novel aficionado in southern California, a creative anachronist in Vermont, or a postmodern theorist in France? Perhaps you spend your days thinking about electronica and pedagogy, or else the uses and meanings of semantic encoding?

Your first visit to Roland^HT may prove disorienting. You may have logged hours of Web reading already, or you may be sceptical of any literature unsafe to read in the bath. If of a scholarly mindset, you probably want a clear-cut distinction between fiction and criticism. On the other hand, if reading this for the pleasure of Literature, you may be put off by the mere idea of theory, even compulsively close the browser window. So I will make Roland’s scholarly value as inconspicuous as possible, without hiding it. (Shouldn’t be difficult. How much literary scholarship pays attention to its own aesthetic design?)

You are fickle. Your eyes get tired quickly. You can’t cuddle up with a computer the way you can with a book. Your attention span on the Web is a few seconds, or so they claim; and instead of working to improve it, you complain that electronic narrative is just not as gripping as a good book.

You get ahead of yourself, confusing form and content. It took you years to absorb, assimilate, digest the grip of books. They are easier on the eyes, yes, than the minute pulse of a monitor’s lights. Nevertheless, avid Reader, chances are you are wearing lenses even as you read this, devices to correct eye damage you likely earned by reading books.

You want satisfaction and security Now, but to read Roland you must have patience. He has moved like a glacier through Western Europe and America for a millennium, leaving in his wake chasms, valleys, and fertile soil on which wild narrative sprouts. He has left bits of himself in more geographical locations than you are likely to ever visit in person. Such vastness is not revealed in a day, nor in a week.

I will allow leeway. You want to be in control; I will give you a choice of identity. No longer merely an input agent, sending requests for bits of data to a server (otherwise known as “clicking on links”), you will choose the eyes of a Medievalist, Computing Humanist, SCAdian, Rock Star, Arty Type. Choosing will provide you with some starting points, things you may find useful or fascinating. Entering the multi-pathed narrative will, at first, land you on a passage likely to interest — do not be surprised to begin with a song if you choose to be a Rock Star. From there on, you will be on your own, all of Roland^HT open to exploration.

(Or you will remain a default Reader, have access to a site map, and off you go.)

From time to time, I will look at my access logs; they will give me an idea of the narrative paths pursued most often, and ones not pursued at all. I may even let you in on these patterns, once there is a critical mass of them. But I will not spoon-feed you, nor provide you with a magic patience pill. To know Roland is your own task.

No closure? You want to know how many pages in this book?

Why?

The question of how many more pages are left in all the world’s literature somehow never arises. We do not stop to think what will happen once we have reached the end of a paper-bound, three-hundred-page book. Why, there will be another book of course, or a re-reading; and after it another, and so on. If item 253 on our reading list happens to be Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 poems, we brave it for a while and move on before exhausting all the possibilities; perhaps we return later, or not.

Every work of literature we take in falls into the mass of the already-read and fuses with it, losing its borders, becoming part of our psyche and changing our worldview. In that same inextricable way, Roland – this Roland, at least – is tied to his sources direct and indirect, and recombines himself in relation to them. To completely read Roland is not only impossible, but undesirable; it would mean a brink to literature, words’ end. One can merely stop at a certain point, knowing that there is always another unknown turn.

among the many articles on war

this one is not much special. and yet.