Taking the long view

This linear scale Dow Jones chart spanning from the 1930's to today shows us how from the mid 1980's to the late 1990's the market grew tremendously, one might venture to say obscenely. Note also how in the last five years a new trend is emergent. Looks like a great flattening. The same flattening aplies to volume. Are we in a new phase of slow to no-growth? The log version of the chart is less dramatic but shows the same flattening trend.

Rebol guru endorses Mac Mini

Carl Sassenrath thinks the Mac Mini (Apple OSX) is Pretty Cool.

The Long Emergency?

Will scarce, expensive oil take down civilization as we know it? James Howard Kunstler's alarmist article at RollingStone.com ponders the possibilties.

Insight from the Huxster

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. --Aldous Huxley

... I wonder what Tony Blair thinks about that right about now.

Definitions of Zero

The numerical symbol 0; a cipher. We need nothing to complement our fullness. I do not know what this term means.

The identity element for addition. I'm not certain what identity element means either. Perhaps adding zero to the self produces a result of the identical self, which is another way of saying that something is produced when adding nothing to something, namely an identical something. And all these words we've been reading and writing are ciphers, identity elements, which we somehow need for the additions.

A cardinal number indicating the absence of any or all units under consideration. I feel absent from myself at the end of this semester. There is nothing left to work on, nothing left to say. I am a sum of zeros. Hollowed out. Nothing to see here. Move on.

An ordinal number indicating an initial point or origin. An argument at which the value of a function vanishes. I'm identifying more with the second of the two statements. In January, my initial point had some quantity and vector strength. Now, I'm experiencing the vanishing point, bigtime, as if a vanishing could be big, which is oxymoronic, perhaps merely moronic.

The temperature indicated by the numeral 0 on a thermometer. Depending on the scale, your zero feel is either freezing, or somewhere deep below freezing. I would characterize my zero feel at mere freezing, in the sense that the semester and all it tried to represent is crystallizing, suspended as time's present passes by. The asterisk in the middle of an ice cube.

A sight setting that enables a firearm to shoot on target. As in zeroing in on your pedagogical quarry. Teaching is like hunting blind. You don't know when you've hit the target, missed wildly, or wounded bystanders. And there is always the self-mutilation to be fretted about.

Informal. One having no influence or importance; a nonentity: a manager who was a total zero. Also a lecturer. A class. As in, that literature class amounted to nothing, had no impact, was worse than absurd, and will be quickly forgotten, like those other general ed. courses, and your bachelor's degree. What takes importance in lieu? If not this, what's that?

The lowest point: His prospects were approaching zero. I wouldn't call this semester, thought of as a point, as a low or lowest point. It wasn't that kind of semester. Vanishing point is better. A point of no return.

Informal. Nothing; nil: "Today I accomplished zero." Yup. Nothing much happened, and then the day continued regardless.

Zero, however, is not a negative number. You can at least give it credit for that. The predominate feeling of being at the zero sum is one of feeling emptied out, like there is nothing left to say, that the time has come to let the silence in. Breezes rustle the cherry blossoms; petal confetti clutters the paths. Nothing is real. Nothing to get hung about.

"Borges and I" by Borges and himself

Borges, Hypertext edition of metatext "Borges and I" with notes and commentary by Martin Irvine. This great little short-short packs a lot of self-awareness into a small space.

Free To Be... You and Me

I still love this verse from "Housework"...

So, the very next time you happen to be
Just sitting there quietly watching TV,
And you see some nice lady who smiles
As she scours or scrubs or rubs or washes or wipes or mops or dusts or cleans,
Remember, nobody smiles doing housework but those ladies you see on TV.
Your mommy hates housework,
Your daddy hates housework,
I hate housework too.
And when you grow up, so will you.

Job Hop Just Like an Executive

Is it a matter of bad work ethic, money grubbin' and lack of commitment? Or does that only apply when you're a non-exec? Analysis from ABC's Career Center.

Gloom and doom from Gioia

Dana Gioia op-ed on why literature matters . Do the math: declining participation in the arts, fewer young people reading literature, deficient reading skills among workers, mass ignorance of history, etc. Is it any wonder ... [insert anything Bush has gotten away with in the last 4 years here] .... I mentioned this to my old friend Mort Allman, and he says he's a contrarian about this issue: "no wringing of hands from this clown. I'll be bathing in warm showers of schadenfreude, as a post-future of economic dysfunction, knuckleheadedness, and educational meltdown descends upon a nation of bankrupt, pitiless, illiterate Walmart standbyes. As the world gets stupider, the smart people [those who aren't scapegoated and flayed] will see a big rise in their intellectual stock price. It's a supply/demand thing," he said. "We've utterly failed to make democratic education work the way it's supposed to. It should be creating an ethic of service and citizenship while at the same time encouraging the development of freethinking tolerant individuals. Instead we get the muck of 'No child left behind', which really means no child allowed to think for herself. Everybody gets to stand in line at the meatgrinder. It's like Pink Floyd's the Wall, man. Or like the videogame Lemmings; we move en masse towards the cliff edge. And that's when the revolution gets its legs... saving society from itself." That's when I told Mort it's not as bad as all that, that you have to understand that people have always been more stupid than smart, more foolish than wise. Life is short, art long. We may be receding slowly and steadily, the fadeout of a great civilization in decline, but there'll always be somebody who manages to keep the light going. You see flickers all around you, if you look. A classroom here, a lunch counter there. Somebody climbs a tree and thinks of a rhyme. Another carries a baby in her arms and imagines something better for her child. Somewhere a kid tosses a rock at a brick wall, and from his anomie springs a curiosity: what's in that book peeking from the recycle bin? Maybe there's something I need in there. Something to take me away from THIS.

Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project

Followup on the previous post... website for the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project.

Oxyrhynchus Papyri being decoded

Big breakthrough in classical studies: The Indepdendent reports how infra-red technology is being used to read a motherlode of ancient texts, probably 5 million words in all. New lines from a lost Sophocles play the Epigonoi have already been decoded. Possibly lost Christian gospels too.

Bankruptcy bill passes congress

Erasing Debts in Bankruptcy to Get Harder. Get ready to smell the glove, American consumers!

New words

Artifatural: (adj.) Pertaining to any manufactured replication of something that would otherwise appear in nature. e.g. "Her artifatural tan was radiant, nuclear, medium rare."
Naturficial . Of a naturally recurring phenomenon or organism that seems too artificial to be natural.

Spilling coffee down the hall

After waxing eloquent on "The Lady with the Pet Dog" in class this morning, I sauntered to the student union building, where I deposited my local taxes in a US mailbox. I decided I could use some coffee, and, facing the dilemma of choosing between Java City and Starbucks, I opted for Starbucks this time. Earlier in the morning I had responded to a Zogby consumer survey; one of the questions was to describe what kind of human being I was: a Starbucks coffee man or a Dunkin Donuts man. Having never considered human nature from the perspective of coffee brand preferences, nevertheless I chose Starbucks. As I made my way back to the office, a cup of piping hot Breakfast Blend in tow, I carefully negotiated my path up the stairs and through the doors, my cup teetering atop a notebook. I made it through the doors into the hallway, but as I turned to go down, I gripped the cup too tightly, which along with the force of my sudden turning, sent the hot brew cascading out and down the sides, splattering the tiles. I rested the cup on a nearby waterfountain and ran cold water on my right hand, which was burning from the accident. I tried to fit the lid more securely around the rim of the paper cup, but the lip was soggy and disfigured, making the fit tenuous at best. Midway down the hall, another spill and splatter on the tiles, and by this point I was at risk of losing the whole cup. Adding comedic tension to the scene was my farcical attempt to keep the coffee from spilling on my light coloured trousers, upon which even the scantest of coffee blemishes would have proved most unseemly. The trousers, at this hour, have escaped a tragic fate, but the day is young; Phoebus has not completed his sojourn 'cross the sky. I cleaned up my mess discreetly with paper napkins. If I am indeed of the Starbucks race, I am a bumbling member of the clan, and were my Starbucks brethern to know of my sloppy, butter-fingered ways, they might well ostracize me to the societies of Wawa minions, Truckstop clans, Roadside diner mavens, even the dreaded Dunkin Donutians. How can one enjoy Breakfast Blend in the face of such ineptitude? How to enjoy the subtle bouquet of flavors stored in each bean? I am not worthy of Starbucks. The insulating sleeve on my cup says that it is made from 60% post-consumer recycled fiber. Et tu, O' insulating sleeve? The hapless post-consumer, I'm feeling fibrous and more than a little recycled. And it's Friday.

Meaningful support for troops

John Kerry gets a couple of amendments passed in the senate, increasing the death benefit to military families and allowing them to remain in military housing up to a year after the death of their loved one -- something perhaps more relevant than slapping a yellow ribbon sticker on the back of your automobile. (Scroll down the page for stories of what real families are going through).

Score one for the anti-propagandists

Broadcasters Must Reveal Video Clips' Sources, FCC Says (washingtonpost.com)

Notes on Marcia's Identity states

These course notes on Adolescent Identity provide a bit more information on James Marcia's states of identity formation: foreclosure, diffusion, moratorium, achieved. The way I understand it now, these are states that all adolescents experience. The notes insist these should not be seen as stages one passes through in sequence. In my notes, I have presented them in a simple table:

	(active engagement w/ identity formation)	(passive engagement)
(stable)	achieved	foreclosed
(unstable)	moratorium	diffused

We see that the active states of achieved and moratorium are the states where the identity crisis has been engaged and grappled with, one successfully, the passive ones (foreclosed and diffused) have avoided the agon. You can also look at it from the perspective of stability, or continuity of self. The achieved and foreclosed states exist as steady states of self consciousness, the former being a realized individuality, the latter a kind of prefab conformity. The diffused and moratorium states are unsettled. The diffused personality fails to commit and thus remains indeterminate. The moratorium fails to succeed in commiting though their identity formation is "in progress." Not suprisingly, I'm not the first to arrange the states in a table like this. An expanded version of this table with additional notes can be found atpbu.edu. As I've introduced these ideas in class, I've wondered how many of us are truly identity achieved. My hunch would be that most Americans have foreclosed identities, meddled with by their parents and churches, perhaps primarily influenced by the mass media. Next in my ranking would come the identity-diffused. Conflict and crisis must be avoided, development arrested, personality kept in a bubble of youthful immaturity and ennui. Less popular would be the moratorium group, those who realize there's a struggle to be taken up, who experience the anxiety and uncertainty of that struggle, and who try on various identities as they work their way towards self-integration. Fewest of all would be those who successfully achieved identity. They are true individuals, individuals who know how to commit, how to relate with others, who are deep and rounded, and who have in a way heroically passed through the crisis stage. A fellow by the name of Dimitrios Jason Stalides has synthesized Erikson and Marcia with Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey" monomyth (and plenty of screengrabs from Star Wars). He calls it Hero psychology. By way of review, Joseph Campbell's hero journey can be reduced to three basic stages: separation, initiation, return. Stalides's monomyth page drills into further sub stages. What's interesting about this to me is how the Campbell hook gives me a way to pull in literature and literary character analysis into the discussion. Identity formation is interpreted as a narrative of self exploration, as the hero's journey, as a coming of age. Even without introducing Campbell into the discussion, one can examine literary personas and map them into Marcia's quadrants. For example, James Joyce's story "Eveline" shows us a woman who moves from moratorium to foreclosure. Tragically so. Sammy in "A&P" moves from passive engagement to active, probably entering into a moratorium state (and depending on how you read the story, ultimately an achieved state). The persona in Wordsworth's Intimation Ode moves from moratorium to achieved. You get the idea: the story moves a character between states, and a poem might express the sense of being inside one of the states. Think of the foreclosure inside Auden's Unknown Citizen, for example. And then there may be texts that explore the idea that personas might be blind to their true identity. They think they're individuals, but they're not. Conrad's Lord Jim comes to mind. At least this gives me some leads to pursue later.

Uncanny synchronicity

I'm typing up notes on self understanding and identity, reading and referring to the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy. The article by Eric T. Olson is entitled Personal identity. I'm also listening on iTunes to a smart playlist shuffle play mix of high-rated Elton John songs. I come across this passage on the website:

Evidence. How do we find out who is who? What evidence bears on the question whether the person here now is the one who was here yesterday? What ought we to do when different kinds of evidence support opposing verdicts? One source of evidence is memory: if you can remember doing something, or at least seem to remember it, it was probably you who did it.

And at precisely the same time, the song Talking Old Soldiers from Tumbleweed Connection is playing, and Elton is singing this lyric:

You're right there's so much going on
No one seems to want to know
So keep well, keep well old friend
And have another drink on me
Just ignore all the others you got your memories
You got your memories

I mistakenly hear the lyric "just ignore all the others" as "just ignore all the evidence" as I'm reading the words "One source of evidence is memory: if you can remember doing something, or at least seem to remember it, it was probably you who did it....Does memory supply evidence all by itself, for instance, or does it count as evidence only insofar as it can be checked against third-person, "bodily" evidence?"
An odd conjunction: hearing this random Elton John song about memories while reading a recently googled web article about identity and memory, while my mind bends the experience, fusing the two perceptions into something even more meaningful ("others" morphing into "evidence").

Self-Knowledge

I've been working up some lecture notes on self understanding and identity formation and found this helpful article from teh Stanford Encylopedia of Philosohpy on Self-Knowledge. It's making my head woozy trying to grasp it all, yet there is plenty of substance to work with.

I see a white bathroom

I see a white bathroom
Posted by: eschorama.

The couple who belong to this bathroom are very very white. They pad around in white terry bathrobes. He reads from a folded newspaper, most likely the Washington Post. She sips white tea from a cup and whispers soft prayers to herself that only the mockingbirds can hear. That which is not white is wooden and brown. Dark brown. These partners in romanticonomic bliss have individual sinks and mirrors identical in look. Symmetry has the value of whiteness for them. Always an even number of flowers in the vase. Their soap and gels are kept in unlabeled white containers. Towels, curtains, and thoughts: all white. Politics moderate. Fiercely so. The antique clawfoot bathtub bespeaks the rich tradition of their race, the amplitude of their whiteness, their incredibly superior purity. In this picture of perfect cleanliness, there can be no suggestion of a toilet, until we realize that the photograph itself may in fact be a toilet's eye view, and when he or she sits on this toilet, their stools complenting the browns of the antique wood shelves and towel rack, he or she is overcome by lilywhite thoughts, or spiritual vaccum as it were, that accompanies the disillusionment of ten o'clock, the oppressiveness of snowmen on winter afternoons. Nothing will be permitted to smell in a room such as this. There is a peaceful kind of whiteness, and they have tried to engender a kind of peace or respite from reality in this place, yet there is the whiteness of the blind too. The blindness and futility of trying to bring it together and keep life clean. They have been through five cleaning ladies, this couple. Call them Jeff and Linda. Five women of color who were unable to keep the dirt away from this room. Now, a retarded girl of sixteen comes in twice a week with rubber gloves and gallons of ammonia bleach. It is better now. Much better. They feel cleaner, even whiter than before. It must be documented in a photo as proof of their consistency, their moderate evenhandedness, their pure taste. Whoever it was that took this shot, he or she, one of them has however documented a perfection that cannot last, for the whites, despite the bleach and sheer drapes the consistency of angelwings, the whites will accrue dirt, grime, mold, the reverberating klunk of a hollow shell. This insanity of whiteness is a temporary forgetting, a dream from what these people need the most, confrontation with the waking world. A world of dirt, dust, blood, color.

Saul Bellow Dead

Detailed obit at The New York Times.

Julie -- cuteness on overdrive

Julie -- cuteness on overdrive
Posted by: eschorama.

Great shot of my dog as a puppy, with Picassa editing by Stacy.

brandywine bridge

brandywine bridge
Posted by: eschorama.

Piling Through

Behind iMac to the right, a rarely touched region of the desk: A user's guide to Cheap Imposter, a shareware page impositor. An imposed test printout of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (excerpts). A December 2004 Verizon Home voice Mail and Call Waiting guidebook. A ruled yellow notepad with a list of Penguin book titles, from which five items have been checked off for desk copy requests (authors making the final cut were Goethe, Henry Green, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, and Stendhal). An old journalism notepad with contact info preserved (e.g. a vintage instrument shop in center city Philadelphia). A Shambhala Publications faxback form with three titles requested: the Gnostic bible, Surrealist games, and Emerson's Nature and other writings. A two page printout of names and email addresses from my amiga emulator yam program's addressbook. Important payroll information for a college I work at (unidentified, two years old). Two sheets of paper containing local library hours and phone numbers. A one page list of songs I've written. Story idea scrawled on a Softmart notepad sheet with the tag line at top "Get Connected with OS/2 Warp Connect!" The story idea is about a happily married man who is informed by a midget that his wife is having an affair, and instead of murdering his wife (which he considers carefully), decides to bear the information quietly and derive corrupt pleasure from his knowing something about her that she doesn't know he knows. A name change notification from my auto finance company. A list of usernames and passwords. A three page emacs cribsheet. More usernames and passwords, three pages worth. An ink and crayon sketch of my dog Lucy. Three more pages of domain name information filled with tuples. An early drawing by my daughter entitled: "A|is|THELADR|OV THE WEEK! It is a picture of a yellow wagon filled with red apples. The wagon is being pulled by a smiling child with large hands standing on a brown ball, from which extends an elongated neck and head with antennae topped by green globes. A four page Unix commands cribsheet. More email addresses. A list of potential entity names for an xml dtd. A slim notebook of creative writing drafts from 1996-97. A spiral notebook with a bright orange cover. A folder filled with draft material for my novel in progress. A folder of contact info for book publishers. A printout of autoreply rejection slips to make it easier for editors to reject my work. A sparsely filled ideas folder. A folder labelled "current drafts". An Allmusic.com freelancers folder. A folder lablled Fiction, containing old short stories. Another fiction folder, on the front of which is a drawing in blue pen of a noble reindeer. In the background Santa Claus, wearing shades, is flying away in his sled. A voice bubble exclaims: "Bye bye, suckkerr...ha ha ho!" A stoic fullmoon observes from above. An old folder dubbed "Prose" with mostly handwritten sheets.

Nero's fiddle

Thank God, slacktivist Fred Clark is back to posting (hopefully regularly) his spot-on exegesis of the Left Behind series. This week's installment: Nero's fiddle. Rock on, Fred.

Morphic resonance redux?

In a previous post, I explored some odd semantic connections in my life at the time and linked them to the idea of morphic resonance, an idea I still don't know much about. Well anyway, the connections keep happening. This, one strangely, involves dead Philadelphia broadcasters. One morning on the way to work, I was listening to the WMGK morning show, hosted by John Dibella, former king of Philly's morning zoo on WMMR. King Dibella had long ago been dethroned by shock jock Howard Stern. Somewhere along the line WMGK changed formats from soft rock to classic rock. Anyway, I'm not a fan of Dibella, never was, but there I was listening for five minutes as the car stepped its way out of West Chester from stoplight to stoplight. Dibella mentioned that his former morning zoo sidekick "Mark the Shark" had died recently. A couple days later I googled "Mark the Shark" and found a site I had been to before, when researching the literacy show "Operation Alphabet": the site is called Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia, and it offers many nostalgic treasures for those of us who grew up on local shows like Sally Starr, Chief Halftown, Captain Noah, and Wee Willie Weber. Anyway, on the front page of their site they had a tribute to the recently deceased Doctor Donald T. Rose, a popular DJ in the 60's and voiceover host of after-school cartoons on channel 48. I browsed the site a little more and discovered that Chief Halftown had passed on a few years back. The next morning, I was listening to WXPN's morning show, and they announced that Annie Haslam, diva of the classical prog rock band Renaissance, was going to be performing in the area. A little googling turned up her website: anniehaslam.com, at which I discovered she'll be performing at the Media Theater, is a breast cancer survivor, and has taken to painting abstract pictures that conjure O'Keefian tissues and tendrils, like shimmering, mythic vulvas and labial folds. Her site also mentioned a tribute to the deceased Philadelphia DJ Ed Sciacki, who used to be on WIOQ and was a keeper of classic rock and prog rock fires in our area. I hadn't known he'd passed away either. Later in the day, I was listening to Howard Eskin on the sportstalk station, and he incongrously brought up the death of Dr. Donald T. Rose, an absolute non sequitur interjected between talk of the Sixers and the Phillies. In my lit classes, we had covered Tennyson's "Tears, idle Tears", a poem about nostalgia for the "days that are no more". Its last line "O Death in Life, the days that are no more" might apply to memories of local radio and tv personalities, who were quietly dropping out of my life. Rest in Peace!

Tony Curtis's villanelle workshop

Check out Guardian Unlimited Books for a succinct explanation of the villanelle form and how to write one. You start with a couplet and work it out from there. Dylan Thomas's "do not go gentle into that good night / rage, rage against the dying of the light" is perhaps the English lanugage's most famous villanelle. Sometimes working in closed forms like the sonnet, villanelle, or sestina helps to discipline content, shaping the chaos of emotion and experience into some connective, musical whole.