Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Employers who fired people for blogging include “a Washington DC-based non-profit“,
the Houston Chronicle,
CollegeClub.com, and probably many more!

“A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look up the word “hermeneutics” in the dictionary.”

Steven Weinberg, “Sokal’s Hoax”, NYRB, August 8, 1996

“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.”

Paul Dirac (1902-84)

You know, POMO prose might make more sense if we thought of it as poetry. But I’m not waiting for my deathbed to figure out what the stuff I’m reading actually means.

Bricolage

Derived from the French word “bricoleur” (a Jack-of-all-trades or handyman). POMOs use “bricolage” for any patchwork or non-expert creation.

Dialogism

Theory that every statement is “really” half a dialog with some imaginary listener–and therefore impersonal, objective statements don’t exist.

Heteroglossia

the challenge of nonstandard dialects to an official language–metaphorically, challenges to any dogma.

Sadly, the POMO bricolage of buzzwords works better as an author’s job-application than it does as a reader’s source of information. Yule Heibel has some very interesting remarks on the economic basis of POMO prose in her comments on my rant yesterday.

I’m working on my own little POMO glossary, and check this out:

The Phallus

“…some critics say the term ‘the Phallus’ in Lacan’s work has as many as eight meanings and some as few as one meaning. One thing everyone pretty much agrees on, though, is that Lacan tries to maintain a distinction between the Phallus as a signifier privileged male attributes, and the penis, as a spongy little organ that can’t live up to the Phallus’s inflated claims.”

Those POMOs have been reading too much spam–or hanging out with some very unmotivated guys.

Fun, thoughtful, quirky, provocative, purely Halley-esque. Just go read it. I don’t have time to add my own two cents this morning, but that’s okay. You’ll be thinking up your own responses and that will be even more fun than reading mine.

I posted a page of pix including photos of organizer Alex Golub; Disseminarians AKMA, Margaret, and Trevor ; JOHOvial David Weinberger, Payntnetters Beth Hastings and Frank Paynter, Steve Himmer and Sage Brousseau from OnePotMeal; game-meister Greg Costikyan, Happy Tutor Phil Cubeta, and virtual economistTed Castronova. Special thanks to Sage for taking some of my favorites of these photos.

Note: You can find actual DGI conference info linked to by my impressionistic blog about it.

I can skip straight to the dish on the Digital Genres conference, because it has already been blogged by both AKMA and David Weinberger, with photos on Kiplog…

Five cool things about Chicago:

1. Streets running east-west are numbered, so in that one dimension, even I can’t get lost.
2. I got to hear some of Frank Paynter‘s un-given talk on Cole Porter.
3. Korean lilac in bloom smells wonderful–and because Beth Hastings knew what the plant was named, I might be able to get some myself someday.
4. To get more perspective on life, I went to the Oriental Institute and hung out with people who died three thousand years ago.
5. To get less perspective, I went to the Penang restaurant (2201 S. Wentworth) and drank beer and coconut milk with Alex Golub and David Weinberger.

Five cool quotes from talks:

1. “Is the Talmud really written, or is it just written down?” (David Rosenberg) [The question can also be asked of most people’s weblogs.]
2. “You see warnings on slash writing that might offend–for example, ‘PWP.’ That stands for ‘Porn Without Plot’, or ‘Plot? What Plot?’ ” (Holly Swyers)
3. “Listing words alphabetically lets you avoid deciding what’s more important.” (Dan Headrick) [He also pointed out that search engines let you find information stored with no organizing principle.]
4. “An archive is not a library. The former stores everything it produces or collects; the latter is selective.” (Theo Van Den Hout)
5. “A weblog is like a Dada street performance–both the production and the consumption are interactive.” (Steve Himmer, aka OnePotMeal.)

Five cool quotes not from talks:

1. “Bill Gates would be a lot less happy about how rich he is if he had to lug it all around.” (AKMA)
2. “Our [Western] relationship with our physical bodies is already mediated by culture and technology much more than was possible in most other societies in history.” (Alex Golub, who lived on sweet potatoes for two years while doing his anthro fieldwork in New Guinea)
3. “When you live in a virtual world, you need a really good chair.” (Alex again, this time quoting a web-obsessed friend who has a bad back)
4. “What’s the difference between high church and low church? My faith is so low-church that we eat the bread and drink the grape juice while believing that we don’t know what’s going on.” (Trevor Bechtel)
5. “We can argue if you disagree with what I said. But if you say we can’t talk about our values–I don’t see how we can argue from that premise.” (David Weinberger)

Props to Alex Golub for organizing a great conference!

“Colloquium” is one of those words that’s supposed to mean something real but most often doesn’t. (Another word of this type, you’ll notice, is “yes”.)

A “colloquium” is a talk that an expert gives to interest non-experts. On a scientific topic, a true “colloquium” could fall anywhere in between an article in Discover magazine (pretty pictures plus arm-waving) and one from Scientific American (a fairly dense critique).

Most people who give colloquia fail on one of two measures. Type one keeps forgetting what “non-expert” means. Type two doesn’t grasp the meaning of “to interest.”

If you find yourself at a type-two colloquium, I recommend thinking up new ways to rearrange all the furniture in your house. If you find yourself at a type-one colloquium, you can still have quite a good time by approaching it as you would a piece of classical music.

First, expect the speaker to have his most clear, most memorable, most understandable material at the beginning. Classical composers often start movements with a “theme” that gets varied later on, and if you aren’t paying attention most of the rest will be lost on you.

Second, even if you get confused somewhere after the theme, all is not lost. The “composer” in front of you, if she’s any good, has some “cadence material” planned for the end of the piece. There is a reason this topic was chosen, a reason for the sequence being followed, and when the end arrives there will be something “best” that’s been saved Uh oh, having said that, I haven’t raised up your expectation that I saved up some big POW! BIFF! BAM! for the end of this post. I’m more the “bing” type anyway….

I’m off to Chicago, to sit at the feet of Alex Golub, Frank Paynter, AKMA, and other University of Blogaria faculty members at the Digital Genres Conference. I may even get to meet two of my favorite Boston bloggers out there–Steve Himmer of OnePotMeal and David Weinberger of Joho will both be speaking.

Expect sparse blogging the next few days, and vastly improved blogging when I return!

“Try? There is no try. There is only do or not do.” (Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back)

“No such thing as bad student, only bad teacher. Teacher say, student do.” (Miyagi, The Karate Kid)

“Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.” (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)

Friends don’t let friends blog drunk–but why do authors make some of our favorite characters speak broken English? One simple reason: this trick tells us Yoda is “exotic” compared to good-old-boy down-home Luke Skywalker.

A less obvious reason for non-standard English is to seduce the reader by making him/her work harder to get the message. Richard Adams used this ploy cleverly in his wall-to-wall-sex-scene novel Maia–by refering to breasts (for example) always as “deldas” he enlists you to work with him for his naughty effect.

Super-wise characters often speak broken English for similar reasons–that is, when you have to work hard to figure out what they mean, you don’t notice that what they’re saying is already trite. (Trite? And why not? Is truth supposed to change as often as styles in skirt-length or lipstick? Okay, stop ranting, Betsy.)

I got some real enjoyment out of these Japanese-in-English pages, most likely non-fictional, devoted to dressing up your cat for photographs.

1. You need to dress a cat. And you will say to a cat
together with a family. “It has changed just for a
moment”. [ “it being very dear” or ] You will pass
pleasant one time.

2. If a family and a cat become fortunate, you will
take a commemorative photo! Therefore, please photo
your cat lovelily with much trouble.

3. If it finishes taking a photograph, you will make
it remove clothes from a cat immediately. You will say
then, without forgetting the language of gratitude to
a cat. “– be flooded — a way — good — having done
one’s best — ! — ”

You can dress up your kitty to look like a frog, a sheep, Ann of Green Gables, or a man in a red necktie (the Japanese word for that seems to be “nekutai.”)

Thanks for the link to Karen Marcello, guest blogger at Boing Boing.

“Ansible,” a crazy Brit sci-fi email newsletter, is one of very few I subscribe to. Today’s issue says that the incomplete biog of sci-fi great Robert L. Forward is now online. Forward is perhaps best known for Dragon’s Egg.

Forward’s neutron star physics and exo-biology are spot-on–he’s a hard-sci-fi master–and _Dragon’s Egg_ also has some of the wackiest, most convincing alien sex scenes ever.

Want more alien sex? You may get a bang out of the species with 3 genders in _The Gods Themselves_ by Asimov.

I met a bunch of great Boston-area bloggers Thursday at Dave Winer’s Harvard blog meeting:

http://www.scripting.com/ “Scripting News: Dave Winer’s weblog about scripting and stuff like that”

Dave was there fixing our blogs and having fun with subjects from Chinese households to NH primaries.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0120875/ “Shiny Glass Beads: Shiny Glass Beads:
Pay it forward: Got a penny? Leave a penny. Need a penny? Take a penny.”

Critt Jarvis blogs about politics, collaborations, and of course blogging. Lots of good snips and links.

http://critt.weblogger.com “One Co-Intelligence Avenue/
Exploring wholeness, interconnectedness, and co-creativity”

A new group blog where Critt Jarvis will be a contributing writer.

http://www.castleblack.net/mikeb/ “Castle Black: It Made Sense at the Time”

Michael Booth’s blog–here is just one insightful quote:

“It is okay, within limits, to talk about an absent person, but when someone is in the room you are supposed to either invite them into the conversation or leave them out of it. The problem with the Web is that the whole world is in the room, so you can’t really talk behind anyone’s back.”

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/stanleyc/“Stanley’s Weblog: Technology investing is my thing”

Stanley Cohen’s new blog invites comments on micro-cap stocks and broadband strategies.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/natureisprofligate/“Nature is Profligate or so it seems… “

Amity Wilczek is a Harvard biology grad student, who blogs about some wide-ranging bio interests with wit and a lot of fun pictures. Disclosure: I do aleady know her, because she’s my daughter.

Jamie, Mike, and some others whose names I don’t know

Start up your weblogs soon!

p.s. Most blogs link to the Daily Show’s own Bush versus Bush debate; I couldn’t get their plug-in to work. That’s why I linked yesterday to a different 12.4 M mov. version