Just so you all know. Maureen Durkin is a student at St Joe’s in English and Creative Writing. She worked through Tunxis with honors and is everywhere. She participates in humanities conferences at UT-El Paso; she participates in other conferences I used to have going but have let slide due to work load. This while also doing what she does at SJ. She’s editor of their lit mag, as well. She has great energy. She and the amazing Spinning have much in common.

Welcome Maureen.

Thanks to Christopher on the Who Hash question. He’s got a case of this in his basement.

By golly, it seems that Coonce-Ewing may have the answer to the Who Hash conundrum.

He writes, “After thinking about it for quite some time however, it seems that Seuss was a bit more sadistic that we realize. After all, if Corned Beef Hash is made from Corned Beef, and Roast Beef Hash is made from Roast Beef, than by simple conjecture we arrive at the horrible truth! Who Hash is made from Whos!”

Questions of time. Time is the enemy. There are things to be done and there are things to be done. Today I have had David Lewis-William’s The Mind in the Cave opened to page 106 and have yet to progress over the pages to consider metaphors of mind as Swiss Army knife or as cathedral, although Raymond Carver had already dealt with that issue. For Mishima awareness loves landscape and curve.

We are all in the same boat: things to be done. This problem is difficult for everyone, but, of course, my main concern is for the story writers whose endeavors cannot be boxed into discrete units. The writer may write from six to seven in the morning then go to work or school. But this can be a painful routine, because once the writer begins, it’s hard to stop, and what if we forget the next step.

On the drive home yesterday, it struck me that people enjoy repeating stories. This is analogous to Beowulf, whose story must be told, repeated, and remembered. In a sense, we tell stories to repeat them, which is an element of sharing.

But there’s also the Dr. Manhattan issue to story. For some reason, perhaps having to do with the atomic weight of hydrogen, we communicate ideas through story. We are therefore stepped in narrative. We are, therefore, steeped in time. If there were no time and space, would there be story?

For some reason I have the urge to find out once and for all the recipe for Who Hash. I feel that I need some of this. I wonder if it’s related to the conventional corned beef variety.

Here’s an interesting conference sponsored by the Institute for Information Law and Policy at the New York Law School and Yale Law. Here’s the description:

The new environments of electronic games, especially those that are massively multiplayer, are not just gamespaces; they are cultures unto themselves. Like real societies, they grow and evolve as their members create rules and norms. Some norms in games are cooperative and democratic, others are dictatorial and dystopic. This interdisciplinary conference will examine the state of play today in an effort to understand the phenomenon of digital games and the virtual worlds they create and to discuss the complex social, psychological, and legal issues to which they give rise.

I find the “they are cultures unto themselves” especially interesting.

Laminations writes:

It just infuriates me when I tell people that I’m from CT, and they say “Oh, yeah,” like they can already picture my life: horseback riding lessons, prep school, white collar parents, vacations in Europe, etc. Actually, my parents haven’t had a real vacation since… maybe 1993. They and most people I know from my home state are constantly worrying about losing their job, paying the mortgage, etc. I feel like I should do a whole public service campaign to debunk the Country Club Connecticut myth.

In the medieval universities of France, students could often be heard fighting about their respective countries. In the United States this phenomenon manifests as the presumptions we make about people from various states and the odd method of competing over greater lack. I wonder why the misconception about CT, a misconception that even I had moving to CT from west Texas? I’d love to hear how this conversation developed in the GW classroom.

This is the god I love my job post. Thanks to the good friends taking part in the weblog cluster and good friends in general.

Spinning writes:

To quickly dispel any possible circulating rumors that I am a depressing, bitter old lady, let me give you one or two tiny pieces of the puzzle. I have a husband who makes the best chili and gazpacho (obviously a patient manwho else will take an hour just chopping vegetables?) and who has brought me a single red rose every Friday for the last fourteen years. He is perhaps, the rock to which I cling when Im dancing in real reality. My writing is something that perhaps is often gloomy or sardonic, but that is from no other man but Edgar (Oh lookhes smiling down at me!). That, and the inclination to write most often when Im having a saggy diaper day.

Very nice writing.

Susan writes in the comment area pertaining to an apology:

“Maybe it’s the way I was raised and taught until I developed my own set of standards based on those teachings and experience with them, but for some reason, I still respect authority figures. No, we can’t always trust them, but what the fuck do students know about something they haven’t learned yet?”

Beowulf is certainly respectable. Here’s a question: do we learn more in or outside of school? When we are exchanging views here and elsewhere, this ain’t school. It’s better.