Category Archives: Epistemology

What if Someone reWrote King Lear in Hypertext?

In King Lear it’s important that Edmund tells us what he’s up to. He speaks this in scene 2:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I 335
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact, 340
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality 345
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops
Got ‘tween asleep and wake? Well then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund 350
As to th’ legitimate. Fine word- ‘legitimate’!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow; I prosper.
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

He tells us exactly what he’s planning. Gloucester, of course, has no idea what Edmund is up to. We know and that’s the trick. This employ of irony isn’t required in tragedy but sure pushes our buttons. It’s important to classical comedy. Herge was brilliant at using it in comics. Tintin rushes toward a bush. Muller is waiting with a gun behind it. In the same panel, Tintin says, “Gee, I wonder what I’ll find behind that bush.” I paraphrase but the point is pretty clear. Despite narrative devices, tragedy needs a special reaction from the audience. We know what’s going to happen: Lear will fall and everyone will forget Cordelia until it’s too late. But what happens and to whom and who knows about it is key. If we could warn Edgar, then Edmund would be tripped up from the start, or he might try to get us, and I wouldn’t want to be up against him. To intrude on Lear as Lear or Tintin as Tintin would be absurd.

Lear in hypertext might be a tightly controlled oval. It would reveal more about Cordelia than we know now, but the story would still end the same way. Cordelia would have all the wrong answers, as would Edgar. Lear is Lear, unless Lear is rewritten as Lear in the “garden,” and every decision he makes, or choice ones, become a new Lear to follow or a Lear who went on to become a burlap dealer in Santiago. Might’ve beens or whatifs are a powerful read. Perhaps some of these will lead to classical tragic falls, other not. This would also be an interesting IF experiment. But in this IF decisions are forks in the universe of paths. >Give Land to sisters >Keep authority will supply different meanings. This would be tons of work. >Let Lear stay or >Kick old fool out.

In the land of many stories . . .

Follow to Mark Bernstein and his conversation with Emily Short for more, and more insightful, comment on this issue.

Deducing Nouns

Collective nouns for animals are interesting. For example, tigers ambush and rhinos bust things up, therefore, we have an ambush of tigers or a crash of rhinos. We have lots of bird feeders, thus we have drays of squirrels in the yard, dray referring the nests they build, although I’m not quite sure of the etymology in the sense of dray and nest.

There’s a deductive poetics to the practice. I always felt that all you needed was a decent eye.

We have a shadow (not a murder) of crows. The grackles have visited the feeders. And they certainly arrived and left like a storm, hence storm of grackles.

There is practicality to this.

“So, what did you see?”

“Lots of grackles.”

“A storm then.”

“No, not a cloud in the sky.”

1/4 Life Crisis

In this response Neha tells me about the quarter-life crisis, which I know only from John Meyer. I also know of Abby Wilner’s work on the issue.

We talk about liminality, spatial and temporal transition a lot (and yet never enough). But new spaces and transitions do not constitute “reality.” When we ask the question, “Then where was I ten years ago” (a question that Ham Sandoval would ask), we verify the validity of Tomorrow as Reality? Transitions and our experiences of them merely indicate continuum. Indeed, it could be argued that our definitions and descriptions of reality add up to the problem of completion in phases. “I’m entering reality now.” What this means is that period of development in my life is “over” and now I can start living, a common phenomenon. This is my essential and benign disagreement with Neha. I can’t fight the narrative of contemporary life (the one sold as The (current) Way), at least the linear narrative that persists, by asserting the abundant alternatives.

This is tricky business. We all buy into some sort of narrative, a structured image we hold as valid against perceived reality: what we see either validates the image or we take what we can get. This image becomes a powerful structure for plot. In my professional position, I have absolutely no long term goals or aspirations because getting the position was immensely difficult and not something easily tossed off (it was a 12 to 15 year process just to get the job. Some do it in less time, other more). I now have short-term issues that need completion to satisfy a question: will this or that work or be interesting to try out? This does not delegitimize any other person’s goal, short or long. Neither does it make for “reality” or a “real world,” merely a now in which we all must act. It is difficult to remain still.

Okay, this is fun.

As to cushion. I partly agree with Neha. But at the moment, I can’t see how one can negate the balance of learning in a “choice-driven” environment and at the same time “experience” the world one hopes to enter in terms of a career.

Help?

Research Question

How do catastrophes, natural disasters, and other major shifts, such as climate change, that affect human movement, thinking, and survival change planning, building, and the administering of collective necessity and the commonweal. Human civ’s spread is a part of this contextual question. Why did villages grow? Why would domestication happen?

Epiphanies

Neha is writing again on her weblog. Nice to see.

But how about some debate on the issue she raises here and treated throughout this post:

It’s been a year since I’ve graduated, and for an entire plethora of reasons, my plans to head to grad school as a freshly scrubbed graduate ended up buried deep, deep under the sea. It hasn’t been all that bad, really. I’ve found there’s a good reason students are advised to take blocks of time off and away from the very cushioned academic environment. Yes, students work part time. Some even full time. And they come from every possible social strata of life. But falling into academia is nothing if not cushioned. If you don’t believe me, ask the thousands of graduates who walk right into the arms of the newest phenomenon called the quarter-life crisis.

There are a few issues here. First I don’t disagree with Neha about social expectations and traditional norms. For all our talk about progressivity, we are still creatures of effacement, which makes Tim O’Brien that much more interesting. But I disagree that academia is a cushioned place. Cushioned against or opposed to what? If it is, students have a hand in making it so. Since academe has become an aspect of the larger market place, it doesn’t help in some cases to base so much effort on “majors” and “jobs.” This, I think, is a mistake in the institution’s design. But the design can be changed. It can be changed by students. The academic environment should treat jobs or careers as accidental and should concentrate on thinking. If one has an idea, the academic environment should provide a place for that idea’s development, marketable or not. Law school should be a place where people who want to be a lawyers can go for professional training.

Likewise, traditions, such as marriage, don’t need to be “kept” if they’re important and sustainable on their own, like an interesting idea. The creative impulse is to make not keep or horde.

Stories are not insulated or cut off from the world. The core conflict is always right in step with what is.

In Beowulf, Hrothgar does not call the Geats for respite. Beowulf journeys, nonetheless.

On Time

In a comment thread, JJ Cohen of In the Middle writes:

Massive projects require the leap beyond the horizon of your own death. They have to be a message to someone who comes after, and very often to someone who comes LONG after. That person isn’t “us” — as you say, how could the builders have wanted that? But if we can at least grant that the architects of old possessed a decent set of wits, they knew from experience that the present isn’t eternal, that the horizon of the future is uncertain … and can’t we imagine, without too much of a leap of faith, that a project like Stonehenge is sent into that future in part to stabilize it, but in part also to keep an ever-receding present alive, even beyond the demise of those who inhabited it?

I’d also want to emphasize what is truly remarkable about a building project that takes several human life spans to complete: it cannot be an ad hoc, day by day labor, but takes planning that exceeds human time and mortal duration. That fact has vast significance when thinking about these architectures, especially in their design for long endurance. It tells us nothing about specific intent, I suppose — i.e., it won’t let us know whether Stonehenge was a fertility shrine or a ceremonial ground or whatever — but it will remind us that such architectures that from their start have inhabited a future more than a present reveal an ancient and enduring human desire.

This comes as a response to this question:

. . . Sylvia Huot asked a question that goes to the heart of the kind of thinking we attempt here at ITM: how to intertwine meditation upon past and future while retaining some confidence that we are doing justice to history?

I would ask this question because it goes directly to Professor Cohen’s mention of building projects in the context of mortality: do we know enough about the Stonehenge builders’ notion of time as both concrete duration and abstract companion. How did they, for example, express “immediacy” or “now” and “later”?

In our own world, time is a thing to watch closely, classify, and beat. Time is a ubiquity as a technological construct: it’s staring at me from the computer now as a personified bot of the interior mechanism. The processor is clocked and so is the heart and DVD drive. Time and death are related: we do call them “deadlines” after all.

The notion of mortality in the west is heavily shaped by conceptualizations of technological futures, generational landscapes and forecasts, and by religion. How heavily do these influence our inferences about the Stonehenge builders?

On Dogs

Yes it’s oft quoted but I think still delightful, from Beston and his “The Outermost House.” It’s for Rina, whom I’m glad to hear is doing well:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the Earth.

It reminds me of McCarthy’s style.

Connecticut Geography

Rick Green in this column scratches his head at the recent Julie Amero case, where new media meets law

The state of Connecticut spent two years investigating before it won a speedy conviction of Julie Amero – the infamous Norwich porn teacher – this January.

But it was never as tidy as the Norwich Public Schools, the Norwich police, the state of Connecticut and the Norwich Bulletin newspaper made it seem.

In truth, Amero, a clumsy computer novice, was the victim of malicious software that took over the PC in the classroom where she was substituting on Oct. 19, 2004. Since Amero’s arrest, the state has refused to even consider this possibility.

.

This case has been a mystery to many people, especially the degree to which officials, including ASA Smith, have expressed ignorance of pretty basic technology and IT issues. The state’s inflexibility has also been strange, as illustrated by Green in this section of the piece:

“The evidence is overwhelming … she purposefully went to these websites. … We know that the images on there were offensive,” Smith said, ramming his point home. “She clearly should not have allowed this to happen. The evidence is clear. She is guilty of all the charges.”

Except when you consider the facts.

Thankfully, a team of computer security experts from throughout the country, drawn to the case by outraged Internet bloggers and a handful of journalists, has presented Smith and his bosses with the truth.

Amero didn’t click on the porn. Software that might have blocked the porn was months out of date. Critical evidence was mishandled. School and police computer “experts” who testified were woefully ignorant about computer security and porn spyware to the point that their testimony was blatantly false.

The state’s case began unraveling soon after the hapless jury voted to convict. A firestorm of pressure – from university professors and software executives to programmers – forced repeated postponements of Amero’s sentencing.

Smith “closes the case,” then reality slowly sinks in. That the case even went to trial reveals what?

This gets me to the point. I often talk to students about what we mean by relationship building under the rubric of critical thinking. In a critical context, linking seemingly unrelated information together is important to innovation and problem solving. A classic example of this is the Cosmic Background Radiation and the Big Bang.

It may be that the Amero case relates to more than just pop ups, aging IT, and the the welfare of children. Kevin Minor, in a Courant opinion piece titled Why I’m Leaving Connecticut Just as Fast as I Can, outlines his reasons for seeking a living in Texas. He writes:

At 25, I am part of the fastest-growing age segment that is leaving Connecticut. I did not want to leave, but a prohibitively high cost of living coupled with widespread complacency and ineptitude at the state Capitol have sealed my fate. I liked Connecticut’s shorelines, its state parks and its midsize, human-scale cities. How many more people like me have to leave before the rest of the state gets the message?

How are the fumbling of the Amero case and Miner’s perception of a stagnant Connecticut related? The Amero case appears to reveal an inability to meet new technological demands, a reluctance to approach people with decency, and a failure in Connecticut’s leadership to keep up with the realities of change. My technological premise is not to plunk technology into a space for its own sake but to use it as a tool with which to engage people in new and different ways. If computers are going to placed into classrooms, then these items should be used and maintained appropriately. “Appropriateness” is a key criteria for judging technological use and digital application. Teachers should be trained to manipulate the equipment and to tease out its potential and they should be provided equipment that meets their evolving needs and knowhow. This costs loads of money, but if done properly, it can surely be more beneficial than a court case that may do more to push good people out of teaching than to invite them in. Smart people don’t like being bullied. And smart citizens shouldn’t bow to dumb government.

The Amero case could have been handled with a meeting between parents, Amero herself, the principle, and an IT person who knew what they were talking about. This would have been the decent approach. Instead, the State’s legal engine got going and in its typical Kafkaesque rotundity, made a fool of itself. Why would Miner want to remain in a state that appears to enjoy ignorance and ineptitude. The state loves education but doesn’t put its resources behind learning. It loves to claim high SAT scores but will not design and maintain spaces that encourage people to remain and revise the revision, wifi or no wifi. Park development, scenic urban boulevards, local markets, public garden space, new media industry, controlled traffic flow, art space, energy innovation, local design, deschooled learning.

By the state, I mean its leadership and its decision-making citizens, who appear lost to the power of good design and to the power of urban potential and networks. In this world, change is inevitable. OS will be upgraded and idiots will attempt to destroy systems, thus one of the critical abilities for which Connecticut’s leaders should go back to school is an attitude that simply says: “I will keep up so that when it comes time to legislate, moderate, litigate, and amplify, will know what I’m talking and thinking about.”

I think we need to instill good critical and analytical habits into our students (speaking from the POV of a college teacher). We also need leaders who have them as well (one of the lessons of Beowulf, who was praised for his fairness, intelligence, as well as fighting skill). Speaking from the POV of a citizen, I think we all need schooling in relationship building.

I wonder how long it would take to create the clean energy sector if Connecticut up and said: “We will be converting all our schools to solar power within 5 years.”

But what politician would dare make such a call. We can’t even get Simsbury citizens to get out and vote on their own budget.

Science and Knowing

I think it’s a good thing to ask questions about what a thing can teach, about process and method, but these sorts of critique are growing tiresome.

PARIS (Reuters) – Pope Benedict, elaborating his views on evolution for the first time as Pontiff, says science has narrowed the way life’s origins are understood and Christians should take a broader approach to the question.

The Pope also says the Darwinist theory of evolution is not completely provable because mutations over hundreds of thousands of years cannot be reproduced in a laboratory.

But Benedict, whose remarks were published on Wednesday in Germany in the book “Schoepfung und Evolution” (Creation and Evolution), praised scientific progress and did not endorse creationist or “intelligent design” views about life’s origins.

What good does talking about “Darwinist theory” like this bring about? “Let’s understand the limitations of shoes before we move forward and so that no one gets the wrong idea. Everyone knows that shoes are not good for drinking out of. Let’s just remember that.”