Category Archives: Space

Journey Ironies

My wife likes to mention certain ironies. She once journeyed to El Paso, Texas where she hoped to see coyotes on every street corner. However, she had to return to Simsbury, Connecticut to actually have that experience. The nights this summer have been particularly heavy with their yammering as these animals move at night through the fields of West Simsbury and often through our yard.

But I’m wondering why they’re so active this summer? They sound like they’re moving about in large packs. Is there some naturalist about who can answer this question?

On reading the city

Nerd journalist Mark Anastasio reads the city:

Stepping out into the steets of San Diegos’ Gas Lamp Quarter this morning, we were taken aback by the smell of freshly scrubbed streets and the lack of pastey white geeks(not unlike myself) milling about in a merchandise induced stupor. Along the sides of the road lay the foamy reminents of city soap, diluted with fanboy drool, dandruff and keys to Mothers’ basements. It had seemed as though we’d gotten a headstart on them. The endless halls of B-list celebrities, video games, and comic books had surely tuckered them out. Yes, the anteaters of popular culture had surely slept in . . .

Read for more coverage of Comic-Con here.

Fantastic strangeness

My teenaged daughter, K., and I and a friend of hers, C., hit the next blockbuster, The Fantastic Four, as is our habit (to check out the blockbusters). And the thing that struck me was the audience in attendance, primarily made up of young children–on average from 6 to 10 years old.

Now, on the one hand, FF4 is marketed to children; it’s part of the culture of summer-fun stuff. The story, however, isn’t kid’s stuff, though the dialogue was definitely adolescent. You’d expect a lot of kids in the audience.

Interestingly, the previews, which we failed to miss, were definitely not tailored for the audience. I spent a lot of time during the previews making K. and C. laugh by imagining the questions the kids in the audience might be asking their parents:

“Mama, what is that mean guy going to do with that giant knife?”

“Papa, why was that vicious-looking nurse wearing garter belts?”

“Ma, is our car going to blow up like that on the way home; does it hurt to drown like that, too?”

“Father, does our nurse have an Uzi in her underpants?”

New London woes

Today the Supreme Court ruled on the pressing New London eminent domain case in support of the Connecticut Supreme Court, a decision that I find misguided and dangerous. I can’t say that I like agreeing with either Justice Thomas or O’Connor, who dissented, but in this case their arguments are to my mind reasonable and sane. From my point of view, the court continues its hands-off decisions, assenting to too much authority in the hands of the state over the individual. What follow are some snippets that I find interesting from the case. Links are in original and italics are mine for emphasis. Justice Stevens in his opinion writes this

Those who govern the City were not confronted with the need to remove blight in the Fort Trumbull area, but their determination that the area was sufficiently distressed to justify a program of economic rejuvenation is entitled to our deference. The City has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including–but by no means limited to–new jobs and increased tax revenue. As with other exercises in urban planning and development,12 the City is endeavoring to coordinate a variety of commercial, residential, and recreational uses of land, with the hope that they will form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. To effectuate this plan, the City has invoked a state statute that specifically authorizes the use of eminent domain to promote economic development. Given the comprehensive character of the plan, the thorough deliberation that preceded its adoption, and the limited scope of our review, it is appropriate for us, as it was in Berman, to resolve the challenges of the individual owners, not on a piecemeal basis, but rather in light of the entire plan. Because that plan unquestionably serves a public purpose, the takings challenged here satisfy the public use requirement of the Fifth Amendment.

The problem that surfaces here is the confounding of eminent domain, “benefits to the community,” the idea of “public purpose,” all in the context of taxes, jobs, and the justice’s “deference.” Further, he writes

Promoting economic development is a traditional and long accepted function of government. There is, moreover, no principled way of distinguishing economic development from the other public purposes that we have recognized. In our cases upholding takings that facilitated agriculture and mining, for example, we emphasized the importance of those industries to the welfare of the States in question, see, e.g., Strickley, 200 U. S. 527; in Berman, we endorsed the purpose of transforming a blighted area into a “well-balanced” community through redevelopment, 348 U. S., at 33;13 in Midkiff, we upheld the interest in breaking up a land oligopoly that “created artificial deterrents to the normal functioning of the State’s residential land market,” 467 U. S., at 242; and in Monsanto, we accepted Congress’ purpose of eliminating a “significant barrier to entry in the pesticide market,” 467 U. S., at 1014-1015. It would be incongruous to hold that the City’s interest in the economic benefits to be derived from the development of the Fort Trumbull area has less of a public character than any of those other interests. Clearly, there is no basis for exempting economic development from our traditionally broad understanding of public purpose.

I agree that one of government’s jobs is to promote economic development (by staying out of peoples’ way as much as possible, yet restraining behavior that puts the public good in danger), but in the context of the above paragraph, there’s no strong connection being made analogically between the New London case and those cited , which is what I find as the greatest weakness of the 5 to 4. How do Berman, Midkiff, and Monsanto fit; hence, how would a nay opinion be incongruous? The question isn’t whether economic development has something to do with public purpose but whether the State has proven that its needs are greater than those of the individuals in “this” case. Oligopoly and blight aren’t at issue. “No principled way,” the justice writes. Bull. The latitude being given to a principle here is astounding. If Microsoft wanted to buy West Simsbury, proving to the state house that it would generate money and jobs, which I’m sure it would, how does Steven’s standard of judgement provide a legitimate framework for consistency (which to me is a public good)? And it’s not just Microsoft, it’s anyone who has more money than I do who could claim my property.

On the other hand, here’s what O’Connor has to say. She writes

Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded–i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public–in the process. To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings “for public use” is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property

The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment, provides that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.” When interpreting the Constitution, we begin with the unremarkable presumption that every word in the document has independent meaning, “that no word was unnecessarily used, or needlessly added.” Wright v. United States, 302 U. S. 583, 588 (1938). In keeping with that presumption, we have read the Fifth Amendment’s language to impose two distinct conditions on the exercise of eminent domain: “the taking must be for a ‘public use’ and ‘just compensation’ must be paid to the owner.” Brown v. Legal Foundation of Wash., 538 U. S. 216, 231-232 (2003).

The emphasis here is going to be on the concept of public use and providing a strict standard for its definition. O’Connor comments on the relevance of Steven’s earlier examples

The Court’s holdings in Berman and Midkiff were true to the principle underlying the Public Use Clause. In both those cases, the extraordinary, precondemnation use of the targeted property inflicted affirmative harm on society–in Berman through blight resulting from extreme poverty and in Midkiff through oligopoly resulting from extreme wealth. And in both cases, the relevant legislative body had found that eliminating the existing property use was necessary to remedy the harm. Berman, supra, at 28-29; Midkiff, supra, at 232. Thus a public purpose was realized when the harmful use was eliminated. Because each taking directly achieved a public benefit, it did not matter that the property was turned over to private use. Here, in contrast, New London does not claim that Susette Kelo’s and Wilhelmina Dery’s well-maintained homes are the source of any social harm. Indeed, it could not so claim without adopting the absurd argument that any single-family home that might be razed to make way for an apartment building, or any church that might be replaced with a retail store, or any small business that might be more lucrative if it were instead part of a national franchise, is inherently harmful to society and thus within the government’s power to condemn.

Furthermore

Even if there were a practical way to isolate the motives behind a given taking, the gesture toward a purpose test is theoretically flawed. If it is true that incidental public benefits from new private use are enough to ensure the “public purpose” in a taking, why should it matter, as far as the Fifth Amendment is concerned, what inspired the taking in the first place? How much the government does or does not desire to benefit a favored private party has no bearing on whether an economic development taking will or will not generate secondary benefit for the public. And whatever the reason for a given condemnation, the effect is the same from the constitutional perspective–private property is forcibly relinquished to new private ownership.

. . .

Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result.

It seems to me, despite the problems with the relevance of Midkiff et al, that the majority failed to live up to the simple test O’Connor brings up here: how far should we go in loosening the standard for defining public use as well as problematicizing the roles of individuals, private owners, and the extend to which the state should act on the behalf of either. I agree with O’Connor about the question of power here. Can we simply allow a tranfer of property from one holder to the next, even if a new holder could show “benefit”? I water, keep the lawn up, do some gardening, and pay my taxes. Certainly, though, some other owner could turn my property into a chicken farm and sell loads of fresh eggs. We could argue that neighborhoods and quality of life go hand in hand, but ultimately thats too arbitrary for the court. Here’s Thomas’ concluding statement

The Court relies almost exclusively on this Court’s prior cases to derive today’s far-reaching, and dangerous, result. See ante, at 8-12. But the principles this Court should employ to dispose of this case are found in the Public Use Clause itself, not in Justice Peckham’s high opinion of reclamation laws, see supra, at 11. When faced with a clash of constitutional principle and a line of unreasoned cases wholly divorced from the text, history, and structure of our founding document, we should not hesitate to resolve the tension in favor of the Constitution’s original meaning. For the reasons I have given, and for the reasons given in Justice O’Connor’s dissent, the conflict of principle raised by this boundless use of the eminent domain power should be resolved in petitioners’ favor. I would reverse the judgment of the Connecticut Supreme Court.

I agree.

Poetry exercise: dream as narrative

We know that dreams often act as a spike for writing and reflection. But we also know that dreams change over time. What changes about them is translatable into image. How does this work:

1. Given: change
2. Significance

As a person grows, the texture and subjects of dreams change. My own significant dreams are those that come in a series and that have that texture of realism. You (second person as a point of view; no, third in my case would work best–but the poem should tell) wake up and are pestered throughout the day by the experience. In this case, motif is critical, it would seem to me. Here’s an example, regardless of interpretation: I used to dream a lot about a space filled with black widow spider webs. The space first had the dimensions of my high school band room’s storage room, where we’d put our instruments and books and things. Later, the dimensions changed to reflect multiple rooms: the band room, a particular friends’ basement, a barn. There were two constants: the spiders and the webs. These dreams would surface then go away after a few days leaving me wondering why? Why, of course, is a part of the fabric of the dream. Anxiety, decisions, whatever. Anyway, the dream would unfold with my entering the space and realizing that I had to make my way through or out; the webs were everywhere: above, in corners, under shelves, laced across the floor like stretched nets. The spiders as a given were shrowded like black points within the webs, terrific potentials, hovering pebbles.

I know the source: black widow spiders love El Paso, Texas. We’d find them all around the house, out back, in manholes. They hunt at night. We’d hunt and find them with flashlights. It was always electric. When you found one in the small, confining basement, hung cupped in its silver universe, you had to stop and and wonder. In addition, at work one time, I entered a dark pumproom at night and nearly tripped. I scrabbled for the light, and sure enough I’d stepped through a web laced across the threshold, like a tripwire. The spiders, after all, have an aura of creepy intension, as if they’re after “us.” To us, they live alien lives in alien worlds, thinking up sinister plots; their revelations, like their webs, are as hard as iron and they see thousands of us simultaneously. Of course, all of this is reflected in film, and, of course, dreams, where the world can become “weblike.”

That’s just one example. But I haven’t had such dreams for many years. Others have taken over. That’s the exercise: to poeticize the calculas of change: one example, two examples. How do these dreams form a parallel experience of existence? What is the story or image that the dreams provide via the memory space of the poem?

Semester roundup: on evaluation

Another semester has closed. The narrative has found resolution. For me it’s always interesting the way things happen. Number one, students always surprise me. It’s always a mistake to judge early. “These students can’t write, read, or think their way out of a sitcom.” No, they typically can, if they do the work and take it seriously. Some do rise, some will have to try again.

I learned early that the best education is about teaching people to think for themselves, to face problems with confidence, and to act with self-possession and to initiate action deserving of respect. This is why all exams in British Lit are comprehensive: we learn Mill by aiming at Wollstonecraft; we draw from the Green Knight for insight into Paradise Lost. Yet, one of the attitudes I saw a lot of this semester had to do with students putting off for tomorrow what they could do today. I’ll get to “that” when I get to the four year, I hear them thinking. I teach at a community college. Problem is the courses I and my colleagues teach transfer to the four year school. Hence they are “university” courses. They are not preparatory for university; they’re preparatory for deeper study into similar content areas, the addressing of which will have to come at another institution. One of the unstated objectives of British Literature and Creative Writing is to maintain the integrity of the content. That’s one of my jobs. I want students not to “like” Eliot but to respect the work. I don’t want people to take my word for it, to trust in what I think is good description. So we read lots of examples and try to figure out what makes the description tick. Then we write self-generated work and hope it “exceeds” the examples. Do we “exceed”? Let’s keep trying is what I say. “As good” is a static ethic. I’ve seen too many students succeed to begin playing it safe.

I’m now what would be considered a “seasoned” teacher. I’ve been teaching for over 12 years, at three institutions. When I was in school I learned quick what I didn’t want to do for a living. I had the typical jobs: hotel dishwasher, factory worker, and others. I cleaned out the “professional’s” waste basket. Fine. But the image of this work, from my own perspective, gave me enough ambition to work through the trigonometry, an area of math that I still love, but didn’t then consider my bag. There were other bags, but cosine still made enough of an impact to generate topics of conversation over beer. I entered school as a computer science major but found the study confining at the time. I loved to write, so I figured I could always write about the science, and so English was a good path. Nobody told me that I had to write just about Wordsworth. Dr. Wren and others claimed that I acted like a “dedicated generalist.” I enjoy history, science, mathematics, programming, art, and games. Sounds like new media. “Dedicated generalist” sounded good and “is good.”

I know that competence matters, and so do a lot of the students at Tunxis or anywhere else. That’s what the Eastgate talk for the last week has been about. Some grades are about competence; others are about averages: A to start finished with D averages as pass, but what does it mean, really?. Can a student do the work? Do they do the work at the level of excellence. Part of the meaning of this word has to do with royalty, but we mean it in the sense of “to rise.” An excellent friend of mine, a teacher in the CC system of El Paso Texas once told me that “to want to be like” is an ethic of mediocrity, and I buy that as an exemplar worldview. Teachers have to think about “things that rise.” Do we have to be excellent? Of course not. But do we lose anything by doing the work, the reading, and completing what we started? No. Some of the students I’ve seen this semester actually worked hard at avoiding the work or concentrating on other things yet expecting to know what I asked them to consider on their own with some guidance from me. If they’d put the same amount of effort into completion and risk, they would’ve done just fine. Still others weren’t in the right place to complete because they had import things pressing against them, family matters, personal adjustments which competed for their attention. That’s fine too. But a student can’t expect an honest evaluation under duress. An honest evaluation can only come after honest attempts at learning what hadn’t been known or understood, which is always exciting.

Competency isn’t politics. But politics can strive to look like it. Currently, the officials are trying to close down military bases in Connecticut. They’ll make it sound like a reasoned decision, that it’ll save money. Easy waste is easier wasted. We just killed a madman in Connecticut knowing full well that he didn’t know a lot about life to give a damn either way. We’re not very good, still, at managing the proportions at large scales, which may be what the future looks like to some. It’s a continual struggle to know want from need.

Anyway, here’s what I learned this semester:

1. The directions are important. Students who followed them did better than those who didn’t or didn’t bother to try. (Note: following directions is not a measure of competence or of individuality in and of itself. I.e., you can be cool and edgy and still know when the deadlines are. There’s just something silly about not being able cite a source or turn in readable copy. I like as much edge as the next guy, but edge still needs texture and nuance.) I have lots of directions for online students. One of them is to submit papers through email with names and paper # in the file name. The majority of the students ignored this direction even after multiple reminders. Believe it or not, those who got it down were better at organization, authority, focus, and risk. To conform to ActionScript 2.0 I have to note my datatypes just like everyone else.

var sSoThere:String = “Okay, okay!”;
trace(sSoThere);

2. Organization really does work. Those people who kept to a semblance of organization knew where to go to look up the answer to a question. Good notes, systemic structures, and attention to details made for a marked improvement in finished work.

Recognizing the difference

Doug Miller, William Cole, and Hugh Nicoll are commenting on Mark Bernstein’s and Eastgate’s response time to questions, issues, and problems. I recall many times rushing an email off to Mark on this or that concerning Storyspace (I’m one of those who’s waiting for Tinderbox for Win, too) and having a response within the hour or after lunch. It’s just too weird. Shouldn’t Eastgate have a techline with lots and lots of voice instructions? Shouldn’t Dr. Bernstein hide his email so that he becomes increasingly hard to contact?

Good thing they don’t. I hope Mark never tires of the email.

Practice with Photos

I’m still getting used to WordPress and there are a couple of things that need working out before the Narratives weblog goes live in the new space.photo One of the nice features, one lacking in other systems, is the wp static page element which may work great as a place to upload and store fiction, poetry, and other work in the pipeline for the Narratives group. What I’m trying to anticipate are the problems that may arise with uploading, design, and access by the numerous members of the Narratives group.

Architecture and Game Space

David Thomas of Buzzcut will be doing work in the College of Architecture and Planning at UC Denver. He writes

I plan on working in the areas of leisure spaces, virtual places and model building. What connects a playground, Disneyland, an architectural model and a videogame? Well, that’s one way of asking the question I’m working on solving.

I’ll be interested in following along with his conclusions and analyses. But I wonder if the comment by the professor that concludes his post reveals a “new media” issue, one that Malcolm McCullough has a lot to write about in Digital Ground as it pertains to the connections between technology, architecture, and designed space.