This article in the Courant. comes as no surprise. But cause can be tricky. (And the slow load is a metaphor for more of the same.)
I’d suggest that a lot of the traffic issues in Hartford have to do with the issue of work, geographical scale, road type, and a whole mess of other potentials.
Much more to learn here.
Steven Spielberg’s film, Munich, ends with Ephraim, a Mossad handler, and Avner, the assassin, walking away from one another, their destinations in opposition. Avner offers dinner, an offer of intimacy Ephraim cannot accept. This image of separation completes the film’s fundamental metaphor, home.
I thought that the film suffered from audience unappreciation, in that the film’s political and ethical themes blew out of the screen like grenade charges and became obvious from the start. The film isn’t nuanced about its expression of human conduct and choice. Nevertheless, if it had been stripped of about 45 minutes of obsession with paradox and the big stick of “telling you what this thing is about,” the film would have been a fantastic psychological journey for Avner, who goes from Israeli family man and expectant father to a man without center, alone in the world. Spielberg tells Israel’s story through Avner; it’s a story of descent, of birth to the modern.
More importantly, the film as set of spaces is where the interest lies. Avner must rennounce Israel at many levels before embarking on his journey, hence becoming country-less, home-less. At the end, he cannot go home, of course, because his home has disappeared. One cannot return to a prior space, as Blake teaches, because the geometry of home is always changing. The wilderness Avner enters enters Avner. Avner must live outside the circle of home in exile, which is why he must walk with Israel henseforth at his back. The state here is a physical circle, a reality with surface, an external and internal force any of us can walk into or out of, as we would a room, house, or other structure.
“Not being home,” a kind-of displacement, is Munich’s most powerful after affect. All agents in the movie suffer from the same placelessness. They live and die “outside.” Unlike Sir Gawain, they cannot change their homes upon return.
Back to the road again, then.
The streets in the neighborhood aren’t very wide. I’m not sure even if street is the right word. Maybe road.
A friend of mine many years ago told me stories about moving from Toledo to the southwest where the big travel roads are called freeways. Where she came from they were called highways. These aren’t the same things. A freeway is about freedom of movement. A highway, on the other hand, is about elevated travel, moving high. She talked about trying to get from one end of town to the other and having trouble finding directions.
“How do I get onto the highway from here?”
“What’s a highway?”
So she had to use the new term to get where she wanted to go.
The notion of a freeway and a highway demonstrate different ways of describing, differentiating, and codifying travel and space. But they also mean different things in different places. My friend and I would talk about this, ask questions: “Why do they call them highways?”
“Why do you call yours freeways?”
Do road, street, freeway and highway imply more than tags or everyday terminology? We know that roads mean more than asphalt. Remember information “superhighway”? “Superfreeway” doesn’t sound right, but we know what the string was meant to do for the listener. We also know now that “superhighway” was the incorrect metaphor.
In linguistic history, street has structural, formal, and administrative meaning: an official road, made road, something built with a purpose beyond the simple directional path, which was simply the way people went. Road has random texture, a “we go this way, usually,” whereas street is direct manipulation. In Latin a street (strata) is a paved road. Thus in the Connecticut suburb, paved surfaces will be called roads not streets because the suburb is meant as country, a pastoral expression. In the suburb there are no street lights. Why? Because there are no streets.
We interact with freeways and highways. Both imply an expression of what people value. On the freeway, we are expressing a value for movement; on the highway, we express our ability to travel above ground.
Typically, a street is a thing over which people we don’t know travel. The road, a more intimate object, is used by the neighbors. The surfaces that help us get to farther places faster are denoted by abstracted, yet value-rich terms: free and high. State and position, being and technical accomplishment.
Susan Gibb has sent me this link to Wired’s coverage of a brewing suit involving Second Life.
Bragg v. Linden Research, a civil complaint filed May 1 in West Chester’s local district court, charges that Linden Lab “breached an auction contract by allowing the land to auction, accepting online payment, and then suspending plaintiff’s account.”
For its part, Linden Lab wouldn’t address specifics of the case. But general counsel Ginsu Yoon says the San Francisco company has retained attorneys in the matter. “We intend to contest this in the appropriate forum,” said Yoon. “We believe the suit to be without merit.”
Known inside Second Life as “Marc Woebegone,” Bragg has “in-world” real estate, nightclubs and other businesses. He says he paid $300 for a “sim,” a large plot of Second Life land that normally costs a minimum of $1,000.
Second Life is one of the only virtual worlds whose members legally own the content they create. A burgeoning trade in real estate, clothing, vehicles and other goods has led to a strong and growing in-game economy, supporting full-time businesses and real estate barons.
The world and its interesting systems and how they relate to spaces beyond bears watching.
Thanks Susan.
Daniella Kato asks my we can’t be content with fragments.
In Ti-Fu Tuan’s Perceptual and Cultural Geography: A Commentary, drawn from a horrid photograph in a database, originally published in a 2003 Annals of the Association of American Geographers, the author writes anout the English Landscape
What do the English make of it. What they make of it is very selective. They prefer the countryside to the city, the old to the new, the bucolic and picturesque to the indistrial. Although the tastes are clear, most English men and woman would not be able to trace them to the powerful–though often subtle and indirect–influences of architects and landscape architects, painters, novelists, essayists, and poets. The English may have a strong sense of the past, but this does not mean that most–or even many–possess a historical consciousness that is far reaching, judiciously evaluative, and self-critical
Forgoing comment on the general “they,” the final sentence draws attention to a process of perception relevant to memory, place, and experience. Yi-Fu Tuan makes a subtle distinction between a “strong sense of the past” and a “historical consciousness.” But what is the distinction?
A “sense of a past” may have very little to do with recollection, reminiscence, or recall, but more with belief. Memory may not have a lot to do with a self-critical historical consciousness, either, yet as a matter of process, belief becomes less of a factor. A “past sense” may have been told to me: your forefathers never lied or grandma used to be a snakecharmer. This honesty or odd picture may have a lot to do with how I visualize life in 18th century New England as a place overly infected by honesty. On the contrary, the past and my relation to it becomes dynamic when I ask: did they not tell any lies at all, which turns the past as populated landscape into a question. If I find a photograph of grandmother blowing a pipe over a whicker basket, then odd grandmother may lead to a process of “story about.” A question, a cracked mirror. Forks.
Where I live in Connecticut I have very little past. The town neighborhoods resemble nothing but themselves to me. A new home may be built to mimic an older form. One day I might see another Colonial. It may remind me of a house down the street from me, and I have yet to be reminded of a southwestrn bungalow by any archectural design I’ve encountered in this area. Furthermore, the antique houses in town are only about 10 years old, really. Of course, this has nothing to do with age, event, influence, or fact. But didn’t I exist according to the same perceptual frame as a kid in El Paso, where homes and other structures had only self-reference, although against other distinct structures the older crumbly ones would make reference to other abstractions like Spain, Mexico, Conquistadores, Islam, or the 20s?
It strikes me as a question to follow, how do we rationalize age beyond experience of physical time and memory since memory is an intangible image of experience? Hardness, shape, words, complex patterns.
Yi-Fu Tuan on loss
These incidents lead me to think how two human beings ought to treat each other. One way is the giving of self–giving another person something you possess. The other way is to welcome someone into your home, world, and self. Both can result in a feeling of loss. Obviously, if you give someone your lawnmower or book, you will sooner or later feel a lack of these things: a part of you is gone. To get around this feeling of loss and, indeed, acquire a feeling of gain and enrichment, you must truly give–give with the understanding that the lawnmower or book is put to better use in your neighbor’s hand. You won’t miss it then. You will feel pleased that a part of you has escaped the iron bars of selfhood to increase, however minutely, the well-being and happiness of another. In practice, what does true giving entail? It entails not lending. “Never lend!” is a Tuanian categorical imperative, one—needless to say—I do not always follow.
The second feeling of loss is paradoxical. How can receiving—taking someone into your life—be felt as a loss? Well, the obvious answer is that you lose your privacy. You get the feeling that cracks are developing in your carefully-constructed world of habits and routines. The cure is two-fold. One is to understand that your carefully-constructed world needs shattering. Being made aware of that need is one great service that the person who enters your life can perform. The other is to see all the riches the other brings in, riches that unfold slowly over time.
An appropriate end to BL2 with Beckett’s Endgame. The folks in class were able to connect Clov’s windows to Television and restricted views it promotes (Ahmed reminds us that the world is more than CNN’s square of space), enabling a wonderful conversation about the irony of ceratin positions on globalization, media, and attitudes about knowledge.
Hamm says, “One day you’ll be blind like me. You’ll be sitting here, a speck in the void, in the dark, forever, like me.”
I didn’t mention terminal paradoxes, but the arc of semester pretty much revealed itself, the story of the course finding resolution, its end suggested by its beginning. Hamm and Clov’s point of view is restricted to their own stagnant space. They aren’t Wordsworth remembering walks at the Abbey, nor do they share Blake’s passion for the devil. The world is different. Not the same England. This was one small window into the story of British Literature. Barbauld to Beckett. Youth to age, age to youth. Life to death. Ideas to Hamm asking for Clov to think one. Clov never leaves. He can’t, perhaps, get out of the story.
The end of the semester is a sad time because it’s a favorite thing of mine to sit with people and talk about the good stuff week in and week out. But it must end.
My project to put together a “Content Management/Course Architecture” system just isn’t moving. There are lots of nice open source items to work with, lots of options: Joomla, TextPattern, and other systems, including WordPress, but the ideas aren’t collecting.
I want a system that students can come to as a node for thinking. A link to a forum via topic feeds, links out from feeds to relevant readings and articles, and something else that I can’t think of at the moment (maybe a calendar). It would have all regular functions: category links, link lists–all the regular stuff.
But it’s not as easy as it sounds. I could build it all at this site but then we’d be dependent on my host for delicate information, but it’s the college’s responsibility. The college servers are locked down for this individual push. The work I’ve done thinking about such a system could be deployed quite easily. The systems function just fine. Ultimately, the output–student work–isn’t mine to play with.
And there’s more. The problem may be matching the tech to experience. How is learning as an experience different than moving through an unfamiliar house or having a good meal. Elgg is a collection of tools and capabilities, as are most software. It’s capabilities push a certain engagement around the theme of learning: weblog, portfolio, connectivity, and collectivity. Thus Elgg requires a kind of context and experience. But it’s not really what I’m thinking about in terms of an architectural learning space, because I’m not thinking of it as a thing but as an experience (sure, like a sonnet). If a student wants to develop a weblog on their own as a means of collecting and connecting to their interests, that would happen outside the node but would or could reconnect to it (which gives me a thought).
Most people know the figuring of the area of a circle is A = pi x r squared. It was Archimedes in the 3rd century BC who did the figuring in Measurement of the Circle. But what I find important about this is not the formula but the kind of thinking that proved the point. Archimedes writes
Since then the area of the circle is neither greater than nor less that [the area of the triangle], it is equal to it.
The suppositions go: A< T or A=T or A>T. If the first and third don’t work, then the second must be true, double reductio. For kicks: 1st case
A – Area (inscribed polygon) < A - T leads to T < Area (inscribed polygon) Area (inscribed polygon) = 1/2hQ < 1/2rC = T where h = apothem, Q = the perimeter of the polygon and C = the circumference of the circle Since here T < the area of the inscribed polygon and the area of the inscribed polygon is also < T then the supposition of A < T contradicts itself
and so forth. Here I’ve paraphrased Will Dunham’s Journey through Genius: The Great Theorums of Mathematics. Archimedes proves the area and approximates pi in the same text but does so by a wonderful bit of questioning and analysis. The area is important, but without the skill of bringing it all together, the mathematician is guessing.