Sitting with the Next President

My wife had a wonderful if question a few weeks back, something simple yet elegant.

What if we had to vote on candidates via radio only?

How would we decide based solely on the aural sense? We were talking about variants of the essay. What if all the candidates had to write their way into the office? I find the radio more intriguing. Kucinich strikes an odd look, especially when posing with his wife. The image rules. In the image we lose the power of the speaking voice. Or am I wrong about that?

I want anyone claiming to speak or act for me to come to my house and tell me what’s really on their mind. I’ll give them a nice cup of coffee and space to think, either party, whatever. At the moment, we never really know much about anyone given that the screen is a moment made to look like a mile of space, and relying on news is even worse given that you can only conclude so much within the edited frame. The illusion of the TV moment and its strange arcs of reality are vividly dangerous for decision making or as a serious tool for argument and consensus building, as we’ve seen. For most people, all they will know of this or that person is as a TV image.

We meet Sir Gawain head on at the end of the tale when he learns what we’ve suspected all along. The audience knows far less from the first person. Storytelling and media are consequential to each other. The political season–which appears now to be perpetual (a mark of a failure in the system?), like war–and its stories are expressed on a rehearsed stage as far away from reality as is possible, but this is so known now that it’s become cliched. We should stop buying that soap and shampoo, I think. It’s always on sale.

Isn’t it important that we think about how we know, distinguish, and conclude?

Eyeballs

At the moment my eyeballs look like this. I’ve been working long into the nights building Mac and Windows versions of Sandoval. Moving between PC and Mac resolutions aggravated the whole front of my face.

Arresting Attention

Three programs are holding my attention on TV. Heroes, a filmic hyperspace, Avatar, an animated epic whose characters and story are just charmingly wonderful, and the newest rendering of Doctor Who. Burns’ War is also right on. If you listen, all these programs share common features. Time is either a character or a force.

Now, this is just me, and a little bit about my own habits at the screen, but I wonder if we need new approaches to media space, such as the regular guy who works at Dunkin’ Donuts. This dude wakes up in the shoes of a dictator and must learn what and what not to do for his short time as coffee guy and life or death maker. I can see his face. One moment he’s pouring coffee, the next he must decide on clubs or bags of rice.

On Mission Statements

Steve Collins writes about Tunxis’ mission statement and makes interesting associations to Harvard

In a word: sort of. Tunxis has created a mission statement that succinctly states the goals of the College but is, I believe, very generalized and somewhat vague. By definition, a community college seeks to provide an affordable education to a broad range of students in a convenient location. Tunxis’ mission statement simply restates that basic premise then adds a few words about “fostering the skills necessary to succeed.”(1) There is no further explanation or clarification. To my way of thinking, that comes up a bit short. To expand on this point, I’d like to contrast it with portions of the mission statement released on Harvard’s web site.
With its reputation and long history, Harvard could have simply rested on its laurels when preparing a mission statement. Instead, it opens with this general declaration of purpose:

In brief, Harvard strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities. (2)

The statement then continues with a detailed description of just how Harvard will carry out this plan for its students, encouraging them to “respect ideas and their free expression,” “to rejoice in discovery and in critical thought,” “to pursue excellence,” and to “assume responsibility for the consequences of personal action.” It goes on to say: “Education at Harvard should liberate students to explore, to create, to challenge, and to lead.” And finally:

The support the College provides to students is a foundation upon which self-reliance and habits of lifelong learning are built: Harvard expects that the scholarship and collegiality it fosters in its students will lead them in their later lives to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society.

Note that there is no mention of cost or convenient location. Instead, the focus is on learning for the sake of learning, on the many benefits that a good education can bring to the life of a student, and on the lifelong consequences of the Harvard experience. The statement acknowledges the development of the individual student and the college’s potential for helping them realize their personal goals in life. It recognizes the individual’s place as a member of society as well, and promises to support them as they go on to become potential leaders within that society.

Lessons in Collaboration

Yo-Yo Ma was amazing last night at the Bushnell. His performance and that of the crew was a lesson in intensity and collaboration.

Up was Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor. Ma was typically intense. He’d sway right and left, leaning toward the first violin and others around the front and second circle, talking to them with his wood, eyes, his extreme expressions drawing smiles and nods of agreement from his partners. It was like watching an intense conversation between a crowd. The sound was just amazing.

The orchestra is a metaphor for the system enlivened by the possibility of collapse. It didn’t collapse. It held together with wiretight, temporary, and simultaneous agreement. For a moment, everyone was talking to one another.

Fiction writers everywhere know that for a month or three years of flash, the story must be the medium. Summaries are nothing.

Summer Wine

Susan Gibb writes

Honestly, the grape at this point tastes very dry. The crabapple–omigod the crabapple is going to be the best. The peach just tastes like fizzy peaches at this stage.

How much for a bottle of the crabapple?

Storyspace: Next Generation

Storyspace is, in my mind, the best conceived hypertext writing environment I know, and I know the system pretty well. As a connectivity metaphor, it’s brilliant and prescient. The numerous ways of building relations and seeing how they can be built and abstracted are the reasons I wanted to go to Manchester. I have a stake in the future of hypertext both as a writer and teacher. The weblog is okay as a means of delivering info to my students. But it’s really not all that I want.

I’d like to promote Storyspace’s next generation manifestation. Much of this thinking comes from playing around with Inform 7 (why, in my editor, can’t I just put [ ] around Inform 7 and create the link automatically in Firefox?), Mediawiki, Tinderbox, Hammer, Inspiration, WordPress, Spotlight, Spatterlight, video editing software, and Flash. It also comes from practical work problems that we’re beginning to solve, linking systems together not by binary but by ideas and necessity.

In a way, first and second gen code is like asphalt. I can drive from one state to the next as a matter of reality. Code and hardware take you places. Then again, it’s also not like asphalt. What follows is a list:

1. Storyspace as cross-platform tool. People love their computers. This is the txt file idea. If multi-platform persists, then so must a txt reader or other cross-plat file.

2. Storyspace as narrative browser. In one way of thinking, text spaces in SSP can be viewed as independent from the surface. I can take an html document and have any browser translate the code and I can rework the code in Dreamweaver, but I can’t share the translation of that code in Dreamweaver. Describing a work-flow might be interesting here. Let’s say I link a part of a narrative from an SSP text space to a wiki, where the narrative progresses, but, in doing so, never really leave the country of Storyspace, then I proceed to zblorb (Texas), type >open the casket at the command line, and then move to a bit of video contained in another SSP space. Let’s say I then click on the video surface and intertwingle with XanaduSpace, then I go back to SSP in some way, basically using Storyspace as a narrative browser/development tool.

In this conception, Storyspace doesn’t become a wiki; it maintains its identity as an environment that can reveal another narrative building block and so on and so forth, and, of course, vice versa. The notion here is not to publish a “manuscript” or CD, but to create routes from one performance space to the next. Inadvertently, in the discussion, John and I will ask: “but will it work with video” because sometimes video or background noise is called for. The question for the creator becomes when did I need this relation to perform in another way.