Finally I can give big congratulations to Jordan, now assistant editorial staff at Marvel Comics. Jordan’s an all around creative human, energetic, swiftly smart, and about the nicest guy I know, and, of course, I’m married to his mother. Jordan’s wife’s a gem too. If you want to be related to someone, you want to be related to these people.
Here’s to you, kid.
Soon, I’ll provide mention to the lists he’ll be working on.
Much of the talk at Congress over the past couple of days has been about numbers and, I must contend, vague expression about this or that strategy. Some argue that al-Maliki has to do honest business with Sunni Arabs and that Saudi Arabia must keep speaking to Iran and vice versa, another Sunni/Shiite issue (to generalize).
But what I take from the Petraeus transcript is a disarticulation of relationship between the “administration” and life on the ground, both for the soldiers and Iraqis. Troop reduction means what to them? How can normality be defined and by whom?
This is wonderful stuff. Susan Gibb on the dangers of do-it-yourself:
The grapes are in full galloping fermentation and while I’ve been elbow deep in it popping the grapes to get that done quickly, it keeps threatening to overflow its container and I’m afraid that it just might tonight. At midnight. Seep over and out and spill over the floor in a big sticky mess. Just managed by good luck to avoid an explosion this afternoon. Skimmed the top pulp that separates itself from the crabapple wine, wrapped it in a plastic bag to discourage fruit flies until I get it outside in the garbage and lo and behold! The stuff was still busy fermenting, putting out gas and the bag was blown up and ready to burst. That would’ve been a mess I’d have had to walk away from. Hop in the car and just drive.
P.S.
The grape jelly: a winner.
Josh comments on this rather old post on movie criteria, which reminds me that archives are good for mining. Anyway, he wants to know the “So bad it was good” part of Equilibrium.
I honestly don’t remember, but I do remember that I thought it a Matrix/Minority Report/Gattaca ripoff and found its pistol dancing smarmy. Other than that . . .
Alan Bigelow sends along the newest entry to Webyarns. He’s also given the space a redesign.
Susan Gibb sure makes a delightful crabapple jelly. Thanks so much.
From Sharpebrains’ interview with Daniel Gopher via A Blog Around the Clock
What research over the last 15-20 years has shown is that cognition, or what we call thinking and performance, is really a set of skills that we can train systematically. And that computer-based cognitive trainers or “cognitive simulations†are the most effective and efficient way to do so.
This is an important point, so let me emphasize it. What we have discovered is that a key factor for an effective transfer from training environment to reality is that the training program ensures “Cognitive Fidelityâ€, this is, it should faithfully represent the mental demands that happen in the real world. Traditional approaches focus instead on physical fidelity, which may seem more intuitive, but less effective and harder to achieve. They are also less efficient, given costs involved in creating expensive physical simulators that faithfully replicate, let’s say, a whole military helicopter or just a significant part of it.
Fidelity then goes to the issue of driving or controlling a horse with your thumb. You know, the console controller.
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.
Milan Kundera was correct in claiming that we should attempt to understand first before we judge. It’s a hard stricture.
Avery Doninger’s blog post accusing Burlington school officials of being, I believe, “douchebags” (in the original post the student wrote “douchbag”) falls into the above category and is yet another example of a wasted effort by the courts and school to offer learning opportunity. Since the post was public, why didn’t an official from the school system in their own weblog or comment space simply ask the student to explain the remark? This would have cleared things up and would’ve presented Doninger with chance to amount an appropriate rhetorical scheme.
Doninger was junior class secretary in April when a dispute over the school’s battle of the bands-type jam session led to her now-infamous comment. After talks with school officials made it clear the school’s “Jamfest” might not go forward as planned, Doninger wrote on her livejournal.com Web log, “Jamfest is canceled due to the douchbags in central office.” She also encouraged others to write or call Region 10 Superintendent Paula Schwartz “to piss her off more.”
A few weeks later, Principal Karissa Niehoff told Doninger to apologize to Schwartz, show her mother the blog entry, and remove herself from seeking re-election as class secretary. Doninger agreed to the first two points, but refused to withdraw her candidacy. Niehoff then told Doninger she would not provide an administrative endorsement of her candidacy, barring her from the race, according to Kravitz’s ruling.
The above presents some traces of context. The witless call to “piss off” the Superintendent is further evidence for answer in the agora, not for prohibition, which merely makes things worse.
I’ve always felt that the answer to rate your teacher websites is a counter “rate your student” website. This wouldn’t work, though, would it.
In today’s Courant, Rick Green writes:
A fascinating ruling Friday evening by U.S. District Judge Mark R. Kravitz suggests that Big Brother school districts can keep watch and penalize juvenile offenders who overstep the boundaries of decency and civil behavior, even if it occurs nowhere near school.
Technically, Rick is begging a question: it is merely an assumption that Doninger overstepped in the first place and incorrect to attribute “juvenile offender” to her position. My claim is that “civil behavior” demands a question or an explanation. But this question and explanation was never asked for. I disagree with Green’s characterization that “education leaders” seek to “muzzle speech,” they simply don’t know how to react appropriately in the context of networks.
I’m really bummed about my inability to make it to Hypertext 07. Manchester looks gand in September. Fortunately, my novel, The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, was able to make it in my stead, and I want to thank Jamie, Mark and others for its safe travel.
My first regret is that I can’t perform TLGS. My second is having not written and designed the work on a Mac. Unfortunately, it was built in Windows over the last five years and would take some effort to rebuild in the Mac version of Storyspace. However, I will soon be embarking on this, relocating images into my MBP. I made the switch to the Mac this summer and am only now beginning to realize how important it will be to provide two versions of the novel or, even better, to allow for new ideas to develop because of this other method of revising.
TLGS tested all my powers in spelling, semantics, organization, and rewriting. It takes time to understand that in Storyspace, editing is a non-linear process, where linking can take the place of idea moving. In Storyspace, the writer doesn’t move a paragraph, though this is possible to do, he or she simply relates it to something else via a link. In the flow of story development a link may proceed from the shape of a cloud, or a returning mood in memory, thus motioning the reader down a path based on image not necessarily by plot. This means one must unlearn the remediated spaces of the typewriter, on which I wrote my first novel back in 1986, and the word processor. I found editing in Storyspace a deep, rethinking process, one that is almost impossible to share or explain. In TLGS, there are many areas of the text the reader will never see because they are simply bypassed. They are a sort of idea-based archaeology, bits of broken pottery that over time, I found no use for in the paths of the novel, such as a stretch of action that appeared at one time to supply the answer to a quandary, but that become too burdensome to keep in the possible flow. Likewise, the end of the novel may prove another beginning or yet another plot point if I was successful at making things interesting enough to explore.
In hypertext, the novel can form a cluster of lives that, much like Heroes, can spin off into an ever expanding universe of possibility. One link could provoke an infinite cluster of new spaces and times: Jackie meets Ron. Ron remembers his grandmother. A new story begins at the next link 1,000 years in the future with Grandma’s extended relation Jose, secluded on some rock being towed toward another sun. For the writer, hypertext can contain bubble worlds.
I honestly cannot say whether The Life of Geronimo Sandoval is a decent work. But writing it was something I’ll never forget. One image by the Rio Grande started it all off. That image also ended my progress into it.