Carrion Call

Almost as if taken from a Parsi description of exposure in the Tower of Silence, Robert Bringhurst brings us to a new appreciation of feasting when he mediates upon the carcass of a dead fawn.

In terms of meat, there is not very much to a young fawn, but the eagles had opened her up, and the ravens had joined them. I reminded myself that being buried bit by bit in the guts of birds is at least as good as going into a hole in the ground, and that fueling an eagle's flight or the voice of a raven is as fine a resurrection as anyone, human or deer, could hope for.

"The Silence That Is Not Poetry — And The Silence That Is" E.J. Pratt Lecture, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's 14 October 2005

In this collection of thirteen talks (The Tree of Meaning), I turn to an earlier lecture that also rifts on an ecological perspective. This time in the mode of culture and its artefacts.

So the cultural floor is a killing floor, and it's littered with smithereens. Reach down and you might pick up some fragments of a Presocratic philosopher, a Zen master's wink preserved in amber, a story or two told by an aboriginal elder, or a sheaf of poems by one of the great poets who go by the name Anonymous. You'll have to sift through a lot of rubbish to find these treasures, but plenty of treasure is there: much more lying in the dust than you are likely to find in the superstructure. That's why every true intellectual alive in the present day is a garbage picker.

"Poetry and Thinking" Luther College, University of Regina, 25 January 2001

For the visually-minded garbage picker there is the example of the catadores of the Jardim Gramacho chronicled in the movies Waste Land. For the booklover, there is detritus.com, the online home of Jeff Maser, Bookseller, through whose catalogues one can idle many an hour.

And so for day 1275
10.06.2010

Weak Ties

Clive Thompson in Smarter Than You Think: How technology is changing our minds for the better in the chapter on "Ambient Awareness" rehearses the sociological literature on the strength of week ties; he does so along with compelling anecdotes from social networking. Let him explain:

Granovetter pointed out, your friends have an informational deficit. They're too similar. This is the principle of homophilly: Socially, we tend to be close friends with people who mirror us demographically, culturally, intellectually, politically, and professionally. This makes it easy to bond, but it also means that we drink from the same informational pool. [...] Weak ties are different. These people are, as Granovetter pointed out, further afield, so they're soaking in information we don't have and moving among people we don't know at all. [...] The ties are weak, but they are rich conduits for information.

I wonder how might this apply to the intellectual ecology of discussion lists where time and again one experiences the synapse effect — a subscriber asks someone off-list about a particular question which answer then gets reported back to the list. The human interaction "jumps" the medium. The social in social media is not in the network or platform per se but in the discussion triggered by the traces. Cloud Chambers.

And so for day 1208
04.04.2010