Ludology Lessons

One of the best explanations of the relations between narration and narrated (I avoid the term "narrative" which in some usage conflates or overlooks the distinction between the telling and the told.) is to be found in Edmund White's biography of Jean Genet.

The usual form/content dichotomy for analyzing fiction is not very useful then, since the formal excitement is induced precisely by our shifting sympathies for Genet as narrator and for Genet's ideas and characters. But the distinction between 'story' and 'plot' might serve us better. The 'story' is the simplest, most straightforward reconstruction of the unadorned events, told chronologically; the story as you might recount to a friend after you read the book. The 'plot', on the other hand, is the author's often indirect and non-sequential method of presenting the narrative, his way of distorting chronology or moulding sympathies or even deliberately misleading the reader for strictly artistic reasons. Genet's 'story' is often confused, even effaced, but his 'plot' is an efficient machine for manipulating the reader's responses.

By analogy I like to argue that ludology can learn from narratology that to play a match is not necessarily to know a game.

And so for day 218
20.07.2007

Physiology of Enthusiasm

I like to juxtapose this character-focalized definition of eroticism as "a collusion of rhythms" [I think it's "collusion" and not "collision"] from Julia Kristeva's novel The Samurai with this excerpt from the chapter "Prophet Dances" in Alice Beck Kehoe's book, The Ghost Dance: ethnohistory and revitalization

Some of the parallels between Christian and American Indian religious behavior go deep into human physiology. Building up rhythm and loudness of speech from slow and soft to fast and loud tends to catch listeners up, their own heartbeats increasing in rapidity along with the speech rhythm to produce a feeling of excitement. [...] Gestures may focus listener's attention on the speaker to the point where the audience is almost hypnotized. Changing the pitch of voice, now high, now deep, induces subconscious mood changes in listeners. Frenzied dancing tends to induce hyperventilation and cause that mental dissociation we term trance. These basic human physiological responses are likely to have been independently discovered in many societies and also to have facilitated borrowings of rituals from culture to culture. Thus human physiology makes it probable that societies will discover and institutionalize "enthusiast" behavior.

Metaerotics automagically!

And so for day 217
19.07.2007

Modes of forgetfulness

Anne Galloway author of Purse Lips Square Jaw rifts on the fashioning of forgetfulness. (And I forget in which entry or at what date)

When I was at UbiComp, surrounded by examples of ubiquitous and merciless memory, I again wondered about the differences between dementia (as forced forgetfulness), nostalgia (as voluntary forgetfulness) and hope (as necessary forgetfulness).

The strength of the truism becomes apparent if you substitute "memory" for "forgetfulness": memories forcing themselves through the body in dementia; memories picked through at will in the sad movements of nostalgia and the necessary memory that connects the sad and the mad with the gay.

And so for day 216
18.07.2007

Cures and Curiosity

Source: Espen Anderson "The S-Curves of Sinks, and Technology"
Ubiquity, Volume 6, Issue 19 (June 1-8 2005)

Dorothy Parker said: "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." The problem is that not enough people suffer from curiosity, but instead accept the world as it is, without wondering (and, eventually, learning) how it really works. That being said, my wife has a knitting machine, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how it works [...]

The balance and decorum make this self-deprecating anecdote engaging. Its construction values curiosity without turning towards more curiosity as a panacea. There is no cure for there is no end of objects, technologies and entities that perk interest.

And so for day 215
17.07.2007

Ditty for the Digital Age

Somewhere somehow this crossed one of the screens upon which my attention was attached for a moment:

Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is the best.

Frank Zappa "Packard Goose". Just what is it that music possesses or gives? All of the above but at various times and in various degrees.


And so for day 214
16.07.2007

Recreation

Thinking of vacations ...

Until all employees are deemed replaceable, some are deemed disposable.

I wonder if economists tote up the true expesne of all those indispensable people.

And so for day 213
15.07.2007

Yogurt Yoga and Contortions

Gayl Jones has a narrator in Mosquito do some neat twists and turns with language, all in a particular voice.

[...] less they thinks everybody got the dextrosity, I means dexterity, of them circus jugglers. Or what them other circus creatures? Not them acrobats. Them contortionists. They think everybody got the dextrosity and dexterity of them contortionists. Well, I guess them contortionists they supposed to be acrobats too, but they seem more extraordinary then them ordinary acrobats. Or like them that do that yoga. Like my friend Delgadina she do that yoga. She say that yoga ain't just exercise, it a whole philosophy. Be saying there's different types of yoga. Not that yogurt, 'cause that yoga and that yogurt do got the same sound to them and a lot of the peoples that does that yoga eats that yogurt. Ain't just the countercultural neither, like it usedta be. That yoga and that yogurt is mainstream today. Them yoga postures only makes you look like you's a contortionist, but you ain't a true contortionist.

Again that voice, most particular.


And so for day 212
14.07.2007

Misplaced Miser

"Eyes of Flesh, Eyes of Fire" Chapter VIII of Theodore Rosack's The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition has a wonder piece of rhetoric that employs the commonplace of not seeing the forest for the trees. It's a rift that pits attention to detail against the whole view and for this reason ultimately fails to convince.

And, after a fashion, we do learn things by treating the world objectively. We learn what one learns by scrutinizing the trees and ignoring the forest, by scrutinizing the cells and ignoring the organism, by scrutinizing the detailed minutiae of experience and ignoring the whole that gives the constituent parts their greater meaning. In this way we become ever more learnedly stupid. Our experience dissolves into a congeries of isolated puzzles, loosing its overall grandeur. We accumulate knowledge like the miser who interprets wealth as maniacal acquisition plus tenacious position; but we bankrupt our capacity to be wonder struck ... perhaps even to survive. [ellipsis in original]

The miser figure rings true but the passage fails to persuasively link accumulation with attention to detail. A tadpole can be as amazing as a whole wetland.


And so for day 211
13.07.2007

Keywords

"Technocracy's Children" Chapter I of Theodore Rosack's The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition a portion of which first published in The Nation in 1968 brings to the fore a very important keyword: maldistribution

Because we have an economy of cybernated abundance that does not need their labor, that is rapidly severing the tie between work and wages, that suffers from hard-core poverty due to maldistribution, not scarcity. From this point of view, why is the voluntary dropping-out of the hip young any more "parasitic" than the enforced dropping-out of impoverished ghetto dwellers?

Rosack goes on to ask the pertinent question:

The economy can do abundantly without all this labor. How better, then to spend our affluence than on those minimal goods and services that will support leisure for as many of us as possible?

"Maldistribution" is a keyword that sets in train a very important set of questions.

And so for day 210
12.07.2007

Hate, really?

February 2007 The Walrus Kay Armatage "Gertrude Stein's Radical Grammar"


The publishers do a disservice to the argument and the facts put forth by asserting in the table of contents that the article is about "Why Gertrude Stein hated commas". She didn’t. She was indifferent to them.


And, as the Poetry and Grammar lecture which Armatage draws upon indicates, she, that is Stein, used them, that is commas, to great effect. My favourite Stein comma passage is from A Novel of Thank You.

She find it just as easy she find it just as easy, she finds it just as easy.

There in that context is the theme of ease in relation to the mark of punctuation, a theme ever so similar to the comma remarks in Poetry and Grammar.

And so, as Armatage leaves readers with a question and a set of observations:

I don’t feel as strongly about commas as Stein did, and who can, really? And there’s the dreaded question mark.

I leave you with a question: can one have a strong feeling of indifference? Yes, I suppose, if one is a very strong anyone.


And so for day 209
11.07.2007