There are some keen pleasures for the telnet set ...
Yred played mute on Stingray. no .talk but lots of actions [.emote] and .think It was rather delightful. Pleased arora & midnite nicely.
Totally lifted out of context to sharpen the image of being bound:
My own feeling is that as we interact with any artifact, any device, we become bound to it.
From a journal entry dated 15/09/96
Spent about two hours yesterday with David Findlay reviewing the on-line version of [...] What struck me is the importance of storyboarding a site: taking account of the possible paths through the site and indeed making sure one does not succumb to the desire to link everything to everything. The adage you "can't get there from here" is very apt for Web development.
Andrew Holleran's narrator in The Beauty of Men finds himself waiting behind a school bus and musing
He regards the school bus now with a certain awe — even if he knows it's filled with bullies and brats trying to inflict pain on gentler children — as he watches them get off the bus at the dirt road that leads into a pool of trailers among the pine trees o the shores of Lake Sampson. Nothing has changed: Some kids get off by themselves, walk over to a mailbox, open the lid, then flip it back in disgust. (They need mail too, he thinks. Perhaps I can spend the rest of my life writing children letters.)
There is this novel written in the genre of memoir. What I like about the narrator's voice is that he presents as a person who is beloved — surrounded by people who care about him. He is rarely describes moments of being alone. Yet this from whence flows the narration, a place of connectedness, a desire to not be alone.
He [Daniel] and I talked for a while longer and then he left and later, when I was alone, I thought about Teddy and I missed him and I sat at my desk with a pad and a pen and began to write.
[Our narrator has been to the park.] When we reached the meadow I watched two shirtless youths, both short, brown, and muscular, passing a soccer ball between them and the sight of the outline of one of their penises made me smile. After I watched them play for a while I spread my jacket on the grass and lay back on it and looked at the clouds passing by in stately order, and gradually I fell asleep to the sounds of the kicking and bumping of the soccer ball and the calls of the young men using it, and just before I slept I wished that death could be like that: falling asleep on spicy-smelling grass with the warm sun on my face while nearby life, youth, vitality, live on.
I have always been struck by the border between generous comment and irony. Take for example, Northrop Frye in a lecture on Oswald Spengler for CBC radio in the series Architects of Modern Thought
Spengler's book [The Decline of the West] is a vision rather than a theory or a philosophy, and a vision of haunting imaginative power. Its truth is the truth of poetry or prophecy, not of science. A good deal of Spengler's mind was second-rate, and he continually misunderstood and misapplied his own thesis. So there are many attacks upon him that miss the real point of his book, but still they're attacks that Spengler really asked for.
[...]
But I think myself that trying to understand Spengler is a fine exercise in intellectual tolerance.
[...]
There is probably not a statement in Spengler that has not been regarded as scientific absurdity or mystical balderdash by some critic or other. But Spengler has the power to expand and exhilarate the mind as critics of that type usually have not, and he will probably survive them all even if all of them are right.
An entry in a small notebook dated September 96. Jill Scott was teaching a course at Carleton on postmodern theory and wrapping up her thesis.
Jill asked for advice for the 1st time teacher. Told her not to be afraid of silence. Pauses permit cogitation.
A not very generous assessment from 1996 (though I'm struck by that the concessive "mind you" apostrophe to the reader) ...
Read Richard Shiff's piece in Public 13. Interesting take on Benjamin's notion of aura being implicated in touch and vision. Lots of restatement and little analysis. I did like the use of De Anima. Fun to find two texts that I used in my thesis used here also but somewhat different[ly]. Shiff seems to be totally unaware of Adorno's critique of Benjamin. In particular the stuff on the dialectical image. This I believe would not allow [him] to place Benjamin as an unquestioned authority at the head of an essay that essentially develops a typology. I'm not opposed to typologies per se but would love to know how & why a particular one operated. There is something a bit imperialistic about a typology that starts out from a collapse of touch & vision. Mind you I'm the one who argues for narrativity as the abstract level necessary for translation between all sensory modalities. I don't fetischize physicality & materiality which at some level Shiff does.
On your own but not alone...
Each of us, grown-ups and young people, often get so overwhelmed with our own problems that we often think we're alone, that no one wants to help or even cares. It's important to remember two things about that: that we all need to offer help when we think it's wanted, and that none of us be afraid to ask when we need it. [...] so we all know a little of each other's problems. We are not alone.
M.A. Screech Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly
In the Annotations on the New Testament he [Erasmus] points out that the original Greek word, schema, may be translated by habitus (state, condition) or by figura (fashion, structure).
I Corinthians 7: 31: praeterit enim figura hujus mundi: 'For the fashion of this world passeth away.' He himself preferred to render the Greek not by figura but habitus.
