Sorry Brittanica

...you lose.

Image from this article on wikipedia.

James ellroy

is quietly (in some sense) writing the great, sprawling American paranoid, post-modern, modernist novel. It's taking him year and it's coming in installments but shit is it good. Next one due next summer. Oh yeah.

so like...

the semsester's over. I have a few hours of free time. I have no idea what to do with myself. Should I spend two days drunk at museums?

bent my wookie

Ice Storm! I ran ten miles in an ice storm on sunday. Then, while walking to my car, slipped and fell. I remember thinking "don't fall on the laptop." I didn't. But my ibook's case is bent so it doesn't sit flat anymore. I think this all looked pretty comical fromm across the street.

Ack!knowledgemments

Is it wrong to give shout outs to breweries in the acknowledgements section of my thesis? Significant thoughts were thought and words were written while under the influence of their products. Yay Avery. Yay New Belgium. Yay Goose Island.

Thesis blog

This just in: Clifford Geertz is a goddamn genius.

So I haven't really been putting the process down in the old internets. Oh well. I wonder. The discipline of the diary (cf. guitar Craft's diaries)--is that a discipline I need? I mean, I've already got so many. what is the value of discipline anyway? why am I asking this? I'm sort of existential about it: you do it so that you can do it. Huh. I guess blogging is about saying nonprofound things. so here I am.

chicago weather forecast decoder ring

90 percent chance of sever thunderstorms means it will be a nice day, but breezy.

10percent chance of light showers means you're going to get soaked and hit by lightening.

Things that happen when you're in Grad School

Your wife falls asleep on your copy of Oreintalism.

your world is wireless and full or terrible douchebags

Why are all thes cell phone commercials showing how their tech enables you to be an annoying and rude person? I like the sidekick ads where all the kids organize a shopping cart race in the supermarket. I wish someone would just stick their foot out and trip one of 'em. On the plus side, it seems like a perfect opportunity for some Laslo Letters-type thing where you start a letter writing campaign about how in times of terrorism and heightened security, it's irresponsible to show this kind of subversive action in public places.

But Whatever. I'd like to do a study on the portrayal of anti-social behavior in connectivity-themed advertising. I think maybe I'd find that these companies were privileging tech-mediated (Their tech of course) interaction over non.

The eye is naturally drawn...

100_0749
Originally uploaded by earixson

This photo, where I clearly state that NO ONE is topless, is my most viewed photo on flickr.

On being tracked down through facebook etc.

To what extent do I owe it to old and former friends to be objectified by their nostalgia trips?

blogging the thesis

I think I'll blog the process of completing my master's thesis. Today, I'm reading "Interpretation of Cultures" by Clifford Geertz.  More to come.

on music, youth and develpment.

I just turned 30. I think I'lll make the party's theme "The Music of my youth," as I symbolically kill the latter. That (along with a question from my wife) got me thinking: what was it about the msuic that I love(d) that I found so compelling that i integrated the music and the culture surrounding it into my own personhood?

Womens' voices were particulary and dramatically different. I can't even describe the gulf between heather Locklear in leather in the background of a Motley Crue video and PJ Harvey. Hearing "Dress" and "Rid of Me" was a stunning experience for a teenage boy. The similarities to my own experience (uncontrollable lust, discomfort? with the display of my body) and the differences.

Here's a further example: my class song was Far Behind by Candlebox. My friends and I mounted a write-in campaign for Life Sentence by the Dead Kennedys. Which one said anything? What the hell was candlebox on about? That mushy, mealy, content-free lyrical style of Candlebox was even then an affront to everything I know about anything.

what I'm saying is what Morrisey said so much more succinctly: The music that they constantly play, it says nothing to me about my life so hang the DJ.

so now that I'm old, now what? I started a bad with another old dude. We're walking the line between nostalgia and progress so far. There are things that I just cannot pull off; they're not cute anymore. But remember: Andy summers didn't join The Police until he was 32.

Ethics and Consumption

SO it's easier for me to go to the store and get potable Fijian water than it is for a Fijian, living in Fiji, to do the same.

cf. Steven Landsburg's argument that not consuming is the same as performing undirected, random acts of generaosity or charity.

cf. Prof. Dierdre McCloskey's contention that ethical consumption does not = the downfall of our modern capitalist economic system. Relevant passage:
"Nothing would befall the market economy in the long run if we tempered our desires down to one car and a small house and healthy foods from the co-op."

on transcendence

So I'm reading Deirdre McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues. Not because I agree necessarily, but because it's interesting. And well written. But there is a section on love, the virtue--as opposed to what I ask myself as I make that clarification--and there is the idea that transcendence is necessary, that love cannot come from humans, it must somehow be participated in even though it is transcendent. [[I'll have to clarify this.]]

Anyway, I'm thinking: transcendence is a drive, not a goal. Once transcendence has been achieved, then it is no longer transcendent, as it now belongs to the sphere of the subtranscendental- or the 'merely' human. Sorry. I'm too much of a humanist to use merely without reservations because unless you are talking cosmology, people and human activity is pretty much it. The mind precedes its objects, as the Dhammapadda says, and the collective mind precedes the realm of human experience.

ANyway, transcendence is not achieved; it is performed. The drive to extend the realm/sphere of human experience necessarily changes (expands?) that realm which then must expand towards the new transcendence. It's a never ending (possibly eternally (for certain values of eternally) recurring) process.

Thus the transcendent doesn't come from anywhere but from us
Q: is this true, or at least a useful definition of, transcendence then?


Related musing on teleology: what if certain processes are teleological, but continue on aimlessly once the telos has been reached?

Science!

James Howard Kunstler on the social sciences, more or less:
"Thus, a Jacksonian student of landscape can observe a Red Barn hamburger joint, he can remark on its architectural resemblance to certain farm structures of the past, measure its dimesnions, figure out the materials that went into building it, record the square footage of its parking lot, count the number of cars that come and go, the length of timethat each customer lingers inside, the average sum spent on a meal, the temperature of the iceberg lettuce in its bin in the salad bar--all down to the last infinitesimal detail--and never arrive at the conclusion that the Red Barn is an ignoble piece of shit that degrades the community." The Geography of Nowhere, p.124.

So another semester comes to a crashing and messy conclusion

Jeez. How many of these have I seen. 2 for an associate's, 4 for B.S., and now one down for the Master's. Damn.

Funny, though, how they all end up the same. I end up cranky. I apologize again to my wife for this. Each end comes, of course, with the question, "what now?" Quo Vadimus, to quote a sitcom that currently resides, on DVD, somewhere inside my storage unit. The immediate future has an answer: Thesis. (Doom doom doooooom.) So that oughta be fun.

But also: why? I ddn't have to do this. I had a career. I was good at it. I even enjoyed it at times. I probably have some deep-seated desire to make a difference. The reasons for this are pretty deeply rooted in my childhood. I would call this phenomenon overdetermined. And it's in the face of unrelenting and overwhelming evidence that Franz Kafka was right (Bumpersticker idea?)-- you can't make a difference. But you have to. That's the existential question-- it's in the Plague, and the Phenomenology of Perception and Beckett (I can't go on....I'll go on): Whatcha gonna do? and I guess we all say yes, but some try to be more emphatic and Bloomish, and at that point it's better to black out the text than to ask "why," because the blacking out is at least action, and the asking becomes divorced from action and so a dead end.

So I've learned a thing or two. Cause I didn't know that before.

Draft Day

the NFL draft is today. I just wrote a paper on how the draft is like any economic bubble--specifically the Dutch Tulip bubble, but whatever. The point is that no matter how much informmation is available about a player, what matters more to that player's value as a draft pick is the talk about that information, and the force of history. Why else so many WR taken in the first draft when so many f them are busts? I mean, Marques Colston was like a 6th round pick and I'd take him over any of the WRs taken over him last year.

I wonder if I should ust present this paper on wednesday instead of the paper I have yet to write.

UPDATE: Calvin Johnson, GaTech WR, just went #2 overall. Will he be a Torry Holt or a Marcus Nash? Keep in mind he was drafted by Detroit (http://www.coldhardfootballfacts.com/Article.php?Page=776)

it's hard to blog

when you are up to your eyeballs in chi-square and Spearman rho tests for correlation and you barely know what this shit is. Plus! populations sample parameters. I don't even know if I know the right term. Damn. Aren't there any good textbooks on this stuff?

the worst possible conditions for studying

The worst way to study is to be on the L platform, while on the other side of the little shelter a dude is cackling and pounding on the divider.

wipeout

I went for a run this morning. I tripped on my pants and wiped out in the road. I seriously skidded. I'm completely ok though. I guess it was all forward motion that got converted into heat between my clothes and the road instead on my face and the road. or something.