Subtle is the Lord — Te Nave Nave Fenua

Te Nave Nave Fenua” (The Delight­ful Land) by Paul Gau­guin, 1892

I have [P]interests, too. Mostly, I pin things to my Lit­board and write a few lines about them. Some­times, these dif­fer­ent Inter­net places where I’m invested strike me as tiny par­al­lel uni­verses. They’re too tiny to be fully grown or able to do much for you. They never assume full respon­si­bil­ity for their con­tent. You spend per­haps only sec­onds or a few min­utes in each of them, but all of them together (Face­book, Google+, Pin­ter­est, Fic­tio­naut, Twit­ter, Scoo­pIt, Storify, Word­Press, Tum­blr, Pos­ter­ous, Wee­bly etc.) man­i­fest some­thing more than just a bunch of sites. I don’t really know myself yet how exactly this works, but the total­ity of alter­na­tive elec­tronic worlds is sub­ject to an evo­lu­tion­ary process not unlike the phys­i­cal uni­verse as such: these plat­forms can be grafted upon one another (mash-up, merger) or com­pete with each other (Face­book, Google+) and so on, with a pro­found dif­fer­ence to the bio­log­i­cal arena being that we, lit­tle me and lit­tle you, are not just stand­ing by but we play with them and inside them (always the dan­ger of los­ing our­selves in the process), we worry about them, we rec­om­mend them, we kick them like dirty old habits. This means that we’re like gods in the midst of these infor­ma­tional uni­verses that we’ve made (and I mean all of us, because only where peo­ple to go play and pin and post and palaver will there be life). Maybe this is also what other, larger, invis­i­ble gods do to our planet and all the other plan­ets. Per­haps the green trees, all of them that I see and can’t see, the whole plan­e­tary net­work of trees, is a com­mu­nity plat­form of divine gardeners.

When I was a boy, I had this idea first, as soon as I’d grasped the unreal real­ity of atoms: what if there was a giant child some­where within, our world noth­ing but an atom in the lit­tle fin­ger of this giant child. Just like per­haps an atom in my lit­tle fin­ger was a com­plete world with a child look­ing up at me in this moment hav­ing the same thoughts. Dr Seuss must’ve had this thought, too. It’s the Cos­mic Tur­tle for beginners.

This whole linked chain of thoughts makes me feel like a spark with notions of my own divin­ity. It was set in motion really when I pinned a lovely post by anony­mous blog­ger and writer Beach­sloth to my Lit­board: it reminded me that I’m a physi­cist by train­ing, some­thing that lingers in my mind like a mirage on a desert road behind me rather than ahead of me. I’ve not used this fact much in my writ­ing but per­haps I’ll do more of that. Right now I’m work­ing on a lit­tle story that involves Ein­stein and I’m happy to feel just a lit­tle closer to him than if I wasn’t a physi­cist. Not that it’s really pos­si­ble to feel close to a cul­tural icon: they hang on the wall. They’ve been pinned there by his­tory (did you know there’re more than 116 Mil­lion images of Ein­stein on the Web?). To close, let’s remem­ber that we’re sparks and gods at the same time. We’ve cre­ated this dig­i­tal Gar­den of Eden and we cop­u­late in it at the same time. We put our­selves here and we toy with ban­ning our­selves from it, at least I do, all the time.

Ear­lier in the week, a group of stu­dents asked me a ques­tion that I’m often asked: how do I find the time to do all that I do?I told them that I try to be effi­cient on a day-to-day basis (as I’m sure we all do), and that I only sur­vive in dig­i­tal Eden because every once in a while I take a solid break from it. Usu­ally, this cycle fol­lows my teach­ing term. When I’m on a media break, I pay a lot more atten­tion to my body. I look at my hands and I notice new lines on them. I sit with my hands in my lap rather than on my lap­top and look out the win­dow. I read to my loved ones. I roll words around in my mouth and swal­low them whole, or I chew them for long peri­ods. At the end of it I can do all kinds of things with words that I couldn’t do before. And that’s only a frac­tion of it. When I’m done with that, I res­ur­rect myself and return to the Delight­ful Land to play some more with you guys.

 

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Up the stairs with Aesop

Last week I spent hours schlep­ping books that I hadn’t touched in years, AustenAdams and Aeosop, from our apart­ment down to the car and (at the other end of a jour­ney) back up again to my office: Busch, Böll, Baude­laire. Since I couldn’t find a trol­ley, I asked my stu­dents to help me carry them: if you’d been there you’d have seen a group of young peo­ple each car­ry­ing 5–10 books (“You can give me more than that”), fol­low me up the stairs into the ele­va­tor, through the can­teen (they were wor­ried what other stu­dents would be think­ing about them: Goethe, Grass and Gaskell) and into my office where they lin­gered, touch­ing and open­ing the books care­fully as if they were pre­cious things, read­ing in them here and there: “Take your time,” I said. They made few com­ments, a lit­tle awed I sup­pose since they didn’t know which books I liked: KafkaKoestlerKant. All of this was only pos­si­ble because they were paper books. Am now think­ing about start­ing a new trend at our school: ral­ly­ing stu­dents to walk through the house with small piles of books in their hands (VerneVir­gilValéry) for no other rea­son than to increase the pres­ence of printed mat­ter in an oth­er­wise increas­ingly dig­i­tal learn­ing environment.


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Meeting Marie Calloway Without Adrien Brody

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.” ― George Eliot

The first alien came as a rose out of the rocky ground. It grew on a moun­tain slope, shad­owed by a lonely olive tree. It grew in three days from a seed that had drifted there on a high, for­giv­ing wind after the crash and burn of the star­ship. It had come all the way from Sat­urn in less than half a human day, and from a far away galaxy in less than a human year.

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Spring Things To Do

Matilde Urru­tia and Pablo Neruda in Isla Negra: “I want To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”

This spring I will for­sake all dona­tions in the form of soft com­pli­ments. Those that I have received already I will con­vert into hard cur­rency. I will be my own arrow and my own tar­get. I will prac­tice putting my inner princess to work. There will be frogs avail­able for lower prices than ever in the his­tory of fairy tales.

Con­tinue read­ing

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books that burn turn into torches

Comic book burning

Read an inter­est­ing arti­cle in the NYT blog by Tim Parks, “E-Books Can’t Burn”. It’s a good read, but the com­ments impressed me even more than the post itself: such pas­sion on either side! Surely a sign of par­a­digm change, except as usual it isn’t clear where we’re going. Of course, the paper-based hard­lin­ers don’t show up on the blog, only those who swing both ways.

Con­tinue read­ing

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The Sentinel

Con­tinue read­ing

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A Week On The Far Side Of The Moon

For the past year, I thought I could beat Face­book as a place to make con­tacts and spread the word more effec­tively, which is why I started Kaffe in Kat­mandu on Tum­blr. I’ve now been back to Face­book since one month or so and alas, I con­cede defeat: using it in con­nec­tion with the “Time­line” fea­ture, it’s both fun and fairly effort­less. Face­book, you win.

Tum­blr is just as clubby and closed as Face­book is. The Tum­blr crowd is prob­a­bly less chatty, more self-involved, younger (yes, you are!) and gen­er­ally more visu­ally ori­ented. The Face­book crowd is more diverse and prob­a­bly more lit­er­ate (yes, you are!) in terms of lost cul­ture and lan­guage. But both of them are clubs for time-losers, enclaves of unmet needs, the harem of an invis­i­ble, all-powerful, name­less Sultan.

Con­tinue read­ing

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The New Zealand Chronicles

I’m going to change a few things with this post: I will (try to) adhere to proper cap­i­tal­iza­tion. I will be case sen­si­tive, some­thing you can dis­cuss with your shrink to test the waters before fully open­ing up. I will also break my ram­bling posts into chunks and I will give each chunk a proper head­line. Lastly, I will not swear (as much).

As a boy I saw a film where Asi­mov wrote SF on a TRS-80. Set me up for a life in com­put­ing & pos­si­bly SF too.

FINALLY, DAMN: FOUNDATIONS
I’ve just finally begun to read Asimov’s Foun­da­tion Series, begin­ning with the vol­ume “Pre­lude to Foun­da­tion” (writ­ten last). Enjoy­ing it very much. Every once in a while, Asi­mov breaks away from plot and sur­prises with occa­sional escapes from pure plot into lit­er­a­ture. An exam­ple: (ch 5) 

«He thought of the gray day out­side when he went to see the Emperor. And he thought of all the gray days and cold days and hot days and rainy days and snowy days on Heli­con, his home, and he won­dered if one could miss them. Was it pos­si­ble to sit in a park on Tran­tor, hav­ing ideal weather day after day, so that it felt as though you were sur­rounded by noth­ing at all—and com­ing to miss a howl­ing wind or a bit­ing cold or a breath­less humidity?»

Con­tinue read­ing

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The Man In The Mirror

 

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Death. Decay. Doom.

My dad. Draw­ing by my daugh­ter. (Click pic for story)

A few years ago, I missed my dad’s death by a few hours. I had busi­ness not far from his house, but I decided not to see him. Later that day, he fell over and died, just like that. It was a mer­ci­ful death, I imag­ine. That night, para­medics were thump­ing his wide chest, the chest that I had laid upon many years before and that I will always remem­ber as the safest place any­where. On the next day after his death, we all went to see what was left of him. He was cold and yel­low in the face then, both there and not there. I hadn’t been able to see my mother in her death a few years ear­lier so this became the first time (I was 43) that I ever came face to face with a dead per­son who wasn’t a corpse yet. The dead turn into corpses later, I think, when the soul has prop­erly left. In my father’s case his soul was still hang­ing around look­ing at us from above. I couldn’t see it but I could feel it. My daugh­ter, who was only 5 then, showed sci­en­tific inter­est in the body, mixed with a nat­ural reverie that I hadn’t quite expected. She seemed to ask ques­tions not of us and get answers not from us either and I pre­sume she could still see my father’s soul and com­mune with it. Of course she doesn’t remem­ber any of this, all she remem­bers is that her grandpa shouted at her when she broke one of his Vien­nese porce­lain fig­urines and that he called her “Mümpi”, which doesn’t mean any­thing (except to him).

Con­tinue read­ing

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