Category: Uncategorised

A worrying example of how brittle and centralized a lot of our culture is:

A recent wave of takedowns affecting many of the Hitler “Downfall” parody videos has resulted in their removal from YouTube.

I’ve

previously mentioned

Wang Hui, as a particularly interesting Chinese intellectual. Now he’s being accused of plagiarism — which might be politically-motivated, or could be a gase of someboy finding him with his pants down. Or both.

Since hearing it mentioned on In Our Time, I’ve been entranced by the start of Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks:

A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad

. The inhabitants of the different countries keep quarrelling fiercely with each other and kings go on loosing their temper in the most furious way. Our churches are attacked by the heretics and then protected by the Catholics; the faith of Christ burns bright in many men, but it remains lukewarm in others; no sooner are church buildings endowed by the faithful that they are stripped again by those who have no faith. However, no writer has come to the fore who has been sufficiently skilled in setting things down in an orderly fashion to be able to describe these events in prose or in verse.

Alas, that seems to be more-or-less an invention of the translator. The Latin text begins:

Decedente atque immo potius pereunte ab urbibus Gallicanis liberalium cultura litterarum, cum nonnullae res gererentur vel rectae vel inprobae…

Which This translation renders more literally

With liberal culture on the wane, or rather perishing in the Gallic cities there were many deeds being done both good and evil

ah, well, it’s still a glorious opening line, regardless of authenticity.

I’m going through a period of over-the-top enthusiasm for unconferences — they’re just at that confluence of anarchism and practicality where you can imagine the possibility of improving the world by worming our way out of the zombiefied social rituals which usually trap us. Apparently, actually attending one that doesn’t quite live up to the ideals isn’t much of a damper on this.

Just wish I could find a calendar for the things…

Currently at the Berlin Open Data Hackday. Mentions David Eaves, who has just launched a Canadian government data transparency project

The Three Laws of Open Government Data:

1. If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist

2. If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage

3. If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower

I’m not entirely convinced by this focus. Data-mining is good, but there are plenty of other important areas that will only be identified by a competent journalist or activist asking the right questions.

Here’s a thought. If you’re developing something that relies on an open-source project, one of the big uncertainties is what is going to happen to the community in the future. Is this project going to wither away next year?

We could gather a lot of data on this. Mailing list use, code commits, blogposts, google hits, etc, etc, etc. Then we can try to see characteristics which are correlated with growing/declining projects, and develop a quantitative prediction of the likely future of a project.

Last night, to a reading by Catherine Hales. [a few of her poems — some of which she read — are online here, here, here, and here.

Back, and unsure about the whole enterprise. Hales seems to be pretty good at what she does — as far as I can tell, the poems work pretty well on her own terms, and the reading went much more smoothly than I would have expected.

But it makes me realise just how adrift I am when it comes to poetry. I go to readings from time to time, hoping to find something that will describe, explain or enrich the world. Instead I just end up feeling baffled, stupid, underread, and resentful about the entire enterprise.

Partly, this comes down to my old grumble that poetry would be much improved by footnotes. When I don’t understand the origin of a quotation, or the significance of an allusion, entire sections devolve towards being just patterns of meaningless words. There’s little way to know what you’re missing; just a requirement that you spend a lifetime reading the language whose fragments are regurgitated into the poetry. This I won’t do, any more than I’m willing to inhale the canon of Star Wars and Doctor Who so I can follow in-jokes on Livejournal.

It’s a different feeling of stupidity to what comes from not understanding science. There, every moment of ignorance has a solution; understanding some area is mainly just a matter of reading textbooks and papers until it makes sense. Maybe it’ll take more time than I’m willing to put in, but I always know that the answer is out there.

Whereas, poetry? [I mean, this kind of poetry, academic poetry. Poetry that gets listened to by non-poets is a different matter] I have the sense that the only way to understand it is through slow cultural acclimatisation, spending years bouncing around the English department of some anglophone university. And I have plenty of ways to waste my life already, without going down that route.

This shouldn’t irritate me as much as it does; I should be able to accept that poetry is just an enclosed, self-referential world, that I can amicably sidestep in the same way I do Warcraft players. But I can’t; I’m somehow still hooked by the cultural status, by the feeling that I *should* be able to grok poetry, by the wariness that people are doing things with words that I can’t even work out how to comprehend.

The saving grace is the knowledge that, even if I did acquire understanding, perhaps through years of rigorous training in some remote poetry-temple, it

still

wouldn’t do me any good. As CH describes her work:

‘Look in vain for (linear) narrative, for anecdote, for epiphanies, for messages, for making-the world-a-better-place: the world is a mess and language is messy and the world is language and any attempt to tidy it up with poetry is falsification. There is no utopian vision…’

But what is the use of a book (or anything else, for that matter), without epiphanies and making the world a better place? I’m well aware of the messiness and meaninglessness of the world; the challenge is to tie it into some kind of plausible structure, to give yourself a reason to carry on living. Catherine Hales, by her own aims, isn’t going to do that.

So, in the end, I turn back to rabble-rousing slam poetry. Not only is it easier to understand, but it hints at the possibility of a life not based on continual self-doubt and self-examination, where it is possible to change the world rather than just passively complaining about it. I prefer my poetry weaponized:)

Sean Roberts, unsurprisingly, has a decently-informed take on Kyrgyzstan:

The news coming out of the country looks all too similar to that which we saw in Spring of 2005, only more violent. In general, the events of the last several days taken together with those of March 2005 suggest two things about this country in the twenty-first century – 1) that the Kyrgyz people, unlike most former Soviet citizens, are unwilling to allow a corrupt government to stay in power through its control of the political system and are ready to risk personal safety in order to prevent this; and 2) the elite of Kyrgyzstan has yet to demonstrate that it is capable of establishing a viable government that meets people’s demands and moves Kyrgyzstan’s development forward.

Hebrew/greek confusion:

In Hebrew the word YHWH looks like this: יהוה — read from right to left. But by the time of Jesus Hebrew had become virtually a dead language even in Israel. Someone encountering this Hebrew word in a Greek text might well have thought it looked like the nonsense Greek word πιπι — read from left to right, that’s pipi. According to St. Jerome this is exactly what happened

Or, as Helen puts it:

Your goal for this election period is to challenge apathetic non-voters. This has got to stop being a socially acceptable position to take.