[This
review was made on the basis of several months’ experience with
late public beta versions of release 10, which have proved solid
enough, although some components of the final feature set are not yet
in place.]The UK's BBC Radio 4 is currently airing a series in which various celebrities read from, and discuss, their teenage diaries. It's an amusing and sometimes insightful listen ... though my principal feeling is of astonishment at the fact of such teenaged journal keeping diligence.
I had a diary every year from as far back as I can remember, and was always very interested in the information which they contained, but contributed little to them of my own. None from my own teens survive, so far as I know, but if they did they would make for thin and unimpressive reading.
One diary, from a little earlier than my teens, did surface recently ... and illustrates the point. There are only four entries, all of them in the first two pages. Here is what one ten year old thought worth recording of his life, in early 1963, in the Pictorial Young Australian Chamber of Commerce Diary:
1st January : Stayed up to see new year in
2nd January : Overslept
6th January : Bad rash
8th January : Didn't feel well at first but OK now.
I don't, somehow, expect the BBC to call me any time soon...
Since putting up Friday's post, I've had several queries about writing on the Asus TF101 (Transformer) – variations on the theme of “did you write this post on the tablet and, if so, using what software?”
Answer: it was shuffled back and forth across three machines, two of them Windows (laptop and netbook) and one of them the Asus/Android tablet/keyboard combination. Roughly half of it, altogether, was written on the Asus; final fiddling and subediting before upload was on the laptop.
On the Windows machines, writing was in WordPerfect though final prep was in OpenOffice Writer.
On the TF101, the office suite provided free with the machine was used: Polaris Office. I have tried several alternatives, and bought the two main market leading standards which I've used happily on other platforms, but Polaris, to be honest, knocks the socks off both.
I'm afraid that there is, if you are doing this sort of cross platform shuffling, no alternative to using Microsoft's file formats. Polaris reads/writes DOC and DOCX; so do the other main alternatives; nothing reads anything else. Even RTF is badly served. If you have a favourite word processor (like my WordPerfect), and prefer to stick with its own native file format, then ... tough. You can write in what you like, but use "save as" to store it in Microsoft's form.
I'm sorry to see the closure of Jim Putnam's Thinking Through My Fingers blog, one of the "other voices" down my left hand margin and for some years one of my "start the day" reads. I would post this as a comment there, but have encountered difficulties doing so.
I can't claim that the news comes out of the blue; I had advance warning about three weeks back; but it's no less of a loss for that.
On the other hand, “I feel as if I'm in a positive place in my personal life” sounds like one of the best reasons I can think of for making a change – so ... all the best, Jim, and I'll live in hope that you might (as you suggest) pop up again somewhere else in time.
I am preparing a series of lectures on landscape imagery for next year, and find myself making frequent return to several books. Appleton's Experience of Landscape, for instance. Nash's Wilderness and the American mind. Spirin's The language of landscape.
As I go, I extract fragments for reference and/or quotation. Time was, I'd have hand written these on index cards; now I stick the book into a scanner and let OCR take the strain.
I'm also, of course, referring at the same time to numerous electronic sources – which is so much more convenient since, quite apart from instant searching, I just have to highlight, copy and paste ... or even "save page as" ... or, better still, just store a link to the page. I have, in my notes for this lecture, for example, links to recent posts by Ray Girvan (Old Park) and Julie Heyward (Instrumentality).
If only the printed texts were as instantly accessible in their entirety as the electronic sources.
Sometimes, of course, a printed text is also available in digital form. It's well worth my well, for something often used, to buy both forms: paper as definitive version, digital for flexible reference and quoting. But that's not possible for the above three examples.
As I scanned a paragraph today, it dawned on me that I am gradually and unintentionally compiling a fragmentary but increasingly complete digital copy of a book in this way.
How do I feel about this?
I take copyright very seriously. I would not knowingly do anything which in might in any perceivable way tend to undermine the author's income from the text. But it seems to me that as long as I keep the material solely for my on use, and no purchasable electronic version exists, I am not going beyond my own moral view of "fair use".
There is one difference between Appleton on one hand, Nash and Spirin on the other: Appleton is out of print. That is probably not a significant difference for any practical purpose ... but it feels different as a starting point. So, as of today, I have started deliberately scanning the whole chapter containing a section I need from Appleton, rather than just the section itself. When I have the whole lot, I'll combine it into one PDF file and bingo ... I will be my own miniature Google Books.
When I've done that, I'll consider what to do about the others.
My brother recently asked about the (social interaction) process by which I arrived at the "On the bench" photographs. (Several others have asked related questions.)
In the course of answering, yesterday morning, I made reference to portraiture as a joint enterprise between portrayer and portrayed (in this case, photographer and subject). While still thinking about that, I found the following Unreal Nature extract from Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image:
“… The author takes a step towards his characters, but the characters take a step towards the author: double becoming. Story-telling is not an impersonal myth, but neither is it a personal fiction: it is a word in act, a speech-act through which the character continually crosses the boundary …”
Which seems much the same thing ... and could apply as much to characters in a novel as in a film. Perhaps all arts are a similar contract. Perhaps social interaction itself is, too.
I started the new year with an act of betrayal.
I passionately believe in the principle of open source software. I ardently support the UN's support for it as the future of world development. Yet, in January of this year, when I decided that I need a web book with more RAM and a faster processor than the Asus eeePC which had served me well for nearly two years, I ... abandoned Debian Linux along with the Asus and installed Windows XP on its replacement.
Why?
Two answers, in essence. One is the availability of particular software tools; the other is simplicity. I'll deal with them the other way round, taking simplicity first.
Matt Revel (who, unlike me, enthusiastically keeps the faith intact) wrote a fascinating post, a couple of days back along, about conversion of an old spec Neoware thin client machine into an Ubuntu Linux server. Read it; it's wonderful. I used to do a lot of that sort of thing, back when computers were large boxes with plenty of space inside and visibly modular components. I still do it with the one remaining tower system I possess (my desktop network server and archive sentinel) but when I look inside the cramped innards of a laptop or smaller I quail; I back away, feeling old and hamfisted.
Reading Matt's post, I learned a number of things, and have taken away a number of ideas. One of them is the idea that I might, perhaps, be able to replace the 810Mbyte hard disk in an elderly but still beautiful Toshiba Libretto 50 (75MHz, 16Mb RAM, running Windows Me) with a flash card. But none of them include returning to Linux for a machine upon which I regularly rely for my core activities.
The truth is, I am not only too old and too short of time now for that sort of hardware wizardry ... I also cannot face the sort of time which Linux requires at the software end. Just as I used to fiddle around inside computers, so I fiddled around getting the best out of command line software shells ... but not any more. The sad fact is that when I install or remove a new program (something I typically do twice a day on average), Windows just installs or removes it, wham, in one go while Linux requires (in return for its many superior qualities) that I assemble several packages (often from different sources) and coördinate them. I do it on two machines (one 32 bit, one 64 bit), so that I have access to the greater efficiency and quality of Linux when it really matters, for particular purposes ... but the rest of the time I use Windows
This is not true of all open source software. Having made the decision to slob out in the flabby upholstered comfort of Windows, I can and do use (and promote the use of) OpenOffice (this post is being written in its word processor), Firefox (I use five different browsers, but Firefox is first choice 95% of the time), Thunderbird (since I discovered the terrible vulnerability of my archives in Outlook) – and each of them arrives as a one click Windows installer. All of those applications I just mentioned, by the way, are superb. I have (legal, paid for) copies of the Microsoft equivalents, simply because in my lines of work I have to operate within coöperative environments based on them as standards, and I must check that every document works exactly as expected within those environments ... but for my own working tools, chosen from preference, I go to the open equivalents: not just out of ideology but because they seem to me better.
So much for simplicity. Now for availability of particular software tools. It is an unfortunate fact that some software is not available under every operating system. Usually one can find equivalents that are just as good, or sufficiently good for one's purposes ... but not always. The deal breaking killer apps will vary from person to person, and from context to context, but for me on a machine which is predominantly used for serious volumes of writing on the hoof, there was just one. Ironically, it was an open source utility from SourceForge which emulates a Unix facility: AllChars, which gives Windows a quick and easy way to instantly type the characters which don't appear on a standard keyboard.
AllChars won't be essential to everyone. I have a frequent need to type the Euro symbol, the a+e ligature in words line encyclopædia, accented vowels, and so on. Some people happily use memorised numeric Unicode combinations to do this. The key sequence 2248[Alt-X], for example, yields (in most but not all modern Windows applications) the mathematical character ≈ which is also very useful to me ... but it takes five keystrokes and memorisation of that numeric code every time I enter that character. So long as I can remember the number, that's quicker than hunting though special character tables ... but still painful if I have to use the character often, or if I need to remember more than a couple of the codes. Life is, to be blunt, too short.
There are word processors which incorporate quick and easy ways to do this. Honourable mentions go to NotaBene (built from the ground up as the world's best tool for academic work involving multilingual text) and WordPerfect (in my opinion the best general purpose word processor available). In OpenOffice's word processor and spreadsheet there is an extension which adds the same utility. In each case, the sequence to access a particular character involves a master key (F6 in NotaBene, Ctrl-W in WordPerfect, a user selected key in the OO extension) plus a mnemonic pair of characters such as ~= for that ≈ symbol , for example, or ae for the ligature in encyclopædia. This same principle is used in AllChars – but it works across any program ( though the trade off is a narrower range of available characters).
Linux does allow addressing of these mnemonic pairs, and there are international keyboard layouts which allow modifier keys to accent vowels in particular. I noted a while back the availability of these options on the Linux variant Asus eeePC ... but also the fact that I couldn't find any way of making them instantly available on reboot without repeating the keyboard selection steps.
To be honest, life is too short for either four digit codes or repeated keyboard selections when I am offered a lazy alternative which works. Especially when (as now, as I write this) I have opened my carry along vade mecum machine in a transport terminus for ten minutes writing before packing it away again and boarding the next leg of my journey. AllChars is that alternative, and it is only available under Windows. And that one fact was what finally decided my return from Linux to Windows when I upgraded my netbook.
Having made the decision, however, I joyously returned to other software for which I had with equanimity accepted substitutes whilst using the Linux eeePC. WordPerfect, for example. I love OpenOffice Writer, and would always use it in preference to Microsoft Word; in fact I use it in preference to anything else for many, many things; but when I settle into heavy duty and complex writing over a long period, WordPerfect saves me enough time to make a significant difference. WordPerfect is not available under Linux, and I did without it without complaint; but now that I'm back on a Windows platform, I have welcomed the return of WordPerfect with open arms.
Four and a half months in, I still feel guilty about my act of betrayal, abandoning an open source operating system for a commercial one from Microsoft. This is the first time I have felt able to publicly talk about it. But, in honesty, I don't see myself going back until my reasons for it become redundant. May Matt forgive me.
I frequently say that sculpture is the visual-plastic art with which photography has most in common. Beyond the visual-plastic, however, there are other close relations. I recently characterised Julie Heyward's "non-bird" compositions as sculptural; I could with equal validity have described her avian sets (such as Slow dance, on which I was commenting at the time) as performance pieces.
And then there are writers whose activities strongly over lap with those of photographers. Poets do it most often; short story writers come next. Contemporary novelists more often tap in to the collective visual memory expanded by television, cinema, photography and other lens based media, but some do still specialise in constructing photographic images of their own from distilled words. The following is taken from The memory keeper's daughter:
“It was a long time before she opened her eyes, and then she was startled by both the darkness and the beauty all around: a small oblong of light, reflected off the glass doorknob, quivering on the wall. Paul's new blanket, lovingly knit, cascading like waves from the crib. And on the dresser David's daffodils, delicate as skin and almost luminous, collecting the light from the hall.”
This review began with the resolution of a need: to unify the efforts of several hundred volunteers into a single live, multilingual, frequently updated and heavily mathematical information flow from and within an ongoing study. LyX is a free, open-source document-processor system underpinned by LaTeX. No user knowledge of LaTeX is necessary (though it certainly does no harm). Once users have adjusted from word-processor habits, this greatly simplifies both content-editing and style conformity management, for both text and mathematics.
Compiled versions are currently available for Linux, MacOS and Windows, covering most users. [More...]
For reasons which remain slightly unclear to me, and which I will not bother to retrace, I found myself discussing with a group of British teenagers the following song fragment:
Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
King of the whole wide bush is he.
Laugh! Kookaburra, laugh!
How gay your life must be.
It was entirely impenetrable to them. In terms of overall meaning, it may almost as well have been written in Sanskrit.
A lot of it is down to geohistorical context. Three key words in there, though derived from rural experience, would make perfect sense to an Australian of their age, however urban: kookaburra (a bird, whose cry sounds like wild laughter), gum (eucalyptus), and bush (wild, open, extensive, semidesert scrubland).
One word, though, is different: it has been subject to a massive signification slippage in the forty years which separate these young people from me, and it leads them to misconstrue the one line which they think they understand.
They know only two meanings for the word 'gay'. One is the “old, original meaning” (as one of them expressed it): homosexual. They regard that meaning as now very nearly a linguistic fossil, to be used only when talking to “teachers, and old people”. The second is the “real meaning, in real life, nowadays”: sad, embarrassing, pitiable, evoking derision. The idea that this word might once have meant joyous, happy, lively, bright, colourful, playful, merry, pleasure-loving, etc, met with total incomprehension. No, they had never heard of that. Was I sure? Was it Shakespearean?
Long ago, in several FidoNet "echoes" (discussion forums) I met a stimulating contributor called John Marks. He responded to my own belief that we should modify linguistic usage to correct historical injustice that he deplored the "truncation of language". That's a good formulation. I have no problem with enrichment by newer meanings; but the idea that an old one is being so rapidly lost saddens me.
There is a more practical issue, though. One meaning lost is neither here nor there; but if language loses many significations that rapidly, a discontinuity arises not just between usage and older literature (which has always happened) but also that written within the lifetime of the reader.
Intending illustration of usage, I quoted to "my" teenagers the opening lines of a Tom Springfield song, Island of Dreams:
I wandered the streets
And the gay crowded places
Trying to forget you...
They understood this to mean depressing crowded places – the places were not happy to their inhabitants, having become (through pathetic fallacy) unhappy to everyone at large because of the narrator's loss.
Literature (in its widest sense which includes blogs, kookaburras and Tom Springfield), already evolving rapidly in many other ways, is a collective memory store and one of the glues which hold modern societies together. The "memory store" function has already migrated wholesale from the library to the web, but that's OK; text on screen is literature just as much as text on paper. But if the language of which it is composed loses its coherence at a fundamental signification level, the longitudinal "glue" function will greatly weaken. Presumably, new ones will evolve.
Another one for fellow peripatetic geeks.
I'm in the process of promoting the palmOne LifeDrive machine which has, for the past three years, been my "extension handheld" to "primary device" position.
That probably sounds very strange to most people: upgrading to a product released four years ago, discontinued for more than two years? But I've always rated reliability above street cred or the cutting edge, in essential equipment, and four years is long enough for the LifeDrive to have proven itself. Two years ago, after all, I readopted the even older Psion 5 as a portable writing machine.
In those two years I have lost and replaced the Psion. And there's the problem. Replacement has to be by increasingly unreliable second hand machines already well used by previous owners; the usable life of each replacement is, on average, going to be less than the last. I mourn the loss of pocketable machines with proper keyboards, but can't do anything about it. I recently heard that Clarissa Vincent, a friend who has loyally stuck to Psion machines despite a frightening replacement rate (she lives on a boat, and her computers knock around the seven seas) has also finally abandoned them and shifted to a tablet handheld (also, as it happens, a LifeDrive).
Also in those two years the connected, low cost and low power consumption "web book" has proliferated. It's no longer necessary to carry an A4 notebook to get realistic working time, and I never again expect to do so routinely; at places where I frequently work for longish periods, I now keep a spare one in a locked drawer. An A5 web book will still not last all day (nor will the A4 laptop), and is not as portable as a Psion, but it will give two or three hours between recharges and fits easily in the same space as a large paperback novel. I now carry an Asus EEE PC and its small, lightweight charger, plugging it in whenever I am near a power supply for a few minutes.
The LifeDrive is a delight to write on (with either a stylus or a folding BlueTooth keyboard), unlike the T3 which it is replacing. It also takes the same MMC/SD storage card as the Asus (and my main laptop at home), so my work in progress can reside on one of those to move back and forth between the three machines. Since the LifeDrive (especially if the MicroDrive hard disk is replaced with a 4 gigabyte Compact Flash card) does last all day on a single charge, work can continue uninterrupted as long as periodic power access is available.
Between stations on the subway, in a supermarket queue, walking across a mountainside or a field, work begun on the Asus during a journey can continue on the LifeDrive ... then shift back again when sitting down for ten minutes or so. And from either, finished work can be emailed out (or, as in this case, posted to a blog) at any time – both have built in WiFi and will connect to a cellphone too.
Prolonged field usage remains a problem. Unlike the Psion, neither machine (this is a universal trend in current devices) allow battery replacement. I still have ten year old Handspring Visors in use for that reason: slow, and unconnected, but they keep working forever as long as batteries (one pair of AAs a month) are available.
A real nerdy one, this, prompted by a flurry of enquiries about something which took me a while to (more or less) solve. If you are completely happy with (or have no need of) accented and other “special” characters in Windows/PC environment programs (word processor, spreadsheet, email, whatever) and on the Asus eeePC, skip it and move on. Otherwise, you may or may not find something useful to you.
On the Windows PC, one approach is to replace some programs with ones that do it properly in the first place. If you are only (or overwhelmingly) concerned with word processing, Nota Bene and WordPerfect both offer everything you need: they are the best tools around, and both will happily save your work to RTF or Microsoft Word's DOC file formats. If you want the richest writing environment (especially if you plan on using considerable quantities of nonRoman text), Nota Bene is the way to go. If you want a complete office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, email, maybe relational database) with the same facility, then WordPerfect Office is probably the better choice.
If, on the other hand, you have to (or even choose to) use other tools like Microsoft Office, then you need the free and open source AllChars utility which enables a Unix-style compose key approach in any Windows program. Tap a designated key (the Control key, by default, but you can change that; I personally use the Windows "menu" key) followed by a two character mnemonic and you get your chosen character. You can change the mnemonics, too, if you want to; I've altered a couple to bring them into line with WordPerfect's own mnemonics. Here are a few examples:
| If you want to type this... | ...use these keys |
| (e-acute) é | Ctrl e ' |
| (e-grave) è | Ctrl e ` |
| (e-circumflex) ê | Ctrl e ^ |
| (multiply) × | Ctrl x x |
| (divide) ÷ | Ctrl : - |
| (plus or minus) ± | Ctrl + - |
| (interpunct or decimal point) · | Ctrl . . |
| (degree symbol) ° | Ctrl d g |
| (AE ligature) Æ | Ctrl A E |
| (German "double s") ß | Ctrl s s |
AllChars was updated considerably in release 4, to be even more convenient and useful than before, and release 5 is currently in alpha testing.
To get the same results on a Linux-installed Asus eeePC, you will usually be advised to do various command line stuff. It seems to work for some people, but not (so far) for me. Here's my alternative solution which is not quite perfect but does work. There are two stages: setting up, and using.
Setting up means telling the machine the options you want to use. It's a one of process, you won't have to do it again.
If you now go to anything that accepts keyboard text input (OpenOffice Writer, for example), you will find that tapping your chosen compose key, then ^o, will produce an o-circumflex (ô) on the screen.
If you chose an international keyboard variant in steps 10 & 11 above, you can enter the same thing by just tapping ^ (it won't appear on screen) then "o". Some of your keys (like ^ and ` and ') will now only enter if you tap them twice; but large quantities of French accenting are quicker and easer to enter this way than with the compose key.
So far so good ... but, shut your eeePC down and next time you switch it on you will find that the changes are lost. Don't despair, though ... it's much quicker to get the back than it was to set them up.
To use the compose key:
To use an international variant of your keyboard:
One final tip: if you only want to accent characters in a few frequently used words, use the auto correct facility (available in most word processors) to replace the unaccented form with the accented one. For instance, tell it that when you type "fiancee" it should be auto replaced with "fiancée".
Oh yes ... and if you are using Nota Bene or WordPerfect on your PC but the excellent Open Office Writer on your eeePC, then reassign the relevant keystroke in OOW (F6 or Ctrl-W, respectively) to bring up the symbol table.
Over at Unreal Nature, under the post title "Life Writing", the alarmingly productive Ms Heyward offers an achingly beautiful text segment (extracted from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life which I shall now have toput on my "to get hold of" list) about a disembodied chess game in a library. Or perhaps it's about something else entirely. Whatever it's about, it's to die for: go and read it.
I have come to the conclusion that Julie Heyward is not one person at all but a team of at least five - none of whom ever sleep. There is no other way to account for the sheer volume of reading, writing, PhotoShopping and wilderness dog walking which she packs into a day.
Inspirational. One day I am going to kill Julie Heyward.
A while back along, I wrote briefly and inconclusively on my use of referencing in blogs.
I'm brought back to the subject by the fact that I am, at the moment, reading and marking a lot of professional development papers written by colleagues. The authors of these papers are always supremely competent in their fields. Many of them outclass me completely in every way, some of them are by any conceivable measure brilliant. They are all experienced in academic discourse, thoroughly used to reading densely referenced material, exacting and precise in their work ... and yet, without exception, they have trouble with referencing their own papers to a required system. I find myself wondering why this is.
In a the relaxed informality of a blog environment such as this one, I have the luxury of being sloppy and inconsistent in my referencing habits. I think that I am, within any one post, internally consistent. In some cases, for example, a post may contain superscript indices in the main body with corresponding numbered footnote references in order of mention. Other times, my references are bulleted in alphabet order of author surname. But I don't mix the two methods in the same post ... though it's true that in some cases (especially when referencing blog posts or web pages) I will, as in the first sentence of this post, simply hyperlink directly to the source material and ignore my chosen system altogether.
In more formal contexts, I stick to whatever system is required. Such systems are many and various, and I like some better than others, but they are always rigorously and straightforwardly logical. Following any one of them is, as their designers intended, trivially simple. There is little to learn, and no scope for confusion; yet errors abound in usage by better people than me. Why?
I think one reason is that the human mind naturally rebels against absolutely logical systems of any kind. Few people, relatively speaking, are truly happy with mathematical or musical or chess. Few subjects attract so many students or, once its nature becomes clear, loses them as fast, as philosophy.
Many are perfectly numerate and a somewhat smaller number enjoy number; but are frightened off by a fairly simple algebraic expression which they would happily deal with if spoken in English. Look at this one, for example:
m – n p = c
Did you look at that, or skip over it? If you skipped over it, you are in good company – so do more that 98% of readers, according to a trial which I ran with eye movement tracking equipment. On the other hand, if I say (or write): "multiply the price of an item by the number of items you are buying, then take the answer away from the money you have with you to find out how much change you should receive", the skipover rate drops to sixty per cent.
If I ask the question "ten cans of tomatoes at 39p a can; how much change do you expect from five pounds?", almost everyone answers within a second or so – and must, therefore, have almost instantly done the calculation summarised by the snippet of algebraic shorthand above. What people are rejecting, then, is not the knowledge but its symbolic codification.
Referencing is similar. A lot of people enjoy playing chess, or playing music, or singing, but instinctively steer clear of the written notations; a lot of people write clear and informative prose, reject the idea of plagiarism, accept the need for attribution, but something in their mind sidesteps the actual referencing process.
In general, however logical and painstaking we may be about specifics which move us, we naturally tend to preference for fuzzy and chaotic systems over precisely defined ones. We prefer the loose significations of language, complete with slippage of meaning and ellipses of uncertainty, to exactly specified symbols without ambiguity.
I quite enjoy referencing, in the same way that other people enjoy doing crosswords or sudoku. This makes me unusual, peculiar ... a bit of a nerd. To like such systems there must be something of the nerd about you. Indeed, Julie Heyward commented (in light hearted teasing vein – I think!):
"Footnotes ... with superscript ... ??!! [Footnotes are like pheromones for nerds -- in a purely intellectual senses, of course.]"[1]
She has a point ... She later added the observation which I have used as my post title – and which is also very true. And, yes, my carefully correct referencing of the quotation is tongue in cheek, with duly conscious self directed irony.
"Nerd", by the way, is defined by the OED[2] as:
"An insignificant, foolish, or socially inept person; a person who is boringly conventional or studious. Now also: spec. a person who pursues an unfashionable or highly technical interest with obsessive or exclusive dedication."
The first listed usage is from Newsweek in October of 1951, half a year before I was born – clearly coined in anticipation of my arrival, and further evidence (see Rats, hats and oranges), that I was always destined to be exactly what I am today...
A passing comment this morning, on my referencing of books mentioned in this blog, had me turning over in my mind all day the question of why exactly I do it as I do (or at all).
The comment wasn't raising this question, I hasten to add, nor in any way critical. No; the questioning came from myself.
The obvious answer is that I am, at least if you catch me on the right day, an academic. The habit of full source referencing is strong in academics. But most academics don't carry that habit into blogs, where the usual form is simply to hyperlink the title to a library or vendor page. Juan Cole, for example, who has far greater claim to the "academic" label than I, includes no footnote or other biblio references within his posts; he hyperlinks, instead, to Amazon. Dr C and Ray Girvan are both at least as academically inclined as I, but neither habitually use detailed references. Even when writing in the specifically book related JS Books blog, Ray contents himself with a simple inline author and title (for example, "ES Turner's An ABC of Nostalgia" or "Greene's Brighton Rock").
I could perhaps plead that I work with students who will be accused of plagiarism and fail their courses unless they painstakingly reference everything. in an approved way. After some thought, though, that doesn't quite hold water either. My references in here are numbered and more or less modelled on the MLA style, though with author forenames before surname in deference to the to the more relaxed atmosphere of blogdom:
Author, Title. Year, City: Publisher. ISBN
If I was really concerned with setting a good living example to students, I would use the Harvard system which is sweeping the university system these days but which I personally don't much like (though it would be easier, and save me time).
Why don't I much the Harvard system? Because my small superscript numbers in the text like this[1] are unobtrusive, where as the Harvard style parenthesised dates such as "Walkinshaw (1887)" are, in my eyes, ugly and clunky. But then I realise that I am not consistent in using numbers, either; sometime I use a Harvard style alphabetic reference list at the bottom of a post, with no numbers or dates in the text, and just leave the reader to use her/his common sense.
All of which leaves completely unanswered: why do I do it at all?
Answer: I don't know. I just do. Perhaps I'm an anal retentive git who doesn't know how to do otherwise?
Jim Putnam, over at Thinking through my fingers, comments on my post of the 11th, "We want to be together...":
Felix is able to provide some details to these three photos, (080209, 080210 and 080211). Many of his photos stimulate my imagination about the stories within the photo. But, aside from having seen the people, is his story in the blog any more accurate than mine?
Jim is absolutely right - as a devout Barthesian, I can't argue.
In the first case, I watched the argument and bullying, so to some extent I can vouch for the veracity of my description ... but the larger context within which I've placed them is entirely a creation of my own imagination. In the second I refrained from much elaboration ... but I did imply a happiness which I can't justify. In the third, I went furthest out on a limb ... looking again at that image, I could equally well have imagined them sharing a sombre moment (financial worry, loss of a friend, parental conflict, whatever) in perfect harmony.
This brings two thoughts drifting to mind. The first is the one I dropped unopened at the end of that post: that there is a message in my images which I may not want to hear. The second is about storytelling.
The first is quickly dealt with: even if my interpretations of those imaged situations is accurate, the common strand still probably lies with me rather than with relationships. My unconscious inner eye, it would seem, at least on those three days, was drawn to images which in my perception showed relationships in pain. Not something which gives me any cause to be proud ... but apparently true.
The second is more interesting. Whenever we communicate, we tell stories. This is true even for a Barthesian - we Barthesians would simply contend that we do known know what story we are telling; or, perhaps, that we know what story we are telling but not what story is being heard by our listeners. When a photograph is shown, a story is told and a story is read, whether or not those stories are the same - as Jim, in his own words, suggests that here they are not.
This is not the first time he and I have been through this particular country. Another road, some years ago, led a group of people (Jim and I among them) to discuss intended and received meaning. I said that, at a conscious level at least, I did not invest most of my images with meaning: I simply saw them, and recorded them, the meaning being supplied by the viewer. This led to an extended period over which some of those people (Jim among them) supplied their own stories to accompany images which I had already made. It was a fascinating and mind expanding experience for me; for some time, I had images and accompanying stories posted on my web site, though they are gone now. Different people interpreted the same image is radically different ways - most of them surprising to me.
I am, on at least one level, very similar to Jim. Like him, I sit or stand and watch people. Our observations emerge into the world in different ways, but beneath the skin they are the same.
Oh dear ... I've done it again. Following yesterday's response to Dr C I've had a storm of condemnatory mail. My correspondents are not exercised by torture, one way or t'other, but by my reference to "the deepest cycle of hell". My critics, believers and nonbelievers alike, are united in (I'm sorry, I really can't resist the word) unholy alliance.
To put the record straight: I am an nonbeliever, and hell was a cultural metaphor drawn from Dante's Inferno.
To those of my fellow nonbelievers who think that I should not use metaphors of religious derivation: I'm sorry, but I can't agree. Such elimination of most of our shared cultural history would truncate and impoverish discourse to an insupportable extent. Even Richard Dawkins wouldn't approve.
Even if I were a believer, I would have to point out that there is little scriptural evidence for hell - it is a relatively recent sociopolitical addition, aimed at cowing peasants into doctrinal submission.
There is a third, albeit smaller, group in the mailbag: fans of Dante. Their objection is a different one: that the poet already assigned classes of sinner to each of his cycles of hell, and torturers didn't figure. I don't quite know what to say to that one ... but I somehow doubt that it will greatly influence my use of everyday metaphorical language.
So there.
But, on the other hand ... listening is important, and so is thinking through what we hear. Despite finally coming down in favour of my own usage, I did carefully think about all of these objections. I wouldn't want anyone who objects in the future to be put off from saying so - seeing and considering ourselves from outside is the only way to stay real.
After a couple of years or more of doing nothing with it, I've stirred myself to participate in Photo.Net.
So far, it's mostly past work that I'm shifting there, so anyone reading this will probably have already seen it - but for anyone interested, the alphabetical slide show index is here and the most recently added folder will always be at the top of the list here.
This is part of a general (if slow) move on my part to shift material from private web space to public spaces such as here at Blogger, the new 2collab project from Elsevier, and so on. As an example, I recently moved an educational dataset resource to a Blogger base ... then placed a link to it in a new 2collab educational resources group ... where, I hope, others will join it as and when I find the fragments of time necessary to transfer them. And an archive of the "Difference of Opinion" column which Ray Girvan and I wrote from 1997-2000, to which access is often requested, and of which Ray and I have until now maintained private copies, has now made the same transition.
Why do this?
Well ... partly it's selfish (who would bother, otherwise?): I shift the webspace, housekeeping, bandwidth and other concerns onto somebody else. It also makes functional sense, though: the user who wants (for example) an educational data set resource is much better off hunting for it in a small and relevant pool than across the web at large, while the producer is better occupied producing than in maintaining websites and reinventing wheels. And in the case of 2collab, the whole project is based on ready made mechanisms for collaboration. Personal websites can often be valuable, but can also sometimes be triumphs of ego over commonsense; the difference lies in deciding when they are the best medium for the purpose at hand and when something better exists.
This seems to me a logical next phase of web maturation and evolution. I don't see myself abandoning a discrete web presence in the next few weeks or months; but I do see that being a possible long term result ... and by long term, I may not mean more than a year or two.
My own website has always, to be honest, been a neglected place which I tended to only fitfully and inadequately; it gives access to only a small fraction of the material which lurks in the space behind it, to which relevant people make direct links. Moving it out to other, purpose designed, generic platforms seems the only sensible course
I read Cloud Atlas first, two or three years ago. It took me until recently to complete the journey, and I wonder why. This is to entice you along the same path.
If you've not read it, Cloud Atlas consists of six novellas nested like Matryochka dolls.
The first novella is set in the past and stops in the middle, interrupted by the second which is closer to the present. The second is interrupted by the third, and so on. The sequence rolls past the present and into the future, finishing in a post apocalyptic far future where language has changed to the point of difficulty and continuance of human life is uncertain. There are links between the novellas (in the first future segment, for instance, the present day one is seen to be film being watched by the new narrator). And from the far future dystopia the sequence rolls back and out again: we get the resolution of each novella in reverse order, each one picking up at the point of interruption, until finally we finish up back in the past of the first segment. The title Cloud Atlas is taken from that of a musical composition written by a character in one of the "past" sections.
It's very cleverly done. Whether you like it varies from person to person; personally I do, but not everyone feels the same way. One important thing to remember, though, is the connectedness between sections: that fact acquires growing significance as you move on through Mitchell's other books.
My second, just a few weeks ago, was Black Swan Green. This (his fourth and, so far, latest), is a much more conventionally structured novel: a largely linear first person narrative covering one year in the life of a thirteen year old boy. The boy is being bullied at school, has a speech difficulty which is usually under control but must be continually borne in mind, watches the Falklands war come and go, secretly writes poetry for the parish magazine under a pseudonym, and sees the structure of his family creaking at the seams.
Despite that description, even here in Black Swan Green there are signs of the importance which interconnectedness holds in Mitchell's fiction. one example is the elderly woman who takes his poetry writing development under her wing: she is a character from one of the "past" sections of Cloud Atlas, where she was a young girl loved by the composer - and now she plays the title music to the boy.
My next stop was Mitchell's second novel, number9dream (on the basis of the link to the title from John Lennon's song #9dream which features in the closing stretch of Black Swan Green, plus an unjustified assumption that a second novel was likely to be better than a first). This one, too, has an essentially linear structure and a single central male first person character/narrator. We are now in Japan, the protagonist is disowned rural lovechild Eiji Miyake seeking his big city father, and the connections are personal or social. His fantasy and video game mediated journey takes him through a Dantesque hell of yakuza (organised crime) violence, but leads him to realisation of what is good in those whom he has disregarded.
Finally I read Ghostwritten, his first novel and, to my surprise, in many ways the most interesting of all. Here is where the strands of interconnectedness begin.
Where Cloud Atlas ranged through time, leaping generations, and was constructed from novellas, this one is a string of short stories and, while they do cover a time span, it is relatively short. The connectedness here is geographical, girdling the northern hemisphere with its string of pearls in a "six degrees of separation" style web of unseen linkages.
At the start of the book, the links are simple and sequential; a telephone call made in the first story, for instance, is received by an unrelated character in the second. As the novel progresses, the links become more subtle, more complex, more active. By the end they are pointing further and further back, and the final link delights with its perfect completion of a circle back to the beginning as it ties off the loop.
Once again, though, the connectedness is not just internal to the novel: it reaches forward to the other novels which succeed (or, in my order of reading, precede) it. Again taking only one example: a corrupt lawyer in Ghostwritten is (or at least shares his name and age contemporaneity with) one of the bullies who in his teens (three novels earlier, or later, depending on how you look at it) oppressed the narrator of Black Swan Green.
Nor is his connectedness only to his own fictional world. Ghostwritten, for example, makes specific links outward to (amongst other sources) Asimov's three rules of robotics and Auster's The Music of Chance.
The whole set, taken together, are a dizzying, exhilarating, enlightening, breathtaking, stimulating, enthralling and eye opening experience. You can enter it at any point, and move in any direction, the links will find you and bind you in, whichever way you go. Having said that, most people will probably enter at Cloud Atlas as I did; my recommendation for an ideal starting pint would be either Ghostwritten or Black Swan Green - but, most of all, to enter it and explore it in full.
