Caterina.net

From chronofile:

Unrelated: Stewart has been dancing about doing the can-can while singing "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir" a la Moulin Rouge. (And, since I read him the anecdote above, I've got him say saying things such as, "I am walking towards the sink so I can what? Wash the what? The dishes.")

This really cheeses me off: Pour Bush, Saddam Hussein est responsable de tout (I have been reading the international papers to get a more complete perspective on the war.) This translates as: For Bush, Saddam Hussein is responsible for everything. In the article, Press Secretary Ari Fleisher is quoted as saying:

Which (badly translated by me) says, The president always regrets the loss of innocent lives.... But he also knows that most of the innocent people who have been killed in this war have been killed by Saddam Hussein and his goons. They are the ones who should be blamed for the loss of innocent lives..

Which is, in Stewart's example, the equivalent of the man beating his wife while screaming, "fckyouyoudumbfckingbitch!ifyouwouldjustshutthefckupiwouldstophittingyou!". Foisting responsibility for your actions off onto the person you are inflicting your actions upon is morally repugnant. Or foisting responsibility onto God for that matter. We have killed their people, and they have killed our people. Shouldn't that be obvious?

Innocent people will always die in wartime. According to the Iraq body count there have been between 493-652 Iraqi civilian deaths since the start of the war. The Allied military death count is currently at 71 (US & UK). The loss of innocent lives is probably the primary reason why so many people have been so strenuously protesting this war. If you're going to wage war, innocent people are going to die. Bush needs to accept responsibility for these deaths. Yes, it's just political rhetoric, and business as usual. But I for one really want the words of our leaders to mean something.

Also: when I mentioned the civilian death statistics to David the other night, he said that while every single death is atrocious, these numbers came nowhere near the number of people that died during WWII, when hundreds of thousands of civilians died almost every day. Here is a chart I found of WWII casualties. 61 million dead, 40 million of them civilians. And in many countries, more civilians than soldiers. Horrifying.

Marc writes to tell me that our former employer Salon has survived yet another brush with death. Amazing.

I've been thinking alot lately about war being not between nations, but between those who want war and those who don't. I just found this article on The Second Superpower (via Jordon Cooper, a Saskatchewan Pastor who lives at the very interesting intersection where Christianity meets Postmodernism.)

----------------------------

(a brief timeout for peeve and pedantry: Gosh I hate it when people use "dialogue" as a verb, as in the phrase "We will dialogue with our neighbors" that appears at the end of this piece.)

An infographic on Le Monde about how SARS has spread, with a good chart of how many infected/dead. (In French). And another SARS infographic on the New York Times site, sans chart.

(At first glance the Le Monde chart seemed clearer and more concise than the NYTimes Chart, but having studied both, I have to conclude that while the chart on the French version is useful, the high-contrast colors, capital letters and curved lines are confusing, whereas the NYTimes version does an excellent job with their colors (smallest distinguishable difference à la Tufte), typography, lines and text, but is not as effective with the numbers (1 and 2 only ??) and the map, which becomes meaningless depicting SARS outside of Asia. I'm paying more attention to this stuff because I'm getting back into design.)

Does it ever happen that, after you finish something you've been working on for a long time, you can't do anything while you sit and feel relieved and satisfied that you've finally finished it? I call this basking. I finished the Christian Bok interview several hours ago, and while I don't know how good it is, it is at least done. I just noticed I haven't done a thing since.

Now I have to finish a poem by Saturday and a short story by Friday, as well as...oh I don't even want to think about it now. I'm basking.

This is what I love about this poem:

From the first/ abstraction,/ loss is/ edible.

From the first your mind snags on "edible" -- its ghost-word, "inevitable" hovering expectantly, "evitable" also ghosting by. Both dismissed. Edible snaps into place, less like a jigsaw puzzle piece than like a Master lock. loss is edible. Odd and fascinating idea. Vaguely bulimic.

To think/ is to filter

A process a lot like much like digestion, actually, and quite a bit like abstraction filtering out essences and specifics. I love the humble mumble of "semi-permeable membrane" through which something -- nutrition? oxygen? is absorbed, into the blood? (circulation) "Keeping yourself in circulation" has a very self-help or How to Get Ahead in Business tone -- in a "commodification of the self" kind of way.

What if appetite/ is a by-product

What if indeed! The word "by-product" is the cousin of "passers-by" -- it is what is bypassed as being non-nutritive, but produced. But the by-product is appetite -- appetite generally being understood as the desire to eat, but here what is edible is loss.

If you pass through/ zero

Sounds a bit like going beyond the chrystanthemum or into the eye of the lotus, but here we are passing through rather than passing by (or by-producing), and entering the quintessence of abstraction: math.

The whole poem moves from abstraction -- something dissociated from a specific instance-- to the grasping and clock-watching specific. What could be more singular than one's own mother? The first instance of "you" (your) is non-specific -- in the sense of "one's"/semi-permeable" etc. moving toward

you may see someone/ you love

And crowning the whole word-pillar -- tenuously balancing on those one-word lines of "loss" and "zero" -- is the title: "Purpose". How terrifying, brilliant, lovely! And what a poem.

I could go on for pages, but it's 3 AM and even I need to sleep sometimes.

There used to be a column in the Globe and Mail Sunday book section called "How to Read a Poem", which I just loved, but it seems to have been discontinued, much to my dismay. This is my little contribution in that direction. I post a lot of poems here, but rarely comment on why I like them. I will try to do so when I have the time.

An excellent post about Denton Welch, author of A Voice through a Cloud and In Youth is Pleasure, by new fan Brian Kim Stefans. William Burroughs claims that Welch influenced him more than any other writer, a claim that is more than a little difficult to believe.

I can't believe I was lucky enough to be invited to a party at The Mushroom House up in Whistler in a couple of weeks! It really is like a house out of Middle Earth -- and that dragon in the living room is something else. Have a look around the site -- the navigation is a bit obscure, you have to click the square on the left side, and then click the little squares that sprout out of it.

I wish I could afford to buy it; it's for sale. You know how much I like mushrooms.

From his obituary:

He was also a student of Wittgenstein. If you scroll down this page you can see the very beautiful polytopes he is famous for (and on that page there is also the lovely description (which I suspect the NYTimes obituarist had cribbed) of what a "Platonist" is: "Coxeter is a Platonist, a person who believes that beautiful explanations exist for all puzzles" .)

Fellow Vancouver Tea Geek Monica and I are starting a campaign to get Golden Moon tea sold again at Urban Fare -- they used to carry it, and no longer do. If you could do us a favor and write them an email requesting they restock it, we'd be grateful!

I also tried T tea on Broadway off Granville, and have been very happy with the two teas I chose (after spending about a half an hour sniffing each sample in the place) Old Blue Eyes and Mad Hatter. It is my new favorite tea company. They give you a small cup of tea when you come in, which is a nice touch.

There is an article mentioning The Game Neverending in Discover Magazine this month, pegging it to the 1991 Mirror Worlds book in which Yale computer scientist Gelernter predicted that technological advances would enable us to create entirely virtual cities. Steve Johnson writes:

I wonder if Theo is a yorkie-chihuahua. Like Dos Pesos. I mean, look at those ears! Either that or he's half Ewok.

It was only last week I was spending all my time reading nothing but experimental poetry, and this week I suddenly find myself reading nothing but business advice books (and a biography of Warren Buffett, don't ask). I can't think of two subjects that are more perfect inversions of one another, the latter being the most exhortative, meaning-laden, accessible, capitalistic and production-oriented use of language possible, the former being the most meaning-subsuming, oblique, and counter-production-oriented text possible, that I often have to work very hard to understand.

A few nights ago when we were waiting (and waiting) at Kinko's, I asked Stewart, who was standing by the book rack, "What are the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People?", and he reached over to see, but the books were shrink-wrapped.

Then two nights ago I was looking for a lost Hofstadter book (Le ton beau de Marot), on a low and infrequently accessed shelf where I came across The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and opened it up and started reading.

This is not necessarily a business book, though its author worked as a management consultant, and it is filled with business anecdotes. So far it seems more personal growth and self-helpish, which is not to say that business people don't need more personal growth than the rest of us who don't consider ourselves business people (they probably do). But I have long held a bias against self-help books, though I don't have any logical explanation for this prejudice (except maybe resenting them for squeezing out the more respectable shrinks such as, say, Jung on the "psychology" bookshelves). I've found that many self-help books can be extraordinarily...helpful. My prejudice may have something to do with this story:

My friend (who I will call) Nancy told me that she once went home with a guy after a date for a nightcap, and while he was in the kitchen mixing drinks she strolled over to his shelves and noticed that every single book on his bookshelf was a self-help book. Shelf after shelf, they covered the walls, they were piled up by his reading chair, they were sitting on his coffee table. There were weight-loss and self-improvement and dress for success and how to win friends and influence people type books. There were how to make it big in the stock market, how to increase your sexual performance, 30 days to a richer vocabulary, attain peace and serenity type books. Mass-market buddhism. Insert Subject Here for Dummies. Golfworld's Putting Power! How to Get Girls. Intermediate-to-Advanced Australian Penis Acrobatics. And it occurred to Nancy that there must be something really wrong with this guy, seeing him through the 3-D glasses of this new information he seemed really really creepy creepy and she had no choice but to feign a sudden illness and flee the scene.

7 habits has sold over 10 million copies -- according to this edition, published in 1990. That's a hell of a lot of books. And they're still selling them at Kinko's. I laughed when I read, "The word "proactive" won't be found in many dictionaries..." I suspect that it was only after this book was released that "proactive" first found purchase on the tongues of bizfolk.

It's starting off with the common self-help concept of taking total responsibility for your life, with which it's hard to argue. And it's also germane to experimental poetry after all. When I interviewed Christian Bok, he asked why people didn't use the languages of science, or business, or medicine in their poetry. And why not indeed! There is a great Rae Armantrout poem using corporatespeak I'll have to find...

In any event, it's an interesting transition from last week's bookpile, and I'm lapping it up. Be on the lookout for a tenfold increase in effectiveness here on caterina.net as I habituate my 7 habits.

Turns out everyone I know is reading self-help books. They recommended:

• For recovery from break-ups: Soul Mates by Thomas Moore
• For getting rich: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• For managing teams better: Peopleware by Tom Demarco et al.
• For overcoming depression: Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy by David Burns, MD
• For peacefulness: Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck

I love all the little people in this Working Wounded web site design. It appears to be connected with a book. There is also a collection of productivity reduction strategies on the site, such as Lingo Bingo. You score points whenever someone uses words like "incent", "synergy" or "deliverable". And if you don't have a sheepskin from Yale you can download your own diploma. It's better than Yale's: Kafka is quoted in the corner. We too have weapons it says.

I was saying below that the prose strategies of business advice books and experimental poetry could not be more different. Implied, though not expressly stated, was that the exigencies of the market necessitate the bluntest, most direct forms of communication, like this which I grabbed from a financial news site just now: 3:27PM (RGEN) 5.44 +0.24

Of course it's more complicated than that. Those working in the Value Trenches of the stock market need the direct succinctness. But the languages of management and marketing have always been more circumspect, er, circumlocutory (is that a word? if it is, it shouldn't be). I thought of this today when I followed a link from the ETCon site to the site of a company founded by Eric Bonabeau, a scientist from that Complexity Science mecca, the Santa Fe Institute. On the site I found the following paragraph which could have been written by someone who graduated from the College of Pataphysics or Indistinguishable From Magic* U:

One can't help but recognize those "traditional approaches" as the use of the human mind in decision-making. The folly! Here is an article about Icosystem in Business 2.0.

More on this later; I've got too much business and poetry to attend to elsewhere.

------------------------------------

* "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke

On Gary Sullivan's site there is a post for Thursday April 17 (the permalinks are broken) about Eileen Tabios' poetic tribute to Filipina Revolutionary Gabriela Silang. The poem he posts is beautiful.

From the preface, the story of Gabriela Silang:

While you're at Wine Poetics, read the lovely poems of Jose Garcia Villa.

Through Ed Vielmetti's site I found this link to the work of Mark Lombardi, who does lovely hand-drawn diagrams of the nodes of power in the United States and beyond. The one pictured there is a chronicle of the Bush administrations involvement in Oil Industry affairs -- of extreme interest are the ties with the Middle East.

Unfortunately, Lombardi committed suicide.

Another excellent meal at Vij's last night with Mark and Julie. Delicious! The decor is luxe-moderne and food Indian-fabulous and the attention to detail (perfect candles, copper water can) lapidary.You can have a look at the menu and plan your next meal in advance. We had the paratha, the fritters, the tiger prawns, the jackfruit, the saag paneer, the duck breast and the lamb popsicles.

The kitchen is run by women, all of them laughing. We turned to watch them. The staff gives you chai and cassava fries and samosas while you wait. Vij greets everyone and makes a point of stopping by each table to ask how everything is. He dashed outside to put an ashtray in front of a woman who had just lit up a cigarette. He picked up napkins off the floor, folded them, and put them on the table for when the diner returned to his seat.

Good service is rare in all but the most expensive hotels and restaurants -- or when you're poised to part with a huge amount of money -- so when you encounter it in regular places it's enough to make people come back again and again and again. But reservations? Reservations, please.

Here is an interesting looking essay about Christopher Alexander of A Pattern Lanugage fame, which I will have to read when it is less late (and less early). It appears that ambitiously titled The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, from The Phenomenon of Life, Book One has finally been released. A bound photocopy of an early draft of this book has been circulating in certain circles for years now; we have a copy of it around here somewhere.

I've just read this review of what the reviewer calls a "riveting and important" book by Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. This irritated me:

This shallowness is apparently the result of "liquid modernity", our shop and surf lifestyles. But what Bauman (and the review's author, Stuart Jeffries) are talking about isn't love at all, and isn't particularly modern, in spite of the context of cell phones and shopping malls. There have always been people who thought that if there are no fireworks, there is no love. But it is during the dull parts that love really happens, like when you go to Des Moines for spring break to visit your irascible and incontinent grandmother instead of going to Hawaii with your college friends to drink mai-tais and pick up cute surfer boys. Love lives in sacrifice, commitment, listening, forgiveness, and putting the other person before your own selfish impulses. Love is made, not found; it's something you do, not something you feel. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds may be "riveting" and well-written, but I suspect it's not particularly "important."

I've been thinking about this as I read about the Laci Peterson story. Stewart said that the reason this story is so compelling is that it is almost a caricature of evil, an anti-love story. Scott Patterson allegedly killed his wife who was 8 months pregnant with his unborn child on Christmas Eve, while having an affair with another woman. He had told this woman that his wife was dead.

Hitler's Forgotten Library

(via Random Walks)

We are happy to announce the launch of Ludicorp's latest project, Confab, an ad-hoc conversational space that was opened up for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and will be used as a demonstration for Stewart's presentation.

Confab users can build their own profiles, upload photos, carry on discussions, form groups, and make contacts. A map of the conference has been created and conference attendees and offsite guests can provide commentary and research on the presentations that are taking place, or meet in the "lobby" or "outside" the building. Confab was developed using core pieces of the engine behind Game Neverending, an online social space in the form of a slightly absurd game world. There is a FAQ with more information about its development.

The conference (and Confab) opens at 8:30 AM PST on Wednesday. Go ahead and check out Confab if you like. Please register using your real name, and if you are not a conference attendee, please be polite and stay on-topic when conference-y conversations are taking place.

It is very cool. Once again, I am impressed with what the team has been able to accomplish with its brains and hard work. Ludicorp has the rockingest team.

It might be the translation. Here it is in Chinese.

I had an ooky feeling when I read that the U.S. Military had issued a deck of playing cards with pictures of the 55 Most Wanted Iraqis printed on their faces. It trivialized the war, turned it into a game. The deck's lurid/ludic potential was released today when they captured their first Most Wanted. I saw the headline Aziz the eight of spades and felt like we'd entered the occult zone of Last Call by Tim Powers. It was a brilliant PR strategy on the part of the Military, that deck of cards. Because now we can tally them up together: 4 of clubs, jack of diamonds, ace of hearts; one villain after another dealt by the devil's croupier...

Armando sends along a link to Out twice by Michel Lambert, a collection of improvisations and their corresponding drawings. I've always been interested in visual representations of music and unique music scores, and this is a nice addition to the category.

During the past few days I've a couple of conversations with Sasha and Ivan about how art has become overthought and underfelt. On his intro page, Lambert writes about how he wants his work approached:

It was Marianne and Derek's birthdays and Frazey's baby shower last night at Intermission. I tried to make Frazey a doll, but my grandmother's 1930s era Singer and I have some kind of communication problem. I have never been able to make it work properly, but other people can, and when I take it in to be repaired they tell me there's nothing wrong with it, and taunt me with a perfectly sewn square of sample stitches.

I love Intermission parties. There are dozens of instruments, turntables and records all over the loft, so people just start playing music here and there whenever they feel like it. Aaron showed me how to play the saw, bending it into a slight s-curve and pulling the bow across the smooth edge. Ivan and I talked about prayer. Sarah told me about her theatre group Radix, who do site-specific performances. They did one in Ikea last year, one in the Templeton Diner on Granville, and another on a crosstown bus. They're currently doing a performance called Sex Machine based on the life of icon/crackpot Wilhelm Reich, and she told us how to construct an orgone accumulator -- one also appears in Game Neverending, of course.

I talked to Sam, who is like a cross between Julia Kristeva and Madame Blavatsky, a psychoanalytic theorist who was surreptitiously hypnotizing other partygoers. We asked her to assess our hynotizability; none of us were, she said, but men are generally more hypnotizable than women. We talked about the fringe sciences that preceded psychoanalysis, palmistry and handwriting analysis and hynotism. I told her about how when I was in a gifted children's program at school when I was 9 and could study anything I wanted, I studied ESP and my teacher took me to meetings of the Parapsychological Society. Don't Knock, We Know You're There said the sign on the door.

I finally met Jason -- both of us had heard a lot about each other, and he knows David and Norma from the Social Ventures Network up in Hollyhock. Darcy, his partner, had also moved here from San Francisco and she and Julie and I and she and Tim and I talked about pretty much everything until the hours were no longer very wee.

I drank nothing but water while I was there, but still managed to wake up with a hangover today. Maybe hangovers have more to do with how late you get home than with whether you drank any alcohol or not. I can't think of why else I'd be feeling so lousy this morning after such a wonderful night.

Excuse me, but aren't all these women in the match.com ad the same type? Same race, same age, save oval-shaped face?

Petition In Support Of Bill C-250 (Canadians only)

Here is an archive of articles about the murder of Aaron Webster in Vancouver in November 2001, and other articles about gay hate crimes.

Everyone in GNE is gay.

I hate computers.

Jared Diamond may be a great simplifier, but he explains things so tidily, you feel as if everything has been conclusively explained, and you can go to bed and sleep soundly. He is a joy to read (in spite of his tendency to repeat himself). Here is a new essay he wrote about Why Some Societies Make Disatrous Decisions:

I of course don't have a moment to read it in view of my leaving for New York tomorrow and the pushel pixing I need to make happen tonight, but I will.

Insects of a stupefying beauty. It also occurs to me that my stupefaction is not insect-related.

Off to Wonderful Wireless New York. We're staying uptown for a change, at my cousin Jen's fabulous place in the Upper West, who just happens to be leaving the day we arrive and returning the night we leave. Can't wait to see all my amici. Sad thing is we'll be missing the party in Whistler at The Mushroom House but it can't be helped. Whoop-de-do!