re-writing

Herrick, "Delight in Disorder"

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthralls the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoestring, in whose tie
I see a wild civility,
Do more bewitch me, then when Art
Is too precise in every part.


I love the opening couplet. The observation feels very true to me, but it's incredibly hard to paraphrase, because the words resonate with each other and shade each other's meanings. There both is and is not a woman in these lines--someone's clothes seem both sweet and disordered to the poet, but the observation is posited as a general statement.

That "wantonness," likewise, is "kindled in clothes" has three meanings:
(a) literally, of course, their disarray causes the clothes to be wanton,
(b) but "wantonness" could also be an attribute of the woman, deduced through her clothes,
(c) or, "wantonness" could be the state induced in the poet by the sight of these clothes.
In fact, of course, it is all three. I've had the feeling of being attracted to someone because of an imperfection or assymetry about her clothing, and Herrick has captured exactly how a feeling that arises in the viewer seems to be caused by an object and rest in the viewee.

The remainder of the poem feels incredibly rooted in Herrick's experience of a particular woman, or several women, but he keeps a general tone. I can't tell if he's really writing a poem about the way lust fixates on details, or if his generalism really is an attempt for him at objectivity. That is, is it important for the poem to be general in order to nail down a particular feeling (which he does well), or is he simply so caught up in looking at women that he gets fascinated by the details and misses the woman herself?

The end of the poem I find really problematic, because just as he introduces himself into the poem--first as viewer and then as the object of these items actions upon him--he moves into total abstraction. If he's still talking about women, his musing about "Art" is just a veiled way of accusing women of attempting to manipulate (poor) him through their presentation. If "Art" really refers to art, he's reducing the powerful specificity of an (imaginary) encounter into a silly metaphor for poetic creation.


In the fourth grade, I rewrote the ending to "Casabianca", because I didn't like the ending. Elizabeth Bishop did, too. Sutton had that version up on her wall.

I can only find one stanza of the version below, but it's already my favorite:
"The boy stood on the burning deck
A-melting with the heat.
His big blue eyes were full of tears;
His shoes were full of feet."

(entry not worth reading. just posting to keep my resolution

So I bought a book on Michelangelo for Art Hum and never cracked it open. I've been reading it recently, and it's terrific. The guy who's writing it manages to make every fact feel just over the border of my knowledge, so I'm learning, but lightly.

Also today: I saw an open rehearsal of Edward II, by a cast that's currently doing a production of Richard II. The eight of them sat on stools, with music stands in front of them, and read lines cold, with the director pushing them to try different angles. It was fascinating--they spent quite a while working out the character of Isabella.

A sidenote: I've always thought of Marlowe as better than Shakespeare at plotting his dramas, but one of the actors tonight pointed out that Shakespeare keeps certain tensions suspended that Marlowe lets precipitate out. As a result, things are always a bit more ambiguous for Shakespeare.

One of my difficulties w/ Michelangelo has always been his faces: as real as the /David/ looks, his face has an unhuman quality; while it's expressive, it's not quite individual. It's got the smoothness of an apt mask, or a well-done piece of CGI. The Michelangelo pieces I find most moving are unfinished in the face, so that I engage with the conception as much as the accident of the finished piece.

Shakespeare's gift--perhaps--is in finishing his pieces while still giving them room to be mentally completed by the spectator. (Keats called this "negative capability".) I think Marlowe was almost there in "Edward II", except he has an overabundance of plot. (Does whoever played Gaveston double as Spenser the younger?)

i'm probably wrong

reading more, i think he was saving up energy for his later poems. there's another thing i've found that he does well, but i don't really want to copy whole sonnet into here.

but the more i read, the more i'm finding lines that are almost gothic: "And lays to view my vulture-gnawn heart open". And, of course, he wrote "The Complaint of Rosamund", which certainly has that weirdness and power I was talking about.

(i need a better word for what i mean by weirdness. i think i picked it up from a discussion i had w/ alex young years ago, in my first 20th century poetry class.

freshman i was complaining about the way some of the poets we were reading would use lines that didn't make any sense, and young pointed out that there were a handful of weird lines in yeats and keats and so on and claimed that more contemporary poets were just trying to hone in on those moments.

a daniel line i like: "Haunting untrodden paths to wail apart")

also, i want sting's lute album. like now.

Reading Daniel today in the anthology reminded me how much trouble I've had with him. He's a quite well-renowned author, particularly in his time, but his sonnets back away from their own emotional impact.

In one of the poems in /Delia/, he compares himself to Actaeon, stumbling upon his love, whose disregard for him causes his thoughts to set on him:

Whilst youth and error led my wand'ring mind
And set my thoughts in heedless ways to range,
All unawares a goddes chaste I find,
Diana-like, to work my sudden change.
For her no sooner had my view bewray'd,
But with disdain to see me in that place;
With fairest hand, the sweet unkindest maid
Casts water-cold disdain upon my face.
Which turn'd my sport into a hart's despair,
Which still is chas'd, whilst I have any breath,
By mine own thoughts; set on me by my fair,
My thoughts like hounds, pursue me to my death.
Those that I foster'd of mine own accord,
Are made by her to murder thus their lord.


How haunting is 12th line--"My thoughts like hounds, pursue me to my death"! But he moves away from that weird (and true) moment in the closing couplet. He restates his metaphor and reasserts a distance from the impact of that terrifying line. He seems to be purposefully writing elegant poems rather than powerful poems.

I'm reading the rest of /Delia/ now--maybe he's just warming up?

About a hyphen

"Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern
In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed
With spray on his pinion."
(from Ezra Pound's translation of /The Seafarer/ from Old English)

I started reading the Columbia Anthology of British Poetry this morning on the subway. Today was a couple of pieces translated from the Old English, Chaucer, a handful of medieval lyrics, Dunbar, Skelton, and Wyatt. (Wyatt's one of my favorite poets: he was responsible (if not single-handedly) for adapting the Petrarchan sonnet to English usage and may have been a lover of Anne Boleyn.)

In the older poems, there's an odd tenseness to the vocabulary. It's a hard thing to show in a small quote, but here's an example from the ballad "Money, Money":

"In the hey-weyes ther joly palfreys
It makeght to lepe and praunce
It maket justinges, pleys, disguisinges,
Ladys to singe and daunce."

(In the highways, their jolly palfreys/It maketh to leap and prance/It makes joustings, plays, disguisings,/Ladies to sing and dance.)

The words feel more meaningful than most words do. Maybe I'm treating the poem as an artifact, and so reading in an extra level of historical interest that I don't find in contemporary "sing[ing] and daunc[ing]." But in reading all these poems, I kept wondering if the intensity of each word is in part a function of the (only relatively) small number of words in the language at the time.

Probably not. But what impact does a smaller language have upon poetry?

In Shakespeare, Johnson, Marlowe and others, there are clearly different registers of language, and part of the job of the poet is to deploy those languages as he sees fit. In Wyatt, too, (and in a different way in Skelton), I hear a deploying of a certain portion of the language. But in these medieval songs and ballads, there's a certain simplicity (or flatness) of linguistic register that makes me take words that have been conventionalized more seriously.

(Another theory: Wyatt, following Petrarch, made poems that play with a central metaphor. These poems use metaphor differently, to clear up a point. I'm beginning to understand why Sidney and other defenders of poetry claimed that its purpose was to illumine: they were responding to an older poetry.)

I put the Pound poem at the top of this entry because I lover the hyphen between "stone" and "cliffs". There's no need for it. Not only is it not required grammatically, there's not another word in the sentence that "stone" could fit with. But in that hyphen, there's an inherent claim about language and translation: the hyphen says that in the original, there's a single word that means "stone cliff," and Pound is translating it.

/That/ claim, in turn, rests on the idea that the intensity of the earlier poem is based on the density of vocabulary: that its words are specific and powerful. And maybe there is a single word in Old English for "stone cliff" (as opposed to "mud cliff", say), but in translating that one word into a novel English compound, he's adding an animating weirdness to the line. "Pinion", in the next line, is the same way in the 20th century.

But "The Seafarer" isn't archaic, or weird, in the original. Unless we're willing to say that words then meant /more/ (and i might be willing to), Pound's version is a touristy version of Old English.


(I don't actually think this is right, but it's an idea that i'm still figuring out. yay, blog.)

nietzsche really disturbs me, sometimes

i was flipping through beyond good and evil as i was trying to figure out that story, and again i came upon one of the passages that really makes me uncomfortable.

he's so good at piercing my illusions. but i can't get a grip on a positive response to his arguments. so i just feel a little nauseous.

in this case it was the beginning of section 194 in "on the natural history of morals." i'm actually not comfortable posting it here; it feels too insightful and personal and painful.

--

polanyi--the epistemologist/chemist i'm reading--raises some information-theory based objections to evolution. i'm not actually to the chapter where he really engages with them, so i don't know if he believes them or not, but they remind me a lot of one of the big mathematical arguments against it recently:

dembski and others argue that the no-free-lunch theorem (""[...] all algorithms that search for an extremum of a cost function perform exactly the same, when averaged over all possible cost functions.""--from Wikipedia, from somewhere else) applies to evolution. that is to say that fitness is clearly some sort of functions (or set of functions) and so arguments for a search strategy that consistently gets to better fitness faster than random (like evolution) are inherently spurious.

the most interesting explanation of why this isn't true that i read that Dhruv linked to from Lawrence's wiki: imagine a topographical map the surface of which is higher for mountains and lower for valleys. If I understand correctly, the no-free-lunch theorems argue that you can't define a function f(x,y) that iterated on a set of coordinates gets you to the highest point faster than random, across all possible such maps. Why? Because every time you try to build a function that's better than random you build information into the function as assumptions that is wrong for some maps.

The argument that I can't remember the author of says that this ain't a great model of evolution. Because most evolution is co-evolution--flowers becoming scented and bees learning to smell those scents--your function actually deforms the map. Fitness isn't really a pre-determined extremum; the organism changes the environment for all the other organisms trying to maximize their fitness and vice versa, with accurate assumptions becoming steadily more accurate and inaccurate ones being dropped.


I keep imagining a similar graph of social behavior. The only ways to become a "better person": change behavior to better match the environment or change the environment to better match the behavior. Reminds me of the role of ritual I kept writing about when I was reading Wieseltier and Aristotle: I was caught up in the image of wearing ruts into the soil that one could follow until one understood again which directions to go. It's the same image (albeit topographically reversed) as with this map, in which by climbing I can make the mountain higher and see out over a more distant view.

Presbyterian Church May Accept (Some) Gay People

WaPo (can't decide if I like calling it that...) has an article on the Presbyterian Church's task force on the ordination of gays and lesbians.

The key paragraphs:
"The recommendation is framed not as a change in doctrine but as a proposed interpretation of the church's constitution. It would allow the 173 presbyteries, or local councils of ministers and elders, to consider all aspects of a potential minister's life, work and beliefs and to decide that it is acceptable if the candidate is not in accord with the church on a "non-essential" matter. It would be up to each presbytery to decide what is essential.

'We ordain human beings, and no human being is perfectly obedient to Scripture,' said Barbara G. Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and a prominent liberal member of the task force.

Wheeler described the recommendation as a return to the church's tradition, dating to its founding in 1729, that a minister could be ordained despite declaring a "scruple," or principled disagreement, on one or more aspects of Presbyterian doctrine."



I'd prefer that the denomination decide overwhelmingly to integrate, of course, but I'm excited about this. I can't tell you how big of a deal this is. It makes (a little) room for inclusion and keeps the denomination from splitting in half down the middle.

Of course, it forces queer ministers to be out. I mean, I suppose someone straight and unmarried could 'scruple' the ridiculous sexuality clauses, but in reality, anyone who does state that scruple will come under suspicion in their personal life. And, of course, defining queer people as people who disobey scripture in a 'non-essential' way is still a problem.

More than anything, I like the concept of the scruple. It lets people become ministers and still preserve their differences with the teachings of the church. They get to participate in the system, while putting it on the record that they disagree with it.

I'd like a scruple with everything.

Yes, I'm at Starbucks, but I deplore the wages of coffee-farmers.
Why, yes, I'm listening to Blink-182, but I have a very broad knowledge of independent music.
I work at Columbia, but I could get a real job. If I wanted to.
I have white straight male privilege, but I really understand systematic oppression. I mean, I've read a lot.

Incidentally

I feel like I just whined in public. Bad blog ettiquette.

What I'm thinking about:

I've been trying to identify the common metaphors people use in talking about what the Internet/computing will be like in ten-fifteen years.

So far:

The Neuromancer Model:

The Internet becomes a virtual reality space in which people interact with each other and representations of various entities through personae.

Gibson's model has physical sensation being piped into the individuals in some cases, but that's not strictly necessary. At it's most basic, this model is Everquest or The Sims Online with the existing marketization of those games dramatically extended.

I read recently about a Korean site that was a cross between The Sims and MySpace or Friendster. People decorated virtual rooms and went to visit each other. I wouldn't be surprised if some companies set up shop in the same way.


The Gadget Model:

Computer chips keep getting smaller and wireless broadband becomes more and more widely available. So data production and checking becomes embedded in everything. The paintings on your wall are flat-panel TVs searching the internet for high-resolution images that are similar to paintings you tell it you like. Your car is constantly aware of the location of the nearest gas station and may suggest detours to stores you might like. Historical markers relay information to your iPod about what happened here. Life becomes overlayed with a layer of information.

If in the Neuromancer model the Internet turns data into virtual space, here it becomes a sixth sense. Being disconnected from the Internet already feels a little odd. A Wired article I read pointed out that you often Google things multiple times rather than just remembering them. In this model, the internet becomes, in part, our memories, our means of communication, and a way of richening what we learn about the world.

The technology piece of this will happen. What makes this really compelling, however, is if we can improve our algorithms for finding the right information.

Collaborative filtering, for instance, lets Amazon predict books you'll like. And Page Rank, ideally, means Google can find the webpage you want, rather than all the junk. As these processes develop, we might do better and better and predicting kinds of information than can be pushed unintrusively onto customers. So your iPod goes and finds songs you'll like. And your house goes to the temperature you prefer given the weather. And, a touch creepily, stores track your behavior and purchases and recommend that you buy things that you actually want.

The Brain Model: This metaphor still captivates me. The basic principle is that the connected-node structure of the internet maps rather nicely onto the similar structure of a brain. Just in the way that an ant hill is a super-organism that performs relatively complicated operations despite the simplicity of its fundamental units, the Internet may yield highly complicated or even intelligent behavior from its traffic.

At its most ambitious, this metaphor suggests that we may generate a meta-mind. More coolheadedly, that there will be interesting effects emerging out of the way traffic flows through the internet. Maybe these effects will be at the memetic level--different schools of thought encounter and respond to one another*--or maybe higher--the way people think changes, in a sort of feedback loop.

*One of my favorite lines in /Kaddish/ occurs when the author wishes that the Buddhists and the Jews had encountered each other a few hundred years earlier. Think of the disputations, he says.



I don't like any of these metaphors, and have my own to suggest. But this is enough for tonight.

I Need To Build Something

Things change quickly. A week ago, I felt like I was accomplishing things. Nothing of importance, really, but life felt cumulative: each book I read contributed to my total amount of knowledge; each project to my competence and resourcefulness and ability to achieve my goals; each grocery bought or towel folded or walk taken or conversation had seemed to move me along in my motions towards something. A successful life. A good day. A high score, or something. I don't really know more than that I felt like I was always knowing more.

Now, on the other hand, nothing amounts to anything. Nothing aggregates into anything bigger. Life doesn't sum. What I thought of as setbacks a week ago are now failures, inadequacies. I keep turning my failures into self-critiques.

The other night I worried that I was the kind of person who doesn't brush his teeth enough.

It's because I'm not making anything. There's no story of my life that I can tell, even to me: I've worn the narrative of Matthew-goes-to-grad-school into inarticulate hopes. I want, a little, to Peace Corps myself to Zambia or Benin or Honduras, but I want to send the resourceful intelligent me, rather than this one.

There's a Mallarmé quote that's something like "Alas, my flesh is sad and I have read all the books." Cara would know exactly what it is. But it sure feels like I have, and the grand projects of three weeks ago are preposterous.

Cindy says happiness isn't something you chase after. It's probably not, but what I had said before that was that I felt like I could see my vision of happiness receding over the horizon, and I do think like happiness is something you shouldn't lose sight of.

C.S. Lewis thinks all desires are partial, fragmentary desires for whatever is True, and that all earthly desires when satisfied turn into disappointment. This rings true with me, a little, although I don't think I buy his next step. Mag says that happiness is in itself a state of transition, before the serotonnin can be absorbed by the nerve. This rings true, too, but I can't believe that the next 40 years of my life are going to alternate between elation and this sort of minuscule despair.

Despairillo.

I don't particularly want joy. I don't need elation or ecstasy. I'd like to feel like I'm moving.

Sometimes, when I was most lonely in Memphis, after my parents moved, I would just get in a car and drive in big circles, around town or out the interstate, and listen to loud depressing music. And sometimes, I wouldn't be able to do that. It'd feel pointless, like it'd remind me that all there was for me was big empty circular motions leaving off just before they began.

I'm terrified of that kind of paralysis.



--
Hofstadter, in Godel, Escher, Bach talks about a particular sort of wasp, that will sting a cricket, to paralyze it, then drag it back to its cave, where it lays its eggs in the bug's midsection and then reseals the front of the cave with mud. The young hatch and eat the living but paralyzed cricket and then bust out of the cave.

The amazing thing about this wasp, for Hofstadter, is that before it drags the cricket into its cave, it goes into the cave and checks to make sure that there aren't any harmful critters in there. This seems, he points out, to show an astounding amount of foresight on the part of the wasp.

But, then scientists tried a simple experiment on the wasp. While it was inside they'd move the cricket about an inch. The wasp would come out, fly over to the cricket, drag it an inch back to the cave and go back inside to check for harmful critters. The scientist would drag the cricket an inch over again. The wasp would come out, drag the cricket again, and go back in to check again. No matter how many times it had checked before, it had to check again whenever it got back to its nest.

I feel worse for the wasp than I do for the cricket.

--
(a Robert Creeley poem, stolen from Mag.)


I KNOW A MAN

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

more pretention (will talk about work soon)

I really like the subway program that puts musicians in the subway. There’s something about hearing 30-40 seconds of music in every train station that breaks me out of my morning-thoughts and puts the world a little more in its place. I used to feel fairly uncomfortable in airports—from the stress, the rush, the weight of bags, my own tiredness, and so on--until I started listening to “So What?” on infinite repeat whenever I was walking through one. I didn’t expect it to work, but it makes me so much calmer. (and now “So What?” gets in my head whenever I think about airports.)

Freshman and sophomore year I spent a lot of time thinking about why I went to jazz concerts when I fell asleep in most of them. The best answer that I could come up with was that they gave me a chance to break out of cycles of negative thoughts. It was almost like I could daydream when I felt angry or sad or guilty or sorry for myself (which was a lot of freshman and sophomore year) rather than spiral through negativity.

So I keep thinking about the opening of twelfth night:

Duke : If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

It’s a totally different fuction for music. It’s wallowing music. I know that feeling, too—occasionally I’ll go listen to loud, bangy music or to love songs or to whatever else, but these two functions for music seem vaguely opposed to me. It keeps you from dwelling on thoughts but allows you to wallow in them?

Perhaps what’s happening is that the music breaks the repetitive pattern of your own thoughts precisely by generating feelings of its own. (Doesn’t it feel a little artificial when you /make/ yourself sad or happy or whatever by listening to the right kind of song?) That makes sense given another metaphor for music’s effects: if a song transports you, it takes you from the mental state you’re in to a new and different one.

A comparison to writing: in that passage of “Lucrece” that I can’t stop talking about, Lucrece uses the letter she’s writing to shape her own thinking about her rape and her ability to act in response. I’m almost certainly reading too much into that passage by saying this, but I’m convinced that Shakespeare is talking about the ways in which writing is a way of structuring thought, of breaking emotions and feelings and concerns into units that can be considered, reproduced, analyzed, and discarded.

I’m sorta half working on a poem now that’s rapidly becoming different from most things I write. Usually in the past I’ve written about internal confusion and excitement and love and so forth and about the fragmentation of one’s internal world in response to another. (I know that’s an unbelievably pretentious sentence; four people know about this journal, and all of them can deal with my pretention.) I’ve been able to use various kinds of puns and rhythms and nonsense to create reasonable objective correlatives for that confusion. But more recently, all I seem to be able to write about is a stable-I getting banged around by a world that doesn’t make sense. I feel incredibly narcissistic writing like this, but it’s what I can do right now, so I’m doing it.

The problem is that most of the things I want to write about are only important to me. Or rather, I can’t get the density or intensity that I need in the lines. So I search for personal feelings that are communicable to stand in for ones that only mean something very personally, and end up sitting there trying to make myself shudder and then writing down the things that make me do it, to see if I can get them to work as stand-ins for my own feelings. It’s terrible work. I hate doing it. It reminds me of all the times I’ve felt awful over the past few years.

It’s like that study that showed that simply making various faces—smiling, frowning, laughing, sneering—produces those emotions in your mind. I try to make myself smile now, when I’m most upset. It works. (Have you ever repaired a broken six-year-old by ordering him not to smile? “Don’t you smile now. Don’t smile. I see you about to smile there. Don’t. Hey. Hey, stop. Ohhh kay. You can smile a little….”)

All of these things are sorta ways that we program our brains, to do what we need them to do. What’s amazing about it is that not only has my brain learned how not to be sad in airports—by listening to Miles Davis—it has learned how to program itself not to be sad. And that level of learning will soon acquire a symbolic significance of its own. I don’t know how to better explain this thought, but it’s a current obsession of mine:

The brain is exactly like a dog’s brain, with incredibly powerful abilities of abstraction.

Repeated rewards lead us to learn behaviors. But our powers of association make the rewards get steadily more abstract and the behaviors get more and more complicated in ways that produce ridiculously complicated results. Emergence, anyone?

hmm.

so at work I'm doing web development and i've found that i can really only think about things by using a legal pad, drawing things out, and then moving to the computer.

and at home, i've started trying to write again. that i can't write down on paper at all. there's something about the way chunking-on-the-fly works in a text editor that feels incredibly natural to me when i'm writing a poem.

i'm trying to figure out what that means. are there really two different kinds of thought processes going on in my head? or have i just learned to associate success with certain tools? (when i write papers, i've started thinking on sheets and sheets of legal paper before writing.)

note: when i say web development, i should clarify that i'm using a front-end program that does all the heavy-lifting. i'm really just setting up content. i've entirely lost any ability i had to hack html and that wasn't much in the first place.

but i've realized that my boss doesn't really know html any more than i do. the computer programs seem to do most of the work and all the random-access knowledge he needs is stored on a bookshelf. it's an incredibly efficient system and one that is steadily getting me out of the computers-are-scary mood i've been in for the past few years.

so i've started to think about the attributes of a work environment that would be designed to help me write poems. kinda like those coding environments that ship with programming languages now, so you can have a language and scripting tools and various other things all open at once.

so what the Matthew-Writes software environment would look like:

to start with, a description of what i use now. i tend to have three or four text files open with lines and ideas and parts of lines. one of these is a main-poem file, that has the text of the thing i'm building, and the rest are gibberish files, with loose lines and stanzas and things.

i work by writing down little snippets, expanding on snippets, and accreting things into the main file. fairly regularly, i'll junk a main-file, move it to the side, start a new main-poem file based on some other snippet(s), and raid the old file for ideas. so at any given point i have something like the following files open: junk.html, junk2.html, index(old).html, index.html, and maybe an index(new).html which may turn into something, but may also turn into another junk file.

So my software environment might have the following "areas":
a workspace: such that i could click on the screen and type in a word or group of words, so that i would be able to write down loose lines as i thought of them.
a tablet: where i would be actively working. that'd be the latest version of the poem/stanza in question. by highlighting a group of lines and then clicking a button, i could push them to the archive (next) where they would be saved.
an archive: where bigger chunks could be kept. sometimes this would hold stanzas that didn't fit in the poem i was working on. sometimes this would hold multiple versions of the same idea, so that i could keep playing with it. the key is to keep my tablet relatively clear. right now i just put things at the bottoms of documents, but then they're hard to find.
a stable version: my current best version of the poem, pulled staticly from the tablet when i decide to keep something, would be accessible at the right.

in addition, i'd want easy look-ups for the bible, shakespeare, oed (etymology), dictionary.com (spelling), and a rhyming dictionary (willful perversity).


all right. enough willful self-indulgence.


current idea obsession: how the tools we use change the job we do.

Brains are Analog

Well, I don't entirely buy the research--it seems awfully crude to be making this sort of claim--but I like the result: New Cornell study suggests that mental processing is continuous, not like a computer.

A key couple of paragraphs from the article (Slashdotted this afternoon):

42 students listened to instructions to click on pictures of different objects on a computer screen. When the students heard a word, such as "candle," and were presented with two pictures whose names did not sound alike, such as a candle and a jacket, the trajectories of their mouse movements were quite straight and directly to the candle. But when the students heard "candle" and were presented with two pictures with similarly sounding names, such as candle and candy, they were slower to click on the correct object, and their mouse trajectories were much more curved. Spivey said that the listeners started processing what they heard even before the entire word was spoken.

"When there was ambiguity, the participants briefly didn't know which picture was correct and so for several dozen milliseconds, they were in multiple states at once. They didn't move all the way to one picture and then correct their movement if they realized they were wrong, but instead they traveled through an intermediate gray area," explained Spivey. "The degree of curvature of the trajectory shows how much the other object is competing for their interpretation; the curve shows continuous competition. They sort of partially heard the word both ways, and their resolution of the ambiguity was gradual rather than discrete; it's a dynamical system."



Now I'm not sure anyone actually believes that minds are digital at this level of input: hell, I can write a Perl script that takes input in chunks and responds to it as it goes. And so the really interesting part of this to me is this quotation, attributed to Michael Spivey:

"More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."

I'm not sure this is all that 'recent'--it really doesn't feel different from what Hofstadter has been arguing for a long time and /seems/ to reflect the theory behind neural nets and even projects like Cog. But what a cool recognition.

Emergence.

(a tangent: been thinking about emergence in terms of social justice work and activism. need more processing, but hmmm. this idea has eaten my brain.)


EDIT: Just read the slashdot response to the article. Lots of "Well, Duh"s. One of my favories:

"The idea that our brains might work like biological organisms is a real breakthrough.

Next week's research topic: Do farts stink?"