Everything is miscellaneous

(subtitle:) The power of the new digital disorder. David Weinberger. New York, Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2007.

(dedication:) To the librarians.

My excitement about this book, coupled with the fact that it was published five years ago, tells you something about how far behind the times I am. To many of you, this is old news. But my literacy level has sunk so low, relative to twenty-first century informational sea level as defined by the current population of the planet, that I am positively buoyant when I make an amazing discovery that is (a) common knowledge to half the world (What, you hadn't heard?) and so passe that it hardly merits acknowledgement to the other half (yawn).

Anonymous authors. No editors. No special privileges for experts. Signs plastering articles detailing the ways they fall short. All the disagreements about each article posted in public. Easy access to all the previous drafts - including highlighting of the specific changes. No one who can certify that an article is done and ready. It would seem that Wikipedia does everything in its power to avoid being an authority, yet that seems only to increase its authority - a paradox that indicates an important change in the nature of authority itself. (p. 142)

That kind of sums up one of the main premises of Weinberger's argument that universal miscellany is both new and good. And this seemingly slippery slope level of openness that is characteristic of Wikipedia, is a central factor in its power and its limitations. It's a little like Prof. Christina Kirk's self-deprecating comment on her directorial triumph in staging Bertolt Brecht's "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" at Otterbein: "How do you make Brechtian theater in a Brechtian age?" The pace of change has made the traditional, fixed, static, and authoritative encyclopedia so obsolete that a radically mutable, malleable, and less reliable wikipedia is unremarkable however new and different.

If you want to know what Joshua Schachter is interested in, visit...his Delicious page.....If you click on the "view as cloud" link, the list rearranges itself into an alphabetized paragraph, with the font size of each tag indicating in relative terms how many times the tag has been used.... Like a playlist or a mix tape, the truth is often hidden between what's explicit. We can go right or wrong in our sizing up of the person behind the cloud, but we are very likely to go because tag clouds visually express a person's interests, compiled from data the person communicated unintentionally. (p. 162)

Beyond McLuhan but standing on his shoulders, in line with Laotzu but highly technological, semiotically like but aesthetically unlike Nelson Goodman, with just a touch of George Lakoff's metaphorical mindset, the point is that message and data, not to mention metamessages and metadata, are everywhere, even (or especially) in the spaces between the items of compiled lists of favorites. Data mining could be the gold rush of the future, as more people produce and process more information in more media all the time, it just gives the "intelligence" community more stuff to track, profile, and sell to the highest bidder.

Enquire doesn't just keep a list of the parts of a particular machine or the people working on a particular project. Rather, it tracks the context of relationships among the people, parts, and information so that users can know not only that something is, say, a handle, but that it is part of the cranking assembly, that it includes a partucular ball-bearing assembly, that it turns clockwise, that it's made out of iron, and that it was produced by the Acme Crank company. To achieve this, Berners-Lee designed Enquire to include relationships such as "made by," "includes," "uses," "describes," "background," and "similar to." (p. 190)

The guy who devised this layered tracking system had a passion for taxonomy, obviously, for meaning that can be named in an orderly space, a la Wittgenstein, as well as a healthy respect for the changing, shifting unpredictability of the real, non-semantic, non-algorithmic world of stuff.

The world and our third-order understanding of the world are miscellaneous in different ways. The world offers an indefinite number of joints without any preference about which ones we attend to: The rocks will continue to circle the sun whether or not the International Astronomical Union decides to stop calling some of them planets. The miscellaneous digital world we're building for ourselves, on the other hand, consists of what we have chosen as leaves - Hamlet, a particular edition of Hamlet, or a quotation from Hamlet - and the connections we've made explicitly or implicitly. (pp. 228-29)

Mao recognized this in his essay "On Practice" where he argued forcefully for working on theory in continual adjustment to the theoretical flaws revealed by application and misapplication to practical problems, not unlike John Dewey's model of education.

I don't recognize myself without my glasses.
On the bright side: these oval-shaped lenses
allow me to see my own image in the mirror,
not to mention a book, newspaper, phone, or
computer screen. Where would I be without them?
And the thin, dark rims mask the bags under my eyes,
so the guy I can't see in the mirror is the guy I'd rather not be. 

[Title to come] 2

If I were directing this movie (and I am) there would be no discernible music during the opening scene, and the opening credits would start across the screen later, much later, after the stage has been set and the setting been established and the characters have introduced themselves to each other. Most of that happens visually, through movement, with a few phrases of dialog to punctuate the sounds of rustling paper and clothes, the clinking of cups and bowls, the pulling and pushing of chairs and treading on the floor.

Right about the time someone comes around corner where the kitchen meets the den, one of them asks, "You have plans today?" and the other replies "Actually I do," and there you go, 'The Exception that Proves the Rule' [working title] scrolls across the screen, followed by discreetly placed notes of who made the film, who performs in it, who did the grunt work, and called the shots. It's a story about a man and a woman who live in a house on the other side of town.

Because there is no music to speak of doesn't mean there is no soundtrack, and in the few minutes just passed - coffee, morning paper, breakfast - a barely audible hum has been slow building in volume, tones changing slightly every few seconds, and somewhere around the three-minute mark it reaches a point where this hum is recognizable as an intentional shape and color produced by instruments - let's say string bass and clarinet.

With dialog comes a plot. Her plans for the day begin with walking the dog, giving blood at the library, and a movie with her best friend Kat. If that doesn't lend itself to a subplot of two, we have business making this movie about another Saturday in Columbus. 'Ulysses' it is not. Sven and Gven Golly are not Leopold and Molly Bloom. Columbus, Ohio, is not Dublin, Ireland, but it might be possible to get to know them a little through the lens of their suburban domicile, where their private dramas unfold within these walls.

He slouches in a wicker chair, resting his aching head against the high back. Rather than disclosing his plans for the day, he announces his dilemma: whether to clean up around the edges or launch a major project, the eternal Saturday problem facing mankind in the first cup of coffee. After Gven goes out the door, the camera follows as Sven wanders from room to room, the doorway framing his movements watering plants, sweeping the floor, putting dishes in the dishwasher. The minutiae only take a minute on the screen, but you can see how this stuff could take all day.

Going outside to gauge the weather and clear the debris from his clouded brain, he sees only things to fix, dispose of, and re-arrange. Each potential task links his to-do list with an extended family issue - his brother would do this, his sister would do that, his father would have done it this way, his mother would never have let it be that way. Each parental or sibling subplot winds around the bone, nerve, and sinew of his waking-up body as he walks slowly out the sticky screen door, past the scraps of lumber to the woodshed.

It will take a while in real time, but eventually he gathers the necessary tools - hand drill, hammer, finishing nails, wood screws and screwdriver - to secure the split door frame that caused the screen door to hang askew. Sven heaves a sigh of satisfaction and takes a break to eat lunch.

[title to come] 1

Chapter 1

A house in Ohio, New Year's Day. Snow lies on the ground, barely covering the sidewalk and patio. There will be something to do today. Besides shoveling, there is Basic Movement when the sun comes out, back on the path to the woodshed, where it becomes evident that the quest for pure white light includes a lot of other information - a cloudy and variegated range of hues - and the education is in finding your way through the minefield of imperfections without getting blown up.

Manipulating the yarrow stalks is an excellent way to find decent kindling before consulting the oracle. Ask it anything, as long as it's not an either/or question, in which case the answer is likely to be yes, or no, or maybe. Since we will both be here all day, start a fire sooner rather than later. Clean up the desk, put a few things away, and re-arrange some tools from a jumbled drawer to a neat container where I can see them when I need them. A few folders on top of the desk made their way to an empty drawer along with some other folders that came home from my previous workplace. Less clutter is good.

Oracle answers: Upward movement pulling against downward movement pits strength against guile and cunning. In spite of sincerity there is obstruction. By halting halfway and consulting the authorities with a clear mind, one can resolve the conflict without great danger. Let others obtain honors; just do the work.

Still Life with Desktop

Handmade clay pot, pewter bowl with keys, four mugs full of pens and pencils, wooden box of binder clips, headphones; wooden box with stones, birch bark, turtle shell; lamp, antique desktop with slots containing Chinese chop, Chinese balls, notecards, envelopes, address stickers, stamps, old address books, bank transaction registers, recent receipts, 2012 Day Runner planner; electric pencil sharpener, mug full of scissors, wire rack of bills, line gauges, iPod nano (unused), Trepanning cassette (unheard), Church of the Master illustrated pamphlet, oil can; stack of magazines, file folders of correspondence (unfiled), half-filled writing pads, class rosters; stack of books: Gaddy and Hart, Real Estate Fundamentals; Remnick, ed., The New Gilded Age; Rheingold, They Have a Word for It; Dennis and Pinkowish, Residential Mortgage Lending; Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow; Bloom, Bloom's Bouquet of Imaginary Words; Minardi, Short Bike Rides, Ohio; Rosenthal, The Surreal Calder; 2013 Staples planner, wicker basket with wallet, post-it notes.

Happy Holidays, Family & Friends

It's beginning to look a lot like Solstice – darker every day – as we approach the turn of the Mayan calendar and an unpredictable fiscal slope. We hope our annual bit of creative nonfiction finds you in good spirits and good health. We would love to hear your own Revised Standard Version of life in your part of the world.

The Year of the Dragon brought change, and we are all seeking balance. Jessi joined the hurricane recovery effort Respond and Rebuild, organized by his friend Gabriel. With tools donated by Occupy Sandy, crews of volunteers remove toxic debris from flooded houses in Rockaway, Queens. Jessi’s regular job is art handling – packing, moving, and hanging art for galleries and collectors. On a rainy week in May, he joined a posse of friends on a bike trip to Acadia National Park in Maine. He went to Guatemala in July, taking Spanish classes, trekking up volcanoes, and exploring Mayan ruins. 

Gven teaches 14 yoga classes a week and took up boxing at a gym in Westerville – peace, love, pugilism. She spends countless hours working with fabric in her little studio and took part in two workshops with the Art Quilt Network,  delving deeper into hand-dying and hand stitching. In August, Gven and Zelda joined Annette and Sharon and their families in Georgia to celebrate her mother’s 80th birthday.

Ignoring Thoreau’s advice to beware of all enterprises requiring new clothes, Sven started a new job as a policy editor in risk management at JPMorgan Chase. He works with a world-class team of writers, mortgage gurus, and IT wizards to make the world safe for borrowers (and bankers). In September, he and Gven joined Anna Banana, Jeanie Beanie, Jo Jo, and The Rock (and spouses) in Tennessee to celebrate his mother’s 91st birthday.  

Zelda started coursework toward her MLIS in January, balancing part-time classes with full-time work. After six years at Half Price Books, she decided to turn the page and focus on school. Zelda and her new housemate Alicia moved into a duplex in a nice old Columbus neighborhood. In July, she took a road trip to North Carolina to visit college friends and took her dad kayaking on Big Darby Creek for Father’s Day.

The garden had mixed reactions to a year of extreme weather. What we missed in strawberries we got back tenfold in peaches. Storms brought down some big trees, so we have firewood for winter, and we planted a bunch of seedlings to fill in. A black cat named Lamar joined the family right after New Year’s, and after some mild sparring with Ruby, he has made himself right at home. 

 

From our home to yours, have a happy holiday!

Peace on Earth,

Sven and Gven

Photos (top to bottom, left to right):

Natural forces at work, Pulhapanzak, Honduras; Jessi and friend with pyramid, Guatemala; Risk management, Lake Atitlan, Guatemala; Zelda in repose; Zelda, Viking librarian; Iris, salvia, more salvia; Peaches in Ohio!