Monthly Archives: January 2021

how it happens

31i2130

We were out at Drift Inn just after sunrise this morning, incoming tide and very cold, but a successful venture for me, with a nice set of photographs.

Most images evolve in Lightroom, and sometimes pass through GIMP before making it to Flickr. Case in point:


31i2127x2adj

That one began with this not-very-promising image:

5146orig

I pushed and prodded and tweaked and tried it in monochrome

5146

before I went back to color and kept nudging until I was satisfied:

31i2127

a morning harvest

Much to chew upon in these three not-unrelated posts:

  • The neurons that hold our hidden thoughts (Harvard Gazette)

    scientists have identified the individual neurons critical to human social reasoning, a cognitive process that requires us to acknowledge and predict others’ hidden beliefs and thoughts … Now that scientists understand the basic cellular mechanism that underlies human theory of mind, they have an operational framework by which to begin investigating disorders in which social behavior is affected.

    There’s a hubristic flavor here, along with the journalistic handwaving, but the claim is at least interesting: certain mental processes seem to be locatable, and there’s an ‘operational framework’ to put to work on further problems. What can possibly go wrong?

  • jnana (Sesquiotica blog)

    What does a mirror look like when it reflects only itself, and no one is looking? … The essence of knowing is the mind perceiving external things and concepts and modelling them and assimilating those models into its schemes and structures and mental Minecrafts. Which means that knowing is an intrinsically separate and separating act; even knowing yourself takes parts of your self as objects, models them, and adds them to your miniature village of the mind. So what do you call the knowing that knows that the knower and the known are the same? The realization that all that is realized is all that realizes, and that at root the watcher is watching the watcher, and any plurality is just the reflector reflecting?

    this idea of knowing that one is not separate from the ultimate unity of the universe (specifics depend on religion—Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh—and particular sect or school within the religion), well, that’s something that we particularly wanted to see as an exotic thing we could borrow from them, like a jewel from the East, the prize of a secret journey to find a holy man.

    More familiar territory for some of us, awash in knotty paradox and the inventive genius of language.

  • Bronze, iron, gold, silver (Language Log blog)

    the Iranian-speaking peoples were among the first to ride in chariots and to mount on horses, so we can think of them as being highly mobile. They were also responsible for the spread of key instruments and modes from the Middle East to Central Asia and thence to East Asia. So we can call the Iranian-speaking peoples masters of metallurgy, mobility, and music, but much more as well.

    Words and concepts are substantial parts of that “much more as well”: see the ‘Selected readings’ links at the end of the post, and especially enjoy Faces of ‘Siberian Tutankhamun’ and his ‘Queen’ buried 2,600 years ago reconstructed by science.

And then add Andy’s post from yesterday. Whew.

with the new iPhone camera

Yesterday’s trash pickup led me to a ditch on the Glenmere road which had some nice bits of ice. I had my new iPhone with me, and here’s what came from my first shot:


25i211

A bit of tweakage (crop, rotate, twiddle contrast and vibrance) produced this, in which my eyes see at least one creature, perhaps blue-faced and blonde-haired (YMMV, as usual):

25i214

Just a few feet away were these two:

25i212

25i213


And here’s a further evolution of the lattermost, in which the latent creature is revealed (or perhaps it’s creatures…):

9078bwx2adj

Similar treatment of the penultimate other produces a being with pronounced Northwest Coast sensibilities:

9077bwX2ADJ

And this version is even better:

9077bwx2cadj

And it’s only Tuesday.

Krazy

I often have the experience of being inspired by something I read or see to order a book (used via Amazon, most often), but when it arrives I don’t recall the details of the inspiration, having by then moved on to yet more inspirations… Today’s case in point is Louis Kronenberger’s Quality: Its Image in the Arts (1969), which turns out to have a very interesting chapter on Photography by Walker Evans (which I had read about a couple of weeks ago in Svetlana Alpers’ Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch (2020), and was, as I now reconstruct it, the source of the inspiration to order). The Kronenberger book has chapters by a variety of mid-20th century luminaries (Virgil Thompson on Music, Gilbert Seldes on Popular Arts, Milton Glaser on Graphics, Ada Louise Huxtable on Architecture, Eliza beth Hardwick on Literature…), some of which are a bit musty a half century later (though their points of view are memorable to those of us who were there then). There are lots of wonderful illustrations, some very familiar and others quite new to me. One that especially delights me is this from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, ca. 1922 (that is, nearly a century ago):



Now, Herriman himself is an interesting character, subject of the biography Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White (2016), and “a visionary whose influence helped shape popular culture for decades after his death… you may never look at the zigzag on Charlie Brown’s t-shirt again without remembering that it was Charles Schulz’s tribute to the Navaho designs that recurred in Herriman’s work…” (from the Amazon blurb). I retrieved it from the Auxiliary Library in the barn and started reading it again.

And Herriman drew the cartoons for Archy & Mehitabel (written by Don Marquis):

i have had my ups and downs
but wotthehell wotthehell
yesterday sceptres and crowns
fried oysters and velvet gowns
and today i herd with bums
but wotthehell wotthehell
i wake the world from sleep
as i caper and sing and leap
when i sing my wild free tune
wotthehell wotthehell
under the blear eyed moon
i am pelted with cast off shoon
but wotthehell wotthehell

(and see What Kittens? for more from A&M)

Twenty-odd Years

Wende posed a Convivial Question for this week:

We are 20 years into a brave new century.
Remember when 2000 rolled over and we all thought there weren’t gonna be enough digits to keep the internet from crashing? So much history has rolled by, over and around us . . .affecting each of us in a myriad of ways.

What has the impact of these years been on you and your inner life?
How might you be a different person from the one who saw in that new century with all the zeros?

So I went to my shelf of journals and found the volume that includes 2000 and read through that year and into 2001, and so I have data to help me note some ways in which I am

  • a different person

    grandparent
    retiree
    photographer again
    last of a sibling set
    yogi

  • no longer

    avid Appalachian Trail hiker (we finished the 11-year odyssey of day hikes in 2003)
    GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Evangelist
    in the role of Librarian and Professor
    engaged with liberal arts colleges
    working on Global Studies/Stewardship
    entangled with digital library initiatives

  • recognizably the same

    omnivorous quester
    bibliophile
    cyberspace participant
    hypertext author
    foodie
    walker
    æsthete [in a good way…]
    collector
    heathen
    musician
    watcher from the sidelines
    Mocker [Ringo’s answer when asked if he was a Mod or a Rocker]

Yes, folks, for 20 years it’s been ODTAA (One Damned Thing After Another). Some things I discovered in the journal entries: few of the films I watched 20 years ago are memorable (most left no trace); I noted lots of boring meetings; lots of travel; lots of (less boring) task-focused meetings; lots of consultations, many leading to Web documents; a wide variety of courses and workshops taught; schemes to change the World around me hatched; weekends on the Appalachian Trail, lots of driving north and south from Lexington VA to trailheads. It was a very full and satisfying life, and so is its 2021 successor.

See some examples of my Web-based record keeping, ca. 2000: ‘Protest Music’ for Brooks Hickman, Hollows and other place names: a toponymic excursion (examples of GIS work), on Information Fluency, Teaching and Learning Resouce Group, Tracking Scientific Information, Technology and American Frontiers course, A History of the Web at W&L (2000).

Egregores and the Egregious

An early morning riffle through this week’s New Yorker produces a marvelous collision of Americas. The first is a two-page spread advertisement for Sensei Lānaʻi, a “Four Seasons Resort” which proposes “Elevating Wellness into Wellbeing”:




This is the single most offensive ad I’ve encountered so far this year, and maybe ever. You owe yourself a close reading of the text:



I then turned a couple of pages to arrive at The Talk of the Town, the lead piece of which is Adam Gopnik’s “Fault Lines” which begins

Readers of “Through the Looking-Glass” may recall the plight of the Bread-and-Butterfly, which, as the Gnat explains to Alice, can live only on weak tea with cream in it. “Supposing it couldn’t find any?” Alice asks. “Then it would die, of course,” the Gnat answers. “That must happen very often,” Alice reflects. “It always happens,” the Gnat admits dolefully.

Gopnik goes on to consider America’s current crisis of democracy, and says

The default condition of humankind, traced across thousands of years of history, is some sort of autocracy.

…Keeping a republic is a matter not of preserving it like pickles but of working it like dough—which sounds like something you’d serve alongside very weak tea. But it is the essential diet to feed our democracy if we are to make what always happens, for a little while longer, happily unhappen.

What a juxtaposition: the utter crass ME-ness of Larry Ellison’s Lānaʻi (“Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison bought 98% of the island of Lanai in 2012 for an estimated $300 million…”) with Gopnik’s rendition of our current slide toward the “default condition of humankind.” But Gopnik tells only a part of the story, which includes Lewis Carroll’s discription of the fatal anatomy of the Bread-and-Butterfly:

its wings are thin slices of bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.

Thus, if the Bread-and-Butterfly did find its weak tea with cream, it would die as its head dissolved; if it didn’t find its weak tea with cream, it would starve. The Bread-and-Butterfly is, as Gregory Bateson noted, a classic example of the Double Bind:

the essence of a double bind is two conflicting demands, each on a different logical level, neither of which can be ignored or escaped. This leaves the subject torn both ways, so that whichever demand he or she tries to meet, the other demand cannot be met. “I must do it, but I can’t do it” is a typical description of the double-bind experience.

Hobson’s Choice is another common trope, in which the Choice is between something and nothing. Both are all too present in today’s world.

Somewhere in the searching and reading that this conjunction provoked, I stumbled upon a term that was new to me: egregore, “powerful autonomous psychic entities created by a collective group mind.” Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny

sustained by belief, ritual, and sacrifice and relies upon the devotion of a group of people, from a small coven to an entire nation, for its existence. An egregore that receives enough sustenance can take on a life of its own, becoming an independent deity with powers its believers can use to further their own spiritual advancement and material desires… provides instructions on how to identify egregores, free yourself from a parasitic and destructive collective entity, and destroy an egregore, should the need arise. Revealing how egregores form the foundation of nearly all human interactions, the author shows how egregores have moved into popular culture and media–underscoring the importance of intense selectivity in the information we accept and the ways we perceive the world and our place in it. (from the Amazon precis)

How very like the ‘Trumpism’ that seems to stalk the land and contribute to that “current crisis of democracy.”

Eeeek…

And A Pseudoethnography of Egregores. Quite enough for a Monday.