Author Archives: oook

Gibsonian take on S/N

I have a lifelong habit of bing[e]ing on authors, reading everything if I’ve found some unique voice in something they’ve written, and then rereading the especially choice bits again and again. William Gibson has been one of those authors for more than 20 years, and this fragment from William Gibson’s blog is pretty tantalizing and suggests that he’s still at it:

Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal-dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

How now, blogosphere?

A posting on danah boyd’s apophenia (blog production/consumption musings) got me thinking about the gradual shift in my own blog behavior. She says

…when i think about reading blogs about tech industry, my research area or other arenas that would actually be helpful, i go into anaphylactic shock. There’s too many, it’s too overwhelming, i can’t cope, eek! I can’t even stomach blogs written by dear friends who i will talk with for hours about professional or intellectual ideas (unless they embed the nutritious material in the sugary gossip stuff). I don’t even think i’d read my blog given its content if i weren’t the one writing it…

I’ve been ascribing similar feelings about tech/ed blogs to my increasing distance from the front lines of the EdBiz, and to the absence of any specific public for whom I’m thinking and writing, but maybe there’s something more fundamental here, some sort of tectonic shift in the world of Online. I need to explore this a bit, and it might as well be a blog posting, even if it’s only for my own edification.

In my own daily routines, I read a lot of pretty varied stuff via RSS, and skim even more… but lately I’ve noticed that I barely glance at many of the feeds that I was reading carefully six months or a year ago. Some of that is just the normal/tidal flux of interests, but much of my interest in “teaching and learning” was linked to my activities in educational institutions and organizations. Now that I’m well-and-truly outside those arenas, I’m increasingly detached from the debates and battles, and I realize that what I think about or see in something really doesn’t matter to or connect with the current needs and interests of my former colleagues. Just yesterday I saw a thread on a blog that I would have sent on to several people and I thought (for the first time) “enh. who cares?”

As I review the hundred-some RSS feeds I’ve been following, I notice some patterns in attention. These days, I find myself adding feeds in areas like food (megnut on food, Hungry Magazine, Maine Foodie, Eating Asia), and paying more attention to video resources (Ze Frank, Better Bad News), but investing a lot less time/energy in tech blogs

(e.g., the Gillmors, the Winer, Signal vs. Noise, Doc Searls, malevolent design, Amy Gahran’s Contentious, Continuous Computing),

and less to the clutch of H5N1 sites I’ve been following for a couple of years

(I scan Effect Measure, but rarely click through any of the links on The Coming Influenza Pandemic or Connotea tagged H5N1, and it’s been weeks since I’ve looked at Technorati on H5N1 or my Yahoo H5N1 search).

And the Ed blogs that I used to watch so carefully are fading from my interest/attention

(including Inside Higher Ed, elearningpost, FLOSSE Posse, EDUCAUSE, EdTech Posse, Alex Halavais, HeadsPace J, Liberal Education Today, blog of proximal development. Even EduRSS has become more of a trial than an essential. All that stuff about what faculty don’t do, and what students do do, and how it doesn’t connect… I thought and wrote about that for years, without much in the way of effects or progress.

Some of these I feel a certain guilt about not-reading, and I can’t quite bring myself to delete them from the RSS list.

I find that I have very little interest in library blogs that I used to scan on behalf of colleagues

(Resource Shelf, RSS4Lib, Free Range Librarian…)

So what’s still at the core? BoingBoing, WFMU, Juan Cole for News of Fresh Disasters, anything BryanAlexander or Gardner Campbell writes (they’re friends), and similarly Brian Lamb and Alan Levine (I don’t actually know them, but feel that I should/could), and the metafolks: Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Jon Udell.

Others I really look forward to for new content: Language Log, Crooked Timber, Google Maps Mania, Ogle Earth…

It’ll be interesting to see how the landscape looks in six months or so. Bet it’ll be different.

links for 2006-05-30

Mike Davis on William Gibson

I’ve been thinking about and studying regions for 40-some years, man and boy, and I’ve done serious scifi/cyberpunk time too, but this bit from Mike Davis [Late Victorian Holocausts, Magical Urbanism, City of Quartz, Planet of Slums, others…] is the clearest link between those worlds that I have ever seen:

The ongoing crisis of the Third World city is producing almost feudalized patterns of large slum neighborhoods that are effectively terrorist or criminal mini-states – rogue micro-sovereignties. That’s the view of the Pentagon and of Pentagon planners. They also seem quite alarmed by the fact that the peri-urban slums – the slums on the edges of cities – lack clear hierarchies. Even more difficult, from a planning perspective, there’s very little available data. The slums are kind of off the radar screen. They therefore become the equivalent of rain forest, or jungle: difficult to penetrate, impossible to control.

I think there are fairly smart Pentagon thinkers who don’t see this so much as a question of regions, or categories of nation-states, so much as holes, or enclaves within the system. One of the best things I ever read about this was actually William Gibson’s novel Virtual Light. Gibson proposes that, in a world where giant multinational capital is supreme, there are places that simply aren’t valuable to the world economy anymore – they don’t reproduce capital – and so those spaces are shunted aside. A completely globalized system, in Gibson’s view, would leak space – it would have internal redundancies – and one of those spaces, in Virtual Light, is the Bay Bridge.
(from William Gibson’s blog, but see BLDGBLOG for the whole [and totally EXcellent] interview)

Geocalumny

For the moment, geocalumny is a googlewhack, albeit a self-referential googlewhack (i.e., it doesn’t really count, since I coined the term, to fill a much-needed gap). Since the first instance (quoting from a John McPhee article in the New Yorker for 3 October 2005, and mashing it up with a Google map [9 Nov 2005]), I’ve noticed quite a few other passages that exemplify the highly-developed art of geocalumny (and/or the closely related ethnocalumny, linguocalumny, and general trash talk). Today’s beauties come from Madding Gerund and from London Review of Books:

(of Texas, ca. 1840)
…filled with habitual liars, drunkards, blasphemers, and slanderers; sanguinary gamesters and cold-blooded assassins; with idleness and sluggish indolence (two vices for which the Texans are already proverbial); with pride, engendered by ignorance and supported by fraud.
(Nicholas Doran P. Maillard, quoted by Mark Liberman, who ends the posting with an addendum: “I need to add that I don’t subscribe to Maillard’s description as an accurate characterization of Texans, whether in 1840 or 2003, and especially not of my wife.”)

and

(an “anonymous scribbler” annotating Leigh Fermor’s Roumeli, to contradict LF’s assertion that modern Greek is ‘undisputed heir of ancient Greek’)
…Nonsense. It is the barbarous pidgin of the Albano-Slavs who defile the land of their occupation with the deformity of their “dago” bodies and the squalor of their politics.
(quoted by Mary Beard in “Don’t forget your pith helmet”, LRB 18 Aug 2005)

This is very much in the “Wogs begin at Calais” vein that certain Blimpish Britons are sometimes thought to have invented. One can appreciate the spleen without endorsing the sentiments, right?

Update: yesterday there was only one Google hit for ‘geocalumny’, but seemingly this posting has provoked a few more.

Addendum: John Dowie’s British Tourist will please connoisseurs of musical variants of the genre.

Four Guys from Sfax

Every time I go back to Leigh Fermor’s list of ‘Greek’ communities, I plunge into another journey of discovery. Yesterday’s was provoked by “the Shqip-speaking Atticans of Sfax“: Shqip=Albanian and Sfax=port city in Tunisia, facts I had tucked away in the back rooms of the mind. I filled in some other bits, including the Ottoman practise of using some ethnicities (Albanians being a frequent example) to control others, and then went a-Googling. One of the things I found was a list of immigrants from SS La Bretagne (Le Havre, France to New York, 28 May 1907), including this set of four doughty voyagers who stated Sfax as their last residence:

Naoum, Yoannou; 35y; Male; Married; Occupation: Miner;
Able to read/write: Yes/Yes;
Last Permanent Residence: Turkish E;
Race: Greek;
Last Residence: Sfax;
Final Destination: N. York;
Having a ticket to final destination: Yes; Paid by: himself;
Money in Possession: $ 12;
Whether ever in U.S.: No;
Joining: Friend Agamemnon Panagakis;
Address: 3 Morris St;
Whether ever in prison, etc: No; Polygamist: No;
Anarchist: No; Offer to labor in US: No;
Health: Good; Deformed or Crippled: No;
Height: 5’7″; Complexion: Brown; Hair: auburn; Eyes: brown;
Place of Birth: Georgia

Dimitrios, Maniatis; 28y; Male; Single; Occupation: Sailor;
Able to read/write: Yes/Yes;
Last Permanent Residence: Greece;
Race: Greek;
Last Residence: Sfax;
Final Destination: N. York;
Having a ticket to final destination: Yes; Paid by: himself;
Money in Possession: $ 20;
Whether ever in U.S.: No;
Joining: Friend Agamemnon Panagakis;
Address: 3 Morris St;
Anarchist: No; Offer to labor in US: No;
Health: Good; Deformed or Crippled: No;
Height: 5’6″; Complexion: Brown; Hair: auburn; Eyes: brown;
Place of Birth: Kranidi

Dimitrios, Selavounos; 27y; Male; Single; Occupation: Sailor;
Able to read/write: no/no;
Last Permanent Residence: Greece;
Race: Greek;
Last Residence: Sfax;
Final Destination: N. York;
Having a ticket to final destination: Yes; Paid by: himself;
Money in Possession: $ 12;
Whether ever in U.S.: No;
Joining: Friend Agamemnon Panagakis;
Address: 3 Morris St;
Whether ever in prison, etc: No; Polygamist: No;
Anarchist: No; Offer to labor in US: No;
Health: Good; Deformed or Crippled: No;
Height: 5’3″; Complexion: Brown; Hair: auburn; Eyes: brown;
Place of Birth: Kranidi

Lefterios, Retoulas; 29y; Male; Single; Occupation: Sailor;
Able to read/write: Yes/Yes;
Last Permanent Residence: Greece;
Race: Greek;
Last Residence: Sfax;
Final Destination: N. York;
Having a ticket to final destination: Yes; Paid by: himself;
Money in Possession: $ 52;
Whether ever in U.S.: No;
Joining: Friend Agamemnon Panagakis;
Address: 3 Morris St;
Whether ever in prison, etc: No; Polygamist: No;
Anarchist: No; Offer to labor in US: No;
Health: Good; Deformed or Crippled: No;
Height: 5’6″; Complexion: Brown; Hair: auburn; Eyes: brown;
Place of Birth: Hydra

The hidden Tales here are not unlike those that attach to any of the Nova Scotia Faces photographs: fragments provoke conjectures, good stories trump inconvenient (or missing) facts, and one ends up far from the starting point. In this Sfax case, my curiosity centers on Agamemnon Panagakis, the Friend, of 3 Morris St., NYC. It’s a good guess that Maniatis and Selavounos are brothers or maybe cousins, and I’ll bet that the four met in Sfax… but how did they get there? Doubtful that they’re Shqip speakers. Hydra is a long way from Albania, but it’s pretty close to Kranidi, so Retoulas is a plausible third. Yoannou remains a puzzle, Georgia being a loooong way from Kranidi or Sfax. Georgia… that’s Colchis of old, Golden Fleece territory
History and Structure of the Hellenic Language tells us this:

PONTIC (PONTIC GREEK) [PNT] 200,000 in Greece (1993 Johnstone); 120,000 in western Georgia; 320,000 or more in all countries. Suburbs between Athens and Peiraeus Katerini. There may still be speakers on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. Also in Boston, Philadelphia, Canton, Akron, USA; Toronto, Canada; and small communities in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Indo-European, Greek, Attic. Brought to Greece in the 1920’s and 1930’s by immigrants from the Black Sea coast, which had been inhabited by Greeks since antiquity. Speakers of Standard Greek cannot understand Pontic, and Pontic speakers are reported to not understand or speak Standard Greek. Pontic clubs and centers exist in the Athens-Peiraeus suburbs. Young people may speak Standard Greek as their first language. Speakers in North America are reported to hold onto their language more zealously than those in Greece. Ethnic Greeks in Georgia called ‘Rumka’ speak Pontic Greek.

…and of course Wikipedia adds more…

More Leigh Fermor

A Lifehacker post points to Google Blog Search, so I bethought myself to check out the buzz over Leigh Fermor in blogland, and found myself hip-deep in an asynchronous multilingual conversation, with pointers to gems like Mary Beard’s Don’t forget your pith helmet (London Review of Books) and a translation of an Ode of Horace that figures in his Cretan adventures during WWII –neither of which would I have been likely to encounter by staying on the gravelled paths…