Author Archives: oook

It’s profoundly comforting

…to discover that Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” is alive 111,000 times over in cyberspace, and continues to propagate outwards and onwards. Perhaps also worth noting that Google Scholar has only about 100 instances. Take a look also at gada.be‘s array.
And the OED has this for first use:

1824 MACTAGGART Gallovid. Encycl., Yawp, the cry of a sickly bird; or one in distress.

Doc Searls, bless him, has a part of the whole thing laid out for us. Here’s the immediate context:

…
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me.
He complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Of wogs and Calais

I have a long fascination with cultural identities, among them the essence of Englishness and the peculiarities of New Englanders (e.g., this from Donald Junkins), so I was delighted to find this quotation in a Language Log posting on Word rage outside the Anglosphere? (emphasis added):

The English aren’t people who strive for greatness, they’re driven to it by a flaming irritation. It was anger that built the Industrial Age, which forged expeditions of discovery. It was the need for self-control that found an outlet in cataloguing, litigating and ordering the natural world. It was the blind fury with imprecise and stubborn inanimate objects that created generations of engineers and inventors. The anger at sin and unfairness that forged their particular earth-bound, pedantic spirituality and their puce-faced, finger-jabbing, spittle-flecked politics. …
Anger has driven the English to achievement and greatness in a bewildering pantheon of disciplines. At the core of that anger is the knowledge that they could go absolutely berserk with an axe if they didn’t bind themselves with all sorts of restraints, of manners, embarrassment and awkwardness and garden sheds.
(AA Gill, in The Times, 30 Oct 2005)

OPML at last

I’ve been resistant to OPML, feeling that “outlining” wasn’t a comfortable format for things I do. Fact is, I think I didn’t quite get it, but I’m perhaps a bit closer now thanks to a problem I wanted to solve.
I have spent a lot of time forwarding stuff to other people, and indeed I think finding-and-forwarding is probably a pretty good summary of my specialty as a librarian. This morning I started hand-coding a table of things I’ve sent to people in the last couple of weeks. How very Web 1.0. And then OPML Manager fortuitously crossed my path, and I decided to give it a whirl as a more grownup way of solving the problem. I’m pretty pleased with what resulted, at least for starters.
I’m not sure just where this leads, but it’s been a couple of months since last I was so involved in emerging technologies, and it feels pretty good to be at it again.

SuprGlu

I’ve been experimenting with Suprglu as a means to put together what I’m paying attention to, but I’m not sure that it’s helpful to add a lot of sources –especially ones that update frequently. Sort of like having a braided stream of RSS feeds, all in one place… but one doesn’t know how effective something will be until one tries it out.

40 years

Every five years I get a new installment in the ongoing saga of my college class (it was Harvard 1965), and the Fourtieth Anniversary Report arrived yesterday. I’ve spent quite a few of the last 24 hours immersed in the lives of people I didn’t know, or knew only very slightly, and I’m as much affected by the experience as I was by the seven previous iterations. This time around, the themes of retirement and grandchildren and parental death are much to the fore, with antiphonal threads of travel and health crises, and occasional notes of dissatisfaction with the directions in which the world is headed.
I am surprised to feel so connected with a group of people, my cohort, but at the same time so disconnected from nearly all of them as individuals. My freshman roommates are dead or vanished, and quite a few others I can recall pretty clearly are also gone. It seems that I didn’t have many friends in the class, though there are a few I’d be delighted to see again. I’m amazed to find that two classmates live within 5 miles (and that they’re recent transplants to Maine, as I am), but I’m not sure if hunting them up is likely to be a good idea, since what we share is granfalloonish membership in a fund-raising pool.
Wallace Shawn, yes that Wallace Shawn, wins my award for most eloquent entry, from which I’ll quote a paragraph:

And today, still addicted to the fantasy that we’re better than others and deserve a bit more, we accept with our well-known tight-lipped equanimity (occasionally broken by our well-known inaudible warblings of protest) all the blood spilled and the bones broken by our servants –Bush and the rest– in their effort to preserve our well-merited position down to the last Reunion.

Those I am most curious about are the 50-odd who are listed only with Last known address, and who have managed to escape the vigilance of the fund-raising arm of Mother Harvard. Their stories would be worth knowing.
There are a few whose lives and eloquence I admire, and whom I wish I knew.

Nelson’s Transquoter

Bryant Adams sent me a pointer to a Slashdot article on Ted Nelson’s Transquoter and I’ve been playing with its possibilities, via the skeletal directions available (download the .exe, edit .edl file, double-click .edl and specify that transquoter.exe is the program to use…), but just how to aim it at the desired place in a file is less than completely obvious (how do you count the characters, and the spans, except [ugh!] manually).

It hasn’t yet occurred to me just what I’d want to DO with this, but that’s probably because I’m not really paying attention… I hope for revelation. Which reminds me of the Auden lyric:

Revelation came to Luther in a privy
Crosswords have been solved there
Rodin was no fool
When he cast his Thinker
Cogitating deeply
Crouched in the position
Of a man at stool.

(from Auden’s The Geography of the House, but for many years just a remembered fragment)

and a followup

Stephen Downes’ blog has a pointer to the text of Gardner Campbell’s There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education from EDUCAUSE Quarterly. I’m really glad that I heard it before reading it, and it’s interesting to reflect on how different the experiences are. That’s really a matter of how Gardner reads it –the care he puts into phrasing and timing. The experience is not unlike hearing Lenny Henry read part of the first chapter of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys.

Something in the Air

I listen to a lot of MP3s, some of them overt podcasts and others productions that don’t quite fit into the ‘podcast’ rubric as it’s been developed in a year of experimentation. Generally I am most moved, inspired, and informed by audio that has the freshness of conversation, and only occasionally do readings get to me in the same way. When I do succumb to a reading, the charm is largely a matter of the skill in the voice. Case in recent point: Gardner Campbell has a simply glorious version of an EDUCAUSE piece, There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education, published in the Nov/Dec EDUCAUSE Review –not a wasted word in 47:30 golden minutes. I can think of a score of people whom I’d love to nail down and insist that they listen, because if they did, they’d finally get it about the utility and importance of the medium.
But 47 minuteses are difficult to command. The best inducement I can think of is to ask that score of folks to invest 2:30 in an excerpt, in which Gardner is deliciously eloquent on Magic in the human voice, on the Theatre of the Mind, and on the Explaining Voice: “when we hear someone read with understanding, we participate in that understanding, almost as if the voice is enacting our own comprehension…”

Musical Interlude

I can’t praise this enough: American Primitive Vol II from Revenant Records. The liner notes which accompany the two-CD release are a marvel of eloquence and elegant production:

Crucial to the Revenant ethos is the notion of the neglected gem. Our Revenant empire, such as it is, is founded upon the proposition that if the masses reject or ignore it, it just may be worth looking into. Neglected artists may be those ahead of their time, too uncompromising for their own good, whose sense of timing and often decorum was not quite the equal of their imagination. (12)

A special category for neglect is the phantom… Some of these phantoms left behind music of such an otherworldly character that it genuinely retains the power to shock, confound, inspire and sustain today.

Some names: Geeshie Wiley, Elvie Thomas, Nugrape Twins, Homer Quincy Smith, Blues Birdhead

Names too obscure even for Harry Smith…

…The phantom, the revenant, has a special allure. In an age of complete media saturation, where we must, unavoidably, reckon with our artists’ personal minutiae, there is something wonderfully, preversely compelling about art that must stand completely on its own, sand biographical context, since absolutely nothing of any consequence is known about the artist behind the work. It has the quality of a cave painting, except we arguably know more about the personal habits of the creatures who conjured them than we do about our friends Geeshie and Homer. (13)

I am not alone in my enthusiasm: Malcolm at Venerable Music says “There is no easy way to explain just how good this collection is! From the very first track (my first time hearing Homer Quincy Smith), I was completely involved with no turning back. I’ve been listening to these songs all weekend & toward the end of each, I still find myself in true anticipation of the next. The ghosts are evident in this one. Honestly, the best compilation I have heard in while! A true 5-star rating!”

American Primitive Vol I was/is pretty amazing too.

Just so

This one snuck up and clubbed me:

When people die, they leave a giant black space in your life. Or maybe the giant black space is filled with people who have died. Every week, Laura plays an Airwaves Archive, breathing life into recordings of old radio broadcasts. It seems to me that the part of radio that is always slipping away from us is the part that makes it so achingly compelling. We can archive everything we broadcast now, and we do, but we are still broadcasting, sending signals out from transmitters. The airwaves are already an archive, filled with murmuring voices drifting past each other out into space.
Amanda Barrett Fading In and Out