I’m exploring various alternative presentation modes for the Nova Scotia Faces materials, and the latest is a Squidoo Lens on Vernacular Photography. I’m not sure what Squidoo will offer that the Wiki can’t, but I may find my way to other Lenses for other enthusiasms.

My friend Mo is wrestling with Paradise Lost. In conversation last night, I was saying that I found the 17th century pretty impenetrable, mostly because I really didn’t grasp what people did and didn’t know, and that I felt disconnected from how they thought about things and voiced their thoughts, and that I didn’t know any [moderately painless] bridges to repairing those deficiencies.

I’ve been reading Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass (consequent upon reading Laura Miller’s review in the latest New Yorker), and what did I find this morning but:

Oh, this was in the seventeenth century. Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else: if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source… (pg 173)

This passage is about the alethiometer, “a device driven by Dust that is able to answer questions formed in the mind of the user. It is a symbol reader, with each of the 36 symbols having an infinite number of meanings…”

2005 was a momentous year for me, because I retired and relocated and started to work outside the structure of educational institutions that I’ve been in and around for 40-some years. I’m now free to follow my own interests and priorities, and what I do with my time is entirely mine to decide. I have at my fingertips the tools to construct and deconstruct, drawing on a variety of collections and interests that have always been restive within the confines of academic disciplines and institutions. The Web provides me with a congenial sort of audience: asynchronous, largely anonymous, not jockeying for grades or trapped in intergenerational hoohah. There’s a continuous flow of nutritive substances via the blogosphere and the remarkable creativity that’s summarized as Web2.x, and I have the joy of figuring out how to build fruitful interlinkages amongst apps and enthusiasms.

So I’m now an Independent Scholar, and my fondest wish is to form my process of continued learning into a public hyper-document. Surely that’s mostly so I can realize and enjoy it more fully myself, but it’s also a conscious effort to develop an example of how Educating self and providing on-ramps for others might be done. That’s what I was trying to do as a teacher, but generally the effort was against the grain of academia. Seems like it should be much more satisfactory in my own spaces, where no stinkin’ badges need be shown.

I have in mind to work with various media, to keep a weather eye peeled for new possibilities, and to continue to rely on the kindness of friends and strangers. There’s every reason to expect at least as much innovation in 2006 as I’ve enjoyed in 2005.

Specifically, I intend to explore OPML further, and I expect to get a lot further with Google Earth, with various APIs, and with sound in various forms. Whether I’ll do anything systematic with podcasting is still up in the air, and awaits inspiration and some reasonable solution to the problem of digital rights vis à vis my collections of recordings in various formats.

My evolving strategies for managing the flood of blog and Web material have relied pretty heavily on del.icio.us (especially for stuff I want to share with others) and Onfolio (mostly for collecting links that I’m still thinking about possible public disposition of). Yesterday it occurred to me that I should make some sort of analysis of the flow of stuff through tags and into folders, and a quick question to Onfolio’s Forum produced helpful suggestions for accomplishing that end. It seems that I gathered more than 1100 links into my Onfolio collections in the last 12 months, and added about 500 items to del.icio.us (there’s not a lot of overlap –stuff that was clearly of public interest went straight to del.icio.us). I haven’t used either service very intelligently or very systematically –tagging has been haphazard, and has proceeded by spates and droughts, and I haven’t annotated items very imaginatively, or taken the time to ruminate on what I’ve heaped up. I resolve to clean up that act in the coming year…

Which brings me to some continuing thoughts on the concept of resolution, and to a thread I’ve been following on Language Log. Yesterday, Bill Poser posted a beautifully constructed piece on Pointers, References, and the Rectification of Names, connecting a continuing discussion on computer languages (specifically, on the failings of Java) to a passage from The Analects (XIII:3), in which Legge has Master Kung saying

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.

David Hinton’s rendering is a bit less ponderous:

Listen. If names aren’t rectified, speech doesn’t follow from reality. If speech doesn’t follow from reality, endeavors never come to fruition. If endeavors never come to fruition, then Ritual and music cannot flourish. If Ritual and music cannot flourish, punishments don’t fit the crime. If punishments don’t fit the crime, people can’t put their hands and feet anywhere without fear of losing them. Naming enables the noble-minded to speak, and speech enables the noble-minded to act. Therefore, the noble-minded are anything but careless in speech. (1998:140)

The meaning of resolve that I’m considering emphasizes bringing things into focus, and maximizing the available acuity and detail –a much more worthy objective than promising oneself to do or not-do something. I don’t know much about Ritual and proprieties, but I’m all for the flourishment of music.

Diamanda Galas (that’s gaLAS) is one scary woman, fierce and uncompromising in her approach to music and her choice of material. Her stuff is emphatically not easy-listenin’, and it’s difficult to know where to start when introducing her to people who’ve never heard her. But consider two brief outtakes from a 2004 radio interview (from Hellenic Public Radio, but no longer available in their online archive) as a jumping-off place: gales of laughter (0:26) and on blues and rembetika (1:54).

Now, if you dare, try something from La Serpenta Canta. And, if you survive the intensity of that, move on to Defixiones, Will and Testament, which is “dedicated to the forgotten and erased of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides which occurred between 1914 and 1923…”

Whew. But for my money, she’s an amazing musician.

Here’s a guitar-mandocello improv, recorded in 2004. It’s about 5:15 and 10MB or so, and has some very nice moments. The astonishing and always-fluent guitar is Daniel Heïkalo, and the occasionally-coherent mandocello is me. This is straight from the digital recording –no EQ, no fancy tricks with mix or mastering, just as Daniel’s skills and equipment caught the passing moments.

Two group pictures dissected, branching out slightly from the Nova Scotia focus.

I’ve made some extracts from a 3-foot photograph, showing 113 members of the Jordan Marsh Rifle Club on May 27 1916, as a branch of the Nova Scotia Faces project.

My nephew Charlie is a master storyteller. I happened to catch one with the iRiver while we were recovering from Christmas dinner: Not much of a man.

In an article on literary prizes in the latest New Yorker, Louis Menard offers a bit of lambent prose that skewers a number of hypocrisies at once:

[James] English [author of The Economy of Prestige] interprets the rise of the prize as part of the “struggle for power to produce value, which means power to confer value on that which does not intrinsically possess it.” In an information, or “symbolic,” economy, in other words, the goods themselves are physically worthless: they are mere print on a page or code on a disk. What makes them valuable is the recognition that they are valuable. This recognition is not automatic and intuitive; it has to be constructed. A work of art has to circulate through a sub-economy of exchange operated by a large and growing class of middlemen: publishers, curators, producers, publicists, philanthropists, foundation officers, critics, professors, and so on. The prize system, with its own cadre of career administrators and judges, is one of the ways in which value gets “added on” to a work. Of course, we like to think that the recognition of artistic excellence is intuitive. We don’t like to think of cultural value as something that requires middlemen —people who are not artists themselves— in order to emerge. We prefer to believe that truly good literature or music or film announces itself. Which is another reason that we need prizes: so that we can insist that we don’t really need them.

I’m a lifelong sucker for the obscure and peculiar, and an undying fan of 3 Mustaphas 3 and other Royalty of the Bogus. Doug Schulkind at WFMU has delivered this,

as an end-of-year treat:
a suite of 20 mp3s that, taken together, blast the notion of ‘genre’ into smithereens. And I thought I had a good collection of the bizarre… Resolve to add Doug’s Give the Drummer Some (“The finest in Micronesian doo-wop, Appalachian mambo, Turkish mariachi, Pygmy yodelling of Baltimore, Portuguese juju, Cajun gamelan, tuba choirs from Mozambique, Inuit marching bands, Filipino free jazz, Egyptian kabuki theater, and throat singers of the Lower East Side”) to my stable of weekly musts. Many of the shows are archived, too.