I’ve bundled the February YouTube finds into a suite of 7 connected pages (so that they load more reliably and quickly), and just barely started a location for extracts from my yellow pads since 2018. The page of February links is unwieldy, but I haven’t decided what to do about that.
The tag cloud for my LibraryThing is updated and still under revision, but provides the beginnings of subject access to books on my library shelves.
And the Lexicon Project burgeons.
I’ve started to build oook.info/lexicon/ to contain the project that I’ve been gathering material for at oook.info/etc/lexicon.html. I expect it will summarize a sprawling domain of explorations, just right for a winter month.
I’m trying to pull together the fragments I’ve been sorting and knitting, to (a) summarize what I’ve been working on during the hiatus, and (b) to articulate what that activity has taught me (or is it learned me?) about the past, the present, and possibly the always-murky future. The result amounts to an assessment of who I am, and what it is that I do, and what I have been doing all along.
The core is a report of my recent bout of mental and digital housekeeping, but there’s also a reflective side [what It All Means] that has been more and more to the fore in the last 5 years: self explaining self to self by examining the Process. I’d like to think there’s something shareable with the like-minded others out there, something beyond the warm and fuzzy what a good boy am I sense that one gets from conversations with the Mirror.
My Word of the Year of 2024 was Curate, and I’m sticking with it for 2025 as I glance back over 2024 to see what I have and haven’t accomplished as a curator. In 2022 and 2023 the WotY was Narrative (see also the 2022 iteration), primarily concerned with extracting and articulating the Stories that I inhabit. Making sense of the STUFF that surrounds me…
Curation is partly a matter of identifying and addressing messes, working at negentropy by organizing bits strewn about. Begin with the image of library shelves: where do items belong in relation to one another? But clearly it quickly goes beyond linear (2-D) arrangement, and the mental model I’ve used to invoke 3-D (and 4-D) relationships is macramé.
One hopes to construct an eloquent and artful structure for one’s Knowledge —partly to discover what it is that one Knows, and to work out how to map and navigate the construction. There’s something spider-like and web-tendy, though I’m less concerned with catching metaphorical flies than with being able to explore amongst what I’ve collected. Because I am and have always been a collector.
The habit/method/strategy of emailing links to myself (and of course to like-minded others) has been with me for a long time, indeed back to my first uses of email in the early 1990s. HTML gave me the tools to Keep Found Things Found (KFTF) by constructing Web pages to trace my progress/process. Before blogs became a thing, I was making “log files” of my discoveries, and trying to inspire colleagues and students to do likewise. I was more successful for myself than as an inspiration to others. It’s all at oook.info, reaching back 30 years.
And here I’ll invoke Informing Others, and cite the image of the Energizer Bunny to describe how my enthusiasm was received, but temper that vision with a digression into Walt Kelly’s Bun Rabbit, and the broader subject of avatars.
The thing is, all of this Informing is digressive, forever hareing off [gratuitous lagomorph reference] after another promising bit of curiosity/interest. Rabbit Hole does seem an apposite metaphor.
So my most outstanding mess/problem was the overstuffed email inbox of unread sent-to-self links, more than 1000. My Do Right page assembles my progress, much of it in the last two months. And what did I discover in assembling these chronological summary pages? The tracks of my curiosity and kaleidoscoping interests, laid out so they can be explored more easily: a nascent Index of my wanderings. Without such a catalog, it all becomes kind of a blur; but once the task is done, it’s practical to analyze the flow to discover and thus map my expanding and branching Interests. With every thing that crosses my path, there’s the question: how does it fit with and/or extend what I already know? And who of my Information clients would wish to know?
I have a lot of sensors/feelers deployed in Infospace, via print materials (NYRB, LRB, Literary Review, etc), digital subscriptions (paid and otherwise), RSS feeds, and sites I visit regularly (viz. YouTube)
The problem of curating the incoming flood of YouTube videos is vexing, and my interim solution of links displayed on HTML pages isn’t very satisfactory. The chaos could be reduced by sorting according to … well, what? And what’s a sensible workflow to get from lists to appropriate subcategories? Still thinking about THAT riddle.
After 3 weeks of use, a page of links to toothsome things for January 2025 is already pretty unwieldy, but at least it’s in chronological order, with dates for my encounters, and many of the entries have blockquoted extracts of their essence. The rationale is that something linked on that page seemed portentious or exemplary in some way, and so wanted to be at least maybe retrievable at some future time. What the page shows is Serendipities, showing how far I can wander in any given day via incoming traffic from Feedly and several subscriptions. Each link could easily become part of a Project…
The January 2025 collection of YouTube videos has sprawled even more messily, the main criterion for inclusion being a sense that I might want to find the video again. The gatheration could be sorted topically (music stuff of many kinds, art stuff, talk stuff…), but for the moment I’ve resorted to splitting the stream into Part A, Part B, and Part C. I suspect I’ll need another Part before the month is done.
I’m working on the year’s-end curation for 2024, with the intention to enhance retrievability for documents I’ve collected and created in several media and various form factors.
By laying these things out for inspection via web pages, I can derive some better understanding of where I’ve been in the last year, and perhaps develop a map of the landscape of rabbit holes I’ve visited. And maybe even construct a sense of What It All Means, and whither next to wander…
Parking these links in the blog will remind me where I’ve squirreled them away. I mean to update them as they are refined: weeded, sorted, commented… Here’s the current corps de ballet:
The Fourfold Root of Stoic Virtue Steven Gambardella
(not sure what to include)
Between the Bauhaus and Bell Labs David Krakauer, Santa Fe Institute
The focus on thinking with all of one’s sense and sensibility was a dominant feature of the Bauhaus, where according to the art historian Magdalena Droste, “[t]hanks to their basic training on the hand loom, however, students were equally capable of running small, artistic crafts workshops” and “A profession was thus created within the textile industry which had rarely been found before — designer.”
Between the engineering design of Bell Labs and the artistic design
community of the Bauhaus, I like to position the Santa Fe Institute. Complex systems are that special part of the universe “designed” by natural selection and self-organizing dynamics or by human collectives: organisms, ecosystems, markets, computers, and cities. And all organizations dedicated to understanding design in this larger, distributed sense have no choice but to accommodate very different styles of thought.…Our project is a radical one, which seeks to explore the frontiers of complex reality — the garden of machines, as it were — and emphasizes the precarious balance between individual iconoclasm, communitarian vision, and creative production.
Breathing Life into Bytes: The Enigma of Machine Consciousness Daniele Nanni
In the Western culture, thinkers like René Descartes championed the idea that our minds, distinct from our physical brains, hold our consciousness. His proclamation, “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), underscores that our self-awareness attests to our existence.
Following him, John Locke envisioned our minds as a tabula rasa (a blank canvas), gradually painted on by our life’s experiences. Contrastingly, David Hume saw consciousness as a mixtape of sorts, a collection of different experiences and perceptions. Immanuel Kant then threw in his two cents, suggesting our minds actively piece together our experiences into a cohesive narrative.
Fast forward a bit, and we find William James, a pioneer in psychology, proposing different “versions” of ourselves within our consciousness. And who can forget Sigmund Freud? With his iconic iceberg analogy, he illustrated our mind as largely hidden beneath the surface of our awareness.
As we mull over these Western theories, the East provides its own philosophical richness.
Ancient Indian Vedantic scriptures, such as the Upanishads, emphasize the concept of Atman or the inner self, and Brahman, the grand cosmic essence. They argue for a universal consciousness, where individual awareness is but a droplet in the vast ocean of existence.
Buddhism, with its profound insights from the Buddha, presents consciousness as ever-flowing. The doctrine of Anatta or “no-self” describes our conscious self not as a fixed entity but as an evolving stream of experiences.
Chinese philosophers weren’t far behind in their contributions.
Confucius rooted consciousness in relationships, emphasizing our interconnectedness. Then we have Daoism, with Laozi speaking of the Dao, suggesting that true consciousness aligns with the universe’s rhythm.
In juxtaposing these Western and Eastern thoughts, we discern a recurring theme: Consciousness is intricate, layered, and deeply connected to our experiences, surroundings, and perhaps even the cosmos.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Web3: The beginning of a digital renaissance? Jasvin Bhasin
(2010s)…a significant paradigm shift: the car was no longer seen as just a means of transport, but as a “computer on wheels” — a data machine equipped with lidar, radar and ultrasonic sensors. These sensors collected a wealth of data about the car’s environment. Enabled with deep learning and artificial neural networks the vehicles now made real-time decisions. Many car manufacturers also rolled out data intelligence platforms to implement next-best-action systems, that also used big data and predictive models. For example, to predict when a vehicle needs maintenance or provide recommendations for route changes based on traffic data. This capability to predict and plan actions based on data led to significant competitive advantage.
This era was also characterised by breathtaking visions where we imagined a future in which people owned electric vehicles that could drive themselves and recharge themselves. These vehicles were not only to be a means of transport, but also an integral part of our energy ecosystem. They could feed surplus energy into our homes and even offer the possibility to exchange this additionally generated energy via blockchain technologies in order to earn money with it…
…For a long time, the development of artificial intelligence was mainly seen as a sustaining and iterative innovation. But suddenly this perception has changed. Now, AI is seen as having a disruptive potential that is fundamentally changing our previous understanding of what qualifies as “work” and “creativity”. Another significant change was that during the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0, discussions focused mainly on the automation of factory workplaces. Now, however, the realisation begun to mature that knowledge workers could in fact be dispensable…
…Currently, a third of the world’s web traffic comes from just three companies: Google, Facebook and Twitter. At the same time, five companies — Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta — represent 50% of the total market capitalisation of the Nasdaq 100, a significant increase from a decade ago when their share was only 25%.
…Amara’s Law says: “We tend to overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term and underestimate the impact in the long term.”
Ambiguity Defines the Human Experience Douglas Rushkoff (from Team Human)
…we are mistaken to emulate the certainty of our computers. They are definitive because they have to be. Their job is to resolve questions, turn inputs into outputs, choose between one or zero. Even at extraordinary resolutions, the computer must decide if a pixel is here or there, if a color is this blue or that blue, if a note is this frequency or that one. There is no in-between state. No ambiguity is permitted.
But it’s precisely this ambiguity — and the ability to embrace it — that characterizes the collectively felt human experience. Does God exist? Do we have an innate purpose? Is love real? These are not simple yes-or-no questions. They’re yes-and-no ones: Mobius strips or Zen koans that can only be engaged from multiple perspectives and sensibilities. We have two brain hemispheres, after all. It takes both to create the multidimensional conceptual picture we think of as reality.
Besides, the brain doesn’t capture and store information like a computer does. It’s not a hard drive. There’s no one-to-one correspondence between things we’ve experienced and data points in the brain. Perception is not receptive, but active. That’s why we can have experiences and memories of things that didn’t “really” happen.
Our eyes take in 2D fragments and the brain renders them as 3D images. Furthermore, we take abstract concepts and assemble them into a perceived thing or situation. We don’t see “fire truck” so much as gather related details and then manufacture a fire truck. And if we’re focusing on the fire truck, we may not even notice the gorilla driving it.
Our ability to be conscious — to have that sense of what-is-it-like-to-see-something — depends on our awareness of our participation in perception. We feel ourselves putting it all together. And it’s the open-ended aspects of our experience that keep us conscious of our participation in interpreting them. Those confusing moments provide us with opportunities to experience our complicity in reality creation.
It’s also what allows us to do all those things that computers have been unable to learn: how to contend with paradox, engage with irony, or even interpret a joke. We don’t think and communicate in whole pieces, but infer things based on context. We receive fragments of information from one another and then use what we know about the world to recreate the whole message ourselves. It’s how a joke arrives in your head: Some assembly is required. That moment of “getting it” — putting it together oneself — is the pleasure of active reception. Ha! and aha! are very close relatives.
Fathoming the Archives again this morning, I ran across something I wrote in 1974, after my first year of teaching at Acadia, in a document called “How it looked, Spring 1974”. This was of course long before the WWW, html, even computer access (let alone ubiquity). Some of it presages my 1990 change of career:
So what I’m really getting at is that Information is one of our biggest problems. We have at the same time too much, such that we choke on information and get to be too blasé about what would have profoundly shocked us 10 years ago — and we have too little information because we keep being surprised by what the world serves up to us. The only way to improve that situation is to do something about it yourself — to start being aware of how much your own information structures are changing, and to start trying to achieve systematic understanding of the information that does come in. In a sense you have to do that, just for your own future protection. Or else you have to find a way to drop out completely.
The point is, we have to seek out and find meaningful alternatives to more-of-same. Short-run solutions aren’t solutions — they’re just palliatives to stave poff disaster, and disaster seems to be getting closer and closer.
Another from the Archives, from July 2002, just 3 years before I retired form W&L:
My version of postmodernism is to see the passing scene as chains of stories, the subtext of which (and often the explicit content of which) is about the networks of relationships that lie behind the observed Events. Juxtaposition.
The stories often leak into each other, sometimes because one is a hinge between them. The stories also link people, quite often people who have no idea that they’re linked. If I hear a story on NPR about going over Niagara Falls n a barrel, I’m linked to … the teller of the story, even though I didn’t retain his name … to the people in in the story, though they played their parts in the past, sometimes long ago, or (often enough) didn’t actually do what the story reports … to others who happened to hear the same radio program … and so on. The nature and strength of these connections may be pretty misty and faint, but my participation in them, even as a passive auditor, is of some significance to me, to what I know, to what I think about, to who I am.
I’m a collector and container of stories and linkages. Everybody is.
Sometimes stone-cold-obvious insights appear out of nowhere and you think: ah. So that’s how it is. Today’s case in point came as I watched a YouTube video:
(I began with this one:)
I’ve never studied geology in any formal way, but I have been accumulating bits of rock lore over the years, and I can look back to influences like John McPhee‘s Annals of the Former World (four books: Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California) and Geology of Newfoundland Field Guide: Touring Through Time at 48 Scenic Sites and a heap of other titles, gathered up in my usual hoovering fashion… actually quite a few books, as I begin to enumerate them and recall when and where and why I found/acquired them.
Anyhow, the stone-cold-obvious insight of the morning is that one can (should? must?) think of the 4 billion plus Terrestrial years of geological time as flows of material:
In fact, flow is at the heart of what we think of as time, across the range of scale from galactic (well, Universal&mdash lotsa galaxies out there…) to the microminiscule dance of electrons (whatever they are…). And of course the life-time scale of human activities (where anthropology lives and works) is a landscape animated by flow…
Would that I could transport this /insight/ back to when I began teaching, or better yet to when I began learning, and apply it to all of my various interests… The old hippy injunction to “Go with the Flow” is much more subtle than we knew… which is a pretty good launch pad for today’s inquiries.
This from my friends and co-conspirators Daniel and Tamara:
I decided to hunt down the background to that excellent precis, and found two nice versions as extracted from Leonardo’s A Treatise on Painting:
Look at walls splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colours. If you have to invent some scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys and hills, in various ways. Also you can see various battles, and lively postures of strange figures, expressions on faces, costumes and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good integrated form. This happens on such walls and varicoloured stones, (which act) like the sound of bells, in whose pealing you can find every name and word that you can imagine.
(from Goodreads)*** Leonardo da Vinci advised the budding artist with creative block to leave behind his blank canvas and stare at the stains on walls: ‘If you look upon an old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies, etc. Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with an abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new.’ Leonardo’s technique, which encouraged the viewer to search for meaning in chaos, referred back to myths about the origin of art in accidental shapes.
(from Tate-etc Christopher Turner ‘The deliberate accident in art’)
After an intense week of thinking and reading and writing about entanglement with computers, I fell to wondering about my own history of writing about things that were on my mind, and Montaigne bubbled up: I wondered if his Essays had been written for himself [they started out that way] and if it was only later that he bethought to publish them for wider readership [yes, in 1580]… and didn’t I have a Kindle book that would remind me… and sure enough I’d bought Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer in April 2011… so, worthwhile (a) to look at again, and (b) to consider the content and directions of that 11 years. It turned out to be a very interesting, worthwhile, and encouraging two days of re-reading Bakewell’s marvelous book. The structure of the book, limned by the subtitle, has chapters thusly:
- Q. How to live? A. Don’t worry about death
- Q. How to live? A. Pay attention: Starting to write Stream of consciousness
- Q. How to live? A. Be born
- Q. How to live? A. Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted
- Q. How to live? A. Survive love and loss
- Q. How to live? A. Use little tricks
- Q. How to live? A. Question everything: All I know is that I know nothing, and I’m not even sure about that
- Q. How to live? A. Keep a private room behind the shop
- Q. How to live? A. Be convivial: live with others
- Q. How to live? A. Wake from the sleep of habit
- Q. How to live? A. Live temperately
- Q. How to live? A. Guard your humanity
- Q. How to live? A. Do something no one has done before
- Q. How to live? A. See the world
- Q. How to live? A. Do a good job, but not too good a job
- Q. How to live? A. Philosophize only by accident
- Q. How to live? A. Reflect on everything; regret nothing: Je ne regrette rien
- Q. How to live? A. Give up control (Daughter and disciple; The editing wars Montaigne remixed and embabooned)
- Q. How to live? A. Be ordinary and imperfect
- Q. How to live? A. Let life be its own answer
And those 20 questions are potential fodder for many Convivium Questions.
The iPad Notebook of my highlightings of passages in the Kindle version captures the excitement of this reading, though any number of other stretches of the text could have been included—it’s that provocative a text.
And yes, it feels that my own writings are of the same allusive and digressive (not to say wandering…) ilk, such that a Project of attending more closely to Montaigne seems delicious to contemplate. So I’ve queued up several resources to hear, read, and enjoy exploring:
Jane Kramer’s New Yorker profile (Sept 7, 2009 and I recall reading it at the time)
Cotton/Hazlitt 1685/1877 translation of the Essays
from the Preface:
He was, without being aware of it, the leader of a new school in letters and morals. His book was different from all others which were at that date in the world. It diverted the ancient currents of thought into new channels. It told its readers, with unexampled frankness, what its writer’s opinion was about men and things, and threw what must have been a strange kind of new light on many matters but darkly understood. Above all, the essayist uncased himself, and made his intellectual and physical organism public property. He took the world into his confidence on all subjects. His essays were a sort of literary anatomy, where we get a diagnosis of the writer’s mind, made by himself at different levels and under a large variety of operating influences.
Montaigne’s times were in some ways not so very different from our own (France riven by religious conflict and inept government; physical danger from various marauders, including epidemic disease and the unpredictable thrashings of victims of structural inequalities, and uncertainties about the future), despite the vast gulf of differences in technologies that 440 years presents. The wonder of Montaigne’s essays [and it was he who coined the term ‘essai’…] is that they speak so clearly across that gulf, and have done so pretty continuously for all that time. Cotton’s translation of 1685 is still readable, and there’s a long-running Montaigne Industry, which charts a history of extremely varied readings and fashions and emphases (all ably and amusingly tracked by Bakewell).