My wife is a member of a local baby group, recently a Red Sox and a Yankee fan have been engaging in some good natured ribbing. The Red Sox fan recently shared this photo of her son at his first Red Sox / Yankee game:
Yup. We like to start'em young.
Got the new North American Levinas Society up and running, still needs some beta testing and some proofing, but I'm pretty pleased.
I used some pretty cool Fireworks techniques (when I launched this blog it was to publish tutorial work... that seems like a long time ago) on the dove, providing it some red highlights and glow. Lot of work for something that only I will ever notice.
Got the layout technique from an article in A List Apart. Pretty easy to follow and corrects a problem I run into on my new homepage: --how to make a flexible, two-column layout with the sidebar running the length of the content section. The solution? Essentially, make the border of the content section the same color as the siderbar, then float the sidebar into the exact position of the border. Pretty easy to do. Unlike my homepage, however, I can't use any background-images or even borders for the sidebar. Hopefully, the next-gen browsers will fully support the border-image property.
Spent an hour reviewing the W3C assessibility requirements. God they have to make those more friendly to non-programmers-- I'm pretty handy with computers and whole blocks of that document read like ancient Greek to me. While I'm pretty sure my site passes as the highest level of accessibility, I just gave up.
Have a meeting Friday to move the Levinas site to its permanent address (http://www.levinas-society.org).
Came across this webtool on Colin Brooke's blog: good, clean fun. It will read any plain text document (and you can just cut and paste from a Word document). Here's what my prospectus looks like as a tag cloud:
Pretty much what I would expect, though I'm a bit surprised that Derrida doesn't have a presence... well, perhaps its fitting that he only haunts the document.
Slash.dot's had a running conversation of a recent NYTimes article that included a list of the top ten most important video games of all-time. Their list:
[Henry] Lowood and the four members of his committee -- the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and Christopher Grant, a game journalist -- announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994)
The list was compiled by collecting entries from experts in the field (and the Slash.dot discussion centers on the fact that there seems to be no clear metric for decisions). Nothing here surprises me--save that I have never heard of the "Sensible World of Soccer." I am surprised that no old school Sierra games made the list (I played significant amount of King's Quest and Space Quest in my formative years--not enough to make the list below, however).
Here's my list, and my metric: these are the games that I have played the most, chronologically, in my life. For whatever reason, they captured my attention and would not let go.
Well, not the best games of all time, just the ones that have eaten up the most hours of my life. Bases Loaded almost made the list. Last summer I played an entire 30 year career as a starting pitcher in MLB The Show. I'm sure I'm fogetting a few more that will come back to me later...
Things to do:
Sigh. No more posting for me until this list is complete--I'll link to things as they are finished.
Unfortunately, I have even more things to add to the list, Intro Writing Committee work and other such fun-ities.
The question of the book, as we shall see, is also that of a certain totality. (5)The question of the book concerns the end of totality, a changing of media that moves away from materiality (book's binding, heard twice) to virtuality. Speaking of the "work" of the "book," Derrida writes:
[...] the unity or body of an oeuvre marked out by a beginning and an end, and so a totality: assumed to be conceived and produced, and indeed signed by an author, a single identifiable author, and offered up for the respectful reading of a reader who doesn't meddle with it, doesn't transform it on the inside--in what we now call an "interactive" way. (6)This reader, which has never existed (?), is certainly a fabrication in a digital age. This is Ong's reader--outside of the room, of the mind, of the moment of composition. But this is not the readerS one encounters in the digital, the readers that one forms a formative relationship (not always necessarily agonistic, either). A move from the single-author to the network (isn't English already comfortable with a move away from the single author study?). What's more, these readers carry into other places, we (I mean I) write for them all the time. Every piece of writing is a blog post. Or a comment. Or a response. For the network. And, as scholars such as Jeff Rice stresses, every act of reading in the digital sphere is also writing (del.icio.us, digg, etc.) So, to use the Rice example, my response to Derrida's essay is very much connected to a post Rice put up this morning (on network "work" as [possibly not] scholarly "work"). This is the academic attention economy. We deliver our time. Tracing the etymology of "book" related words, Derrida writes:
[...]like the presence of the Greek tithenia ("to put") in bibliotheke, they all point up the act of putting, depositing, but also the act of immobilizing, of giving something over to a stabilizing immobility, and to the statute, to the statutory and even state institution, which alerts us to all the institutional, juridical, and political dimensions that we must also debate. Setting down, laying down, depositing, storing, warehousing--this is also receiving, collecting, totalizing, electing, and reading by binding. So the idea of gathering together, as much as that of the immobility of the statutory and even state deposit, seems as essential to the idea of the book as to that of the library. (7)Wow, I love the play working through that passage--book as a statue (inorganic), which is the inorganic organicism of the Humanist human?. And why, perhaps, so many of us are ready to be posthumans? One can project where this is going--what happens when our dominant communicative medium, the everyday medium is no longer the "book"? Derrida asks:
Will we continue for long to use the word library for a place that essentially no longer collects together a store of books?Anyone who has strolled through a library lately sees this transformation... the other day a friend of mine told this anecdote:
Teacher: so, the call number of a book will help you find the book in the library. [after a few more minutes of lecture] Student (sincere): so, let me get this straight, if I call that number, the library will send me the book?Derrida:
[...]nonetheless the underlying tendency would be for such a place increasingly to be expected to become a space for work, reading and writing that was governed or dominated by texts no longer corresponding to the "book" form: electronic texts with no paper support, texts not corpus or opus--not finite and separable oeuvres; groupings no longer forming texts, even, but open textual processes offered on boundless national and international networks, for the active or interactive intervention of readers turned coauthors, and so on. (7-8)It is not a surprise to me that this discussion is seasoned with Levinas' language--that the finitude of the "book" is (not) contrasted to the infinite of the book-to-come, the network. Derrida stresses that "the-book-to-come" will expectedly have to resist BEING the book, it will be a struggle to hold this book back as an infinite becoming, a non-teleological tension between collection and dispersion (did I say Levinas, I must have meant Heidegger, or both). This book-to-come will be haunted by Hegel, God, totality, dialectic. Desire for the "onto-encyclopedic or neo-Hegelian model of the great total book, the book of absolute knowledge linking its own infinite dispersion to itself, in a circle" (15). The danger is in thinking this circle closed, a circuit. A network is not a circuit. Derrida:
Now what is happening today, what looks like being the very form of the book's to-come, still as the book, is on the one hand, beyond the closure of the book, the disruption, the dislocation, the disjunction, the dissemination with no possible gathering, the irreversible dispersion of this total codex (not its disappearance but its marginalization or secondarization, in ways we will have to come back to); but simultaneously, on the other hand, a constant reinvestment in the book project, in the book of the world or the world book, in the absolute book (this is why I also described the end of the book as interminable or endless), the new space of writing and reading in electronic writing, traveling at top speed from one spot on the globe to another, and linking together, beyond frontiers and copyrights, not only citizens of the world on the universal network of a potential universitas, but also any reader as a writer, potential or virtual, or whatever. That revives a desire, the same desire. It re-creates a temptation that is figured by the World Wide Web as the ubiquitous Book finally reconstituted, the book of God, the great book of Nature, or the World Book finally achieved in its onto-theological dream, even though what it does is to repeat the end of that book as to-come. (15)Phew, that's a long passage, but a good one. Like Borges' fable, we must becareful not to become emperors' seeking the map--to consider the WWW as the empire to be consolidated, synthesized, hierarchized, ontologized, mapped. The WWW is an answer to the questions posed by differance, differends, conditions most post-modern. It will not provide an answer (except, maybe, "forty-two"). While the internet can bring us together to create answers, it will also create questions, perhaps only questions? Oh the AGONy. Both visions presented above are extremes, two specters of the book-to-come; our lived experience will be mitigated through these (and many other) specters. Derrida concludes with four points--one of which interests me in connection with recent debates surrounding net neutrality:
3. The Right to Books. Between the two fantasies I have just mentioned, the turbulence and impasses have, as always, a juridical and ethical-political form. If everything symbolized the World Wide Web can have a liberating effect (in relation to controls and all forms of policing, and even the censorship exercised by the machines of power--of the nationstate, the economy, the universities, and publishing), it is all too obvious that that only advances by opening up zones without rights, "wild" areas, areas of "anything goes" (ranging from the most dangerous, politically speaking, to the most insignificant and the most inept, the worst that coudl come and fill in, paralyze, or break up space). A difficult question in a war for rights and power that was already ongoing at the time of the book's domination, but is obviously taking on new forms and new rhythms. These must be recognized, analyzed, and treated fairly as possible" (17-18).What gives the WWW the diffusive power Derrida discusses? Movement both ways- the fact that every reader is a writer (potentially). And under the technologies of web2.0, the intellectual networks, the sharing, the push-button endorsement, the tag, the attention economy, "I think, therefore I am" to "we digg what we might never (hope to) perhaps become," this movement becomes as natural as blinking.
I awoke this morning to a terrible scene:
Immediately I took a quick survey of the damage:
I conjured the spirit of my favorite Belgium detective... he immediately instructed me to locate the origin of the crime:
Next, I investigated the body of the victim. The injuries were severe. It seems the killer, or killers, took pleasure in their work.
With a sleuth's eye, I took a quick look around at the suspects:
My instincts told me the truth would "emerge" in time... no dog can hold it forever, and when nature's duty called, the Poirot in me would be there, checking for traces of cushion...stay tuned
A couple of posts back I talked about the resume project my students have been working on--today we created a new style sheet for it using a background-image technique I first learned from Karl Stolley as a member of his sustainable web design group last year. The workshop went well, and now those resume's look's quite different. I've ran into a few padding issues between Firefox for PC and Safari. Don't bother looking at it IE (yet--I'm not going to cover conditional comments until a few projects from now).
Up next for my class, the Zen Garden--I'm excited for this project. I am only going to look at the projects in FF/PC, so that should allow my class to get into one design (rather than having to worry about cross-browser compatibility, I'm not tackling this until their service learning project).
I've written up the first four of the six sections of my Web Standards for Professional Writing project--its at 35 pages single spaced without most of the background images. Up nex for XHTMLt: definition lists, classes, spans, and images; for CSS parent and child selectors (to go with Zen Garden), floats, and using small background images to create texture (Karl does this on his homepage, I do it as well--this one I figured out by myself! Its nice to see that I "naturally" came to do something similar to what my original standards-mentor does... what's that thing about great minds?)
