Writing

There's a point to this post, and I'll get to it. But the peroration has to come first.

I spend all day on a computer ... in this I am not unique ... and I write more very day now than ever before in my life, even when I was writing a dissertation. This too is not unique, at least the writing-a-lot part. But I have to admit, or aver, that I part company with most when I say that I loathe sloppy writing almost to the point of obsession. Of course in "averring" this, I expose myself to the virtual scorn of those who might, inexplicably, think that I slop around in my prose. George-Costanza-like, I protest too much. But, fortunately, complaints on the new social media Internet are fleeting, Peter-Pen-like, if I may. So even the Costanza-being in which all of us participate to one degree or another dissolves before we can fulminate sufficiently to make it a hard fact. You cannot dissolve that which never congeals.

So at MRU, the major research university where I string pearls in exchange for just enough oyster meat to keep me from shrinking into oblivion, we had a little micro-contre-temps in which I was confronted with a couple of examples of sloppy prose. Sloppy prose, like the inexcusable driving that passes for navigation these days, depends upon proximity. If you are in the crosswalk, then the feather-brain on the cell phone in the giganto SUV planet-killer is a proximate threat to life and limb and deserves a full-voiced reproach. But in the office, the sloppy prose which invades one's space cannot be the subject of reproach ... people are sensitive, and one wants to be sensitive ... but still, you have to put paid to it. Sloppy prose is like a rash ... untreated it creeps and grows and invades warm, moist, private places that you thought you had under control.

I cannot abide sloppy prose.

But abide I must because this is a world of sloppy prose, and it is a world in which sloppy pose is lauded and lavished and insufficiently lamented.

So, at MRU, there occurred a couple of instances of sloppy prose, and they came to my attention too late for effective intervention. In terms of proximity, this prose would be in web sites and on monitors which are immediately proximate to the one which I directly control, and in a zone over which I am supposed to exercise a certain oversight notwithstanding that the terms of authority are neither clear no exercisable. I was confronted with the need for a stratagem, and I could think of nothing better than changing the sight lines. I went into a meeting with my earnest, likable, engaging, and committed colleagues, and I regaled them with raw rhetorical theory on the relationship between authorial voice and postulated audience.

I live and breathe rhetoric ... and it was a little spasm of joy to spend a few hours perusing Aristotle on rhetoric in preparation for a meeting at MRU. And I practice rhetoric in my job all the time. But is is always the same rhetoric ... as it must be given my position as a content maker for a central office in one of the most important academic institutions in the world ... I do not exaggerate. The rhetoric at MRU consists of an authorial voice that is authoritative, cool, composed, concise, and a postulated audience that is attentive, open, pressed for time, and rational.

The problem in contending with people in the writing zone about audience is that they always substitute real or biological audience for intended audience ... and in any event, they ought to be talking about postulated audience. When you think that you write for an actual audience, you are condemned to pandering or ignorance, or both. But when you sit on the cusp of a dialectic between real/intended audience and the audience that you choose to invent, the postulated audience, you grasp at the possibility that writing is a mode of changing people. You pull an actual audience to the image of audience that you create in writing.

That's how I think.

But I have not been applying that in my blog. It bugs me that I seem to blog less and less, that each night starts with good intentions and ends with a promise to look at it again tomorrow. There is no excuse at MRU for not getting one's writing done ... that is the way of the work world, of course. And I write and I write and I write. But the blog is silent. I post on Facebook ... I have at least two Twitter accounts that I feed. I write dozens upon dozens of emails every week ... and I am such a punctilious little putz that each email is tightly composed and subject to non-negotiable rules of composition and form.

But the blog alone suffers ... and that must stop.

So in aid of writing, and blogging, I have come to the conclusion that the answer to not writing enough is to create the requirement not merely to come up to one's previous standards, but to exceed them. With this post, I am committing to posting something thrice weekly, with deadlines of Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday before I go to bed. And I have created a new blog where I plan to post collections of reflections on educational technology. I'll link to it when it gets a little more substance.

And that, dear reader, is the point I promised. I'm a-gonna blog like I mean it, because I do mean it. Thrice weekly, or else.

Photos by Arod, part of my alphabet series that is seeing the light of day right now for the first time.

Metablog: One Year

It is exactly one year ago that I wrote my first real post for this blog. That makes this a good day, and it is the better because I am now clear of the big presentation that has been on my plate at MRU, the major research university at which I toil. And, moreover, it is the eve of my sainted mother's first cruise in the Caribbean with her two sisters.

When I started this blog, I didn't know what to expect ... I just wanted to write in a way that was more public than the years of private imaginings that had been my chief venue. That first post was just a ramble based on a ramble, and I promised myself that I would have no rules about writing except that I would not write anything which would lose me a job that I wanted, nothing that my mother would call disgusting, and otherwise anything I chose to write. I've stuck to that deal. Even though I know that the MRU legal office keeps its eyes on employee blogs about which it is cognizant, and even though lots of my colleagues know about my scribblings, I still have that one job that I want which is the one that I have. My mother, on the other hand, is easy to amuse but difficult to disgust ... I cannot imagine anyone so low as to want to disgust my wonderful mother ... and so I have kept faith, as it were, with my second rule. And, on the third hand, with a due nod to Click and Clack if you gather my drift, I have certainly kept my vow to ramble only in those fields in which I am native. So, a year comes to a close with a little self-satisfaction.

Now self-satisfaction ought to be one of the seven deadly sins. The real ones are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. I think that lust is a virtue, one which only turns to a sin when practiced darkly and secretly; so I substitute self-satisfaction. The seven deadly sins should be divided into two types, to whit, those that are absolutely sins (gluttony, greed, envy, and self-satisfaction), and those that are sins only when their object is ill-deserving (sloth, wrath, and pride). I have blogged against the glutotny and greed of our society as it swallows itself in an orgy of preening over-consumption. And I always try to distinguish those moments when sloth, wrath, and pride serve us and when they undermine us. Sloth in the name of refreshment, wrath at injustice, and pride in contribution ... what's wrong there.

But I digress.

Isn't that the point of a blog ... but to digress?

So back to this morning's presentation. The way in which I produce the MRU course catalog is undergoing a massive change ... we are adopting a "collaborative, distributed content management system" in my own words, now immortalized in PowerPoint, that limitless destructor of the English language. The photos in this post are from the presentation. But, hey, if you're going to have a job you have to row in the direction the river flows, and we will make a great catalog this new way, and one that is more electronic.

Still, I will not have the pleasure of a go-to-press day quite like those I have enjoyed over the last seven years. But I will move onward and hopefully upward. And I will still get to ramble on here a little when the press of work is not too great.

Work is the biggest obstacle to blogging ... it is, in that same sense, the biggest obstacle to living free.

I have posted 184 times in a year, 185 if you count this one. That's better than one every two days, but the more recent data suggests that I will settle in to 2-3 posts a week. I have averaged 75 unique visits a day, which is sufficiently satisfying. It keeps going up, but the vast majority of the visits are via Google searches and Google image searches. Curiously, the single greatest source of search-visits is the short post on Barry Lyndon ... I suspect that the provocative photo is the source of the fascination. But I also continue to have numerous visits through people who search the name of Jaffar Kiani, the hapless victim of a religious stoning.

I am gratified by that for nothing so enrages me (see wrath above) as sanctimonious religious violence and hatred. No one who reads me can doubt my consistency on the notion of the inherent evil of religion. It has been a joy to express in one way or another my bottomless belief that any soul is free to believe whatever nonsense they want to, but religion is the curse of our species.

That said, I am fascinated by religious history, as I am by pretty much any history. Blogging has actually led to a decided increase in my reading habit ... almost back to the level of those halcyon days before I became a graduate student. Nothing quite sucks the love of reading out of a body as does a near decade of reading for graduate studies. I overcame that, though, and read again now for pleasure and reflection.

But as I look back on what I have read in the last year, it strikes me that I have left behind any number of good posts that I might have issued. I still want to write something about why Alfred was great, and why the very cultural success of the middle Islamic period came to guarantee the present airless immobility of Islamic cultures, and why the latter-day idolizing of figures such as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane are ill-placed, and why I think that a revisit to Frederick the Great will pay dividends.

Writing posts about history requires just a little more time than is allowed as I typically sit at the bar in the kitchen of the apartment I share with my famous roommate and bartender RL (on famous, see this post) drinking the nightly cocktail and watching him cook dinner as he is doing right now. Tonight, in celebration, we started with a Junipero gin martini, and now a Junipero gin Hearst with Barolo Chinato Cocchi. Writing lengthy posts sometimes takes more than a sitting, and that makes me feel as if I should not interpose a post on pithier and more rapidly produced subjects, typically cranky. I should be less bureaucratic about it, and I will try to live by that.

Speaking of dinner, I see the oven clock says 2 minutes, so I had best fade into tonight's pleasant warm evening.

In sum, love being a blogger, love the blogosphere, looking forward to this evening next year when I celebrate number 2 ... may it come, but may it come slowly.

Ooops

Three decidedly cranky posts in a row. I am trying to be good about posting, and hence the crankiness ... I guess I had best try to have an optimistic day tomorrow so I can post something nice. I have a budding post on the key issues of early islamic history. But that will require an uninterrupted hour of quiet and reflection. Perhaps I will write about how nice puppies are.

Rambling

Not sure why these pauses in blogging occur. During the day, I think about what it is that I am thinking bout that I ought to blog about ... and then in the evening I manage to find some other thing to do, and finally postpone blogging to tomorrow. Gotta find a way out of that because I want to blog nightly ... certainly I am opinioned enough!

So a few things on life's way. I keep aquariums ... aquaria is the spelling I prefer. A year ago, I had a failed experience with keeping some Oscars in a 60-gallon tank, and I have just let the tank run empty every since hoping that the ammonia problem would eventually self-correct. Well it did, but I waited a while to make sure. Last week I put 10 tetras of some strip in there, and they are thriving. I am happy. I think it will be a while before I return to the Oscar attempt. But at least I have life in that aquarium.

That is the more satisfyaing becuae we are approaching Christmas ... say what ... because we are approaching the 17th annual (actually 19 years minus two missed years) gala Christmas party. In July, I wrote about how my life is tent-poled around two great events, the second of which is the Christmas party. I had hoped to hold it this year on the 23rd, but it turns out that faithfulness to a number of friends demands that we hold it on the 16th.

So this is going to be a little placeholder post that announces that I am going to blog Christmas ... setting it up as I have done for 17 of that last 19 years ... the first three of which were at my friend Kurt's house, but I will explain all that.

I'll put a Christmassy photo up on this post tomorrow since we get off work at noon.

100

This is post 100! Writing this blog has been a deeper and more expansive experience than I could have imagined ... just as fulfilling, frankly, but more challenging than what I thought it would be. I promised myself only two limits regarding content when I started ... nothing that would lose me a job that I wanted and nothing that my mother would call disgusting ... and I think I have stayed within those bounds. But actually writing the thing raises an array of shifting micro-limits that I have to consider one by one as they arise. That turns out to be one of those expansive experiences.

As I re-read posts, I am probably a little too often cranky by say a third. I keep thinking that I should have more puppy-dog posts ... writing in the line of, "Jeez, aren't puppies cute." But cute as puppies may be, extolling their cuteness is boring for me and likely my reader. That raises another issue ... I promised myself that I would write this for myself. If others read it, that is great. But if I write with a dominant view to attracting others, then I lose myself and the challenges that make this sort of activity rewarding.

But a dichotomy like that ... writing for yourself versus for a putative audience ... is really a bit of a fraud, especially for someone who styles himself a lit-crit, if not perhaps brassy enough to call himself a literary critic. There is always an imagined audience ... I would assert that there is an imagined audience for a day dreamer snoozing in the sun imagining life on Mars in some fantastic future. I have been just such a day dreamer, and I have more than once interrupted my musings to imagine what kind of audience I have secretly constructed.

So too with a blog. I use a tool called Site Meter which gives me some data on how people get to my site. By far and away the one search term that outnumbers all other is the poor sod who was stoned to death by the bloodthirsty mullahs of Iran ... I'm not going to name him, because I want people who google his name to find my pointed comments. I had one today from Oman. No comments, though.

In fact, not very many bloody comments at all. A number of friends email me or discuss posts in person. I kind of expected enraged religionists to periodically condemn me to hell ... but, o well. Beware what you ask for. We know how bloodthirsty the believers can get.


I went to a forum today at MRU ... remember that MRU is Major Research University, which stands in for the major research university at which I toil. The head of the libraries talked about new endeavors in the digital humanities. He's quite a speaker ... a little rotund, white hair, a bow tie, and a tweed jacket ... but dropping technoid terminology with the same aplomb as only a decade ago a like man would have dropped some then-zinger-now-turgid terminology such as "crosscultural" or "polysemic" or "semiotician" or "seme." The curious thing about the power of technology is that it is re-privileging those who stand for content. I think that there are two new exploding forms of content on the web. This blog is part of a redefinition of what is current, and the exploding digital humanities cyberinfrastructure is part of the redefintion of how you research things, how you look things up. The danger is that the "australopithecines" of the ilk of Comcast and Microsoft and what-not, fearing the explosion of real content, manage to substitute empty piffle that makes them money ... yes, that battle seems lost. But every blog and every digitized book is a spit in the eye to those folks.

Getting a little lost here ... pause while I go search for some photos.


Back now. Another great treat in writing the blog has been to parade out a bunch of the kooky photographs that I like to take. I take dozens, even hundreds of photos every day, and I have slowly become accustomed to killing the ones that do not work. The photo above is from a mystery book store near UCSF, and the one at the top of this post is from one of the new French public toilets that provide relief and, by report, a comfortable place for junkies to shoot up. Ah, the joys of a liberal city. But the guy pictured seems one of the better sort of new San Franciscan, notwithstanding the goody-two-shoes entreaty to volunteer.

Whoops, getting cranky. And that is how I will end this little self-congratulation. I always regret the overly cranky posts ... not so much because I do or do not agree with them, as because throwing a public hissy fit is so uncouth. I feel bad about dumping yesterday on fat midwestern tourists ...I should be happy that I live in a city that tourists feel they should feel. I like the tourists ... I like them because they leave a lot of money here, because they tend to stay in their designated districts, what I call spaceship tourism, and because just often enough they provide a little non-local eye candy. Now as to the 'burbanite real estate monsters ... we'd be better off without them, but who am I to say? Who indeed.

So 100 posts ... I'll try to be less cranky and focus more on content. Try, try, try.

Photos by Arod.

Metablog

I managed to work myself into a bit of a tizzy about the brutal stoning of Jaffar Kiani. I think that nothing since the Nazis, or the Catholic Inquisition, matches the Iranian state for savagery and barbarism, if not efficiency. They are disgusting.

But the post I have been trying to construct will not quite come together. It has far too much anger ... state murder enrages me more than I can explain ... and my editorial endeavors at MRU are at a fever pitch right now. There is not enough time to write myself through the problems.

The attempt did lead to a long ramble through the pages of Jean Genet who, more than any writer, grasps the sublimed erotic character of state murder. I read Genet when I was 19, 20. I read a good chunk of Funeral Rites on an island in the middle of a lake on the shores of which my father had a summer job as a chef one summer as he transitioned from headhunter to nightclub manager. I had borrowed a boat and rowed out to this lonely place to consume this eerily erotic book that was certainly deeper than I could fully grok at that point ... but there would never be a point in my life where I could feel it as deeply as I did then.

It is in Miracle of the Rose that Genet is in raptures about the condemned Harcamone, not to mention sundry other doomed thugs and lovers. Perhaps I need to find a metaphorical island, silent and uninhabited, to re-encounter the raw innocent eroticism that is Genet, and to extract from it the horrors from which he recoils and which yet he simultaneously embraces.

So I have to give up on this first attempt to blog the nightmare of capital punishment ... but I thank blogging for giving me two nights of wandering through an old friend, Jean Genet. There will be more executions ... perhaps none as brutal as the Iranian stoning ... and I can take up this subject again. Because I did the research ... there is a stark and horrifying picture here of some workmen burying a young woman before her stoning, and the entire law is here, insane and chilling in its detail and matter-of-factness and savagery.

Meanwhile, still working 11 hours a day, 6 days a week on my course catalog ... two weeks and six days to go till I go to press.

Click here for other posts I have written about Jaffar Kiani.

Metablog: Failing Your Way to Success

Not sure if yesterday's post was sharp or a pile of wet refuse. But, notwithstanding a bunch of micro-edits today, I'm going with it. I have not written a significant amount of criticism or rhetoric since I finished my dissertation in 1997. The ideas ... juxtaposition and reversal, the tyranny of relevance, reversal of authority and authenticity, as-if consciousness ... keep swimming around up there, and they influence how I observe and think. But applying them to subject matter and then publishing what I think is not an instantaneous route to success, as it were. Still, one must fail in order to succeed.

Part of the problem is in switching from a near-decade ago mode of dissertation writing in which no limit on length imposed itself to the decidedly aphoristic medium of a blog. Yesterday's post was around 1100 words, and I think that is the longest I have posted.

Clearly, I need to tease out what I think about relevance before I can rest with it. I distrust relevance as a concept because its validity escapes its statement. By that I mean, that the proof of relevance is not in itself, or in absorbing it, but in the relationship to which it points which is the relationship between a topos and some social being, whether that is an individual or a group. From my vantage, that means that there inheres in the idea of relevance a false consciousness in the present day precisely because of the expanding yet debased ideas of identity that we have adopted. If the proof of relevance is in a relation between an idea and a person, and a person is defined by an identity, then the speciousness of the idea of identity inheres in relevance.

This is the basis of the notion of the tyranny of relevance. I like to say that anything human is relevant to me, but that relies upon a smug conceit that I can be somehow more ineluctably human that others, particularly those who would not adhere to my distrust of identity. So even my own embrace of relevance as non-specific is founded upon a character flaw.

Ah, to err is human. And to be airy is human. I think I have managed both at once.

administrivia

Been a blast writing this blog, and I'm only on my 10th day. But it raises issues that I didn't expect, and I think it worth addressing these from time to time.

So the first such issue is this: the name is Arod, rhymes with Herrod, nothing to do with A-Rod who came along decades after I was Arod. It was the given name of my paternal grandfather's whom I adored and who died when I was 10, and it is a name that is liberally sprinkled around in my family. It occurs in the Bible, Numbers 26:17. No idea of where it came from in the family. It is my middle name, and it has been my Internet handle since I first had an email account in 1994. My friends, however, call me Stephen.

A couple of issues relate to identity and identifying. Anyone who chose to do so could identify me by name pretty quickly, and I am not really trying to hide it. But I would rather keep my identity a little fuzzy on the blog itself, at least for now, and require that extra step or two of anyone who wants to have the actual moniker. Why? See below.

I have also chosen to identify my friends, acquaintances, and family rather obliquely by using initials that may or may not correspond to their actual names unless any of them tell me explicitly that they prefer that I identify them or, perhaps, link to their Internet presence. And I am going to identify the place where I work as a Major Research University or MRU. Again, you can find out where I actually work in about 3 or more clicks, but if you have to know it by name you will have to do that work.

Why? This blog is about my intellectual and ideational ramblings born of a lifetime of study, both formal and informal, but always passionate and involved. It is not about the specificity of identity either of me or where I am now or of whom I know or have known. The Internet paradoxically allows us simultaneously to be more identifiable and less unique. So if there is anything unique here, it is not in the naming of an identity but rather in what I might say and, more importantly, who out there is touched by it, whether that be a couple of friends or a self-selected cross-section of folks whose take on ideas and thinking bears come congruity with mine. I am not concerned about who or how many look at this, but I want whoever does look at it to do so because of some part of what I write, not some part of any specificity which I can identify or which they can identify.

I am a little suspicious of identity, anyway. You see, incongruity, ambivalence, and looking at the edges are features of where I came from, where I am, and where I am getting to. So the approach mirrors this.

I remember an anecdote about Stephen King who said, in response to the news that he has macular degeneration, that it was okay with him because he always looked at things out of the corner of his eye anyway. I like to look at things square on, but I prefer to turn my gaze not to the center but to the boundaries between things. And boundaries are usually fuzzy, not hard.

So, if this is a pile of steaming crap to you, then you will probably gag at my ramblings. If not, check me out.