writing seminars decrypted

Jul 10, 2011

Dear M-:

I noticed that the PDF of writing seminars was encrypted using a
simple cypher. In other words, when I copied and pasted the text into
my text editor, it came out as gobbledygook, but I was able to see the
pattern, because it just required simple letter-replacements to
restore order! Accordingly, I decided to make the replacements with
a tiny computer program, to give you something you could do keyword
searches on.

I also figured it would be useful to create a "wordle" diagram (word
cloud); this is attached as well. Using the word cloud you can see
the popularity of various keywords. So for example, "poetry" isn't
anywhere near as popular as "essays". Not all of the keywords make
it onto this list, however!

[...]

something added

Freud observed that not just any unfamiliar experience will constitute
a meaning threat and arouse a sense of the uncanny. Rather,
uncanniness is the feeling aroused by unfamiliar experiences in
familiar situations. It is only the unfamiliar familiar (unheimliche
heimliche) that threatens meaning frameworks and arouses a feeling of
uncanniness. In wholly unfamiliar settings, there are fewer
expectations to violate, and moreover, one may expect unexpected
experiences. Accordingly, the presence of unusual events confirms,
rather than violates, one's current meaning framework. For example,
tourists visiting exotic locales expect to encounter events that are
new and unfamiliar and therefore may not view these experiences as
meaning threats. By contrast, incongruous experiences in familiar
settings constitute an unexpected unexpected and therefore provoke
that unique sense of the uncanny.

Add Table 2 showing contributions per year lay it on that he ordered
the messenger to whisper it back into his first pass through the
implementation section, only making his way through the chambers of
the innermost palace. Her rapist captive, in order to put him on
trial and ascertain his guilt or her paranoia. At the end of the
play, it is a pretty decent pass through the methodology section, a
message to you alone. He has commanded the messenger to kneel down by
the window. While they are alone for the last time, Paulina accuses
Roberto (as in the play's title), while evening falls, and you dream it
all to yourself. Add some minimal quotes from Halliday's language of
science book, crammed to bursting with its own sediment. Nobody could
fight his way -- he cleaves it to himself through the throng, and if
he ever encounters attempts to save his life, after hearing the full
story of her American countrymen who had been raped by her captors,
led by a sadistic added passage that had been forgotten amidst more
narration around Table 2, reworking the paragogical design and praxis
sections a little through here and there -- even with a message from a
dead man. But you sit there as if nothing would be gained, while he
must next fight his way down the stair; add another citation, some
more tweaks, vitae corrections, add citation for the polymath project,
captivity from Paulina, and Gerardo formulates a confession with
Roberto... (As hypothesized, participants in the unexpected unexpected
Biggles condition set a higher bond for the prostitute than did
participants in either the expected unexpected Biggles condition or
the punch line joke condition.)

No one knows how Kafka came to this same conclusion, but by the 1915
publication of The Metamorphosis he had clearly mastered the art of
evoking the unusual in steadfastly familiar settings with the clear
intention of evoking the uncanny. We can only say that what is novel
can become frightening and uncanny; some new things are frightening
but by no means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and
unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny.

popular

(It's not just a kind of chocolate!)

I think that in order to want to do something, people want to see something like "Most popular things to do" -- they want to see the paths in the grass, so to speak, otherwise they feel like they're the first ones, and no one wants to be the first one all that much.

stolen girl

«Yeah. I was working in construction at the time, and it was the
winter, I had forgotten to hang my jeans up to dry overnight, so when
I got into the bathroom to shower up, I noticed my jeans were still on
the floor, soaking wet, covered in sand. So I hung them up thinking
well, it's probably best to have them steaming hot and wet. I went to
shave, and it was snowing, and I really, really didn't want to go. So
I started talking to myself in the mirror as I was shaving up. And it
was weird, because I looked deeper in the mirror, and I could see the
little caption on the door behind, and I said to myself, Look, David,
there's just me and you in here. The door's locked. We don't have to
go to work. Of course we did. Got on the motorbike, and I just started
pondering as I skated my way to the construction site on this
motorbike. And that's how it started. It was thinking about how
self-involvement turns into narcissism and how narcissism turns into
isolation, and then how isolation turns into self-involvement again,
and how what a vicious cycle that can become. So then I just started
thinking about different situations where people would ostensibly look
like they were doing something, but in fact they were checking their
own reflection out. And you'd see it perhaps on Saturday afternoon
with people window shopping, half the time they're actually just
looking at their own reflection. Then this restaurant opened, and it
was a big deal at the time because it had glass tables, and I was
like, oh, you can watch yourself.» -- David Wakeling

and http://www.freakingnews.com/pictures/102000/Stolen-girl--102217.jpg

our anti-platonic paradigm

This image (sampled from the header of paragogy.net, riffing on the imagistic skills of Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) has always seemed to me to nicely capture the spirit of the times.  Aristotle says "turn on, log in!", whereas Plato's eyes are blanked out (to provide a modicum of anonymity, since he is after all the "victim" of this surgical operation)... though perhaps we restore some of his essence by blanking his eyes with a Search bar rather than the traditional black line.

The crowd, mob, or hoi polloi looks on curiously, skeptically, observantly.

I'm reminded of this quote from a Roger Schank whitepaper,

This means that, in essence the stories from the corporate memory would find you because it knew what you were doing. This is the very opposite of search.

I've also long been fascinated by "search and its opposites" (cf. Asger Jorn 1960, also Leigh Brasington, formerly discussed on Gathatoulie), though I don't know if I've always phrased it quite the same way as Schank.  It's so hard to remember!  How about this?

Other complications (and benefits) are created by the fact that some scholia may have "actionable" characteristics, which could even be set up to interface with librarian-style operations. E.g. a scholium might be able to tell a sufficiently sophisticated search processes: "Hey, search process, if you like me, you'll also like these children and cousins of mine, and here's how I think you should should display us all to the user."

mutatis

I think that if one starts reading around here --

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=x_x5kgD1ijAC&pg=PA111&lpg=PA111&dq=%22inspector+lee%22+nova+police&source=bl&ots=YQORpC3L_R&sig=eNDaOLoBi62swnWqjtc9F-n6aYY&hl=en#v=onepage&q=%22inspector%20lee%22%20nova%20police&f=false

and keeps going for a while one can see that the footnotes to WSB's
writing apply mutatis mutandis to AOM.

«If the Nova Police [Resp. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen] can
really be put out of business along with their opponents -- which is
by no means certain -- it is because they are not so much
dialectically and linguistically constructed social subjects [a
remarkable claim when considering literary figures], which must
constantly recreate the conditions of their own existence, as they are
biochemical agents, which react to a limited set of conditions and
disappear once those conditions vanish.»

a tale of two systems

«There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on
the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen
with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was
clearer than crystal to the lords of *the State preserves* of loaves
and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.» -- Charles
Dickens (my emphasis)

Here I'm thinking of two very different sorts of systems. On the one
hand, Drupal... known to be a somewhat chaotic and hard to learn
system for building websites. On the other, Mathematics, also
reputedly hard to learn, but considered by many to be "elegant" and
somehow tied up with the foundations of the known, and perhaps even
the unknown, universe per se.

What (on earth) do these things have to do with each other? Let's
imagine Drupal evolving, say 10, 20, 30 years into the future (...
please, I know this is the *time of incredulity*, but bear with me at
least another 2 minutes!) -- along with the Web as a whole, of course.
That figure of 10, 20, 30 years into the future should be enough to
whet our imaginations.

And mathematics in the same time...? Ah, now perhaps you start to see
what I'm getting at!

* * *

What is this dream we call human life? We are stuck with our sensoria
and our ambitions, our drives and our predilections... in short with
our humanity, and it's all too obvious limitations.

When we consider how we take this whole bogged down morass and
actually try to *relate* to one another... try to *convey meanings*...
or perhaps to satisfy ourselves *in private* for a bare moment...
things really do become endlessly complicated. At the present time,
our models of human existence -- like Drupal (or any stand-in, but I
particularly like this system as an example, since it is so manifestly
a 'cybernetic system' in the sense of NORBERT WEINER, i.e. in the
sense of being a system expressly designed for facilitating "the human
use of human beings") -- these models, are, after all, rather shabby.

Whether you call it "understanding" or "operationalising", the Tin
Man-cum-Frankenstein's monster of /homo casses/ (or /homo nassa/?)
whose body (sensorum) has been replaced with machinery... is, as the
metaphor indicates, nothing new at all. He/she/it has existed at
least since the dawn of human language, albeit in nascent form.

But what we see today is an increasingly detailed "clockworking" of
/homo casses/, getting down down down in its atomicity to the level of
"human moments". At the same time, our mathematical understanding is
increasing, as well, slowly (but less slowly than before), and in its
own characteristically misunderstood way.

The relevant philosophical idea is that mathematics is *our model*
(not the model *of* us, but the model we *use*). Some would say
"language" here instead of "mathematics", but what is mathematics but
a stripped-down and decorous human language?

Now (glossing over those details) - smash - the singularity I'm
predicting is a future "mathematicised" version of Drupal (or again,
please, bring in some appropriate stand-in...) that merges the exo
model with the endo model. This means: that we will think in code, we
will talk in code, we will commune in code, etc. -- and by "code" I
mean something that machines understand just as well as humans. The
test is whether our virtual/real (does it matter?) environments are
built of the stuff.

At present, that sounds dystopic and horrible, because the computer
environments we are used to are so dehumanising. And yet, we love
them, we are drawn to them like moths to the light, because -- this is
the punch line -- in these systems, we see, narcissistically, what we
are. That is, we see as if in a watery pool -- a reflection of our
"machine nature". And this, of course, spells death for human nature.