The great majority of intellectuals—particularly in the arts—are in a desperate plight. The fault lies, however, not with their character, pride, or inaccessibility. Journalists, novelists, and literati are for the most part ready for every compromise. It’s just that they do not realize it. And this is the reason for their failures. Because they do not know, or want to know, that they are venal, they do not understand that they should separate out those aspects of their opinions, experiences, modes of behavior that might be of interest to the market. Instead they make it a point of honor to be wholly themselves on every issue. Because they want to be sold, so to speak, only “in one piece,” they are as unsalable as a calf that the butcher will sell only to the housewife only as an undivided whole.

Walter Benjamin, “Venal but Unusable” fragment published April 1934

Guilty as charged.

Thinking of metaphors for future use. Transmission is a capability that seems amplified by the Internet, as it was amplified in the past by the near simultaneous inventions of photography and the telegraph. Is transmission always coincident with broadcast? The adoption of the term narrowcast to describe low power radio and some forms of Internet delivery seems important. The former is limited geographically, the latter by the bandwidth limitations of the server providing content.

Looking at the OED, it seems that the term “narrowcast” has been around since 1932. The OED quotes H. Angus in Broadcasting 7/2: “By ‘narrow-casting’ I mean any type of education or entertainment or information that isn’t of interest to the general public.” This indeed describes the network I find myself surfing, like many others I have long since lost interest in what the mainstream media, or the mainstream of “blogdom” has to say about anything.

What triggered my thinking about this was Patrick Maynard’s definition of photography as “a branching family of technologies, with different uses, whose common stem is simply the physical marking of surfaces through the agency of light and similar radiations” (Engine of Visualization 3). In the case of both cinema and Internet technologies, these markings are evanescent transmissions.

People and their marks appear and disappear on the Internet, and we partake of their communications through an entirely different surface. It is a surface composed of light transmitted from a screen. As any student of photographic technologies could tell you, surfaces reliant on transmitted light (such as slides) have a higher potential dynamic range (from light to dark) than reflective surfaces. But the price we pay for exhibiting transparencies is a reliance on other technologies to provide the light needed to see them; prints can be viewed without constant upkeep. Bulbs burn out.

Continue reading “Casting” →

I was caught by a turn of phrase on pretty serendipities: “One of the pleasures of diving in and out of blogging is revisiting old favorites and reaffirming fondness for their offerings.”. Of course, reading quickly as I usually do, I misread it—I would have sworn she said “driving.” Hence, I immediately found myself conceptualizing a tool, a “blogdriver,” if you will. It might be something like a screwdriver, or it might be something like a taskmaster who would force someone to persist in the blog habit. Sometimes the mondegren is more striking than what was really said.

I’ve never been able to accept the whole “blogs are conversations” thing. Usually, when I conceptualize my audience, it’s a weird hybrid of my conception of myself and my conception of the people who have visited me for a long time. It’s very much like a friendship, and you don’t want to bore either yourself or your regular visitors. But all the same, the tinge of guilt one feels at walking away in the middle of a conversation is much stronger than the guilt one might experience from not being a good “blogger” in those times when you really have other things to do. A person can slip in and out the door easily and largely unnoticed. It’s a big community, and while conversation occurs, it isn’t a necessary prerequisite for participation. And it is of a substantially different tone than conversation in other venues. The degree to which some people “just don’t get it” is not surprising.

Continue reading “Blogdriver” →

Ping is such an odd little word. In network terms, it amounts to a sort of detection. If your ping is answered, then you know something is there. But this fundamental part of network behavior is changing because of automated garbage. The surrender was swift and seemingly final. I don’t understand.

I suppose I will never really surrender my romantic conception of authorship—that is authorship which is equated with both control and responsibility. I never used blogger (except in the classroom) because I want to have control over the disposition of my data. More and more, aspects of the social behavior on the web are co-opted by aggregators. I find little difference between Technorati, Bloglines, or Google. It all amounts to social control of interaction, whether by algorithm or hive-mentality. It is a shift into the privileging of founders of discursivity over authorship. Page-rank matters more than expertise, and the origin matters less than the interconnection with a common source.

People fight for the right to comment because it is, in effect, a scrawling on the margins of someone else’s thought. Commenters don’t want to be silenced because someone might abuse the privilege. However, the ability to produce derivative works from other works and give them the courtesy of a personal ping to tip the hat must now be channeled through the likes of “Ask Jeeves” or other tracker of popularity. The net just got colder, in my estimation. Not because the relatively private tool of pinging has been surrendered, but because nobody noticed. It seems really easy to abdicate the responsibility for “cleaning one’s own yard” to another service. But this is, I believe, something that must be paid for.

The communities are being enclosed into neighborhoods; I think I’d rather stay in my cardboard hut on the edge of town. I don’t need a butler to clean up my trash. I don’t mind using these net butlers help to “fetch” things for me, to track and sort lists of things. But controlling interaction is another matter entirely. I think controlling and being responsible for my own writing is important—and this includes maintaining the communication channels which, at least for now, I have left open.

I realized as I was working on the redesign that I’m about to have a blogging anniversary. I’ve had a personal web site since around 1998, and it was sort of a combination gallery/ music trading space. It began, like most people, in an ISP hosted 5 meg free space. I started writing “this Public Address” on February 10, 2001, when I moved to my first domain, visibledarkness.com. The initial entry was:

2/10/01      A week or so ago I finally decided to become master of my own domain. I was tired of trying to write out my previous address; my handwriting is awful and few people managed to find my place, except those who wanted to trade music (sorry folks, I’m too busy right now). I’ve been in a weird, frantic, busy sort of mind and you might say that I’ve been lost in the land of allusion. So designing the place has turned into a minefield of allusions. The sort of “what’s new” zone became “this Public Address.”

      I’ve got mixed feelings about explaining everything; if you have to explain the joke, it isn’t very funny is it? But since I seem to get further out every day, I thought I would go ahead and explain this one. William Blake wrote a speech on scattered fragments in a notebook about the state of art in his time. It has no title, but since one of the pages refers to “this Public Address” it has been referred to that way by generations of Blake scholars. Since an Internet address is indeed a public address, and what occupies my mind most is the state of art, it seemed fitting. Of course, since this ramble will mostly consist of fragments rather than completed thoughts, the name works on every level.

Continue reading “History Lesson Pt. 1” →

from Boring Postcards USA, Phaidon

Something a little brighter

Pardon my dust, I’m remodeling. I’ve gone from blue to brown to black to grey. Hey, at least I think it’s cheery. It scales and does not look like crap on my larger monitor. I was getting really sick of the old design.

I do not feel that content composed in one visual environment is transportable to another. At the very least, the meaning becomes skewed to the new context. Thus, as before, I’ve upped the version number of the blog to match the change in look. Once things get sorted out, the previous incarnations of the blog will be made available. But for now I’m concentrating on getting the current version to work right.

Bug reports are welcome. I’m testing the layouts in Safari, Firefox, and IE on both the Mac and PC and it seems to be okay so far. If you think otherwise, let me know. I am already aware of the problems on my older pages such as the gallery and I will fix them when I get a chance.

Update

James reminded me that my about page still said that I was in Arkansas. I looked out the window and checked, and it seems that I’m not anymore. So I fixed it. It deserves a more complete update, but I made another major change as well. I added a different research interest, which has just sort of snuck up on me.

I never thought I’d admit that I was interested in the rhetoric of science. Science just displaced composition theory, which was never really my strong suit anyway. I’m still interested in comp theory because I have to confront it each time I enter the classroom; but it isn’t an overriding interest because I can’t stand the idea of “researching” my students. They are people to me, not “subjects.” The admission that I’m a science geek comes much harder—but it has a long history.

When I was a kid, I used to read Popular Science in the bathtub. I tried to talk my father into a chemistry set, a microscope, and all that stuff. But he just kept saying “wait until you get into high school, they have all that stuff.” When I got to high school, I went through all the science stuff like a whirlwind in my first two years. Then I got bored. Music, poetry, photography and girls intervened. I haven’t really looked back until now. I suppose I can blame my high school photography teacher, Chris Burnett.

I tried to get into photography right away, but the class was always full. Photography was taught by a chemistry teacher until the year I got in. He stepped down, and a former chair of the English department, Chris Burnett, took over. This solved several problems for me at once. He was the sort of teacher who really didn’t care exactly what you learned in his class, as long as it was something. My writing scores were so low that it was hard for me to get into literature classes; Chris agreed to do independent studies in William Blake and Milton with me while I was taking his photography classes. He also turned me on to Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins. I learned a lot more than photography in his classes.

The second year in, I became a tutor in his classes. I taught photography while Chris taught several kids in the class such basic things as the alphabet. Photography, since it had a reputation as an easy class, attracted people who were neatly progressing through high school as functional illiterates. He did his best to change things, and as I think about it now, he was going through many changes while he was teaching those years. He was recently divorced, and struggling to find out what he wanted in life. He left teaching the year I graduated. He completed an M.F.A. at Cal State Bakersfield, and the last I heard he never returned to teaching. He made his living building houses instead.

I thought about him when I dropped out of Community College. He showed me just how complicated life really was—and how no matter how hard you tried it wasn’t always possible to change things. I thought about all the people he tried to reach who spent their time in the halls sniffing glue, and thought to myself there had to be something more productive than that. Teaching tore him up, but I suspect he was a little damaged before hand. I think that’s probably why I haven’t tried teaching before now. It can rip your heart out. But he helped me, probably more than he could ever know.

Learning photography from a literature person rather than a scientist forever skewed the way that I look at things, I suppose. But as I research the early history of the medium I find that most of the photographic educators were scientists rather than humanists; their peculiar brand of humanism comes filtered through a different kind of consciousness. They were looking for a different kind of truth from what I am accustomed to. And nobody talks about the scientists much. It is the humanist/art people who have dictated what has gone down in the history books of photography. The scientists only get glancing mention, if they are mentioned at all. It seems a strange omission, but it is understandable that the alchemy of photography be given precedence over the chemistry.

I will never forget what Chris used to say when students asked how photography “worked” as he slipped the paper into the developer under the safelights—“It’s magic,” he would always say.

Memo

To the person who keeps posting comments on entries consisting of a period:

Though you will no doubt never read this, I feel as if I have my terminating punctuation well under control. I have no need of your surplus termini.

To the person(s) who insist on saying hello and providing a link to your site with no information:

This is not a billboard. Irrelevant comments will be deleted, no matter how well intentioned.

Thank you.

For the first time in years, I haven’t been doing much writing. I also haven’t been doing any reading. I’ve been real busy just being.

I’m sure I’ll start spouting off about something soon, but for now I’m still trying to arrange this workspace. So far, I love the twin cities. My labor for the last three weeks has been loading and lifting instead of reading and writing. It actually feels pretty good for a change, but soon I know I’ll have to get back to the other sort of work.