Aesthetics: June 2005 Archive Page

Computers and the Internet are changing the way people read. Thus far, search engines and hyperlinks, those underlined words or phrases that when clicked take you to a new Web page, have turned the online literary voyage into a kind of U-pick island-hop. Far more is in store.

Take "Hamlet." -Gregory M. Lamb --How the Web changes your reading habits (CS Monitor)

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Much of this article discusses reading text over cell phones. Since I've been carrying a PDA around for over seven years, I think it would be extremely difficult for me to adjust to the tiny size of phone screens.

We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going. The recombinant is manifest in forms as diverse as Alan Moore's graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, machinima generated with game engines (Quake, Doom, Halo), the whole metastasized library of Dean Scream remixes, genre-warping fan fiction from the universes of Star Trek or Buffy or (more satisfying by far) both at once, the JarJar-less Phantom Edit (sound of an audience voting with its fingers), brand-hybrid athletic shoes, gleefully transgressive logo jumping, and products like Kubrick figures, those Japanese collectibles that slyly masquerade as soulless corporate units yet are rescued from anonymity by the application of a thoughtfully aggressive "custom" paint job. --William Gibson --God's Little Toys (Wired)

On Father's Day, while we were headed east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, on our way to a family vacation in Amish country, the steering on our 1992 Taurus gave out. The car spun out in the grassy median, flipped over, and came to rest partially in a westbound lane.--Dennis G. Jerz

--What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Walked Away from This... (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This wasn't a lot of fun to experience, but if you've got to be involved in a rollover accident, I strongly recommend that you become involved in one that doesn't kill anyone.

On this blog, I don't want to talk about what might have caused the accident, and I'm not seeking advice on what to do next. Anyone who's had a close brush with death sees life as more precious.

My son dictated his description of the accident in a letter he wants me to give to his piano teacher. He ended it with, "Well, I hope you're glad we survived."

Mine Ears Have Heard the Tinkling of the Righteous Ice Cream Bells (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

An ice cream truck just drove by our street, playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". It's an emotionally rousing march, but it sounded very strange in this jingly kid-attracting arrangement. Okay, it was part of a patriotic medley, but it was still uncanny.

I haven't been this creeped out by music since the time I was in an elevator and heard a mellow instrumental rendition of Michael Jackson's "Thriller".

My daughter asked whether the music was supposed to put children to sleep, and before I knew it, I was telling her that this is "the sandvan," that drives around neighborhood during naptime.

The horrible conclusion which had been gradually intruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave. Turn as I might, in no direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable of serving as a guidepost to set me on the outward path. That nevermore should I behold the blessed light of day, or scan the pleasant bills and dales of the beautiful world outside, my reason could no longer entertain the slightest unbelief. Hope had departed. Yet, indoctrinated as I was by a life of philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my unimpassioned demeanour; for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies into which were thrown the victims of similar situations, I experienced none of these, but stood quiet as soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings. --H.P. Lovecraft --The Beast in the Cave (The Works of H.P. Lovecraft)

I had been searching for a quotation from Thoreau, "unfathomed mammoth cave."

This story features getting lost in "the vast and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave," "wandering for over an hour in forbidden avenues," a light source that goes out, and the lobbing of missiles at an unseen foe. Reminds me more of Hunt the Wumpus than Colossal Cave Adventure.

The story also refers to the practice of using caves as a sort of hospital for patients with consumption.

No, the beast isn't a grue, but the story -- while far from Lovecraft's best -- was a pleasant find. Still, ending with a final capitalized word, with three exclamation marks, is a bit TRITE!!!

"You mean to tell me that we have just purchased a mega-expensive computer that will build robots, drive cars, walk, talk, and probably wash windows and you want a text computer game that requires less than 640K RAM and a black and white monitor to run?" Indeed that was what he wanted, and off we went to the computer store. We returned with Zork. --Lorelle VanFossen --Computer Game -- She's Got a Thing for Spring (Taking Your Camera on the Road)

My wife is not a geek. Today she mentioned, out of the blue, that one of the things she admires about me is that I'm clever enough to find things on the internet. She says she's not the slightest bit interested in doing anything like that herself, she says, but it was still a nice ego boost to hear the mother of your children say she's impressed by something you can do.

Lorelle VanFossen is here writing about the nature-themed IF game, "She's Got a Thing for Spring." While her history of the text adventure genre conflates Zork with Adventure, her description of a personal connection to text adventure games is precious. When my wife was pregnant with our daughter, I started writing a text-adventure game in which the PC is in the delivery room about to give birth, but for some reason my wife wasn't very thrilled with the demo I showed her. (She tactfully encouraged the other games I had in the works, rather than coming right out and saying she didn't like the game I'd written, but I still got the message.)

Lau never expected to become a fortune-cookie writer. After graduating from Columbia with degrees in engineering and business, he joined Bank of America, then ran a company that exported logs from the Pacific Northwest to China. In the early eighties, he was hired by a Chinatown noodle manufacturer, which eventually expanded into fortune cookies. The firm bought the Long Island City plant, and it soon became apparent that its antiquated catalogue of fortunes would have to be updated. (?Find someone as gay as you are,? one leftover from the nineteen-forties read.) ?We knew we needed to add new sayings,? Lau said. ?I was chosen because my English was the best of the group, not because I?m a poet.? --Jeremy Olshan --Odd Jobs Dept: Cookie Master (New Yorker)

Much like the film industry, an overemphasis on blockbusters is one of the industry's biggest weaknesses as far as encouraging innovation and creativity, say observers. "Future titles need to offer more than wild shootouts, violent explosions, and the wholesale cheapening of life," says game designer Howard Sherman.

"We've been moving in the wrong direction," says Steve Meretsky, a designer and industry veteran, "toward bigger budgets, centralized decisionmaking by fewer big companies that has led to more licensed games [based on movies and books], and fewer experimental games."

Many of the young talents that might help create those games are also discouraged by the industry's focus on money. --Gloria Goodgale --Video-game industry mulls over the future beyond shoot-'em-ups (Christian Science Monitor)

"Since the war has ended, all is good."
"Are the people happy?" I asked.
Mr. Shukry paused for a moment, as if it were the simplest question he'd been asked in months, "Of course they are happy," he said.
"Are you Muslim?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. --Michael Yon --A Fork in the Road (Michael Yon: Online Magazine)

Grocery stores full of fresh fruit. Gleaming kitchen appliances and widescreen TVs. A picnic in northern Iraq.

A fascinating report from Dohuk.

The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mighty small: one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in chills when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike unclefts link in a bulkbit, they make bindings. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff. --Poul Anderson --Ander-Saxon (Wikipedia)

Anderson offered this scientific treatise, which replaces all Greek and Latin roots with their Germanic equivalent. Thus, "molecule" becomes a "bulkbit." I find this passage fascinating, due in part to the sensual, gut-level connotations of Germanic roots in the English language. French, Latin, and Greek were the languages of high culture, the intellect, and government -- because when the Norman conquerors came to England, they brought their own vocabulary with them. Meanwhile, the peasants out in the fields continued using their own words for their earthy activities, as we can see in the labor-related word elements used in coinages like "scourstuff" and "seedweight."

Do I dare introduce a translation exercise such as this into my Intro to Literary Study class next spring? We already have blank-verse writing assignments. How about "Blog in Ander-Saxon Day"?

As it happens, "web" is from the Old English "webb" and "log" is of unknown origin. Taking "log" to mean "record," that takes us back to the Latin "recordari," with "re" meaning "back" and "cor" meaning "heart." (It was thought that the heart was the seat of memory thus, "record" = "to bring back to the heart".)

The sense of "back" here really means "a return in time" rather than a spatial relationship, so I'll jump right to the Anglo-Saxon word "go," the past tense of which was originally "wend". Thus, I suggest "webwending" or "webheartwending" for "weblog."

The archives would probably be the "wendinghoard."

Permalink = "fastyoke" or "fastbind". (I like the idea of "yoke" rather than "bind", since you bind something to you to keep it getting away, but you yoke yourself to something else in order to use its power to help you move something. But I guess "fastlink" would do.)

Well, that's enough fun for this morning. I hear my daughter's woken up.