For example:

I was thinking recently about serial fiction. The BBC has done an updated adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, with cell phones and twitter. The creators’ contention is that Sherlock isn’t defined by 19th Century ephemera like frock coats and gas lamps, but by things like the unique characterization of a detective who solves mysteries by deductive reasoning, and explains his methods and reasoning.

I also learned that House, MD is loosely based on Holmes. Certainly Holmes was a popular precursor to many other popular and recurring characters in detective fiction like Agatha Christie’s Poirot.

I found myself thinking of novels and serial fiction as such modern phenomena: television shows, characters like Poirot, science fiction “universes,” and all these things leading to the peculiar phenomenon of “fans” who follow specific characters or universes. But on reflection, people have always liked to revisit favorite characters and worlds. From Greek gods and heroes to Native American legends and stories, “experiencing a very real social connection to imaginary beings and telling story after story about them” seems, on reflection, to be a human universal.

But where does the Western mass media version originate? The creation of so much serial fiction that we can view it as a phenomenon — and product! — unto itself, with fan clubs (Hercules spawned roman cults, so I guess that’s not necessarily new…) — where does it come from?

Let’s work it backwards: authors can make a living writing serials and reusing characters and worlds because owners of presses (magazines, newspapers, TV networks) will happily pay them. There is an audience. Where does the audience come from? Increased literacy and spending power, perhaps. Maybe also Marxist alienation! But let’s get more material. Where did magazines et al. come from in the first place? Because Wikipedia suggests that serial fiction has been around almost as long as magazines.

It looks like magazines appeared out of the newspaper and gazette subscriptions in the 17th and 18th centuries. But where did they come from? It turns out the earliest regularly-published, standard-format publications were handwritten newsletters in Italy and Germany in the 16th century. Merchants and politicos were willing to pay for information to get an edge. And, I guess it’s not surprising that enterprising publishers inventing subscription busines models and the like saw a benefit to adding entertainment and art into the mix. The first magazines begain in the mid 1700s, and the first serial fiction was being published soon after.

Oh, and those early handwritten newsletters were handwritten because printing presses were too slow at the time! Oh, hello, Internet!

Discovering I like “modern” art, and exploring Autechre’s 2010 albums, Oversteps and Move of Ten, I came across this review of Oversteps that is really more like an art critic’s review of Autechre’s 20-odd year career, followed by a short review of the album. It’s one of the best writeups I’ve seen of their music, and also helped me flesh out my thinking on art in general. I even decided to wander the halls of MoMA a couple times while listening chronologically to all of Autechre’s back catalog.

“Like all good art, Autechre allows itself to be symptomatic, instead of futilely trying to be socially relevant,” writes the reviewer.

On a recent visit to the Met, the Modern area was mostly closed for installation, prompting me to explore earlier art more. Exploring Braque, Van Gogh, Rembrandt and others, it struck me how much art has changed. Particularly post-photography. There are many other things about “modernity” that influence artistic expression, but I am stuck on the idea that mechanized means of production — and reproduction — greatly affected the art world. One begins to understand the point of, say, Warhol.

Autechre are creating music decades after the invention of tools to make music electronically. Tape loops, record players, turntables, synthesizers, hip-hop, disco, remixing… Music has been made for half a century out of the tools dreamt up in the 40s and 50s. So many factors have influenced changes in art and aesthetics. The blooming of the middle class as both audience and producers of art, rather than just elites and patrons; post-war industrialization and invention leading to easy reproduction and re-use of art…

no electronic musician today can create without doing so on the administered grounds of an abstracted avant-garde moment which pioneered both electronic products and likewise the principals that they are somehow liberating which comes along with them. In short, the avant-garde slipped into the culture industry and the administration of younger generations through products. No artist today can use a synth or music software without being tacitly forced to subscribe to the obscured cultural zeitgeist of generations earlier

This is true of all instruments; they are products of a previous cultural zeitgeist. After all, Mozart did not compose for the piano, because it didn’t exist yet; his era’s pianofortes were rather different in sound. But no previous artistic age emerged from such industrial mass production and engineering, so perhaps there is a fundamental difference.

Artists of the past sought to master and perfect their vision. In “the modern era,” this sometimes seems to have shifted towards a constant exploration of boundaries, a desire to stretch and redefine our limitations. Perhaps this is endemic to “the modern era.” And, yes, I think the best art is more symptomatic than overtly engineered. Evolutionary rather than intelligently designed, you might say. The latter most often seems to me to produce mere curiosities.

Regardless of the validity of my judgement (perhaps the servings were just right!), it led me to wonder about how universal this experience is.

I recall being young, and how important it was to have my own things. Sharing’s great, but having your own serving or toy can make you feel more individual, independent, or adult. Hand-me-down’s are understandable, but you’d rather have your own that’s unique to you; it’s tied up with your sense of identity, maybe. Even as a grown-up, I’m inclined to buy a new “something” for myself rather than have someone else’s used things, even if “refurbished,” although economic circumstances are highly influential in this decision process.

But, how much of this is a universal human urge? How much of it is influenced by a culture that highly values newness and ties identity to material posessions? As a young person, do you sense the need to have your own things because you see it as something adult figures value? Or are these innate urges that modern marketing merely magnifies? Does this urge go all the way back to our ancestors who may have valued the tools and supplies that served their survival in an uncertain world, and looked to cling to them and defend them from loss, damage or misuse?

As our species faces ever more pressing issues of sustainability, and (hopefully) questions the deep assumptions of capitalism, can we find ways to encourage and magnify the also human urge to share resources wisely and efficiently? Is there a possible world where three young boys out on the town decide to get just one large serving of fries to share rather than each purchasing their own? (Or is that actually pretty common in many places, and I’m limited by only seeing one example, with these boys, in this city, in this part of the world?)

African homophobia does not exist, nor does European homophobia, Asian homophobia or South American homophobia. Acts of homophobia occur in each of these spaces.

…African conceptions of homosexuality are shaped by factors including nationalism, globalisation, migration, ethnicity, and religion. They are shaped by labour practices and national politics, by participation in sports and watching movies…

Homophobia in Africa is a problem, but not as African homophobia, a special class that requires special interventions. And certainly not the kinds of special interventions that reconsolidate old, ongoing and boring oppositions between a progressive west and an atavistic Africa.

Indeed. Enough primitivization and infantilization of the other peoples of the world. We are all here, in the current “modern” era. All people, together, trying to figure this dumb old world out.

Not that it’s always easy to figure things out. I’d not heard the story of Agnes before.

It’s worth reading the whole story, if you’re not familiar with it. I wasn’t, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the twist ending. Suffice to say, Agnes was a transgender person who encountered the medical science complex in the late fifties, and was written about in depth by a Dr. Garfinkel. Quoting from his book, eastsidekate writes:

[Agnes] wanted to know as well whether [further research] would help “the doctors” to get to the “true facts.” I [Dr. Garfinkel] asked Agnes, “what do you figure the facts are?” She answered, “What do I figure the facts are, or what do I think everyone else thinks the facts are?” [emphasis original]

Agnes’ question, in a nutshell, summarizes the key dilemma that I think LGBTQ people have faced, (that I have faced) for generations. I know very well that I’m a woman, but I have to manage myself very carefully, as other people are prone to think otherwise… Furthermore, there are often seriously good reasons why I may not want them to understand the facts as I do.

We have spent generation after generation “passing”, painstakingly manipulating and carefully disclosing bits and pieces of the way we “really” are. A lot of time, people don’t see us, and sometimes, that’s because we know it’s not safe for us to be seen. This is a particularly troublesome proposition for transsexual people– to the extent that we’re out as such, cissexual society often views us as somehow “not really” the men and women we claim to be.

…My dream, for Pride month and beyond, is for all of us to envision a world where passing isn’t necessary. I can’t imagine living in a world where simply being one’s self is sufficient grounds for full membership in society. That said, I can’t imagine a more beautiful goal.

Hear hear.

And this post is already too long, but let’s throw this in: Faustus at Erosblog takes note of a book about a New Jersey woman who found herself joining a Malay prince’s harem — more than once. It seems a fascinating story, and I couldn’t help thinking of Faustus’ highlighted passage when reading the above stories and pondering the murky waters of identity, including my own:

There’s a persona you create to fill in for you on the strangers’ laps all day, or to lie forgotten about between the black silk sheets in a prince’s office bedroom. The persona is sexier, bolder, wilder, and inevitably feels less pain than the real you. If she doesn’t, you haven’t done a very good job inventing her. So maybe you start to visit that persona once in a while when you’re not at work. On weekends, you know, just when you’re being socially awkward at a party, or when a friend hurts your feelings or you’re out on a date and feeling vulnerable. And you find out that she helps you, that brazen stripper, that sophisticated call girl.

…that girl who wears the thong so effortlessly in public might not be the one making the major life decisions for you.

I’m not making any sort of strict comparison here, for such would be unfair. The cis person drawing on a specific alter-persona as needed has the privilege of not having to “pass,” having her “real” self accepted much more readily and more often than does the LGBTQ person. Still, it speaks to the need for more queer discourse, feminist discourse, more stories told and awareness of the variety of possibilities available within the human experience. Perhaps one day there will be little to no need to adopt a persona or a wall to be accepted as valid.

It bears repeating: “I can’t imagine living in a world where simply being one’s self is sufficient grounds for full membership in society. That said, I can’t imagine a more beautiful goal.”

Hear hear.

Grad school is a marathon not a sprint, and one of the big reasons people burn out in grad school is that they apply 20-something strategies of brute-force [instead of] slow but steady, 30-something tactics that get you through…

…you are at your most productive after you wake up, and that you’ve basically got about 4-5 hours of genuine, hard-core concentration in you per day — what I call ‘being on the bottom of things’: the ability to ignore the world and just drill down to super-concentration level. When that’s done, it’s done.

That’s why you spend the rest of the day keeping ‘on top’ of things — browsing, scanning, surfing, paying the bills, spell-checking, going to lectures, and otherwise getting ready to dive down back to the bottom.

(via Feminist Review, where you can read what the heck it’s about, because it’s early and I have to go to work)

You Just Don’t Get It

John Stuart Mill says this

…the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this mode; nor is it in the nature of human intellectual to become wise in any other manner. (On Liberty)

“Oh, that’s no fun,” I thought.

Isn’t it more fun to go with our first inclination? And stick to it. Especially when people disagree. When people don’t like our ideas, I have a suggestion. Shout:

You just don’t get it!

And then shout at them until they do…get it.

[...]

I was watching the Sky coverage of Israeli boarding of the flotilla. An interview of protesters in the street in London and some guy grabbed the camera to announce, “Sky has real problems and if you are watching this, you are probably a wanker.” There was something about the finality with which he said it that struck me. He knew that Sky viewers “just didn’t get it.”

[...]

American politics descended into “you just don’t get it” some time ago. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone rub their chin and say, “hmm, I hadn’t thought of that. That’s interesting.” God knows, I never say it. I’m too busy shouting, “You just don’t get it.”

There are two possibilities here, anthropologically speaking.

First, we have lost our Millian gift for a thoughtful examination of the issues. We are in love with the theater of being totally right all the time. We are addicted to emotional outrage. We don’t care there are deeper issues. When it comes to politics, we are all now divas. Give us the big gesture. Give us the sweeping condemnation. Or leave us out of it. Politics might once have been a game for sober souls. Now its for emotional show offs.

Second, the cultural world has widened. If we were to do a geographic mapping of the ideological space, we would discover that it has expanded. So much so that it is now vastly larger than it was in the Mill’s England. In this case, the outrage is entirely justified. We live in a larger world, where the differences really are more different. When the world of politics expanded, its tensility would not hold. Ground opened up. The consensus tore.

Probably both are true. And if they are both true, what then? How do we put Humpty Dumpty back together again?

Something akin to this has been on my mind for some time. Particularly the sort of paradox involved in feeling this way about the world: being exasperated that all of the people caught up in “you just don’t get it” absolutist theatricality… they just don’t get it.

Perhaps it’s the oldest problem of humanity: how do you transfer a willingness to listen to others to those who are unwilling to listen? Brings to mind the “empathy gun” of the Hitchhiker’s movie…

anyway..

One problem is the disconnect between food science and reality.

For example, at this enticing recipe for broccoli and gruyere gratin at noble pig, a commenter references a similar recipe with “half and half.”

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this, but, as a geek, I can’t help thinking in terms of longevity and translatability of information. If I’m not living in 20th/21st century Earth, what does half & half mean to me? It’s a chemically unique solution to a very specific set of circumstances.

OK, arguably, “chicken” is a very unique solution to a specific set of circumstances, and there are a lot of different kinds of chicken (let alone chicken parts!), but, if I say “chicken” you have a sense of what I mean that relates to an animal, a growth pattern, a biological reality. If I say “half & half” you only know about a packaging representation in your grocery store. How do you make a chicken? How do you make half & half? Which one is easier to grasp?

I think it’s worth thinking about. I’d rather a recipe that references milk & cheese in various quantities than half & half.

WordPress provides a rudimentary feature to turn individual categories into tags. Entropy and mess in tags is ok, as they provide emergent information, “wisdom of the clouds.” But categories are not tags, and I have plans for them, so I want to pare them down, and not post-by-post.

Thank goodness for Batch Categories, a miraculous plugin that lets you filter by categories, tags or even keywords, and update, remove, or replace categories and tags across whole groups of posts. I’m not done yet, but it’s making this mountain climbable.