Steve Conger

Chain smoking

2011-12-27T12:32:00.001-08:00

He took the cigarette pack from his shirt pocket and hit it against the heel of his hand until two or three cigarettes were higher than the rest. He pulled out the highest, then shook the pack so the other two descended again and put it back in his pocket. He took the butt of his last cigarette, burned almost to the filter, and put it in his mouth. He put the new cigarette tip to tip with the butt. He breathed in deeply. The coal of the dying cigarette flared and lit the new one. With a jerk he took butt from his mouth and snuffed it in the already too full ash tray. He brought the new one to his lips and inhaled deeply. His fingernails and the tips of his fingers were stained yellow.

A paragraph from my novel (at this point, only stray paragraphs exist.) An attempt to describe the chain smoking of a skitzophrenic acquaintance of mine. The attempt, as with the commuting pieces is to find a style that maps to reality.

Coming to One's Self

2011-12-03T11:37:00.001-08:00

Only here, in rare moments when you are not absorbed in the tasks at work, the tasks at home, when you are not occupied by the mechanics of coming and going, of getting from one place to another; only here, at rest for a moment on the bus, your book still in your book bag, no one in the seat beside you, do you come to an awareness of yourself as your self, separate from any outside concern. It is not an entirely comfortable awareness. You catch your reflection, half sketched, transparent, lost like a ghost in the sea of the window's muddy glass. How did I get so old, so gray? You feel finite, unexpectedly fragile, aware of the arbitrary briefness of this, of all moments, of the infinite stretch of dark time before and after.

The continuity of the self, the narrative that we tell ourselves to connect moment to moment, day to day, year to year, is mostly illusion. When we are at work, we are the work, the task at hand absorbs us. Our awareness is of the task, of what is required for the task. In moments of relaxation, when we read, we are lost in what we are reading; when we watch TV we are lost in the television show, with it's own illusions of continuity punctuated by commercials. Even when we are doing nothing we avoid the confrontation, thinking about the past, daydreaming about some unlikely future. Our actual selves, the consciousness of self, is full of gaps, lacunae, vast swaths of memoryless, lost time. We are a collection of bright fragments like dust motes in a shaft of sunlight. Our life histories are stories we tell ourselves to connect the dots. That was me when I was in college. That was me in when I first starting work. Real memories mingle with imagination and we cannot tell the difference.

You cannot look too long at the reflection in the dirty window. It is too empty, too lonely. It brings up an emotion, nameless, but akin to the emotion that you have viewing gulls flying in silhouette over the gray surf on a desolate beach. You look away and pull a book from your bag to read.

The Accident

2011-11-26T12:21:00.001-08:00

The car, an old orange Chevy, cut too closely in front of the bus trying to get ahead of it in the express lane. The bus struck it just behind the right fender. For a long second the bus just pushed the car down the highway, then with a screech of metal, the car broke loose and spun into the lane to the right. It hit a van that was beside the bus. The van slid into a semi truck and trailer that was in the next lane over. A pickup truck smashed into the back of the semi. Everything came to stop.

Everyone on the bus looked around at the other passengers, in a moment of shocked silence. Nobody had any obvious hurt. I had seen and heard it all unfold, but, on the bus, there was almost no feeling of impact. Pure physics, I suppose. The mass of the bus was so much greater than the car's.

People began to talk. What was that guy thinking? Is the driver hurt? A few jokes. I didn't want to go to work today anyway. It's all your fault. You sat in the wrong seat today. It disrupted the whole balance of the universe. How long do you think we will be stuck here?

The bus driver could be heard calling the accident in to the dispatcher. Then she turned to the passengers. "Everyone alright?" there are mummers of assent. "Anyone see what happened?" Several people nodded or said yes. The bus diver pulled out a small stack of white cards. "Anyone who is willing to be a witness, would you please fill out a card." Several raised their hands. She walked back through the isle passing out cards. I took one. The woman in the seat in front of me said "sorry, I was asleep."
The bus driver nodded. Finished passing out the cards she returned to the front of the bus.

There was a moment of silence as people looked over the cards, then, almost as if on a signal, people began pulling out their cell phones to call work. Hello, yes, I am on the bus. We just had an accident. I will be late getting in. I don't know how late. I'll let you know as things get figured out.

I didn't call. There wouldn't be any one in the office yet.

After the phone calls people started talking again. People who had never spoken to each other now talked freely. I have been riding for fifteen years and this is the first accident I have been in. It's my third. I was in another one one the freeway about a year ago, similar to this one. Somebody cut into close in front of the bus. I have been on buses that broke down many times, but. . .

Sirens could be heard, faint at first but getting louder. Within a couple of minutes two ambulances, a fire truck and three police cars were parked around the accident scene. Only one lane of cars was getting by on the right shoulder.

A policeman came on board the bus. "Is everyone alright here? Did anyone see what happened?" He waited for a response. If you would give me your names and a contact number, please." He came down the isle with and took names in a notebook. "Thank you. Another bus should be here in twenty or thirty minutes. We will transfer you onto that bus and you can continue on your way. Until that time please remain on the bus and be patient. Any questions?" One passenger laughed and said "thanks for riding Metro."

What I am looking for, what I am trying to achieve in these scenes from the endless commute, is a style, a sense of a style, that can convey accurately and simply what happened, what is happening. Poetry I have thought about, form and structure, metric, language, rhetoric, genre, but I have never given such thought to prose. Now I have a novel in mind, maybe my only novel, and I find I want to actually think about sentence structure, the flow of narrative, the presentation of detail, capturing what I see, what I hear, smell and taste. My daily commute is an exercise in patience, frustration, exhaustion and now also an exercise in writing, in memory and precision. I am sure there will be as much frustration and wasted time in the written commute as in the actual, but, perhaps, in the end, something novel will come of it.

Parking Lot

2011-11-18T12:36:00.001-08:00

Strangely, and perhaps sadly, the best part of my commute is often in the morning at the Safeway parking lot. When I emerge from the store, having purchased a tall drip coffee, black with no sugar or cream, and walk out onto the parking lot, I look up for the briefest moment and see the horizon with its clouds just brightening with the morning sun and I see the buildings around the lot and the cars on the road and a flock--a "murmuration" of starlings, a few crows, and, in that moment, feel the cool of the air on my face, and, for only a second, a certain exhilaration, the sense of what I can only describe as "the freedom of the road," the sense of new places and strange horizons, of novel destinations. It is, in short, a feeling of escape. But then I get back I'm my car and pull out onto the möbius of my daily route, taking a sip of my black and satisfyingly bitter coffee.

Roadside Crosses

2011-11-12T16:06:00.001-08:00

Those crosses beside the highways and the country roads that mark the spot where a speeding teenager, or a drunken driver, or a driver hit by a drunken driver, or a tired driver, or a distracted driver, or a driver who was simply unlucky flew off the road and, in a variety of tragic, gruesome ways, died; I have observed them at various times over the years. At first there are flowers and balloons, teddy bears, sometimes--sometimes a portrait of the deceased printed on computer paper, scraps of a poem, some words from friends. Over time the flowers wilt and are replaced only on birthdays or anniversaries. The balloons deflate and lay in the long grass like so many latex snakes. The teddy bears are carried away by stray dogs. The pictures tear and blow away, caught in the wires of a nearby fence or in the twigs of bushes. One day the cross itself is gone and there is only grass and sky, road and fence and the muddy ditch beside the pavement.

Bus Stop at Night

2011-11-11T19:09:00.000-08:00

Commute, from the Latin com, "with" mutare "to change." To change places, moving from home to work, work to home. The transition, a place between places, a (parenthetical) world between worlds, with it's own laws and weathers, it's own events and stories, consisting of car interiors, park and rides, bus stops, busses, trains, the landscapes sliding past the window like endless variations of an old film. The commute contains other changes as well, the change in selves: the work self with its focus on tasks and deadlines, it's hierarchical relationships, it's mixture of reinforcements and humiliations; the home self with its different relationships balancing authority and intimacy, with it's own special rewards, worries and humiliations. The commute is a time for the self, itself, to transition. I have been commuting for fifteen years.

The bus stop at night. Is that a place to begin? But then is any place a beginning? Leaves and litter rise in little whirls behind the bench shelter. There seems to be some sort of wind tunnel here--the breeze off the water funneled between the buildings, breaking into turbulence on the sidewalk and street in swirling eddies and brisk gusts. He pulls his coat collar closer around his neck and pulls his cell phone from his pant's pocket to check the time. Fifteen minutes. Bad timing. He got to the stop too early; too long to wait comfortably, but not long enough to go somewhere warm and get a cup of coffee. He looks down the street. A pair of headlights shine on the pavement under a swinging traffic light.

A half dozen people are also at the stop. In the garish light of the streetlight they are huddled shadows. Most are bent over their cell phones or IPods. A couple of weathered men talk in Spanish beside the posted schedules. One man leans on the light pole itself smoking a cigarette. Beside him, under the shelter's plastic roof, a women in a pale blue sweat shirt stands silently.

A bus pulls up, not the one he needs, but the one that comes only about ten minutes before. A woman, dimunative, only about five feet tall, stands on the sidewalk by the bus schedule sign and shouts at the bus driver as the passengers disembark. "You bastard, I know you. You're a cop. You're CIA or a sheriff. I know you from before. You are trying to go undercover, but I know you. You can't hide." The bus driver ignores her. The passenger part around her like a stream splitting around a rock, not looking at her, not meeting her eyes.

After the bus pulls away, she comes up two him. She is wearing an old red nylon coat.the sleeves are frayed and ratting. There is a tear in the side revealing dirty white foam. "I am sorry about that," she says, "but he had it coming. She looks up into his face, her eyes slightly amused. "Do you have any change? I need to pay my rent." He reaches into his pockets. "I have 38 cents, that want do much toward your rent." She takes the money placidly and moves down the bus stop not stopping to talk to anyone else. The woman, standing near him, her face half hidden in a pale blue hood, smiles up at him, knowingly. He smiles back.

The bus arrives and the half dozen people waiting line up to climb aboard.

Three by China Mieville

2011-09-05T10:42:00.000-07:00

Overview

China Mieville is an author who has been on my reading list for a long time. He came recommended by friends and by many reviews. I finally decided to take the plunge. I read his three most recent novels. Brief reviews follow. He is as good as his reputation. His novels are strange, intriguing and often beautiful.

The City The City

Think of Berlin before the fall of the wall. East Germany separated from West Germany, each half of the city with separate politics, economics, destinies. Now imagine a city just as divided as Berlin was, but with the wall existing purely in the mind. The citizens of one city are walled off from the citizens of the other city by a reinforced habit of thought. Each citizen carefully "unsees" the citizen of the other city, even while avoiding the vehicles and pedestrians of the unseen city. Clues in clothing styles and architecture help with the unseeing, and a secret police force called "The Breach" enforce the separation.

The story begins with a murder investigation: a prostitute, seemingly, dispatched and then dumped in a garbage filled lot in one of the cities. It seems a simple case, but a couple of things don't add up. The chief investigator is too good to let it go. He follows the leads to find links to a revolutionary movement, a possible breach and the conspiratorial myth of a third city that somehow exists in the interstitial boundaries between the other two.

In many ways this novel is a classic detective story, but with an underlying strangeness that gives it an odd, somewhat disturbing beauty.

Kraken

There is a secret London, filled with cults and strange religions each with their own gods and their own particular apocalypses. There are also, in this secret London, people with Knacks and powers. All are on edge because a giant squid has mysteriously vanished from its display in the Museum of Natural History. Somehow this disappearance is a preamble to a total apocalypse nobody wants.

The protagonist of the novel, Billy Harrow, is a curator in the section of the Museum that housed the squid. After its disappearance, he is sequestered by a squad of police who specialize in cults. He escapes to find out for himself what is going on. He quickly finds himself immersed in the secret London underground and especially in the cult of the Kraken itself.

In many aspects the novel reminds me of the work of Neil Gaimen, especially Neverwhere. In fact it often seems like an attempt to out Gaimen, Gaimen. That being said, it is an enjoyable novel. The cults and religions are intriguing. There is suspense, humor, and occassional flashes of poetry

Embassy Town

Of the novels reviewed here, this is the most complex and interesting. It is about "Language" both literally and metaphorically. The novel takes place on a planet at the edge of navigable space. The atmosphere is toxic to humans, but the aliens, known to the local human population as the Hosts, have made an area livable for human colonists.

The Hosts speak "Language," a very peculiar speech. For one thing, the Hosts have two throats and speak simultaneously through both. The Host can only understand language spoken by living sentient beings., Recordings or synthesized speech are incomprehensible to them even when it reproduces the sounds of words perfectly.Secondly, Language can only express factual statements. It cannot express contrary to fact conditions. There is no "what if." Language cannot lie.

Humans have created genetically engineered clones called ambassadors who can speak simultaneously and be understood by the Hosts. The Hosts too have tried to expand their Language to communicate better with the outsiders. The use real people, set up in situations that can be used as similes--metaphore is beyond them.. The narrator of the novel is such a person. As a child she was used to create the simile, "she who ate what was put in front of her."

Language is visceral to the Hosts, so much so that a new ambassador's voice accidentally becomes an addictive narcotic. To free themselves from it the Host must either horribly mutilate themselves or learn to lie.

A bit of a Rant

2011-08-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

I have read many articles in the past few years bemoaning the loss of standards in higher education, and, in particular, the loss of a common cultural set of references. I think the source of much of the complaint is really a reaction to a loss of privilege and the decline of the "educated" class.

A university education used to belong to only a few: those that had the money and those who demonstrated the intellectual abilities to get money in the form of scholarships. The educated few shared a common experience and a shared vocabulary. They read the same "classics", got the same basic science and math, the same basic economics. Out of this group came all the lawyers, bankers and politicians, the men who made the laws, enforced them and controlled the money. Life was good for the educated class of mostly white men.

All this was lost because of the democratization of education. The first serious blow came at the end of World War II with the enactment of the GI bill. Suddenly tens of thousands of men who would not naturally have been able to attend a university were able to. Worse, they believed their children should have the right to attend too, and ideally, all children should have the right to attend the university of their choice.

The universities became crowded with those who were "different, " who did not fit into the culture of the educated class. They were dissatisfied with the classical curriculum and wanted "relevant" education, focused on current issues and employment.

The final blow to the educated elite came with the explosion of the Internet and the democratization of knowledge itself. Now anyone could access the classics (previously available only in expensive university press editions). But more, they could access literature, philosophy, history and political thought from a myriad of cultures. The net effect was to diffuse the set of common cultural references so dear to the educated class. No longer could you count on someone catching a reference to Thucydides or the Book of Job.

To "cultural conservatives this is a defaming of all that is holy, a cultural disgrace, a loss of core values. But what they are really upset about, though they will not admit this even to themselves, is a loss of privilege and power, the loss of a world where they knew all the cues and their position was secure.

Personally, I see the diversification of culture as an increase in richness. The more cultures, the more languages, the more literatures, the better. I love ancient Greek and Latin literature and now, thanks to efforts like Tuft's Perseus Project, I have access to most of it for free. In addition I can access Arabic, Chinese, and African literature. The loss of a set of common references is small compared to the enormous richness of new reference and new vistas. The belief that somehow one culture's literature and languages are somehow superior to other culture's literature and languages is just another form of racism. Democracy in politics and in culture is messy and can be frightening, but is worth the journey.

A Little Rhyme

2011-08-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

I have always avoided end rhymes. It was one of the those things that a contemporary poet just didn't do. I did, however, often sneak in internal rhyme patterns. I would do things like have the last word of one line rhyme with the middle word of the next line, or other more intricate patterns. Part of the pleasure of poetry to me is the puzzle aspect. Making the pieces fit into some arbitrary structure.

Lately I have been committing two cardinal sins: playing with end rhymes and playing with traditional metric feet. I stooped so low as to write a sonnet:

I imagine that you stand beside me
in meadows high on quiet mountain slopes
where hawks wing in the skies above and see
beyond the horizon of our small hopes
and fears. So much that I would tell you now
if only speech were left on my dull tongue
I would tell vast legends of what and how
it should have been how it should be sung
if sung as I dreamed it sung, but facts
are not as one would wish however strong
the wish. Instead we must accept our acts
and live the consequences, even wrong
in mountains where the sky itself would start
I imagine worlds with us no more apart

No challenge to Shakespeare here.

And then I worked on an elegaic piece--elegaic in the sense that it imitates, in some sense, Latin and Greek elegaic metric. Classical elegy consited in a dactylic hexameter followed by a pentameter line 6/5. In English one could argue the iambic pentameter is equivalent the the classical dactylic hexameter, culturally if not mathematically. So I wrote a metric of a iambic pentameter followed by a iambic tetrameter, with each couplet rhyming. This is my first experiment:

some think with every decision the world
divides—a new world formed, now curled

beside this one, each possibility
explored. Whatever can, will be.

In some parallel world just beyond reach
all that we let get away, each

lost moment, not lost, each failure unmade.
So, in another world, you stayed.

A flock of honking geese wings over head
the rain will arrive before bed

this afternoon spent staring out windows
the dry grass stirs as the damp breeze blows.

Just to be clear, I am not really obsessing about some lost love. The poems just seemed to trend that way.

I tried to avoid direct end stops on the rhyme. Most lines are enjambed, meaning you read through the line to the next. Also there is usually a caesura in the line after the couplet, a pause that keeps the poem from becoming too sing song--or so I hope.

The gist is that is is fun sometimes to play with traditional metrics.

Coming soon--at least I intend. This blog has been offered in fits and spurts--reviews of several books. I have been on a reading jag of late. Included in the reviews will be three books by China Mieville, The Information by Gleick, and a book about the city of Alexandria, among others

Finnegan's Wake 2

2011-07-02T12:27:00.000-07:00

The second sentence, or not quite a sentence, the first of three, clauses shall we call them, each separated by a colon. (Grammatical structures are a bit fluid in the Wake.)

Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war:

"Sir Tristam" is both Tristam Shandy--the 18th century novel that most resembles Joyce in its scope and it's stylistic and linguistic playfulness--and Tristam (Tristan) of the medieval romance Tristan and Isolde. (Isolde will maker her appearence in a few paragraphs.) The "violer d' amores" is a stringed instrument, the tenor of the violin family, having six or seven stopped strings and an equal number of sympathetic strings, according to the dictionary. More literally it is the viol of love, and seems to stand in apposition to Tristam. "The short sea," the north sea? The British Channel? "Passen-core" recalls "passenger" but also passage, pass--I am sure I am missing some pun on another language. "Core," of course, means that it is central, this passage, re-arriving, having arrived and left and arrived again from "North Armorica."

"Armorica:" armor, amore, America, at least a three part pun. But what does it all mean? It supplies Tristam with his armor and his love, it may also express a complex attitude toward America, the home of so many Irish expatriots.

"Just as the Isthmus of Sutton separates Howth from the rest of Ireland, so the Bosphorus separates Europe and Asia..." (http://www.finnegansweb.com/wiki/index.php/Europe_Minor)

"wielder fight:" wield, fight, also, perhaps, welter weight as in a boxer. "penisoltate:" penis o late, pen isolate, peninsula.

The gist: Tristam is back to fight his war.

Finnegans Wake: First Sentence

2011-06-29T15:52:00.000-07:00

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

The first sentence of Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce, though, actually, it is the end of the last sentence of the book:

A lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

And so the beginning is the end in this infinite circle of a book ( "a commodius vicus of recirculation")

The question arises why one should read this book, this book of the night, that revels in it's own obscurity, a book that focuses on the confused, vague images of a mind in various stages of sleep. Personally, I would say don't read it unless it entertains or amuses you. I am not a big advocate of must reads or should reads. Despite, or perhaps because, I received a classical education, I have very little respect for traditional educational paradigms. I rather like the wilderness of Internet learning, where each person can develop their own idiosyncratic path, their own canon. I feel no need to defend the classics. If they are indeed classic, if they still speak, they will find audience; if not, let the chaff fall where it will.

That being said, Finnegan's Wake amuses and entertains me. I intend to work through it sentence by sentence in this blog. I won't catch everything, in fact, I will probably miss more than I find. But I will entertain myself, at least. Consider it my form of sodoku. A mental exercise to stave off eventual Alzheimer's.

It won't be the only thing in the blog and I will label each blog that focus on the wake "FWake" so they can be asiduously avoided.

So, the first sentence. . .

Stephen's name, from Ulysses is hidden here: "st Eve and." And also Eve and Adam, according to Genesis, our progenitors, and the first of us to take the fall.

"riverrun," "swerve of shore to bend of bay, " refer to the landscape of Dublin, the river being the Liffey. A vicus was a civilian Roman settlement, but more importantly, it recalls Vico Giambattista an Italian thinker from the 1660s who wrote a book called "The New Science" that contains speculation on many things including the origins and evolution of human language. Commodius just means spacious, a settlement that can accommodate many--one such as Dublin perhaps. The use of the Latin terms for a settlement along side modern Dublin binds the past to the present in a circle of time.

Howth Castle lies close to the village of Howth, Fingal County in Ireland. It is the ancestral home of the line of the St Lawrence family (see: Earl of Howth) that died out in 1909. From 1425 to 1767 the title had been Lord Howth, holding the area since the Norman invasion of 1180. It is now held by their heirs, the Gaisford St. Lawrence family.

So Wikipedia.

The initials HCE in "Howth Castle and Environs" appear in many forms though out the book. Appropriate that the first appearance should be in the first sentence.

Public Poetry

2011-02-11T12:11:00.000-08:00

A gray morning, sitting at the Starbucks in Lakewood, south of Tacoma, waiting for my son to finish his class. A world away Egyptians are celebrating into the dark. Mubarak has resigned. It is a fragile moment. It could herald the birth of a democracy or a new dictatorship. Let us hope the Egyptian people maintain their energy and focus long enough to see it through, long enough to develop the institutions that will preserve their victory.

As is my want, I wonder if poetry has any vital place in the public sphere; if it has any role in such events. Song does, that sometimes step sister of poetry. The Egyptian streets are full of singing. But poetry?

There have been times and places when poetry was on the lips of those who were involved in momentous, public acts, but I do not have a sense of that for this time, this place. Poetry seems relegated to the private, at most a meditation on the public, a reflection on such actions.

(I think of the cryptic, intensely private poems Celan wrote that were inspired by events in Israel)

I do not know the Egyptian literary scene, and my reflections may only reflect my sense of American poetry. The question is open. Is it possible in this time and place to have a legitimate (as opposed to sham, shallow, favor currying) public poetry?

Stray thoughts in a Starbucks

2011-01-21T12:19:00.000-08:00

Sitting in a Starbucks in Lakeside, south Tacoma. Jazz on the radio. Conversations. The hiss of the expresso machine. Traffic outside. Tall grasses in a planter swaying and rustling in the wind. Rain on the tables and chairs on the patio. The traffic light bleeding red on the wet pavement. I am waiting here until my son finishes his class up at Pierce college.

I am typing this on my IPad, not the best tool for writing, but it does have the virtue of slowing me down, of making me pay more attention to each word. Sometimes I have thought that we would write better if we had to pay for each word we used. Think how carefully we would choose each word. Think how much thought we would give to whether what we had to say was worth the price. Though maybe not. Those compelled to write would write no matter what.

InterestIngly, I have written prose on the IPad, even have begun a short story, but somehow I can't imagine writing a poem on it. The feel is wrong. (I actually stll prefer pen and paper for poetry--and not just any paper. It has to have the right texture and qualities. I wonder if that says anything about the relevance of poetry to the contemporary world--or does it rather just say something about me.) Maybe that will change. Maybe I will write a series of IPad poems just to do it.

Trumpet and piano now on the background music mix. The rain continues. I should do something worth while today, but probably won't.

The day's coffee lingers bitter on the tongue. A good bitterness. It is the taste of what keeps me going.

It is time to pick up my son.

Monads

2010-12-05T20:15:00.000-08:00

This is how I use (waste) my time on the bus when I am not sleeping: I was reading the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the German philosopher Leibniz, a book called The Fold Leibniz and the Baroque. It is a difficult book, and my mind wandered to what I remembered of Leibniz' Monadology, where, famously, "monads have no windows--" a cryptic remark about the absolute isolation of each thing from every other thing. So, thinking about these things, I composed in my head a short, rather Celanesque poem:


Monad
what is
sole?

windowless
mirrored only
reflected folds
of velvet curtains
silken cushions

your hut 
on endless plains

windblown

light snow
whitening
the south sides
of furrows
& ruts

oblivious
to the cold

you

When I arrived at the bus stop at Westlake, I rushed into Pacific Place, which I knew was open even if the shops weren't, sat at a table, and wrote it down so that it wouldn't disappear like a dream as I became involved in the business of the day. This reminded me of Derrida talking about Socrates' distrust of writing because it weakened the mind by removing the necessity of remembering . . .

A Sentence

2010-11-28T20:18:00.000-08:00

I have let this blog lapse. I have been so busy writing the instructor materials for my database book, that I have had little time or energy for anything else. At last, I am nearing the end of that task. My web site keeps getting redesigned in my mind, but, for it too, I have had little time.

I am going to return to this blog, but for now I am going to abandon any larger plans about its purpose and topics. I will just write.

Currently, this late November evening, with small patches of white hiding in the shadows from rains that have melted all the other pre-thanksgiving snows, I have a desire to write a sentence, a complex sentence, a labyrinth, really, of phrases and clauses in which the unwary reader can wander lost in a sea of particulars,the night rain rattling on the black of the window panes, any trace of the subject and verb long lost, hidden away like the orphan snow under a dripping eve; a sentence written, that is to say, in the manner of the late Henry James, in novels like the Wings of the Dove, in which any hint of an idea, any taint, any stain of a philosophical nature, dissolves into the mystery of the immediate; a sentence, furthermore, which will not fit into a tweet, which any editor would cut with an indignant stroke of a pen, and which most modern readers, if the term can be applied, will find unreadable.

Inger Christensen

2010-08-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

Inger Christensen has what I would call a "structural imagination." She--like a few others such as Louis Zukofsky and Ronald Johnson--likes to create elaborate structures, complex verbal cathedrals or temples within which she can place her quiet hymns.

Christensen is a Danish poet, famous in Europe for her experimentations, but like most European poets, unknown here. She died in 2009.

I came across her through a translation of part of her Alphabet in Volume two of Poems for the Millennium edited by Rothenberg and Joris. It struck me as an incredibly beautiful hymn to existence. I went to Amazon and purchased a copy. This is the beginning of the section for the letter L:


life, the air we inhale exists
a lightness in it all, a likeness in it all
an equation, an open and transferable expression
in it all, and as tree after tree foams up in
early summer, a passion, passion in it all

[this from the translation by Susanna Nied, New Directions, 2000]

Each section of Alphabet keys on a letter A through N. The length of each section is determined by the Fibonacci sequence in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers. The poem is not only a great hymn to existence, but a plea for existence. As she notes not only trees and kingfishers but, "The atom bomb exists," "the hydrogen bomb exists" as do war and pollution and poverty.

I have also read her it, another massive and complex architecture within which swells a hymn to creation.


It. That's it. That started it. It is. Goes on. Moves. Beyond

[Also translated by Susanna Nied, with an introduction by Anne Carson--in interesting poet and translator in her own right]

I love the "structural imagination" of her poems, the creation of new forms and verbal games. I actually believe such structures enhance and enrich poetry, but that is a discussion for another day. Even more I love the depth of her humanity and her sense of the beauty and mystery in the world around her.

Paul Celan

2010-07-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

A poem should resist meaning. It should stand immutable and irreducible, impossible to decompose into a series of propositions and statements. Nobody writes poems that resist meaning more than the German Poet Paul Celan, and yet for all that, they convey depth and power that is unmatched by other poets.

For the last two or three years I have been studying the poetry of Celan, particularly his later poetry. Paul Celan was born to Jewish parents in Romaina. During World War Two he was detained in a Nazi labor camp. His parents died in another camp. After the war he found his way to Paris, where, though fluent in many languages, he continued to write poems in German--the language of his mother, but also the language of the Nazi's that killed her. His early poetry fit into the European surrealist movement. His most popular poem, "Todesfuge--Death Fugue" is in this vein. But in his later years, he started stripping away artifice. His poetry became more compressed and impenetrable, but still conveyed some essential emotion just beyond articulation. It is the later poetry that interests me most.

Here is a complete poem (my translation, though heavily dependent on various cribs):

in the rivers north of the future
I cast out that net, which you,
hesitantly, weight
with stone written shadows

Although it resists meaning, one could still write volumes on this. The poem conflates time and space. What is it that the I is fishing for? Who is the "I", and who is the you? What do the stone shadows write?

Here are a couple of more passages that stir me--not complete poems:

something rushes through us
the first
of the world's last wings

And

Island meadow
you,
fogged in
with hope

Celan fought depression and paranoia most of his life. He committed suicide by drowning himself in Seine in 1970.

Note: the photo comes from Wikipedia

Louis Zukofsky

2010-07-27T19:49:00.000-07:00

The web site is in stasis while I rethink my design. But I decided I will try to make this blog more active. I intend to post brief reviews of some of my favorite and lesser known poets. I will start with a major influence, Louis Zukofsky.

I wrote my master's thesis on Louis Zukofsky's "A", or more precisely I wrote my master's thesis on "A"-21, an eccentric translation of Plautus's Rudens that incorporates a certain echolalia with the original Latin and manages to blend in a fair amount of Shakespeare as well. When I wrote my thesis very few knew of Zukofsky outside of a few poets. I came across him following a quote from Ezra Pound who dedicated his "Guide to Kulture" to him and Basil Bunting, "two voices struggling in the wilderness."

I found his book "ALL the shorter Poems" and skimmed through it. At first I wasn't impressed, but a few days later I had a dream in which I had opened the book and found beauties. The next day I opened the book again and there were indeed beauties there. Later that week I went to the local bookstore and ordered a copy of his newly printed epic called "A".

Zukofsky is often called a poet's poet, or sometimes even the poet's poet's poet. I would argue that there is no in the twentieth century--not even Ezra Pound--from whom one can learn more about the craft and structure of verse. In his poems you will find both masterful traditional verse forms and radical experimentation. I especially learned from his experiments with counting words per line rather than syllabi or feet. "A"-22 and "A"-23 are still breathtaking in their subtle audacity.

If Zukofsky's poetry was only about structure and form, it would not deserve any wider audience. But there is a deep humanity and compassion there. "A" at 800 plus pages in 24 sections, took a lifetime to complete. In the beginning the poet is brash, a progressive who explores the possibilities of social justice through communism. But, as time progresses, through world war two, Korea and Vietnam, as the world armed itself with nuclear weapons, Zukofsky increasingly countered with a nuclear deterrent of his own--the nuclear family, his wife Celia and his son Paul. In the end love may not triumph, but it does preserve what is still of value in the world.

Book Stores

2010-06-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

I hate bookstores. I say this as someone whose palms sweat whenever he encounters a new bookstore, someone who has spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars in bookstores all across the country. What I hate about bookstores is the sense of futility they give me. So many books that are on shelves for a couple of months and then disappear forever into overstock warehouses or landfills. Any really good work is likely to be overwhelmed and lost in the sheer volume of what is published.

I also hate how authors I have followed for decades increasingly fall off the shelves to be replaced by newer, flashier books. (I am not talking about literary greats here, just good solid authors, who consistently wrote good stories . The situation is even worse with poets. Even excellent or great poets have very little shelf life.) I hate that I want to add my own books to that mass of print, and can't imagine that they would suffer any better fate.

I realize that almost everything that has been printed is available at Amazon or somewhere on-line. But it is not the same experience. When I go into a bookstore I don't know what I want. I browse, opening books, touching them, looking at the typeface, reading random passages. I go the poetry sections looking for old friends and new. I go to the philosophy section to see what they have (usually not much), then I browse the fiction and science fiction areas. My selections are tactile and visual as much as intellectual.

I hate bookstores. The Elliot Bay bookstore that used to be in Pioneer square downtown has just reopened on Capital Hill near where I work. I will show my hatred by not spending more than 2 or 3 hours there next week.

Alethe

2010-06-22T08:24:00.000-07:00

Philosophical speculations from reading Heidegger's 1934 lectures on logic:
A tree--
why is it always a tree? Are trees hard wired into us as symbols of nature? Would that be true of people who live in a mostly treeless region? And what tree? I usually imagine a maple with broad limbs and green fluttering leaves, but sometimes I imagine a pine with blue clusters of needles. Would someone in the tropics imagine a palm tree or a mahogany? --

All part of the point, really. A tree, any tree, does not exist for our purposes. It is not there to provide us shade (though it may do so on an August day). It is not there to scrub carbon dioxide from the air, though we may be grateful that it does. It is not there to provide us lumber for our patios, though, sadly, only then do we value it by assigning it a price.

Its only purpose is to be itself, a tree, separate from any of our purposes. That is the root--pun intended-- of what Heidegger means by Alethe, the Greek word for truth which means "unhidden" or "not forgotten." Truth is the unconcealed. When we allow the tree, the broad flat leaves of the maple filtering sunlight, to present itself as itself, to stand, as it were, in the clearing, only then do we see the truth of it, the mystery. Only then do we encounter it in its "uncanny" otherness. Only then do we experience the sacred.

Ancient Greek Poetry

2010-05-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

The web site is progressing, but still not ready to upload. It is one of the more complex things I have tried to encode. All the data--news, poems, path information, stories, etc. are stored in xml files and use xslt for the display. Anyway, I hope to post it someday in the near future.

I checked out a new library book The Greek Poets Homer to the Present. It is new this year 2010 from Norton Press. It is edited by Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keely, and Karen Van Dyke. As the cover flap says it contains over 1000 poems by 185 poets with 120 different translators. It starts with Homer and ends with contemporary living poets. It is really a massive and wonderful collection.

Reading it, started me thinking about what is it that I like so much in especially ancient Greek poetry. I have been attracted to it since high school. (Part of what first attracted me to the Cantos was Pound's use of classical myths and texts). I took Greek in college and continued it in graduate school. I still dabble at translating today.

It is important when talking about Greek poetry--even just ancient Greek poetry--to realize one is talking about hundreds of poets over a couple thousand years. And that, in itself, may be part of it. The vastness of it, the distance in time, the fragility. So much was lost, so much survives only in tantalizing fragments, scattered coins that suggest a larger treasure. Modern poetry has been in love with the fragment every since it rediscovered the Greek. And Greek is, essentially, a modern discovery--the middle ages the Renaissance, the 18th century were almost entirely devoted to Latin poetry. Much of what we know of Greek Literature only came to light in the 19th and 20th century.)

That still begs the question of why it attracts me so. I hazard one thought: I like it because of its directness and essential naiveté. By naiveté I am not suggesting that the art was unsophisticated. Greek poetry sports many complex metrics and sophisticated structures. Nor do I mean to suggest that Greek poets were simple or somehow socially or humanly innocent. Rather, I mean that they dealt with the basic human condition directly: War, death, love, hatred, anger, competition, sex, old age, they dealt with these thing without embarrassment, without subterfuge. Yes, they often used myth when writing of these things, but myth for them was not a symbol or a metaphor to decorate a thought; myth itself was the way they thought. It was how they experienced the world. The Greeks never second guessed their poetry. They had no need to justify it to the world. Poetry was a natural and sacred act. Finally, their poetry often has a simply transcendent beauty. Here is the beginning of the Theogany (my Translation)


Of the Helicon Muses,  let us begin to sing
who possess the great & sacred mount Helicon
who dance around the violet fountain on soft feet
& around the altar of Kronos’ mighty son
who, afterwards, bathe their flawless skin in Permissos
or in the horse’s fountain or in sacred Olemios--
so beautiful, their feet flowing like water.

There is so much to say about this topic, it cannot possibly fit in a single blog entry. Though in the future I might focus on individual poets. Anyway check out the book The Greek Poets, not just for the ancient poets. The Greeks have been writing great poetry for almost 3000 years.

Ezra Pound

2010-04-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

I am going restart my blog with a few reflections on Ezra Pound.

For many years, as my weary friends would attest, I was obsessed with Ezra Pound. I read everything that Pound had written and most of what had been written about him. Especially I read and re-read the Cantos. I mined Pound for secrets of technique and
structure. I saw him as a veritable bible for modern poetry. I ignored other people's reservations that he was too inaccessible, elitist and deliberately obscure. I also ignored other more serious concerns that Pound was a Fascist and a racist.

I remember in a graduate class on Ezra Pound a woman who dropped the class after a couple of weeks because she was so repelled by his antisemitism. I thought she was being over sensitive, but now, after many years, I have greater sympathy for her
position. I tended to dismiss the racism and fascism as aberrations in an otherwise good man, as historical accidents that could be mostly ignored. But now I find them more troubling and less easily forgiven.

Of the two issues, I find Fascism the less troubling. It is a part of the historical context. After the the optimism and confidence of the 19th century was shattered by world war one, after the excesses of the 1920's followed by the world wide depression of the 1930s, there was an almost desperate desire in many for order. Fascism offered this order, even if at a cost. Also, anyone who has read Pound's "Jefferson and/or Mussolini" knows he seriously misunderstood Fascism.

The racism is harder to swallow. One could argue that it too was of the time. In his last years he reportedly apologized to Alan Ginsberg for having fallen prey to "that stupid suburban prejudice, antisemitism." But I am not so sure this is sufficient.
Pound always claimed to be apart from and above the times. And, his racism was not just passive. In the Cantos he writes "the Goyim are cattle" and his radio broadcasts from Italy during the war are vile with racist epithets and stereotypes. If attacked he could always use the age old diversion, "see I have a Jewish friend, Louis Zukofsky." But it was poetry that made them friends.

One of enduring complaints about Pound is that he and his poetry are too intellectual. I think this arises from his use of multiple languages and obscure historical texts throughout the Cantos. But I think Pound was, if anything, not intellectual enough. He was not a scholar; he was an enthusiast. He found things that struck him and pasted them whole cloth into the Cantos. He didn't do the depth research to understand the contexts and sources better. He didn't analyse relationships; he felt them. This may be one reason that the Cantos never quite "cohere." The poem is obsessed by structure and contains threads of many possible structures, but never actually settles into any one of them, or any coherent combination of them. Pound never had the discipline to be called an intellectual, but I suspect if he had the Cantos would never have existed.

Nowhere is Pound's lack of intellectual prowess more evident than in his economics. His ideas are crackpot in the best American tradition. When he is talking economics he reminds me of some of great uncles who were convinced there were simple answers to
everything and that the only reason they weren't being implemented was because of a vast conspiracy of industry and government to hide them from the people. I believe this is essentially American. It represents American optimism and pragmatism, the belief that every problem can be solved and that the solution is, in some way, essentially simple if you are smart enough to see it. The problem is this belief is everywhere frustrated by reality. But, rather then surrender the belief, they prefer to see outside agencies, particularly the government and big business as forming vast conspiracies to hide the simple solutions from the people in order to protect their power and profits.

Exra Pound was remarkably un-self reflective. Some biographers have suggested he was a shy person who compensated by focusing everything outward. He sustained his energy by finding enemies to rail against, and causes to support. But I have the impression
that he very seldom paused to reflect on what he was doing in any serious way. There two times in his life when he was forced to turn inward. In the prison cells of Piza, and in dispair of his old age. I don't think it is an accident that those are the most moving and popular parts of the Cantos.

So, where am I now with Ezra Pound? The umbridled enthusiasm is gone. There are parts of the poetry and parts of the man that repell me. On the other hand, there are poems and parts of poems that I still find as moving as anything in 20th century Literature--Canto 100, for instance, and the drafts and fragments. One could do worse than to remember the last words of the Cantos: "To be men not destroyers." If only Pound had adhered to that more in his life.

Update

2010-04-11T10:29:00.001-07:00

I hope to have the new site up and at least partially functional by next weekend. It has been taking much longer to do than I thought it would. Partially this is because I am overly ambitious, and partially because I have so many other responsibilities and claims on my time.

However, I intend to post it soon, even if there are parts that will still say "under construction."

I don't really think anyone is reading this blog, but if you are stay tuned. Once the web site is up, I will start putting real posts here, posts on literature and philosphy and poetry.

A New Start

2010-02-07T09:53:00.000-08:00

I have not written anything much in this blog for a while. I have returned to work and most of my school related entries have moved to http://congeritc.blogspot.com . I have renamed this blog from "Sabbatical notes" to just "Steve Conger." I may change that again later, if I get some clever idea.

I am in the process of creating a new web site. The site will showcase my own writings, but also I hope, become a portal to other writings on the web. This blog will be for the discussion of writing, poetry and philosophy and for reviewing books and sites that I find interesting.

The web site is taking shape. I will announce its URL when it is ready to be viewed.

End of Sabbatical Reflections

2009-12-28T10:04:00.000-08:00

It has been a busy few days. There was Christmas, of course. Then the day after Christmas we drove up to Seattle to the 5th Avenue theater to watch White Christmas. Yesterday was mostly down time, trying to recover.

The Sabbatical is almost over. A week from today, I believe, I must rise before the dawn, pull out of the driveway and drive to the bus stop where the bus will take me to Seattle. I will get off around Westlake and walk up Pine to the school. I will be back in my routine.

Have I accomplished what I wanted. Yes, and no? I finished the book and appendixes though I still need to focus on a concentrated rewrite. To do that I need some guidance from the editor, which I hope to get soon. I worked a lot on my own writings, though I didn't finish much of anything, and I didn't send things out for publication as I intended. I did redo my school web site and prepared the syllabi and all the assignments for Winter quarter. I have started to build my personal web site, which I hope can be a focus for my personal writings. (This blog will transition to become my personal blog and I will start a second blog devoted solely to my classes.) I got the front and back lawns planted. I have worked with Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010. I have read an enormous amount and have relaxed. The latter is perhaps the most important.

Am I ready to return? Yes, I think so. It is time to get teaching again.

Solstice

2009-12-21T09:51:00.001-08:00

Working on a poetic collage of sorts for this first day of winter:


gloom of this sunless winter morning
amaterusa, the sun has gone into a cave
 & must be tricked to look out
light mirroring blinding light
 the beginnings of a return
between darkness & dawn
a remembrance of the  dead
(my mother died near Christmas
 snowing at the funeral
  then a shaft of sunlight
through clouds)
it is not the distance from the sun but the angle
 maximum 23 degrees latitude
  26 degrees longitude
standing still, if only for an instant
when darkness triumphs
  if only for an instant
(if only in Northern latitudes)
circles of standing stone
evergreens
  they are for eternity
juniper
pine
fir
a day of reversals
“today when freeman fawns on slave—“
said Kallimachos
when the god is torn apart by his maddened followers
water into wine
  a new shoot sprouts
  delicate leaves
  unfurl
Dies natalis solis invictus
a day for Christmas shopping
only 4 shopping days left
at the birth of winter
earth turns
toward summer

With a little help from Wikipedia. Amaterusa is a Japanese festival for the solstice. Other relevant ones included are the Greel Linaea, the Roman Saturnalia and Sol invictus (the victory of the sun). Kallimachos is a poet from the 2nd century BC in Alexandria. It is from the fragments of his Aetia, a long poem in elegiac metrics about the origins of certain rites and practices. The translation is my own.

Not Much

2009-12-18T10:18:00.000-08:00

I have finished and posted all the assignments for Winter quarter except the final Sql assignment. I intend to have it up before the weekend. I hope that will make the quarter flow smoothly.

Next I hope to work on my own website and get it up to the point that I can make a public announcement of its existence.

The rain has stopped.

My mind too has stopped. A blinking cursor on a white screen. More, and better, later.

A holiday greeting

2009-12-16T09:13:00.000-08:00

Here is a image for the season:

Though, I have often been curious why a tropical plant that really only flourishes in equatorial conditions should have become a symbol for a winter holiday in the northern hemisphere. Is it perhaps a dreaming after the tropical warmth?

Today much warmer. The rain pocks the standing water in the back yard.

I hope to work on assignments for winter quarter today. I have put rewriting the chapters on hold until I hear from the editor. I want to make sure that the final format is what they want.

Holidays

2009-12-12T09:13:00.000-08:00

The first morning in a while when the house wasn't freezing. The sun through the windows offers a pleasant illusion of warmth.

So, I have been working mostly on getting things ready for school. I have 7 assignments done for the SQL class, and 4 for the Visual Basic class. I have uploaded the materials for the Database class. Students will have to log in to look at the chapters there.

I want to finish them and then work on the main personal web site. And so much other writing I want to do, but time, for this sabbatical at least, is running out. The holidays are full of activities that pull me from work. Today, for instance, after putting up the Christmas tree, we may go up to Bothell to Molbak's Nursery (a seasonal trip we do every year) and then down to Green lake for the illuminarium--paper lanterns lit along the walkway all around the lake. A lovely, if chilly, thing to do.

And there is still Christmas shopping to do. (A difficult thing without money.)

The thing is, I am not even that fond of "Christ--mass," though I am willing to celebrate the solstice, the brief triumph of night over day (in northern latitudes), and the day's slow return. A reason enough for gifts. And I love the smell of a tree in the house. (Still not sure what the conifers meant to the druids or why they were incorporated originally by the Church--ever green I guess means never dying, or at least free from the cycles of winter dying and spring renewal? I should look it up.)

Anyway, a busy time. A time for scattered incoherent blogs. . .

Cold Morning

2009-12-09T09:22:00.000-08:00

10 degrees Fahrenheit this cold December morning. Mount Rainier beautiful blue white in the rising sun. In the house it was only 62 degrees. Our poor furnace is over powered by the weather. Despite the clarity of the morning views, I look forward to the return of rain and warmer temperatures.

As for work, I have been working on school stuff primarily. I finished the first assignment for the visual basic class and started the second. I would like to have all the assignments ready before school starts. As for rewriting the book, I decided to hold off a bit until I have talked to the editor. I want to be sure what they want in the final manuscript. Once I know, I will begin an intensive rewrite.

I also had an idea for a another book. I have always had more ideas than I could handle at any one time. One of my problems has always been focus. I scatter my energies among many projects, rather than focusing on one of them and bring it to completion before I move on to the next.

One thing at a tme.

Misc

2009-12-07T16:22:00.001-08:00

I have solved some of my CSS problems. I just turned the second column white so it looks as long as the first even when it isn't. I still needed to add an extra div to provide background color for the heading.

Today I have been mostly working on Assignments for ITC 222 SQL. I have finished the database and finished the first seven assignments. Now I think I will try to get the first several assignments for ITC 172 Visual Basic.

Otherwise the main interest of the day has been the cold. Our poor furnace struggles to keep up and we can only heat the house with a mix of space heaters and the fireplace.

Brisk mornings can shock the mind alive. Maybe I will get some work done the next couple of days.

I have decided that when I return to school, this blog will become my personal blog associated with the web site I am designing. I will start a second blog that will focus only on materials for my students and classes.

CSS Frustrations

2009-12-04T07:57:00.000-08:00

A gibbous moon 95% full bright over the western horizon, while the sun rise paints the mountain the color of salmon in the east. Lovely, but cold.

CSS can be frustrating, sometimes. I spent way too much time yesterday trying to get my columns to be of equal length with variable content. By default columns are only as long as the content in them. There is a trick you can use, but it involves making a separate container div for each column and then offsetting the columns off screen and pushing the text back on screen over the containing divs. It is complicated and messy. It results in the appearance of equal length columns, but has some other drawbacks. For one you can no longer center the outside container in the body because of its offset.

In the end, after hours of work I resorted to cheating. I set a minimum height for each column and if I needed it larger I manually set the height in the page itself. This is bad in terms of maintainability, flexibility, and extensibility. I will revisit it again. A simple solution is not to have a background color in the second column. If the background of the container is white and everything in the container is white, it looks as if both columns are the length of the container. It is just not as pretty.

Anyway, I would rather contemplate the moon, I think, waning into December.

a bit of Hesiod

2009-12-03T09:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I got back the peer reviews for chapters 7,8 and 9. Overall they were quite positive. I also worked on preparing assignments for Winter quarter. In addition I was reviewing my "decipherment" of the first 120 or so lines of Hesiod's Theogany which forms a hymn to the Muses. Here are a couple of key passages:

they went up to Olympos glorying in sweet voices
with immortal song
the black earth echoed around them as they hymned
sweet drumming rose under their feet
as they climbed to their father ruling the sky
holding the dark thunder & bolt lightning
after defeating his father Kronos by might
distributing to each of the immortals their fair portions ad privledges
these things the Muses sing who have their home
in Olympos, the nine daughters of magnanimous Zeus
Klio & Euterpe & Thalia & Melpomene & then
Terpsichore & Erato & Polumnia & Ourania & also
Kalliope, who is the most renowned
because she attends to the exalted princes & sacred kings

--and here the end of the section:

happy he whom the Muses Love
ο δ’ όλιβιος ̀’ον τινα Μουσαι φίλωνται
sweet speech flows from his mouth
even if he is full of grief
with a mourning spirit
full of fresh sorrow
his heart parched dry
yet a singer, a servant of the Muses,
singing news of past men & the Olympian gods
causes anxieties to be forgotten
the memory of them prepared for burial
the gifts of the goddesses turn away sorrow

First Frost

2009-12-02T10:24:00.000-08:00

The first frost of the season. The new grass glistening white in the morning sunlight. I had to scrape my car window to take my daughter to school. A line of crows sits sentinel on the neighbor's roof.

With all there is to do today, my main impulse is to do nothing. Still, I will bow to my better impulses and at least work on assignments for next quarter.

Taking Stock

2009-12-01T08:37:00.000-08:00

The first of December. The last month of my sabbatical. The time is going fast, and December, with all its holiday activities, will go by even more quickly. Time for a quick update. What have I done so far? I have finished the appendixes and have begun rewriting with chapter one. I have also done the syllabi for winter quarter and redesigned my school web site. Currently I am developing the database I intend to use for ITC 222 and possibly for ITC 172.

My goals for the remaining time:
Finish the database
Create the assignments for ITC 222
Create the assignments for ITC 172
Rewrite as many chapters as I can

also continue to work on poems and my new web site

in memorium

2009-11-29T20:03:00.000-08:00

lacrimae rerum et mortalia mentum tangunt
the tears of things and mortality touch the mind
--Virgil

Walking with Cell Phone

2009-11-25T15:27:00.000-08:00

The day before Thanksgiving. Amazingly warm, almost 60. Sun for awhile, but the clouds slowly grayed the afternoon. I took a long walk with my cellphone, taking pictures.

Here is a picture of the mountain as a backdrop to the town

The road into Smallwood park

The fish pond in Smallwood park

The ruins of the sawmill that was once the reason for the town's existence:

Catullus Carmina 11

2009-11-23T09:56:00.000-08:00

A translation of Poem 11 by Catullus:

Furius and Arelius, comrades of Catullus,
whether he penetrates the extremes of India
where the shore is pounded by
the waves of dawn

whether to Hyrcanus or to the soft Arabs
or to Sacus or to the archers of Parthius
whether to where the seven-mouthed Nile
colors the sea’s surface

whether he trudges across the high alps
viewing the monuments of mighty Caesar,
the Gaullic Rhine, the turbulent waters,
the furthest outposts of Briton

or whether he attempts all these simultaneously
bearing whatever heaven wills--
speak these few words to my girl
not pleasantries

may she live & grow strong in her adulteries
may she take 300 men into her clasp at once,
not loving one in truth, but repeatedly
herniating them all

nor may she look back at my love
as before, which through her fault
has fallen like a flower at the meadow’s edge
touched by a passing plow.

In this poem Catullus exposes all his moods: the conversational, the mock heroic, the brutal invective, the delicately tender. He begins by addressing two "comrades of Catullus," opening a long rhetorical sentence that turns on the preposition "siva," "whether." Then, referring to himself in third person, he outlines an empire vast enough to get lost in. The locations he cites are not merely poetic, they map the exact delineations of the empire: India, Arabia, Egypt, the Rhine, Brittan. His hurt is as big as the empire itself. There is an ironic juxtaposition here of the personal and the politic, the intimacy of his grief vs the vastness of the Roman occupations. Concluding this sentence, he tells his comrades that he has a few words he wants them to impart to Lesbia, and he warns them they are not pleasant. Thus the invective--an art form, if you wish, for which Catullus has been remembered for 2000 years. Against the anger and brutality of his statement to Lesbia, is the the almost unbearable tenderness of the last lines, cast aside like a flower tacto arato est.

Good Books

2009-11-22T13:53:00.000-08:00

I got a Writer's Market 2010 from the library. I must confess looking at the Writer's Market books is always a bit depressing. There are no markets for most of what I want to do, and what little market there is, pays nothing.

I have a similar feeling sometimes in libraries and bookstores, though with subtle differences. There it is the sheer volume of books that I find depressing. So many books and so few with any real value. Good work or even great work will be simply be lost, ignored on the shelves among so many other books.

Good books, great books turn us back toward ourselves (in the full sense of ourselves in the world among others). The vast majority of books are written to do the opposite, to turn us away from ourselves, to distract us with entertainments, or superficial self help.

"Distracted from distraction by distraction" wrote T. S. Eliot.

Not that I don't crave distractions too. It is just the immense store of distractions. It is quite possible to live a lifetime without confronting a single serious thought.

Is my elitism showing through? Very well, let it show.

The Seahawks lost too badly to prove a distraction and I am running out of ways to avoid work.

A few notes

2009-11-19T15:06:00.000-08:00

The wind shook the house last night and howled past the windows. The rain sounded like pebbles thrown at the window panes. I was a little surprised this morning at how little damage was actually done. I had expected things to have blown everywhere, but there was little out of place.

I worked on rewriting chapter one this morning and then spent most of the afternoon trying to redo the index page on my school web site. It was difficult because I am not an expert at CSS, especially positioning. I am trying to avoid absolute positioning of elements and to use float instead. It takes me a great deal of trial and error to get the various sections positioned correctly. I make a change, display the page, return to the stylesheet, and then display the page again. It took me close to two hours to get it correct. But I did get it. I have a new look for the index page and posted my syllabi for winter quarter.

Documentation

2009-11-18T11:13:00.001-08:00

I spent most of yesterday morning and this morning trying to write a section on documentation f0r chapter one. All my attempts seemed wooden and stiff. Finally I had a sort of break through. This is how the beginning of it reads now:

***************************

Documentation is a lot like flossing: nobody likes to do it, and far more claim to do it than actually do. Developers want to develop. The last thing they want to do, generally, is to take time out and describe what they are developing and how they are going about it. And yet, like flossing, few things are as important to a healthy database enterprise.

Imagine you have been hired to work as a data administrator for some company. They have a large and complex database, but the former administrator, who was also the developer, left no documentation. In order for you to do your job you need to understand each object in the database is meant to do. You also need to know it is supposed to work, how data is processed. Managers expect you to be able to provide them with the data they need when they need it. Some pieces probably make sense right away, but several pieces remain obscure. You try to ask people about them, but managers are not database designers and, generally, they don’t have a clue. Many of the people who were involved in the creation of the database have moved on, and it is difficult to get a clear sense of the original intentions or purpose of the database. Eventually you may solve the problems, but you will have spent countless hours in investigation, hours that could have been saved by a little documentation.

Documentation is one of the most important and one of the most neglected aspects of any database project. When you look at a database built by someone else, or even one that you may have made some time ago, it is often difficult to see why certain decisions were made, why the tables are the way they are, why certain columns were included or left out. Without documentation, it can take a great deal of research and guesswork to understand the database. You may never understand all of its original logic.

So what does it mean to document a database? There are really two main aspects that need to be documented: the structure of the database itself and the process by which the database was developed.

*****************************

It is still not perfect by any means, and I don't know how the editors will react to the flossing simile, but at least it flows better than what I had before.

A brief patch of sun this morning, gold, green on the new grass of the back lawn. The mountain is clear and bright with new snow, but the weather report suggests this is a brief respit.

British Actors et al

2009-11-17T10:04:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I was working on a long, philosophical post about language, structure, abstraction and the particular, but I think I will spare what few, if any, readers I might have.

Last evening I watched a BBC production of Midsummer Night's Dream on DVD. The production values were low and the staging unimaginative yet sometimes strange. There was a lot of rolling around in a pond and mud that was unexpected, and puck was weirdly imagined. Yet, as the advertisement on the DVD says, "word for word as written by Shakespeare." It was a serviceable presentation of the play. Interestingly, I recognized a couple of the actors from their roles in other BBC productions in the late 70's and 80's including Doctor Who. That is not totally unexpected. British actors consist of a small pool of professionals who tend to appear over and over again in different contexts. It is still true. David Tenant, the current Doctor Who--the show has run for thirty five years or so from 1962 until sometime in the late 80's, then starting again in 2005--has just finished playing Hamlet along with, interestingly, Patrick Stewart from Star Trek the Next Generation.

Enough of my Geekdom though.

Today I am going to work on rewriting Chapter One.

Dreams

2009-11-14T10:42:00.000-08:00

I discovered an interesting (to me) and useful document on MSDN. It is essentially a book on Application Architechture. It is quite useful reading, and something I might direct my students to.

Saturday morning and I slept in, something I haven't been doing. The benefit of oversleeping is that I actually woke up with some fragments of dreams. It was, for me, a usual dream. I have an apartment somewhere, that I totally forgot existed. It has many of my lost books and albums. Often the apartment is majestic in its size or view. Often also I am living with my parents still and want to return to that apartment, to get out on my own again. There may be complications with rent--but usually I still am in possession of the apartment even though I have not been there in years and had even forgotten it existed.

I have some ideas about what the dream might "mean," though I am not going to explicate it here. Over the years, I have read most of Freud's and Jung's major works and at various times I have applied Freudian interpretations or Jungian interpretations to my dreams. But in the last several years I have taken a different approach. Now, I don't interpret the images as symbols of some representation of the ID, I just live with them awhile as they are, let them speak in their own terms.

The idea came to me when a friend told me of his recurring dream. He was holding the ladder for his father who was working on the roof. When his father came back to get off the roof, he was no longer a man but a bear. The mind leaps to many obvious interpretations. Freud would see it as Oedipal, Jung probably as an archetype of the shadow. But by not leaping to abstraction, by sticking with the bear, I believe, you get a much richer picture of the relationship. A bear, as the Indians knew, is a complex animal. It is large and temperamental and can strike at a whim. But it is also noble, a hunter, a fisher. It can even be comic and gentle. The bear is a figure of great power. It must be treated with the proper respect and, yes, kept at a certain distance. You can admire, perhaps even love a bear, but you cannot allow yourself to get too physically close to it for your own safety.

There is more in the images of a dream, than in the structure. Nineteenth century science was about finding structures (as is all science actually), so Freud and Jung looked for recurring structures in dreams mostly ignoring the individual richness of particular dream images. (I think this touches at the edges of what might be an important insight into all science, but I am not sure I could clarify it yet, something to do with the apprehension of the unique phenomenon vs the place of that phenomenon in a larger structure. There are hints of this in Heidegger.)

Anyway, enough Saturday musings. . .

Rewrites

2009-11-13T09:16:00.000-08:00

Stormy morning. I woke to the sound of the wind whistling past the bedroom window. There are rumors of a dusting of snow this evening. I love autumn, but I am not sure I am ready for winter to descend.

I am ready to rewrite the chapters, but I need to develop a consistent strategy, a way to approach the rewrite that keeps me from just floundering here and there through the text. So far I have this: start by adding the new stuff, in particular the section on documentation and the additional practices. Then I will look at my explanations and definitions expanding them and adding examples where necessary, cutting where required. Then, finally, I will look at the writing, correcting errors and cleaning up the syntax where it could use it. I wrote the chapters rapidly. I think I spent about 8 or 10 hours writing each one. I just let the prose flow. For the most part that is good, but there are places that are a bit awkward.

I must confess though that I would much rather work on other projects. I have just purchased a Domain www.spconger.com. I am more interested in working on the site than rewriting chapter one.

Reading

2009-11-11T11:25:00.000-08:00

Finished all the appendixes and am beginning the rewrites of the chapters. It is hard to know where to begin. I need to add more practices and a section on Documentation. I also want to add a rubric at the end of each chapter to help guide students and instructors to judge the quality of their work for the scenarios. There are descriptions that need to be clarified, expanded, or reduced. There are some sentences that need reworked for style. A lot to do, but my basic impulse is to skip it for now and read.

I have been on a reading binge of late. I reread American Gods by Neil Gaimen. I also have been reading Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom, and inspired by it, I have reread Julius Ceasar and Hamlet. (They were the only two plays available in the Eatonville Library. I have the complete Shakespeare, but it is buried somewhere in a box in the garage like most of my books.) I am still reading The Logic of Hegel once in a while, along with perusing my most recent issue of Scientific American.

I really should be spending more time writing than reading, but old habits are hard to break. I have read many thousands of books. Despite that I am not one that believes that reading in and of itself is of all that great a value. It is not so much how much one reads that matters, as it is the quality of what one reads. Among those thousands of books I have read are many that are of questionable quality. Much of reading is a lot like watching TV--a more or less entertaining distraction from everyday concerns.

I have sometimes had the fantasy that I would like to unread all I have read, unlearn all that I have learned, return to a preliterate state where I could look at a page of writing and see not words, but patterns of black and white, shapes as mute as sunlight and shadow.

The Custodian

2009-11-09T14:18:00.000-08:00

I have been working on the last appendix on Visual Studio. I also have been looking at some of my older stories. I like some of what I find there. Here are the first three paragraphs of a story called the custodian:

It could not be said that he had ever aspired to the position of custodian. He had never said as a child to his father, "when I grow up I want to be a janitor." He had never explored the option of a vocational degree in custodial science when he had made his brief foray into the community college system.

It was something he had settled into like the dust he wipes from behind the curtains or vacuums from the heavy hair dryers in the beauty salons. He had started the cleaning business in desperation between jobs. He had hawked his expensive stereo and his TV for an industrial strength vacuum cleaner, two mops, a broom, some rags, and a bucket. He had arranged to rent a buffer when needed and set out to find some jobs. It was meant to be a stop gap to keep him fed and housed until he found some "real work," something where he sat behind a desk and had two trays, one marked IN and the other OUT. But that was 25 years ago. Cleaning jobs came easy. He had always had plenty of customers and the money hadn't been all that bad. . .

He had even come to enjoy it. There was something pleasurable in working the odd hours that others didn't work, the late nights, the early mornings in the predawn or at dawn when the gold light would melt the cold glass of the window into a warm honey. There was something pleasurable in working alone, in seeing places of business when no business was taking place, in noting the traces of the people who had worked in this place or that, but who were not here now, who were a palpable absence.

Rainy day thoughts on cafes

2009-11-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

Another gray autumn day. A heavy rain is drenching my new lawn. I can tell where the low spots are by the gray puddles. I will have to add some soil to raise those areas in the spring. Something about rainy mornings--the coffee tastes especially good, black, bitter, slowly stirring my brain to life. So what thoughts arise, sparked by caffeine, on this gloomy morning? If any?

As my family arises, my concentration is shattered. Noise and questions drive away any contemplations. That is the problem with working at home. I really should find some other place to work--the bakery or the library perhaps. I can handle public noises better than domestic ones. I have always worked well in cafes. In college I got most of my work done in the student lounges. I wrote a good deal of my textbook in the cafeteria at Pierce College in Steilacoom while waiting for my son who was attending classes with running start. There is something comforting about the buzz and hum of people coming and going, the hiss of espresso machines, the clatter of dishes, conversations that flow in the background like river water over stones.

I am about to begin the major rewrite of all the chapters. For that I think it is time to seek out the public places that are paradoxically more private.

Mashell River

2009-11-05T09:34:00.000-08:00

Took a long walk yesterday and walked down along the Mashell river which flows along the borders of Eatonville, taking pictures with my cellphone. I was thinking I might use one for a new web site I intend to build.

Here is one of the pictures:

In terms of work, I have finished all the appendixes except one of Visual Studio. I am not sure I should use the Beta. Ultimately Microsoft doesn't allow screen shots from Beta's to be published but I could use them as placeholders. The other thing that concerns me is that the ASP.Net changed a great deal between Beta1 and Beta2. I worry it may change even more before the final version.

I may leave it for now and begin rewriting the chapters.

ASP.Net 4.0 Beta 2

2009-11-03T07:57:00.000-08:00

I worked last night with ASP.Net in Visual Studio 2010. I was in for a few surprises. The default template now has a master page and a fairly elaborate prepared css style sheet. I suppose that could be good especially for someone just starting out, but I am not particularly fond of master pages. To start with just a web form you need to use the blank web page template.

Another issue I had was VS was not recognizing xhtml elements. It would underline each and give me a validation warning. It took me about an hour to figure out that if I went under Tools/Options/Text Editor/Html that there was a place to set the html target to xhtml Transitional. After that everything worked fine.

I also tried to do the ASP.Net with IIS. Again I had troubles configuring IIS to work with Windows Authentication. I got it so it would work, sort of. It still didn't work with database connections. I made an Login for the IUSER account and gave it access to a database. It worked in design, but not when running. Finally I got the connections to work by using SQL Authorization and adding the connection strings directly to IIS. It works. but I want to get the windows authorization to pass through.

Sugar Hangover

2009-11-01T09:03:00.000-08:00

So, a bright morning this first of November, greeted with a sugar hangover. We gave out close to six pounds of candy last night to what must of been well over a hundred kids (though "kids" is relative--some few of them could use a good shave--). This year we were prepared. We stocked up on candy like we had never stocked up before. The unfortunate side effect is that we still have a fair amount of candy. And my daughter brought home another several pounds of it. Even my sweet tooth is daunted.

The lawn, planted at the end of September is beginning to look like a real lawn. Emerald green in the gold of morning light.

So. I feeling the urge to get down to serious work. So far I have finished two appendixes and have two to go. Then I can get into the more intense process of rewriting. I want to add a section about documentation to each chapter. I also want to create rubrics for each chapter's scenario so both students and instructors know how to evaluate their work. . .

But, first the Seahawk game. I fully expect them to lose to Dallas, but hope, however unreasonable, always champions the improbable. . .

Halloween

2009-10-31T16:35:00.000-07:00

I saw Sting on some talk show talking about his new song "Soul Cakes." He explained that it was the origin of trick or treats. People in England would put out cakes for the dead. The dead, of course, would not eat them and the poor would come and ask if they could have them if they prayed for the spirits of the dead.

That may be one of the nearer origins of trick or treat and Halloween, but putting food and drink out for the dead is a very ancient tradition. There is the medieval tradition of All Hallows Eve, the night when the dead are released for a moment from their graves. The Ancient Greeks would put bread and beer out for the dead. Placating ghosts with food is one of the oldest traditions of human kind. It probably goes back to at least neolithic times when the bones of the dead were often kept under the floor of the house and disinterred when the family moved. I would not doubt that it dates back farther into the paleolithic, back to when humans became aware of themselves as human as mortal.

It is part of our core humanness to be haunted by our dead and by the fear of death itself and to try to placate them and it. Food is a fundamental of life, a necessity and a comfort. Providing the dead food is a way of reminding the dead of what it was to be alive. Food is communal. To partake is to be a part of the community. By inviting the dead in, we ward of their anger at their separation. We let them know they are not forgotten.

Some Timely Notes

2009-10-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

Mallarmé made a big point about the white (blanc) page, the blank, the virginal page. I don't have a white page, but I do have a white screen, a blank text box waiting for some input. Red October burns into a brown November. About a third of my sabbatical is over. That's the trouble with time. It keeps moving on.

I remember when I was very young how a day could seem to last forever. Now they seem to race by. I think the difference is how great a percentage a day is in your life. When you are very young each day represents a larger percentage of your total experience. As you grow older each day becomes a correspondingly smaller part of the whole. I am sure it could be expressed as a simple ratio: 1 day / total number of days. At six years old each day is 1/2191 or so of your total experience. At 54 each day is 1/19898 of the total. (The calculator in Windows 7 has some great new additions including a date calculator. This number is the difference between my birth date and today's date.)

As Andrew Marvell said

At my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near

Stray thoughts

2009-10-27T08:52:00.000-07:00

Thinking about currents, eddies, surface tensions for my river poem. . .

Thinking about F#. I have been trying to write a small program that resolves the quadratic equation x|x>0 and x<42 where p= x*x-x+41. I found this equation in a novel by Arthur C. Clark, Rama 2. In the novel he uses it to trigger an atomic bomb. The unique thing about this equation is that it predicts a sequence of 41 prime numbers starting with 41. After the 41st prime the sequence falls apart. The equation is somewhat an anomaly, a curiosity. I see it as a metaphor for existence: a momentary expression of order in broader chaos. (I am writing a long sequence of 41 poems based on the equation called quadratic.) I have been having trouble with the syntax of the F#. Most examples show the syntax for the interactive interpreter, but I want to write it as a function in a program. I am sure I will figure it out eventually.

Thinking about my lawn which is greening in the gray light and the rain light. . .

Of such scattered things my thoughts consist these days . . .

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 On-Line Trainings

2009-10-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's channel 9 has a new and very extensive training course for Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010. All for free.

Some of the new features for VS include extensibility management which allows you to create applications which can easily be extended by just dropping a dll in the directory, expanded parallel computing, expanded Windows Presentation Foundation (XAML), Silverlight programming, Azure for cloud computing, F#, MVC for the web (not sure of all that that contains but it seems to be a alternate platform for web development, Expanded ADO and data binding tools, Entity Framwork, UML support and more.

I intend to work my way through many of these tutorials between reading Hegel and working on my book. (Found a bit of a Zen moment in Hegel, actually, and unexpectedly. He was saying the usual image of infinity is a line stretching both directions into infinity from some arbitrary point on that line, but that the true image of infinity must be a circle with no beginning or end.)

No Seahawk game today, thankfully. But I must attend a funeral this afternoon The sister of one of my daugter's friends died of cancer. Sad, but they don't want any dark colors. She requested that everyone wear bright colors especially yellow and light blue.

A Couple Links

2009-10-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

I am perpetually amazed at what is available on the Internet. One of my favorite sites is Ereignis. This site contains everything Heidegger: texts, discussions, articles, etc. Interestingly, I have not found similar sites for other philosophers.

The Internet is amazing for what it has, but it can sometimes be as amazing for what is absent. My students, my son for that matter, rarely turn to books for information. The subject map of the Internet may be the map of tomorrow's knowledge. The idea does not put me into despair. Modes of literacy change. Once knowledge was what you and your neighbors had managed to memorize. (Plato was suspicious of writing because it would mar memory by making it lazy and replace living dialog with dead text.)

Whatever the gaps, the amount and variety of information available is infinitely richer than what I had available to me when I was young searching the Coeur d' Alene Library and the local Drugstore book rack.

A second link, this one more professional. http://www.devx.com. It is a wonderful site with hundreds of articles for developers using almost any platform and language.

Decipherments

2009-10-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

Windows 7 is released today. Somehow it seems like old news since I have been running it for almost a month now. Still I hope it does well.

Last night I worked on a translation from the Greek. I used to do a lot of translation, but haven't done any for a long time. I went to one of my favorite sites on the web.http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/. The site is amazing to me. It has hundreds of Greek and Latin texts, translations, grammatical and lexicography tools. (They also have Sanskrit, German and English Renaissance materials. It was the only place I was ever able to find Christopher Marlowe's translations of Ovid.) I realize others will probably not be as enthused, but I have spent years trying to collect classical texts. They are expensive and hard to come by. Perseus makes them available for free with a host of scholarly tools.

Despite my years of working with Greek and Latin texts, I am not that good at it. I call my efforts "Decipherments." So, last night I picked a short text, a fragment of Bacchylides, at random. It is about a formal request by the Greeks for a return of Helen before the Trojan war. There is a passage very typical of Greek sentiment:

Zues who dwells on high and sees all
is not to blame for the great sufferings of mortals
All men have it in them to reach
unwavering (straight) ἰθεῖαν justice, attendant
of holy Eunomia and prudent Themis.
Prosperous whose children live with justice.

Anyway, today I am going to work on another appendix and start making notes for rewriting the chapters.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

2009-10-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

I spent the morning uninstalling Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and then installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. It went amazingly smoothly. My experience with Betas in the past did not lead me to expect that, but this beta one had a good uninstall utility, and the Beta 2 a good install.

I haven't actually played with it yet, but I will today.

I remember with the original SQL Server 2005 beta it wouldn't uninstall. I spent hours with the registry editor trying to get rid of every last trace of the beta, so that I could install the final product. If I was smart, I would only install betas into virtual machines. The problem with that is performance. At least on my machine, Visual studio crawls inside a VM.

Monday I had to take my son up to Puyallup to see a doctor. Yesterday I went into Seattle. Friday I have to go to Tacoma. The gist of it is, I am getting a little panicked about getting the writing done.

On the positive side, My lawn is turning green. It may actually be a lawn by spring.

Centennial musings

2009-10-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

So, a weekend of centennial activities for Eatonville. Friday there was a Centennial Ball. (I hate dressing up). Saturday there was a parade. Today there is a dedication ceremony. And, since my daughter and grandchildren are involved in it all, I must attend.

100 years to grow to about 2000 people Still, survival is survival. Over a million people pass through here on the way to Mt. Rainier each year, though I suspect most don't remember that they did.

It is a long story how I ended up here, but I will spare you for now. Suffice it to say, for now, that houses down here cost around a quarter of what they cost in Seattle. There are other compensations. We can see the mountain from our back yard. Currently the hills around the town are gold with autumn leaves. When I commute, the first twenty miles or so consist of small farms, fields and trees. I often see deer or herds of elk. The drawbacks are the distance from work and other activities. (I am really sorry not to have made it to the PostGres Conference this weekend.)

I am starting to feel a mild anxiety about all I need to get done this sabbatical. There is really a lot to do on the textbook. So far I have only finished the appendix on Access. (I finished chapters seven, eight and nine, but that was officially between summer quarter and fall quarter, not on the sabbatical itself.) I need to finish 2 more appendixes and then rewrite all the existing chapters. That, plus all the other work I want to do.

This is the week to regain my focus.

PostGres Access Centennial

2009-10-15T08:43:00.000-07:00

There is a PostGres Convention with Seminars being held at Seattle Central this weekend. I had fully intended to attend, but unfortunately it falls on the same weekend as Eatonville's Centennial Celebration. There is a ball I am expected to go to Friday, a parade Saturday in which my daughter and my grandson are participating, and events on Sunday. Most weekends are free and would pose no conflicts, but it just happens they chose this weekend. . .

I have been working on the appendix on Access. I was a bit surprised to learn that Access no longer supports user based security at all. (It makes sense, in a way, since user based security in older versions of Access was a nightmarish mess.) That makes it useless with my security chapter. I also realized that I will have to redo the whole ASP.Net application to work with Access since I can't use stored procedures. I was further surprised to find that the OLEDB provider doesn't work with Access 2007 but the SQL Client one does. (at least in the Wizard.)

Today, there is a break in the rain. There are tiny green shoots throughout my lawn. Maybe I will get some grass after all.

So

Neil Gaiman et al

2009-10-14T08:53:00.000-07:00

This morning I was looking at Neil Gaiman's web site. www.neilgaiman.com I like the general layout and feel of it. I wouldn't mind something like that for my site. I am sure he isn't responsible for the site except for Blog. He is too busy and has people for that.

I just finished reading his The Graveyard Book. It is a children's book, but reads well enough for an adult. (In fact most librarians feel it reads a little too adult despite having won the Newberry award, and, fearing it might be too frightening for children, classify it as young adult. Much of his work is hard to classify, he writes everything form children's stories to books that are definitely adult. I could see children, exited by his works for kids, wandering into some of his more adult books such as American Gods. The difference is't so much the subject matter as the intensity of the violence and a little bit of adult language. ) Gaiman has a very unique sense of the world in his writings, a mix of myth and dream, nightmares and morality tales with a touch of the graphic novel or comic book (He did the Sandman series.) Very modern but very archetypal at the same time. It makes me think about my own fiction. Is there any unique slant I could develop? My stories, with a couple of exceptions, seem more Ray Bradburyish than anything.

Yesterday started with a dentist appointment and went downhill from there. Not that anything went horribly wrong. It is just that nothing really got started. I need to regain some focus today and going forward.

Getting Started: Another Week

2009-10-12T08:19:00.000-07:00

Each day I have spent two or more hours outside watering the seeded lawn. 8500 square feet of dirt. There are some pleasures in it. I am too muddy to come back inside, so I stay outside and watch the leaves turn, and the crows, and the kids playing in their front yard a couple houses away. I work a bit on my poems and think about what else I need to do. Still, I am looking forward to the coming rain. It will be a relief not to have to water every day, not to worry about the dry spots that appear by afternoon. . .

Finished the fraction class. All the operators are overloaded. I added a ToString() method that outputs the fraction in "1/2" form. I added a constructor that takes in a string of that format and separates out the numerator and denominator. I decided not to deal with mixed numbers.

Now what I really need to do is to finish my appendix on Access. One of these days soon I will return to my more philosophic thoughts, but today needs to be practical.

Fractionally Better

2009-10-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

Still working--or more honestly avoiding work--by working on the Fraction class. I found it much more complicated to overload the equality == operator than I thought it would be. First, you can't overload the == operator without also overloading the != operator. To make it work I also had to override the GetHash() method and the Equals() method. Though once I had done that, the operators were easy. It was also necessary to make sure I had a workable method to reduce the fraction, otherwise the comparison of say 1/2 to 2/4 would not return equal. Here are the methods


        public static bool operator ==(Fraction f1, Fraction f2)
        {
            
            return f1.Equals(f2);
        }

        public static bool operator !=(Fraction f1, Fraction f2)
        {


            return !f1.Equals(f2);
        }

        public static Fraction Reduce(Fraction fr)
        {
            int i;
            for (i=fr.Denominator;i>1;i--)
            {
              if(fr.Numerator % i ==0 && fr.Denominator % i == 0)
              {
              break;
              }

            }
            fr.Numerator=fr.Numerator/i;
            fr.Denominator=fr.Denominator/i;

            return fr;
         }

        


        public override int GetHashCode()
        {
            return Numerator ^ Denominator;
        }


        public override bool Equals(object obj)
        {
            bool result=false;
            if (obj == null)
                 result=false;

            if (GetType() != obj.GetType())
                result= false;

            Fraction fr = (Fraction)obj;
            fr = Reduce(fr);

            
            Fraction fr2 = new Fraction(this.Numerator, this.Denominator);
            fr2 = Reduce(fr2);

            this.Numerator = fr2.Numerator;
            this.Denominator = fr2.Denominator;

            if (this.Numerator == fr.Numerator && this.Denominator == fr.Denominator)
            {
                result = true;
            }

            return result;
        }

Now I just have the > and < operators to do, and to develop a good ToString method. I also want to overload the constructor.
As for the rest, I have been watering the lawn and looking forward to next weeks rain. The river poem flows on, approaching 20 pages.

Fraction Class

2009-10-08T08:23:00.000-07:00

So, last evening, with nothing on TV, I worked on developing a C# class called "Fraction" that will add, subtract, multiply, divide and compare fractions. This involves overloading several operators specifically (+,-,*,/,==,>,<,!=). The class has two integer fields, "numerator" and "denominator." Here is the Use Case diagram for the class:

Here is the code for overloading the addition operator:



 public static Fraction operator +(Fraction F1, Fraction f2)
 {
     if (F1.Denominator != f2.Denominator)
     {
         F1.Numerator = (F1.Numerator * f2.Denominator);
         f2.Numerator = (f2.Numerator * F1.Denominator);

         F1.Denominator = (F1.Denominator * f2.Denominator);
         f2.Denominator = (F1.Denominator * f2.Denominator);
  
     }
     Fraction F3 = new Fraction();
     F3.Numerator = F1.Numerator + f2.Numerator;
     F3.Denominator = F1.Denominator;

     return F3;
 }

I would like to refactor the greatest common denominator code into a separate method since I also need to use it for subtraction, but I am not sure how to return the results I need to the operator method. I also intend to add a method to reduce the fraction, and a ToString() method that will output the fraction in a form like "1/2" o r"2 1/3."

This program isn't purely for my own amusement. It occurred to me some time ago, that this would be a great class to give to students to test. Each operation would need testing, and with a variety of inputs. Students could design a testing schema, conduct all the tests and document the results. It might make for a good special topics sometime.

On my book, I am almost finished with the Appendix on using Access with the book instead of SQL Express, though the hardest part is still to come. Security. Access security is nothing like SQL Server's security. I am tempted to just say, if you are using Access skip that chapter. But I will try to recreate the security measures in Access.

Now to water the lawn (a two or three hour task.)

Yard Work

2009-10-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

The last two days I have spent entirely on the lawn, preparing the dirt, seeding and watering. I still have some of that to do today. This autumn weather is lovely, but I actually wish it would rain so I could water less.

Reading Hegel before bed. (It does help hurry sleep.) The first principles of his logic are Being, Nothingness, and becoming. Interesting the poem IT begins in an almost identical place:

"It. That's it. That started it. It is. Goes on. Moves. Beyond. Becomes."

In terms of computers, I was looking at F#. It is a new language included in Visual Studio 2010. It is a function based language, especially useful for math intensive applications. I have played with it some but my math skills are not sufficient to take full advantage of it.

So, back to the yard. I really hope it grows.

Parallel Programming

2009-10-03T09:34:00.000-07:00

Reading MSDN magazine: Another new topic to explore is parallel computing. The growth in the power of individual processors has slowed. Computer manufacturers have made up for it by adding processors. In order for a program to take advantage of multiple processors it must be broken into separate threads that can be directed to the various processors. To do this requires a whole new set of fairly low level and complex concepts. You have to be aware of what's happening at the CPU and memory level. Most difficult of all is controlling the concurrency and synchronization of threads.

The question is, I guess, is this something we need to teach? Very few of our classes get beyond intermediate programming concepts. Yet, I suspect this is something that employers will be expecting of new hires in the future. Visual Studio 2010 includes some enhancements for parallel computing, such as PLINQ, that help abstract it some. Still, I really can't see, any but a very few students, being able to master these skills.

Something to think about.

Brize Marine

2009-10-01T08:15:00.000-07:00

Cool morning. Autumn in the air. Time to get the grass seed on the lawn. I started the appendix on Access. I have recreated the database from the book. Next I have to test the SQL statements. I also worked on a short story called Brize Marine after a poem by Mallarme. It is an old story, but I am reworking it, trying to make it more in my current voice. Here is a paragraph from the story:

His mind resembles an ancient Greek papyrus. It is spotted and stained with old wine spills. Holes have been burnt, corners charred by the flame of certain searing events. Pieces have molded with damp misuse, collapsing into a leprosy of paper flakes each with less than a word. Insects have gnawed at the edges. Gaps. Lacunae. Often it is the essential piece that is missing. The subject of the sentence, the object of the verb. What are left are modifiers that modify nothing, subjects without actions, actions that act on nothing. He remembers a pattern, a direction, a gist, but teeters perilously at the edges of the absences, the unbridged abysses.

First day of Classes

2009-09-29T07:55:00.001-07:00

Today is the first day that it actually feels like I am on Sabbatical. Classes are starting and I am not there. I am sure I won't miss the commute, but I am worried I will miss the structure of working. I do better with structure. Now I have to make my own.

I ordered a couple of books from Barnes and Nobel the other day for some light reading: Hegel's Science of Logic and a long poem called "It" by Inger Christensen. For almost a century after his time, Hegel was the philosopher that one had to contend with either to expand on or refute. I have read a great many of the refutations. I thought it was time I read the man himself. The logic is considered his major work. Christensen is from Denmark and considered a major poet in Europe, though unheard of here. I find in her a kindred spirit. Her poems combine structural puzzles along with a hymn like beauty. Exactly what I have always striven for. Her poem "Alphabet," for instance is based on the Fibonacci sequence. She uses it to determine the number of lines in each section. (I often use mathematical structures too, though I usually count words.)

The trick will be to not get carried away with reading and to remember what I need to do.

Database and Derrida

2009-09-27T08:56:00.000-07:00

I have been a bit remiss about updating the blog the last three days. We have had a contractor here who is--finally after 11 years--giving us a back yard. The sound and sights of a backhoe moving dirt from the pile in the front yard to the back has distracted me and made it hard to focus.

I did outline a few of my next steps. One of the things I promised to write was an appendix on how to use Access with the book. (I used SQLExpress.) So I need to recreate the book's database in Access. The design parts will all be the same, but I will need to show how to actually create the tables and relationships in access. I will also have to run all the SQL from my SQL chapter to see if it works in Access. The security chapter will be the difficult one. Access security is nothing like SQL Server security, and Access doesn't support stored procedures. For the ASP.Net Chapter all I should have to do is change the connection string.

On the side, or at the corners, or in whatever gaps of time occur, I have been reading Derrida on Plato and Mallarme. Derrida was one of my excuses for not getting a PHD when I finished my Masters--or rather Deconstruction was. The Liberal Arts departments in the major universities were involved in an outright war among competing philosophies--Deconstructionism, Structuralism, New Criticism. Jobs were lost for not espousing the appropriate jargon at a given university. I thought none of that had anything to do with literature and so went to work for the Forest Service instead of continuing after my masters.

I still think that was true. But, years later, I have come to actually read Derrida. I don't agree with all his pronouncements on language and meaning, but I find his discussion of specific texts surprisingly, for me, insightful and interesting. I love his book on Paul Celan, and am learning a great deal about Mallarme. . .

What Derrida and Database have in common is any one's guess. It is one of the conundrums of my life trying to reconcile my irreconcilable inclinations. But at least it keeps me occupied. I am not often bored.

Convocation

2009-09-23T15:01:00.000-07:00

So, this morning I rose in the dark, ground coffee beans and started the coffee brewing while I got dressed, filled a travel mug, went out to the car and drove, still in the dark, up through the patches of forest and the fields with their low domes of mist to Graham. By the time I reached Puyallup the sky was bluing toward dawn. Then onto 167, to 161, to I5 and into Seattle for Convocation:

Convocation: with voice, or, better, voice with, to vocalize together, as on the African Velt some hundreds of millennium ago. The 'tion' nouns it--I love turning "noun" into a verb. The act, as it were, of voicing together the hope for a new year.

Equinox

2009-09-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

Today, for a moment only, light and dark are balanced, Set has achieved a stalemate with Ra. But soon enough, the dark days of winter.

Today also they are delivering dirt for our back yard. After 11 years of living here we will finally have a yard and not just managed weeds.

WPF

2009-09-21T10:55:00.000-07:00

Monday Morning. Things have not gone well so far today in terms of getting things done.

Yesterday I worked on recreating my Library application with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). WPF (and Silverlight) uses the xml based XAML to create forms and objects. XAML is far more flexible and powerful than the tradition text based Windows forms, but the price for that power is complexity. I must confess I find WPF frustrating at times. The controls have less immedate functionality than their Windows and Web counterparts. You can add functionality and have enormous freedom to customize, but, as I said above, at a cost. Here is an example of XAML code. It is the code for my opening window:


<Window x:Class="WpfApplication1.Window1"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Title="Library Manager" Height="500" Width="597" Background="CornflowerBlue">
<Grid>
<Grid.RowDefinitions>
    <RowDefinition Height="200" />
    <RowDefinition Height="200" />
    <RowDefinition />
</Grid.RowDefinitions>
<Calendar Grid.RowSpan="2" Height="165" HorizontalAlignment="Left"
Margin="0,37,0,0" Name="calendar1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="240"
DisplayDateChanged="calendar1_DisplayDateChanged" FontSize="15" />
<DataGrid Grid.Row="1" Height="139" HorizontalAlignment="Left"
Margin="31,43,0,0" Name="dataGrid1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="522"
DataContext="{Binding}" />
<Label Content="Items Due" Grid.Row="1" Height="28"
HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="12,8,0,0" Name="label1"
VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="120" />
<Button Content="Add Checkouts" Height="23"
HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="258,45,0,0" Name="bubtnAdd"
VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="100" />
<Button Content="Return/Renew" Height="23"
HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="258,83,0,0" Name="btnReturn"
VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="100" />
<Button Content="Users" Height="23"
HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="258,124,0,0" Name="btnUser"
VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="100" />
<Button Content="Analysis" Height="22"
HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="258,161,0,0"
Name="btnanal" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="100" />
</Grid>
</Window>

I also decided to use LINQ to connect to the database. LINQ creates a class for each entity in the database and theoretically makes it easier to retrieve and manipulate the data. It uses a syntax that resembles, but is not quite, SQL. The advantage of LINQ's syntax is that it is the same no matter what the data source. It also generates intellisense and can be debugged by the compiler--unlike an SQL String. Here is the code for the Calendar date changed event:


private void calendar1_DisplayDateChanged(object sender, CalendarDateChangedEventArgs e)
{

DateTime selDate=(DateTime)calendar1.SelectedDate;
LibraryDataClassesDataContext lib = new LibraryDataClassesDataContext();
var due = from d in lib.CheckOuts
     where d.ReturnDate ==null && d.DueDate <= selDate
     select d;                                        
dataGrid1.ItemsSource = due.ToList();        
dataGrid1.AutoGenerateColumns = true;
}

This works. When I click on a date in the calendar it will display all the books due or overdue as of that date. The problem is, it doesn't refresh. When I click back on an earlier date, it should show only those books overdue as of that date. But once filled, the grid does not change. This would be automatic in windows or ASP.Net. Here I am going to have to figure out how to clear and refill the grid manually.

Anyway, that's what I wasted my Sunday on when I could no longer bear to watch the Seahawks losing to San Francisco.

Addendum: I figured out the refresh problem. I was using the wrong event. I used Calendar_DisplayDateChanged when I should have used Calendar_SelectedDateChanged.

A Rainy Saturday Morning

2009-09-19T09:48:00.000-07:00

Pouring rain. The light green through the leaves. This is the Northwest that I know and love. I moved to this side of the mountains, in part, to get away from the constant heat and sun.

I have had very few philosophical thoughts the last few days. I have been preoccupied with rebuilding my computer after the installation of Windows 7. Everything has gone amazingly smoothly, and computer is behaving much better than it did with Vista. It is faster, smoother. I have had almost no errors or hangups. Many programs hiccuped a little on the install because they didn't recognize the OS. But Windows has a nice feature that lets a setup run in compatibility mode, and then they are happy.

I didn't hate Vista as much as some people did. After Service Pack 1 it was fairly well behaved and it had a lot of features that I liked. But Windows 7 is definitely better. My computer--a two year old Toshiba Laptop--behaves as if it were new.

I spent this morning with a few final downloads. Mostly I downloaded the Java runtime, and the Java SDK with the Netbeans IDE. I don't do a lot of development in Java, but I like to have the option. I also was checking to see what I lost. Inevitably there are a couple of small things that don't get backed up. I think I lost a bit of the River poem--but it is a bit I am pretty sure I can recreate. I also lost the SQL script I was making for my Winter 2010 SQL class. I want to give that class a new database and a new set of assignments. Again I can recreate what I did, but this involves a few hours work. The last thing I lost--or not lost actually, it just doesn't work anymore--is my library application. It is an ASP.Net application I wrote to keep track of what Library books I have out. It helps keep down the fines. I can recreate it easily enough, and probably even make it better. In all not bad for having to do a clean install.

So, rain. I always get a boost of energy in the autumn. I love the coolness and the smells of the season. The cinnamon of fallen leaves. The rustle of dried plants in the breeze. Autumn is when I turn to more philosophical musings, so there will be more of those soon.

A Fresh Start

2009-09-18T09:30:00.000-07:00

So I did it--I wiped my laptop and installed Windows 7. So far everything has gone fine. All the reinstallations have gone well. The only trouble I have had is that there is no sound. That is not a problem with Windows 7. I had the same problem with Vista. As far as I can tell, there must be a wire loose between the sound card and the speaker. As far as the OS is concerned the sound card is operating fine. My solution in the past was to buy a USB sound card to bypass the internal sound. It worked fine, but the sound card I had won't work with 64 bit operating systems. So I ordered another one. I hope it works.

I am amazed at how fast my computer is now. I think it is mostly the switch from a 32 bit to a 64 bit operating system. But it is probably also due, in part, to the greater efficiencies in Windows 7. I have a great deal more RAM available. From what I understand, A 32 bit operating system doesn't actually use all 4 gigs of ram. Also Windows 7 requires less RAM to run.

Anyway, so far, I am happy with change.

Misc. Comments

2009-09-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

The gray skies of early morning are breaking up and the sun is streaming through. From my kitchen window I can see the blue top of Rainier floating above white clouds. It should be a good day. Technically, my sabbatical doesn't start for another two weeks. I think when I don't go to school on 28th, it will really hit me.

One of my first adventures, I think, will be to install Windows 7 on my laptop. It requires a clean install, which means I also have to reinstall all my applications. I ordered another copy of office from the Academic alliance store. (I don't have the media for my current installation--though it is a legal copy.) I have made sure I can get back to MacAfee to download the anti virus software. I can get Visual Studio and SQL Server. Most of the other programs can be reloaded from the web. I have written a few programs that run on IIS. I am not sure if they can be simply copied back and run. I may have to rewrite them, but that is usually a good exercise.

Anyway, I am a bit nervous about the process. My laptop has my life on it.

My Next project is to finish a couple of short stories. Then I will return to the textbook. I still have to write the appendixes and then rewrite the whole thing based on the peer reviews and my discussions with the editor. Still a lot of work ahead.

A Relief

2009-09-15T08:31:00.000-07:00

Just turned in chapters 7-9 for peer review. That is a huge relief. As usual, I didn't have time to really proof them for typos or to correct some of the writing, but they're in. I can take a breather and work on my stuff for a week or two. Then I will start on the appendixes and on rewriting the earlier chapters.

I want to work on some short stories. There are two or three that are nearly done, and I have ideas for several more. The goal is not only to write them, but to send them out for publication. I have been writing for something like 38 years (I wrote my first stories and poems when I was a sophomore in high school). In all that time I have never stopped working on poems, translations, stories, essays and novels. But in all that time I have submitted very few things for publication. I think I have probably published a few dozen poems, in all. I hope to change that now and start sending things out on a regular basis.

I also intend to build a web site, where I will make may of my writings available to those who wish to read them (probably not a large number.) I have been studying printing on demand. It is a form of self publishing, but unlike the traditional vanity press where you purchase 500 copies to sit and mould in your garage, you only print as much as you need when you need, even single copies. I was thinking that my web site would let people read things for free. If someone wants hard copy, I could use print on demand to send them a physical book. We'll see.

Poetry and Football

2009-09-13T08:22:00.000-07:00

I don't think poetry is information. It is not something that you use to get an advantage, to accomplish something, to make a profit. Indeed, poetry has little monetary value if any. Even a collection by a relatively well known poet is likely to printed in an edition of 2000 copies or less. (Still, as William Carlos Williams says in "Asphodel that Greeny Flower" poetry is not news but millions die every day for lack of what is found there. )

There have been times and places where poetry briefly held a very high value. It is said Neruda could fill football stadiums for a reading. Certain Russian poets held similar rock star status. The secret to such popularity seems to be political oppression and the poets' resistance to it. What drives the popularity is politics as much as/more than the poetry.

There have been other times and places. Historically poetry has often been tied to a group's cultural identity and/or to its religious ceremonies. (Another book to be written.) Today's poetry, in English, at least, has lost all such attachments. Poetry has been reduced to an expression of personal sensibility. (Fill in here a whole history of Romanticism. modernism, post modernism and whatever other "isms" you desire.) Poetry is intrinsically difficult (more on this another time) and most people have better, or at least other things to do.

On an entirely different note, Today is the first game of the Seahawks. For almost 30 years I have willing wasted 3 hours of my Autumn and Winter Sundays watching. Each year I begin the season with an unrealistic hope of success, and each season I am more or less disappointed. But here I am again, expecting great things. . . For any of you who hate football, I would say you are perfectly justified. It is a brutal game played by genetic mutants and is an enormous waste of money that could be better used. Still, if we had the money, I suspect we would not use it for better things (a few dozen tanks, a couple of fighter planes. ..) I started watching football about the time the Seahawks were formed so that I would have something to talk about with my forest service coworkers. (They were not so keen on talking about Jung or Nietzsche.) I became addicted to the game. For the most part, I limit my self to Seahawk games. I can set aside 3 hours, but 9 or 12 seems a bit much. So with every expectation that this is the season we return to the Superbowl, I look forward to this afternoon's game.

Huckleberry Finn

2009-09-12T14:29:00.000-07:00

Worked on my text book for several hours, but still have several hours to go. When I couldn't do it any longer I took a few minutes to work on my River poem. It is one of my two long poems. I see it ultimately as book length. I realize nobody reads book length poems except me. That is as it is. Today I incorporated a bit of Huck Finn deep into the poem:

was a monstrous big river down there
sometimes a mile and a half wide sometimes
you could hear a sweep scraping or jumbled
voices could see a streak on the water which
you know by the look of the streak that there’s
a snag there in a swift current which breaks
on it and makes the streak look that way
we would watch the lonesomeness of the river
kind of lazy along and by and by lazy off
let her float wherever the current wanted to go
it’s lovely to live on a raft

A little sun

2009-09-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

Chapter 9 is proving to be a slow slog. I feel like I need to explain everything, and then I look at my explanations and realize they need explaining. It is far too warm and nice out to be doing this. I still have 3 days before I have to turn these in. A little walk in the sun wouldn't hurt, would it?

Windows 7 and Art

2009-09-10T17:22:00.000-07:00

I was disappointed to find that I can't upgrade from Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 professional. It has to be done as a clean install. I might be willing to do this, but it means gathering together a great deal of software for reinstall. Office is the main problem. I hate to buy a new copy when the next version is coming out in just a few months.

Last night we went to a wine and cheese preview of the art at the Puyallip fair. A few pieces invoked a mild interest but most were fairly boring. There were the usual cowboy paintings, a few more or less awkward impressionistic landscapes, a couple of arresting water colors. I have a fondness for the imitations of Japanese and Chinese watercolors--the usual bamboo, plum blossoms or fish. There were a few pieces that would have been avant guard 70 years ago. A couple of well done realistic portraits.

I admit I am an elitist when it comes to art and literature. I am not interested in paintings that do what a photograph can do better. I am also not interested in paintings that imitate other styles of paintings without adding anything truly new. On the other hand, I have no problem with people doing that kind of art or liking it.

I wonder what it takes to create great art or literature these days. Sometimes I wonder if it is even possible. Though, on the other hand, I suspect that every age has felt that way to some extent.

Chapter 9 is now over 50 pages and growing. I will be very glad to have it done.

Corn Maze

2009-09-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon we did the first corn maze of the season. I am not as crazy about corn mazes as my wife, but I did enjoy the smell of damp earth, the rattling of the corn leaves--the corn still green and about 7 feet tall. I like looking up though the corn to the sky, watching the clouds move in, and the crows winging overhead.

Today, was the first day of school in Eatonville. We got my daughter off to middle school and then rushed over to the elementary school to watch my granddaughter line up for her first day of Kindergarten.

Once home, I worked a couple of hours on Chapter Nine. As for more philosophical musings--maybe later today.

Information Technology

2009-09-08T09:23:00.000-07:00

Information is knowledge as capital. That is, information is knowledge that can be assigned a monetary value. It can be used to accomplish some task or to gain an advantage. It can be sold, purchased, traded, exchanged, gifted, guarded, stolen, borrowed, banked on, deposited, mortgaged, or even wasted. Information is, in short, a form of wealth.

There are other forms of knowledge, but more of this another time. . .

Technology is mostly information. It consists of patents, copywrites, procedures, algorithms. It is as important to know how to make something, how to get something done as it is to actually make it. Technology comes from two Greek words "Techne" and "Logos." Techne is a term that encompasses all that is made, that is not self originating as are things in nature (phusis). Logos in its oldest sense means to arrange or order. As such it came to mean language--the ordering of letters, syllables, words--and science--the ordering of thoughts. So, technology is the logic or the ordering (the procedures, processes, recipes) of things made.

(Information by the way, consists of two Latin words and an English suffix. "In" is a Latin prefix, "forma" means shape, together they mean to give shape to. The "tion" is an English suffix that turns a verb into a noun so that Information is that which has been given shape.)

Together information technology is about knowing the ways to give shape to, the ways to create, manipulate, use, and secure knowledge that has monetary value.

It would take a book to justify these quick definitions.

Anyway today I work again on Chapter nine adding text to explain all those screen shots.

Labor Day Thoughts

2009-09-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

On this labor day, I labored on chapter 9 about ASP.NET. I walked through a simple program taking screen shots of every single step. Now for the explanations. . .

I consider myself a poet, and I teach computer programming and database. The duel definition sometimes engenders a bit of schizophrenia.I sometimes distrust technology as much as I am fascinated by it.

The common wisdom is that any piece of technology is neutral in essence. Good or bad can only be ascribed to how it is used, to the intention of the user. But I agree instead with the philosopher Heidegger, that technology is never neutral. Technology changes the world. Technology changes how we interact with the world, how we perceive it. Ultimately it changes us. Heidegger is not anti-technology, but he thinks we have never looked at technology essentially, we have never looked carefully at what is offered versus what is taken away.We have never judged what it adds to our quality of life, versus what it replaces. The only judge has been the market place.

I suppose if I were a good capitalist that would be sufficient. But I am not convinced that the fact that something can be sold makes it intrinsically good.

Anyway, I may in this blog, try to think through some of these issues about what information technology is and isn't and how it relates to poetry. It may make for more interesting reading then simply listing my daily activities, though I will continue to do that also.

Sunday Musings

2009-09-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

Ray Bradbury reportedly once said that computers were primitive technology because they are so difficult to use. When a technology is mature it is as easy to use a telephone. (I am sure he was not referring to cell phones or smart phones). Although I am a great admirer of Bradbury, in this case I think he is wrong. Computers are fundamentally different than most technology. Most technology is designed to fulfill a single purpose--or at most a very small set of purposes. A can opener is designed to open cans. A radio is designed to receive and amplify radio waves into sound. A television is designed to process television signals. A telephone is designed to receive and amplify sound waves from another phone. They are simple to use because they have a clearly defined and limited function.

Computers on the other hand do not have a predefined function. They are open ended. What they have is a small set of actions that they can perform. These actions are very simple in nature (store, retrieve. move, remove, add), but they can be combined in almost infinite sequences to achieve unique and previously unimagined results. In this way computers are like language or mathematics or the genetic code. They offer a finite set of actions with essentially infinite recombinatory possibilities. (Part of the difficulty with computers is in their openness; part is in the limited set of processor level actions they offer. Computers do everything awkwardly, but they do it so fast that the awkwardness is usually not apparent.)

This open endedness of computers is what has fostered the huge creative burst that resulted in the Internet. (I know the military created the original Internet protocols and set up the original architecture , but I mean the Internet we have today where anybody can create a presence, sell anything, write anything, share anything.) Computers began as business machines and ended up as communication devices, media players, game machines, and shopping centers.

The current trend, I think, is to try to reign in the computer, to break it up into single purpose components that can sold and managed separately. Smart phones encapsulate most of the communication functions. Media centers that combine the computer's ability to move bits of data that contain music or video with televisions and Ipods and zunes. Game consoles. Net books are optimized for Internet browsing and shopping. etc. For most people this is really what they need. They don't utilize most of the capacities of the computer and are often confused by them.

Cloud computing also represents an attempt to gain some control over the open endedness of the computer. It is essentially a return to the thin client concept of the old mainframe days. All your applications and data will be stored on servers somewhere and the personal machine will essentially be just a device to launch a browser. For companies this is ideal. It will lessen piracy. It will decrease the costs of distributing and upgrading software. It will lower the cost of providing it infrastructure for companies, since they will not have to maintain the same quality of machines or complex internal networks.

I guess I am afraid that computers will become sanitized and limited. But perhaps not. Creativity once released is hard to contain.

Starting the Sabbatical

2009-09-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

My first sabbatical in 20 years begins this fall quarter. I am beginning this blog for a couple of reasons: one is document what I do during the sabbatical, the other is to get the experience of blogging because I believe it could be a useful tool for my classrooms.

I have great ambitions for the next 4 months. I have a contract with Pearson Publishing for a textbook on beginning database. I want to bring that book as near to completion as I can. I also want to catch up with some new software. I have a VM with Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 beta 1. I want to see what I can learn about the Entity Framework, and, perhaps, Azure development. (Azure is about "Cloud Computing." I want to figure out how you connect to a database when you don't know where it is.) I might also explore some free database software, particularly PosGres SQL which I have ignored in the past. In addition I want to do some curriculum development and redesign my website.

In a different direction entirely, I want to work on my poems and stories. I have, in particular, two very long poems I want to complete. I may look into self publishing for those or just post them on a web site. I also have a half dozen short stories in various states of incompleteness. I would love to finish them and send them out. And, brewing in the back of my mind for a long time now, I have played with an idea for a novel.

This is probably all too ambitious, but I really don't want to waste this time.

I don't expect anyone much to read this blog. But if you want to know what I have been up to, it will be here.