The weirdest quote of the day comes from Anne Widdecombe about the weirdest, least pleasant and most ludicrous story of the day. She said, “Jesus Christ said suffer the little ones to come unto me, not that they should be eaten for public entertainment.”
Year: 2002
And the winner of Yahoo!’s Person of the Year is George W Bush, which I’m sure has come as quite a surprise to anyone not living in the USA. Whatever one’s personal opinions, I think it’s quite likely that the rest of the world would find such a ‘victory’ inappropriate, unlikely, completely out of the blue. I would love to be able to have the figures at hand, but from my impressions of the media in my country and the general consensus of general opinion that one absorbs in day-to-day life, the vast majority of the world has a radically different view of him. The worrying thing about this is less that there is a radical discord between public opinion on this issue in the US and the rest of the world, but that it can only be a sympton either of a radical cultural divergence between the US and the rest of the world or between the coverage of the leader in the media. Here are a few articles from BBC News that I think hint at some of the international impressions…
- Russia ‘regrets’ US anti-missile plan (Russia)
- ‘Moron Bush’ aide resigns (Canada)
- A Tale of ‘Two Speeches’ (Romania)
- Schroeder shunned by ‘cordial’ Bush (Germany)
- US Jews and Arabs criticise Bush (Jews & Arabs)
- Bush Bestriding the World?
- Europe concerns over US Iraq policy
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Move along. Nothing to see here…
If you believe I have a reputation at all, then sit comfortable while I abandon all claim to intellectual expertise, skill or insight and instead link to this really nice picture of Tobey Maguire which makes my heart-rate pick up pace and my vision get all weird and blurry…
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On Schott's Original Miscellany…
I initially had a few reservations about Schott’s Original Miscellany. After all, wasn’t it just one of those funny fact books that people with knitted loo-roll covers place in the toilet? But when you see it – when you get your hands on it and investigate its pages – everything changes. It feels wonderfully archaic and traditional in a really reassuring way – the paper is good quality, the binding is luxurious, the art resembles the woodcut work of Eric Gill. And the facts within it aren’t just funny trivia – they’re actually significantly useful piece of information, fragments of literary interest, selections of philosophical quotes. Maybe it’s just a trivial little book to help make the self-satisfied middle-classes feel more witty and interesting… But it doesn’t matter. I’m a fan…
So through the magic of a constantly updating Google News RSS stream to NetNewsWire1, today I stumbled upon a piece in the Orange County Register called Manly Images. It’s an article about how John Ibsen – a researcher into early photography and masculinity – has discovered that men before the 1930s were much more intimate with one another:
“From the dawn of photography before the Civil War through the 1920s … it was customary for two or more American men to visit a photographer’s studio to have their portrait taken together,” he writes. “Posing for the photographer, the men would often drape their arms nonchalantly around each other and would sometimes hold hands.” These days, he notes, a more common way for adolescent men to spend time together is to go to the movies on a Saturday afternoon – and even then, they are likely to sit with an empty seat between them.
Immediately I was reminded of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of the relationship between homosocial relationships and homosexual relationships. She argued that man-on-man friendships have been structured around the continual disavowal of any gay component – that the neurotic denial of any sexual component either was recently or has always been one of the most significant structuring principles of society’s conception of how men can relate to one another. And indeed, if you read the article further, this is one of the assertions of the article itself.
This new reticence, he noted, coincided with the introduction of a new way of thinking about sex. “The notion of people having a specific sexual identity is a modern notion. People weren’t nearly so much inclined to think of sexual identity before the late 19th century,” he says, noting that the word “homosexual” comes from a German word that was coined only in 1869. But in short order, homosexuality and homophobia came to be intertwined with the concept of masculinity and what it means to be male.
But if men used to be more comfortable with one another’s bodies and the physical expression of affection, could they be so again? It’s quite possible that this comfort was directly connected to the invisibility and complete suppression of concepts of homosexual relations. Or it could be that there simply wasn’t as much anxiety associated to such relations. But I’m afraid I think that it’s more likely that having a free and non-disenfranchised gay community probably means (at least in the short-term) a greater degree of anxiety for straight men. Until – that is – we move even further from the stereotypes and the repression and find a place where people no longer feel ashamed even to be suspected of being gay…
Note 1: Courtesy of voidstar you can get a bespoke Google News RSS-feed via this incredibly simple basic format: http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php?q=gay&num=15 – where in this case ‘gay’ is the word I want regularly updated news about…
Over Christmas I was given some Clinique for Men eye-firming lotion and hair-gel, some soap, some Armani scent, a novel about Heroin addiction and a book called “How to be Alone”. Add this to the wedding I went to yesterday and increasing status as ‘weird-fifth wheel’ at my friend’s and colleagues parties and gatherings (those that I’m still invited to) and all I can do is thank god that I have work that I enjoy. Where’s my tiny house in the countryside with my labrador and chunky jumpers? Bah. Humbug.
The ethical and legal problems that occasionally Google is confronted with are essentially the same as any site run by any individual or business: Do I have an obligation to the people who use my site? How do I reconcile that with legal considerations? How do I reconcile that with my personal need to make money (either from my site or without my site interfering with that process)? A recent (but already well-linked and not particularly new) article in Wired – Google vs. Evil – talks about the kinds of decisions that have been made in what must now be the world’s most useful search-engine company. If only all online enterprises were as angst-ridden and committed to self-examination…
The company’s growth spurt has spawned a host of daunting questions that no data-retrieval system can easily answer. Should Google play ball with repressive foreign governments? Refuse to link users to “hate” sites? Punish marketers who artificially inflate site rankings? Fight the Church of Scientology’s attempts to silence critics? And what to do about the cache, Google’s archive of previously indexed pages?
I’m looking for advice (and/or links) on how one might go about sorting out the wireless networking of one G4 desktop Mac and one lovely sexy-new G3 iBook (both running OSX 10.2.3), the former of which is currently connected to the interhighweb via an Alcatel USB ADSL modem and BT Broadband. Some of the possibilities that I’ve been presented with so far:
- Buying an ADSL router, an Airport base-station and an airport card. [In which case any advice on which router to buy would be extremely helpful]
- Buying two airport cards (which apparently would allow my ibook to connect to the web without the need for a base-station or router
In an article on the New York Times’ website, Religious Sect Announces the First Cloned Baby [via Scripting.com]:
RaÎlians are followers of RaÎl, a French-born former race-car driver who has said he met a four-foot space alien atop a volcano in southern France in 1973 and went aboard his ship, where he was entertained by voluptuous female robots and learned that the first humans were created 25,000 years ago by space travelers called Elohim, who cloned themselves.
The word/phrase ‘lazyweb’ (which I believe was coined by Matt Jones) refers to the way in which if you describe something you’d like to exist online then someone else somewhere else will build it for you. But what do you call it if you never mention it and yet someone builds it anyway? The meme-stream is getting thicker, I think. Congealing. Clotting.
Well anyway – that’s my theory for Phil’s stunning creation of the Pepys Diary Project – which is a far more elegant, thorough and well-built creation than I could ever have conceived of – let alone built. It’s essentially a republishing of the diaries of Samuel Pepys – an incredibly prodigious and thorough London-based diarist from the 1660s. He wrote over ten years worth of diaries – which including descriptions of the black plague and the Great Fire of London. Essentially each entry is to be published in ‘real-time’ weblog-format from this coming January 1st. And it comes complete with the ability to add ‘annotations’ which hopefully will be a place where people can collaboratively research and explain what’s going on in each entry… All in all it’s a stunning piece of work…
When I was thinking around this area I did a lot of research into the possibility of finding decent journal-based or diary-based out-of-copyright material – but there’s a surprising shortage of it. It seems that the form of the journal or diary is very much historically contingent. It’s a recent form of self-expression. Here’s a piece from Walter J Ong’s “Orality and Literacy” which I posted a few months ago on the matter:
“Even in a personal diary addressed to myself I must fictionalize the addressee. Indeed, the diary demands, in a way, the maximum fictionalizing of the utterer and the addressee. Writing is always a kind of imitation talking, and in a diary I therefore am pretending that I am talking to myself. But I never really talk this way to myself. Nor could I without writing or indeed without print. The personal diary is a very late literary form, in effect unknown until the seventeenth century (Boerner 1969). The kind of verbalized solipsistic reveries it implies are a product of consciousness as shaped by print culture. And for which self am I writing? Myself today? As I think I will be ten years from now? As I hope I will be? For myself as I imagine myself or hope others may imagine me? Questions such as this can and do fill diary writers with anxieties and often enough lead to discontinuation of diaries. The diarist can no longer live with his or her fiction. ” (Orality and Literacy, Walter J Ong, Routledge1982)
Still – you’d think that there would be a great many diaries that were in the public domain – ie. published between the seventeenth and roughly the late-nineteenth / early-twentieth century. But if there are, it seems impossible to find them. The most evident one available is Dracula, which is available on Project Gutenberg [Dracula by Bram Stoker] and essentially operates as a set of several arch and wordy journals. The length of each of the entries makes it far from ideal. In fact most of the material that would be ideal for weblog republishing comes much later. I’d be thrilled to be able to put the Diary of Anne Frank online, for example, and I think it could be a tremendously powerful and valuable thing to do. But that’s unlikely to be available for quite some time to come…