Deleting old emails is strangely emotional

It makes me wish I wrote letters on paper so that deletion was a more tangible act.

Another quote I found

I wish I were finding these quotes online so I could properly use the cite attribute of a blockquote tag.

Reputation is also not generalizable or portable. There are people who will cheat on their spouse but not at cards, and vice versa, and both, and neither. Reputation in one situation is not directly portable to another

This is from The Best Software Writing I, which came out in 2005, and so is a little dated (I love that I'm going to be working in a field where 2005 is "a little dated"), but not too badly, and is strongly recommended to anyone who enjoys good writing and the use of computers. If you've never cared to, or maybe had to, write a line of code in your life, 40% of the book would be understandable, and if you've done any programming at all (hell, setting up a blog is a sufficient start), that goes up to maybe 80-90%.

The interesting 40% mostly involves software's business & social side- smart people like Cory Doctorow or Clay Shirky (the source of the quote above), who ought to be read by pretty much anyone who likes the internet. Alternatively, skip the book, since it's mostly a compendium of blog posts (there are a few conference talks included), and just go read their blogs.

My Favorite Line in Moby Dick, thus far

So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.

Questions

• Why are there so many colleges in New York City, and why do they all advertise on the subway so much? Do they do any research that shows this is effective?
• Is it appropriate to play Marco Polo in a motel called the Marco Polo Motel? If not, why?
• Does anyone ever click on Facebook ads?
• Why do websites make you pick a username? Why not just use your email? (OpenID will probably never work)

Proposal: "Dog Day"

I think we should have a holiday devoted to dogs, a day marked by celebrations of man's best friend. It should also be a holiday enforced by law.

--On Dog Day, everyone must take their dog for four walks during the course of the day

--On Dog Day, it would be illegal for any restaurant, charcuterie, or other place of business to bar dogs from inspecting the premises.

--On Dog Day, all the streets will be closed, and everyone will be required to carry a tennis ball or frisbee around with them.

--On Dog Day, adopting a dog from the Pound gets you a significant tax credit.

--Finally, at the conclusion of Dog Day, as a final token of esteem for our canine friends, a mailman will be sacrificed in their honor.

Totally Inefficient Use of Wikipedia

There are, to the best of my knowledge, and my knowledge is disturbingly expansive (if ephemeral), no outstanding female European royals that are near my age. This makes the prospect of my living in a castle far more improbable than childhood Hal ever imagined.

A Blog Redesign!

At the urging of my esteemed cohort and future host, Hal, I was given to undertake a redesign of our blog. The changes are fairly minor, as far as their size, but I think they are of great value in increasing the legibility and attractiveness of our blog.

1. Our blog's primary font is now Trebuchet, a change from Georgia. It's a taller font. I prefer it.
2. The former backgrounds, a repeating pattern for the page background, and a faux-paper texture for the text's background, have been replaced by a single light-gray color. I avoided white, which I find too stark on a computer monitor, but retained a high contrast against the text.
3. The separation between the blog's title and the blog posts has been modified in a minor, mostly irrelevant way, replacing an image with a dotted line.
4. Links and other colored items are now all various shades of gray, and the Blogger nav-bar has been changed to a gray styling as well. To avoid making this blog unreadably monotonous, Hal and I will endeavour to include pictures in future posts.
5. I have widened the blog's text by 100 pixels. This makes it significantly wider than the sidebar, which heretofore was over-emphasized, but is not so wide as to cause difficulty for the reader. A quick sampling showed the average post was now about 15 words, or around 85 characters, which I think acceptable.

Comments are greatly appreciated! It's extremely likely that there are HTML elements I have failed to correct. In the next few days I'll be trying to exercise them thoroughly, but if I miss anything, please alert me (or Hal).

Thanks!

Shrubbery of Doom

A long time ago I was supposed to review Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, the author of the excellent short-story collection Jesus Son. I got distracted by life and never finished that review. The book was terrible, but somehow it won the National Book Award.


Anyway, here's the first paragraph, the only one I completed in its entirety (I had a lot of suggestive jottings), from that review.

'Of the three people I know who set out to read this novel, I am the sole survivor to reach the end. It lends a certain glamor to what was otherwise a joyless undertaking. Reminiscent of the Vietnam War which gives Tree of Smoke its setting, to have read this book in its entirety is to emerge a veteran of a senseless waste of life. Other phrases which describe both Vietnam and Tree of Smoke include “interminable quagmire” and “catastrophic South-Asian adventure.”'

This is not a blog

Increasingly, this blog is being read by acquaintances unaware of its original social context and Nassau Weekly origin. Since our "About" tab on the Left is pretty unhelpful, perhaps an explanation is in order.

The authors of this blog are Harold "Hal" G. Parker III and Harold "Hal" T. Pratt IV. We both went to Princeton, worked for the same newspaper, and belonged to the same eating-club. In addition, we superficially resemble one another. Both of us blog under the username "HP."

Once upon a time we wrote an article for the Nass called "Hal vs. Hal," which consisted of a series of letters exchanged between the Hal's on the subject of television. Then, we wrote three more articles of the same Hal-vs-Hal type. Finally, one summer we decided to turn the idea into a blog -- hence, the ":The Blog" part of the title. We like to think of this blog as a Hegelian experiment in self-objectifying narcissism.

Also, one last thing you should know is that Hal Pratt is not the author of the post, Three Memories by Hal Pratt. I wrote that one as a joke just as he wrote a fake one about me as well, Three Memories by Hal Parker. Hal Parker is not the author of that post.

Or is he?

(To be clear, the answer is no.)

-HP

Kant Get Enough...

...of Manfred Kueh's Kant: A Biography.

Here are three humorous excerpts.

1. "It was not just the cold that made Scheffner shiver. Nor was it simply the fear of his own death, which might have been awakened in him by the hollow sounds of the frozen clods of earth falling on the almost-empty coffin. The tremor that would reverberate in his head for days and weeks had deeper causes. Kant, the man, was gone forever. The world was cold, and there was no hope -- not for Kant, and perhaps not for any of us." (2)

2. "In fact, one of the only joys remaining to him was observing a bird, a titmouse, that came every spring and sang in his garden. When this bird came late one year, he said: 'It must still be cold in the Apennines,' wishing the bird good weather for its homecoming. In 1803 the bird did not come back. Kant was sad and complained, 'My little birdie is not coming.'" (418)

3. "On February 11, he uttered his last words. Thanking Wasianski for giving him a mixture of wine and water, he said: "Es ist gut," or "it is good." Much has been made of these words -- but "Es ist gut" need not have been the affirmation that this is the best of all possible worlds, it can also mean "it's enough," and it probably meant just that in the context. He had drunk enough -- but he had also had enough of life." (422)

Why I oughtn't be allowed out on low sleep

I was reading Charles Petzold's blog again, and it was talking about Desk Set, which is my favorite movie of my mom's favorite movies (creepy yet?), and I realized that the reason I think Spencer Tracy is cool is because in that movie he plays a computer salesman. Also, it's definitely the best appearance of a computer in a movie ever, including 2001, which is great, but Hal would never really do that, and WarGames, because, seriously, WOPR would have just realized that the human that told it to play Tic-Tac-Toe was a Communist and needed to be killed. SO unrealistic.

The Joy of Stylometry

From Wikipedia:

The primary stylometric method is the writer invariant: a property of a text which is invariant of its author. An example of a writer invariant is frequency of function words used by the writer.

In one such method, the text is analyzed to find the 50 most common words. The text is then broken into 5,000 word chunks and each of the chunks is analyzed to find the frequency of those 50 words in that chunk. This generates a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. These numbers place each chunk of text into a point in a 50-dimensional space. This 50-dimensional space is flattened into a plane using principal components analysis (PCA). This results in a display of points that correspond to an author's style. If two literary works are placed on the same plane, the resulting pattern may show if both works were by the same author or different authors.

...
Early efforts were not always successful: in 1901, one researcher attempted to use John Fletcher's preference for "'em," the contractional form of "them," as a marker to distinguish between Fletcher and Philip Massinger in their collaborations—but he mistakenly employed an edition of Massinger's works in which the editor had expanded all instances of "'em" to "them."

...
In the early 1960s, Rev. A. Q. Morton produced a computer analysis of the fourteen Epistles of the New Testament attributed to St. Paul, which showed that six different authors had written that body of work. A check of his method, applied to the works of James Joyce, gave the result that Ulysses was written by five separate individuals, none of whom had any part in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Succor

A quote, from some random blog.

"Here's some advice for successfully reading a book: You need to stay focused, so try to avoid distractions. Avoid multitasking. Avoid task switching. Turn off the TV. Shift positions occasionally so you don't get cramps or backaches. Don't get too comfortable or you might fall asleep. (Interestingly, many of these same rules apply to having sex, except that you can read a book with a cat in your lap.)"

Help!

I think I'm becoming a behaviorist.

"Nothing less than truly scintillating...satisfying, even electrifying"

So reads an exceedingly vapid blurb on the cover of The New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster, a collection of three previous novels, City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986). Although these novels were originally published separately, they constitute a thematic unity and belong together -- whether or not they constitute a diegetic unity in addition seems to me a question for the reader.

(Diegetic is a word which refers to things within the universe of a story, as opposed to narrative commentary from without. Do the three books occur in the same physical universe with shared characters, etc.? It's questionable)

I reread this work recently on the recommendation of Marina. Simply put, I was blown away. Literally. Just kidding: only figuratively. I had read it years before, but I guess it hadn't made too great an impression. Not since Lolita has any book changed so greatly in my estimation upon rereading.

It's an incredibly stimulating book, the kind that launches a thousand conversations. There's so much theoretical ground one could cover in talking about it that I feel hopelessly burdened in trying to compass it within the space of a blog-entry. Instead, I think I'm just going to copy out a long quote from the end of the first book, City of Glass, about a private investigator originally hired to investigate an eccentric who imprisoned his child in darkness as an experiment in natural language:

This period of growing darkness coincided with the dwindling of pages in the red notebook. Little by little, Quinn was coming to the end. At a certain point, he realized that the more he wrote, the sooner the time would come when he could no longer write anything. He began to weigh his words with great care, struggling to express himself as economically and clearly as possible. He regretted having wasted so many pages at the beginning of the red notebook, and in fact felt sorry that he had bothered to write about the Stillman case at all. For the case was far behind him now, and he no longer bothered to think about it. It had been a bridge to another place in his life, and now that he had crossed it, its meaning had been lost. Quinn no longer had any interest in himself. He wrote about the stars, the earth, his hopes for mankind. He felt that his words had been severed from him, that now they were a part of the world at large, as real and specific as a stone, or a lake, or a flower. They no longer had anything to do with him. He remembered the moment of his birth and how he had been pulled gently from his mother's womb. He remembered the infinite kindnesses of the world and all the people he had ever loved. Nothing mattered now but the beauty of all this. He wanted to go on writing about it, and it pained him to know that this would not be possible. Nevertheless, he tried to face the end of the red notebook with courage. He wondered if he had it in him to write without a pen, if he could learn to speak instead, filling the darkness with his voice, speaking the words into the air, into the walls, into the city, even if the light never came back again.

The last sentence of the red notebook reads: 'What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?"

A Mysterious Passage

While doing research for my senior thesis, I came across this passage from Leo Strauss's 1964 book, The City and Man:

“Plato’s work consists of many dialogues because it imitates the manyness, the variety, the heterogeneity of being. The many dialogues form a kosmos which mysteriously imitates the mysterious kosmos. The Platonic kosmos imitates or reproduces its model in order to awaken us to the mystery of the model and to assist us in articulating that mystery.” (61-62)

This is perhaps the most strikingly platitudinous thing anyone has ever said about Plato.

Thimply Wonderful

Thimphu is the capital of Bhutan.

Here is an interesting fact about life in Thimphu:

Thimphu is the only national capital in Asia that does not have traffic lights. When local authorities installed a set of lights, people complained that they were too impersonal. The authorities gave in, and took them down. Instead of traffic lights, the city takes pride in its traffic police that directs the oncoming traffic with their dance-like movement of their arms and hands.

Against Trivia

How quickly the recitation of trivia turns to the subject of historical death-counts. Death-counts are the ne plus ultra of trivia. How many people died there.

Trivia is itself the end product of the atomization of history into a collection of unrelated "facts" whose only meaning is to be stated as quickly as possible in the greatest numbers possible. Trivia is a war against history.

The Scandal of the Vulva

Even though the vagina is only part of the female genital apparatus, often people use the word "vagina" as slang for the whole. I believe I have an explanation for this synecdoche.

The vagina is the exact spatial and functional complement of the penis. Penis and vagina exist "for" one another. To characterize the entire apparatus in terms of the vagina, therefore, is to define it as in need of the penis, as intelligible only in the context of the penis. Correspondingly, women exist in order to be "satisfied" or "made whole" by men.

The scandal of the vulva is that it suggests the possibility of a world without penises. It's certainly not incompatible with the penis, but neither is it purely dependent on it. Rather, the vulva institutes a regime of womanly pleasure liberated from the capabilities of males, a regime with which any rapprochement is always of an improvised and factitious nature which eludes science.

From the Diary of Samuel Pepys, II

23 February 1668

This evening, my wife did with great pleasure show me her stock of jewells, encreased by the ring she had made lately as my Valentine's gift this year, a turky-stone set with diamonds; and with this and what she had, she reckons that she hath above 15olb worth of jewells of one kind of other. And I am glad of it, for it is fit the wretch should have something to content herself with.