Sep 2002, 20 entries

Not surprising. “The disclosures put the United States in the uncomfortable position of possibly having provided the key ingredients of the weapons America is considering waging war to destroy”

Reinvented as a dogblog

Another novel hata

I hate my country. “You are searching through their houses… and in some aspects, you feel like you are violating them,” said 33-year-old Army Specialist Darrin Gould. “But then you come across that next stash. You are excited. You spend hours, days searching and you finally find something.” U.S. Army Uncovers Two Huge Afghan Arms Caches

On October first, I’ll be returning from my month and a half writing break from the book and starting part 3. During the last month I’ve been planning and researching stuff that I’ll need in the next part. Part 3 will be a completely different story than parts 1 and 2, and will use a single perspective (rather than a rotating one). I don’t know why I’m talking about this, it’s not very interesting.

What is interesting is Game Neverending. I’m amazed at the amount of detail they’ve invested in the game so far. I tend to telescope into a project, working first on the most general things and working my way down to the details, but they seem to be painting the canvas from one corner to the other, figuratively speaking, putting joyful little details in the most unexpected areas. I would lov e to build a game to rival theirs. Any interest I have in games like these is negligible compared to the interest I have in the idea of building games. Building a game that allows people to build things is even better. When will there be a game that enables its players to build games? That would seem to be the ultimate destination. Like a book that explains how to write a book. Perhaps only a certain kind of person would play that. There do seem to be more people interested in playing games than building them. I’m sort of upset because my coffee is cold.

As anyone who’s visited my right column knows, I’m reading Godel, Escher, Bach right now and absolutely love it. I wish I would’ve written it. See how this pattern can be found in multiple mediums? I have a way of cancelling out the growing envy that I get when experiencing something that I wish I had created. It is to imagine that I had in fact created the thing in question. Godel, Escher, Bach won the Pulitzer Prize, so I won the Pulitzer Prize. I imagine that I would begin writing other books, like he did. And then I wonder, after I did everything he did, how would I feel? Would my work be done? Or would there be more to say? There’s always more to say. Hey, but instead of using my whole life writing all these books, in reality I’m only 26 and still have the rest of my life ahead of me. And in this rather dull way I justify my own existence and hope that there’s still a chance, however small, that I can still say something worth saying. Oh, this coffee is so cold and yucky.

I sometimes put milk and suger in my coffee. However, whenever I do, I fear doing to it what I did to my coffee just now (my next cup will be black). For any cup of coffee there is a certain ratio of milk and suger that, if added in the exact right proportions, will cancel out all flavor in the coffee, turning it into a bland dirty water tasting thing. It sucks. And now I’m going to finish it and get a new cup. I have lots to do tonight.

Purr…

Jonathan Franzen has been spying on me. Franzen makes a telling point when he says that while a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist Georgian might appear totally different, but the truth is that both “watch Letterman every night, both are struggling to find health insurance… both play Lotto, both dream of fifteen minutes of fame, both are taking a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and both have a guilty crush on Uma Thurman.”. Amazon.com review of How to Be Alone: Essays:

Sometimes I come up with the stupidest things, but they crack me up. For example, for a split second I considered registering allinterface.com and making it a super-designed, no-functionality site. All Interface. All in you face. The .com, .net, and .org domains are all available. You could start a franchise. I started laughing as the imagined scenario quickly expanded, then lost its fascination. My headphones were on, so I don’t know if I actually made a sound.

Click here if you do not wish to wait.

I’m dying with curiosity to have my go at Game Neverending. Still waiting for my password. From all reports, creativity is overflowing with that crew. It would be fun to work on a project overflowing with creativity, I think. That’s the main benefit from working in groups, in collaborations, the amplification of energy that occurs when you have more than one mind working on an idea or problem. Ideally, this is what I should focus on achieving at work, but it’s difficult sometimes, ya know?

Here’s an excerpt from the essay I’m writing by the same name as this node.

I’m interested in the process of moving objects into our minds from the real world, in particular what happens in-between the time that you first experience something and when you understand it. I can almost feel the “letting-go” that occurs when I understand something, or claim to understand it. It is a boiling down of a complex thing into simple parts that are consistent with one another and are easily pinned down. It is a workable thing. For the most part, these workable, understandable, things are all we need to function on a daily basis. If someone says, “Pass me the fork,” we don’t necessarily need to experience, contemplate, and digest everything about the fork in order to pass it to them. We need to know its approximate location, its approximate weight, and any physical properties that we might want to avoid (such as the prongs, since you don’t want to get them dirty with your hands, or the other way around if it’s a used fork, and also the prongs may be sharp). Knowing those things, however, you can pass the fork and seem like a reasonable, functioning, adult in the process. Does anyone really understand a fork though? We know what we need to know, and let the rest pass undigested. This may be why we so often get confused about function and definition. We look at a fork and we say, “The function of this thing is to skewer foods with and transport them to our mouth,” and its definition is the same. However, if a definition is tied to our own superimposed function, and not to the object itself, it can occasionally lead us to be confused about whether something is or is not a fork. When you place a fork in a gallery, is it still a fork (even though it is not intended to be used as a fork)? What about a fork that’s 100 times its regular size? On the other hand, if someone handed us a stick and said that it was a fork, and proceeded to skewer food with it and using it as an eating utensil, we would not be able to have any real dispute with this man, since our definition was never tied exclusively to the object but rather to its functionality. Therefore, anything that has that function, is a fork. (from page 5 of The Thing That Has No Name)

Currently Listening To: 5 new Radiohead songs

I think about names a lot. Whenever I come across a new phrase or a new combination of words, I test it to see if it would make a good url, or a good title for a book. I’ve switched the names of all the characters in my book multiple times for seemingly no reason other than that their names are one of the primary elements that I gain enjoyment from.

I’m writing an essay right now called, “The Thing That Has No Name” partially as a result of this obsession of mine. There are a lot of phrases that sound sort of catchy, but which I think are probably a little too stupid: The Representation and the Thing. The Model is not the Thing. Etc, type-o-thing. Typeo.com (which of course happens to be a porn site, darn).

The more I think about names, though, the closer I get, I think, or at least I hope, to understanding what makes a good name. I think it has something to do with discovering a new signifier, finding a word that is three or four times removed from the signifier that you intend, but which, along the way, signifies other interesting things. Finding the word that has a whole family of meanings, only one of them correct, but all of them helpful. Not a fully formed thought yet, though. So I apologize for its plain-common-sense quality. Anyway. The study of names. Back to my silly essay.

I have blogger’s block. There is no lack of things to mention, if I wanted to, but to talk about one thing by definition means that I would not be talking about the other things, and for some reason I don’t have the mental energy right now to choose which thing to talk about.

Quick list: PHL, East of Eden, Game Neverending, OPML, Peer Blogs, AppName, NYC, TMBO, The Thing That Has No Name, Lolita, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, All Consuming, Java, shark gives virgin birth, house in Corona, la dee da. That was actually refreshing, I should make those lists more often. When you discard the burden of elaboration and actual communication, it becomes much easier to talk about things.

I’ve set up a certain scenario in my head that, if for some reason it doesn’t work out, I will console myself by possibly purchasing my very first Robot Vacuum Cleaner.

If I ever went back to school, there’s a good chance I would go back to study robots. Either that, or cities.

1000 Journals got its first filled journal back: journal 526.

In other news, K’s co-worker got to meet Vincent Gallo last weekend, and he gave K a music video of one of his songs. He has a funny voice, some people don’t like it but I find it strangely mesmerizing.

When I was in school I had this theory that no matter which 4 or 5 courses I chose to take, no matter how diverse they were in subject, they would all have something in common. And for the most part it was true—it could’ve been because I was studying the liberal arts, which are all philosphical to some extent, but even when I took botany or anatomy or some math class, everything still felt like different sections of the same big class.

I feel that way still. Any book I read somehow ties into something absolutely crucial to what I’m currently thinking about in the book. Every project at work give me new insight to the characters, the setting, and the themes. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software is of course fueling most of my current articulation on this topic, but I think the book is right on when it talks about this… ultimately, life’s meaning is the quality that emerges out of our myriad unrelated activities. Occasionally, consciousness becomes aware of this quality, and life feels “fulfilled”.

That’s all for now. I’ve been learning a lot lately, about web services, JAVA, SOAP, autobiography, grammar, and the strange opportunities that come up during the day.

I’ve been thinking of the quality of open-mindedness as well. I think in order to remain truly open-minded, I have to occasionally let go of firmly established beliefs. Before I can fully reconcile myself to the occasional new ideas, I let myself momentarily let go of some of my long-held beliefs, whether religious, personal, or political opinion. Just like when I’m solving a rubix cube, I have to let go of some of the ground I’ve made on other parts of the cube. Maybe “let go” isn’t the right word, because I can’t truly let go without taking a step backwards in the game. I have to keep a memory of my movements away in order to eventually make my way back after I’ve gotten around a particular obstacle. To all external appearances, though, I’ve let go of that belief. Internally, I’m holding on just as tightly as ever, but moving the belief temporarily outside of the immediate foyer of my personality in order to move some contradictory block past, under, and around until it fits in its own place and I can bring originial beliefs back around.

I have no idea if others have similar experiences to this, but to me, it feels like a tangible working space for my self-awareness.

Guess who’s back. Back again.

There’s at least one definition for every word, and they provide the foundation for communication, since, without definitions, words are nonsense.

How does a definition pinpoint meaning? I think it pinpoints meaning by placing any word within a larger context and then refining that context. For example, take the definition of a rose: a rose is a flower that has thorns, pinnately compound leaves, and is often fragrant. This definition isn’t complete, but it serves as an example. A rose is a flower. It is a flower with these special qualities, thus making it a sub-class within the larger class of flowers. Both roses and flowers are classes that exist within larger classes, and have characteristics that distinguish it from the larger class. A flower is a plant that has blossoms. A flower can also be a name for the blossom itself. A rose is an class within the larger class of flowers, and a flower is a class within the larger class of plants. Every word is a class that exists within a larger class and has traits (classes themselves) that distinguish it from the larger class.

If this is the case, isn’t the world of definitions a farce? A hall of mirrors? Where is the real meaning if every definition relies on other definitions? Doesn’t it mean that real meaning is implied through connections, but is not absolute?

Some other thoughts. How does the world of real objects interact with words and definitions? This (orange) is an orange. The full definition would be: this (orange) is an orange that has these space and time coordinates. In that sense, objects and words are identical from a definition standpoint, although, as Plato argued, the word orange is a variable that holds the class of all of those things that we call oranges. The fact that a real object has space and time attributes is the same as any word that has sub-classes.

Second thought: meaning is decentralized. It’s possible to say, this rose is a flower. But you can’t make connections in the other direction: The flower __ a rose. What does this mean? It means a lot! Meaning does not float down from above, like declarations from some ultimate ruler of meaning… it percolates upward from objects. It emerges from the many. It has no form outside of the sense that meaning is a set of objects that have been grouped together. Yes, I’ve been reading Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.

I’m still working on another essay that’ll have some of these things hopefully more thought out than they are here.

Continuing on the old person obsession, does anyone know a woman between the age of 96 and 100? If so, can you ask her a quick question for me?

What are your dreams like?

I’m not interested in the subject of the dreams necessarily, but more of their style. Do the dreams have short scenes or long narratives? Does she replay scenes from her past or does she invent new scenes? How is time handled? Most importantly, how have these dreams changed over the decades? Is she more youthful in the dreams, or is she in the same body that she’s currently in? How is color used? Has she become any more aware of the dream-state over the years, and is she able to detect better when she is dreaming?

My great-grandparents are gone (all of them). I wonder to what extent it matters, though. Aren’t believable answers often better than correct answers? Aren’t interesting answers, or creative guesses what we’re really after? It reminds me of an interview I read of Zadie Smith, where she said she never did interviews to get information for her books because the personal experience is too shrouded by particulars, and the overall view was too limited. I think it’s because interviews tend to turn into stories themselves, that they don’t necessarily lend to novels. A novel of anecdotes is pretty lame.

And it’s in this way that I wasted my life.

That sentence came to me this morning as I was walking to work, “I’m wasting my life,” and I’ve been thinking about it all day. We are wasting it, aren’t we. Life just isn’t about using it correctly, at it’s most everyday level, it’s about a self-contained game with culturally determined rules. We never think outside the game. I like that:

Think outside the game.

From the Greek meaning: all the demons

The first of two words I learned about that sort of creeped me out today. The second one which K reminded me of is fantastic. In the ghouls and goblins sense: that was a fantastic hamburger! It reminds me of another eerie image that haunts me occasionally: angels crying. If the angels are crying, then we better be very very worried, because they probably know something we don’t.

Along these lines, Pandemonium is going to be the title for Part Three of The Most Beautiful One.