Hermenautic Circle blog

sunset flame has added a photo to the pool:

Great atmosphere but it would take you all night to get half a bag of candy in this neighbourhood!

Hey all — Just a quick note to say that all the copies of The Rules for Hearts are now spoken for by and/or en route to gay-straight alliances in Omaha, Nebraska; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Peoria, Arizona; Lethbridge, Alberta, and a few different GSAs in Edmonton, Alberta!

A special thanks to Kris Wells of the University of Alberta for helping to get the word out to the Canadians. :)

sunset flame has added a photo to the pool:

Wonder if he's read the Legend of Sleepy Hollow .....

sunset flame has added a photo to the pool:

The little gaucho is especially cute!

Note to self: Look out the window to see if there are any really little kids waiting for treats before putting on the mask and opening the door :)

"Perhaps he'll hop into a pouch." (Courtesy of Wendy.)

In the first of two Astral Weeks columns, I look at some interesting recent short stories. This installment: John Langan's "On Skua Island" and Benjamin Rosenbaum's "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes,' by Benjamin Rosenbaum" (that is the title!).

“But maybe we have it wrong. The dead do not hate the living; love hates the dead for being dead and again and again summons them back because of this.”

- geegaw.com : Film Threat

Studs Terkel is dead. And the radio world as we now know it has been permanently altered.

When I heard the news, I felt a horrible lump within me bunch up and plummet to the floor. I had been talking up Terkel only yesterday, openly contemplating to friends whether today’s podcasters and staid NPR types — who seemed narrowly concerned only with those caught within their fifteen minutes of fame — would even come close to Terkel’s deep and wide-ranging interest in people of all types. The only guy among my generation who has come close to Terkel is possibly Benjamen Walker, whose excellent Theory of Everything program is now sadly defunct. And over the past few months, I’d likewise been pondering whether I had an obligation to expand the range of my own program to include more people outside the cultural world.

Terkel demonstrated with his great journalistic genius that everybody had a hell of a story, that everyone was part of history, and that with enough curiosity, you could find the insight in damn near anyone.

He documented working people in a way that nobody on radio has been able to come close to in the past several decades. He provided an invaluable history of the Great Depression. One could listen to any of Terkel’s interviews and feel immediately humbled, almost insignificant by comparison. He brought so much life to the interviewing form, unfurling so many unexpected details in his subjects. The train hopper who described the way in which he packed hot dogs into his clothes to avoid starvation. The behavioral specifics devised and brought about by existing within an epoch.

Anybody interested in people would do well to revisit Terkel at length. This was a man who changed the rules of oral history. This was a man whose prolific professionalism simply asked us to look deep inside ourselves, and see the people around us. And I don’t know if we’ll see the likes of him again for some time. But his passing signifies that we all have to do much better.

Confused about what’s going on in the northern Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many people who follow African issues closely were surprised to see fighting in the eastern DRC become so fierce so quickly. I suspect I’m not the only person tearing myself away from US elections coverage and trying to catch up on an extremely complex situation.

The very basic rundown: DRC has been nominally “at peace” since a ceasefire was signed in 2003 between most of the parties involved with the Second Congo War, often referred to as “Africa’s World War”. It’s a conflict that has cost the lives of over 5 million people, largely due to disease and poverty exacerbated by the fighting, rather than to direct violence. And the conflict has never really ended, despite reasonably successful elections in 2006.

The conflict, in part, is an outgrowth of the Rwandan genocide. When Paul Kagame’s forces chased Hutu militias out of Rwanda in 1994, they fled across the border into eastern DRC. This created one of the world’s most morally complicated humanitarian situations. People who’d fled Rwanda were refugees, and many legitimately feared for their lives, so humanitarian organizations felt compelled to care for them. But it became clear that these camps were housing and feeding militias, who were making raids across the border and continuing to kill Tutsis, which made some humanitarian organizations wonder whether they were helping perpetuate the conflict. (This is why we don’t set up refugee camps in war zones… but it’s very hard to figure out where those zones actually are.)

There are still Hutu militias in eastern DRC. And there’s a Tutsi militia as well, the CNDP, led by Laurent Nkunda. This group is nominally a self-defense miliia to protect Tutsi populations against the Hutu groups… but things are a little complicated in eastern DRC. This part of the country has amazing natural resources - a wealth of minerals as well as valuable timber - and anyone who’s fighting in eastern DRC is probably also attempting to gain a share of some of this wealth. When the Second Congo War ranged, it drew in Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia, all of whom wanted a share of the booty.

So the current conflict is nominally between Nkunda’s forces, the CNDP, who are trying to root out a Hutu group called the FDLR. The FDLR is probably supported by the Congolese government, and so much of the conflict has been between the CNDP and the Congolese army. But the Congolese army is badly trained, miserably supplied and extremely ineffectual, and lots of army members have simply been running away. So the conflict has ended up being between the CNDP, who are marching into cities in eastern DRC and the UN’s forces - MONUC - who are in those cities trying to protect civilians.

This ends up being a deeply odd situation. Since the Congolese army won’t fight, CNDP - which many believe to be backed by Rwanda - is fighting the UN, which consists mostly of Indian soldiers. Oh, and because MONUC hasn’t been very effective at protecting civilians (in part because they’ve got the mandate of keeping a peace that doesn’t exist), they’re getting attacked by the civilians they’re supposed to protect.

Video from the fall of Rumangbo Station, the headquarters for Virunga National Park

If you’re an average Congolese living in north Kivu, the situation is very, very scary. Roughly 250,000 people have fled their homes, and many are seeking safety in the thick jungles of Virunga National Forest. The video above is from the official website of the forest, which does an amazing job of using digital media to share what’s going on in eastern DRC… and to raise money for the work rangers are doing in protecting natural resources in a very unstable war zone. Nkunda’s rebels have now seized the headquarters of the park - the team is now trying to find 50 rangers who’ve fled into the jungle, and are looking for places to make phonecalls and let their families know they’re alive.

Most of the 250,000 people who’ve fled don’t have a resourceful team of bloggers and videographers looking out for them, but it’s worth paying close attentions to the accounts from Virunda, because they give a sense for how desperate and precarious the situation is.

For more on the situation, which is fluid and changing:
The Economist has a pretty good overview, as does the Guardian, focusing primarily on international mediation efforts. Global Voices is covering the situation from the perspective of bloggers, mostly the Virunga crew. Sokari’s got a strong piece about western mineral interests in DRC that’s worth reading.

Remember the long lines, malfunctioning voting machines, poorly-designed forms, and general confusion at the polling places in 2000 and 2004? Even with a third of the electorate voting early, an unprecedented turnout is expected this year, and it looks like we're heading for a repeat.

read more

The legend has passed. He was 96 and packed zillions of lives into a single one by reaching out to people of all stripes - rich and poor, black and white, male and female, old and young, conservative and liberal - all in a bid to understand the greater human condition, to hear this country sing in all its voices. He was curious and keen, insightful and kind, and if you haven't read WORKING, you are doing yourself a grave disservice.

Watch. Listen. Think.

What a goddamn loss.

I just got a new book on web development: The Substance of Style, by Virginia Postrel. One of the cover blurbs describes it as an analysis of a major new phenemenon: that people care more about how stuff looks.

To me this a book about the role of looks in software development. What is the value of looks to a user? How do I manage the tradeoffs between usability and style?

In the back of mind what I’m thinking about is Apple’s natural instinct for graphics, and the way they pushed the state of the developers’ art beyond Jakob Neilsen. Given that nothing ever ever ever trumps usability, and that excessive design always always repels users, how does Apple manage the balance so much better than other developers?

Looking back — way back — at the candidates, and all their typography. (Thanks to Teddy Blanks.) [JH]

I’m listening to a worthy mix MP3 titled A Deeper Groove, courtesy of a site called deepgoa. So far it’s a great list for getting me into the groove of work.

(MP3)

At the HarperTeen Myspace blog, I contemplate the possibility that I should NaNoWriMo...

Neal Stephenson appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #245. Stephenson is most recently the author of Anathem. It is not known whether or not he “likes cake a lot.”

Condition of Mr. Segundo: He likes cake a lot.

Author: Neal Stephenson

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Going back to the idea of the general reader, or the common reader — whatever we want to call the audience here — the philosophical proposition involving the fly, the bat, and the worm expressing basic cognitive abilities, and how cognitive abilities come together so that humans are a higher form of animal than other animals, this was a very clear way of expressing this particular concept of individual senses. And I’m wondering if this was something that you concocted. Or that you took from Kant. Because I actually tried to find a philosophical precedent for this as well.

Stephenson: It’s more from [Edmund] Husserl. So Husserl was an amazing guy who could just sit in his office and look at a copper ashtray, and then write at great length about all of the processes that went on in his mind when he was perceiving that ashtray, and recognizing it from one moment to the next as being the same object. And so he’s got a number of lengthy books about this, which, as you can imagine, are pretty hard to read. So the content of the dialogue, or the parable you mention — the fly, the bat, and the worm — really comes from him. But it’s me trying to write a somewhat more accessible version of similar ideas.

Correspondent: So you really wanted to be accessible in some sense, it seems to me.

Stephenson: In some sense, yeah.

Correspondent: Well, what sense exactly?

Stephenson: (laughs) Well…

Correspondent: If the reader doesn’t matter and, at the same time, there’s this accessibility here, it seems…what’s the real story? (laughs)

Stephenson: Oh no. The reader matters. The criterion is very simple. It’s got to be a good yarn. If it’s not a good yarn, then the whole enterprise fails. So I think that to have a good yarn, you’ve got to have characters that people are interested in. And they’ve got to get into situations that make for a good story. It’s okay to stop the action and have them sit down and have an interesting conversation. You know, for some reason, I always go back to the movie, My Dinner with Andre, which is a long movie consisting of two guys just sitting there talking with each other. But it’s a completely engaging and fascinating movie. That’s kind of an existence proof that you can build a good yarn that consists largely of people just having conversations. And so that was kind of my guiding — that was my guideline, I guess you could say, for trying to work that material in.

BSS #245: Neal Stephenson (Download MP3)

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Here is "Maldito," by Jessy Bulbo, a video faithful to the vibe of the old-school Mexican punk-rock moshing ritual. Check here to learn more. Jessy Bulbo plays at Foro Alicia on Nov. 7.

Filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #244. Kurosawa is most recently the co-writer and director of Tokyo Sonata, a film that played the New York Film Festival and that will be released by Regent Releasing in the United States on March 17, 2009. For more information on this extraordinary film, please see our review.

We also wish to express our many thanks to translator Linda Hoaglund, who assisted us during the course of this interview.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Voiceless, per the requirements of a sonata.

Guest: Kiyoshi Kurosawa (director of Tokyo Sonata)

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: You have this train running behind the Sasaki home. And this suggested to me, along with the fact that you cut this film frequently crossing the axis in the editing — crossing the 180 line — it almost suggests an Ozu parody. Or the kind of movie that Ozu would have made if he were to live in our particular times. And I wanted to ask you how this visual style originated, as well as the subway line.

Kurosawa: (through translator) Yes, Ozu was the name I was most dreading hearing, if only because I’m such a huge maniacal fan of him. I really tried to shut him out of my brain. But I guess subconsciously a little bit of his influence remained.

Correspondent: Back to this notion. Ozu was not a part of developing this script? The subway line, I didn’t get an answer for the train behind the house. And I’m very curious about that. Because it very much reminded me of Ozu’s trains.

Kurosawa: (through translator) Actually, that train and the proximity to the house of the Sasakis was not in the script at all. It wasn’t intentional. As I wandered around Tokyo looking for the right home for the Sasaki family, there happened to be a train track next to that particular house.

BSS #244: Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Download MP3)

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