Mail, whether electronic or postal, has one charm that even the most jaded recipient, dulled by garbage-bag loads of unwanted magazines and catalogues ( ah life at the top of the pyramid!), will respond to: an unexpected, 'thanks-for-doing-what-you-do', note. I just received one such email from the urbanmonk. her blog is at THE URBAN MONK - thank you for your note!
So it got me wondering about this strange but so fruitful web logging culture. And I thought of the opening pages of Elias Canetti's "Crowds and Power". ( A book that should be read by all voters, and sworn upon b y all jurors.)
"There is nothing man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Evven clothes can give insufficient insecurity: it is easy to tear them and pierce them through to the naked, smooth, defenceless flesh of the victim.
..."It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch." Blogging may be a way of entering the crowd, may be a way of reversing the fear of sincere expression and experience. The most exquisite part of it though seems to happen when, across the web, someone touches, snaps the vast mass into the touch of an individual. Thanks UrbanMonk.... I love your blog site.
10:51 PM

3.25.2001

Jon Haddock's imagery, on show at the Howard House Gallery in Seattle until May 5. Art imitating Life imitating Art...and at some point I ask, so what is the point? Check it out anyway.
11:38 PM

3.13.2001

This is live from the Digital Arts class
10:06 AM

2.11.2001

News of the mapping of the human gene, now complete, hits the media. Now the implications, the ethical issues, and of course, the fast-forming commercial enterprises related to the genome project start taking shape. One such company, based in San Francisco, is GeneSage. Part of the services it hopes to offer to health professionals as well as patients is a secure online databank for storing genetic information. Another service, which seems to be already available, is a form of 'genetic counselling'. Aha! I see a new profession forming - genetic counsellor. Heads up, class of 2002 and beyond! If you don't quite have the grey-netics to be a geneticist, and you are receiving a Liberal Arts education, here lies your future.
1:36 PM

1.30.2001

My response to David's email:
"I too have been wondering about the stocks of wood ( 'being driven in by the truckload' as one report said) going up in smoke in Gujerat. It is hard to suggest, leave alone implement, such fundamental changes to antediluvial (they must have had floods in India way back when too, right?) traditions at a time of mass grieving, but I agree with you. However, just to give you an idea of how prone Indian culture is to the tinder-box syndrome, consider what triggered the Indian Mutiny in 1857. The Sepoys, a contingent of natives, were asked to make contact with pig fat! ( Okay, they had to do it with their mouths, but this is sort of problematic for high-caste Brahmins you know!) So, while there may be many environmentally conscious politicians and activists around who are looking on with concern as wood is being trucked in from distant places ( Bhuj is a desert town), I doubt if anyone will publicly voice the concern.

They are now talking of between 100,000 to 200,00 dead and injured. My father was on the phone late last night, in tears, naming all the people we knew who are either dead, destitute or missing.

This is India.
10:25 PM

I have been listening to reports of the earthquake in my ancestral home state of Gujarat with sadness. My friend and colleague David Lumpkins writes to me in an email:
"We're still watching the news on TV. They continue to find people alive, and each of these is counted a miracle on American TV. Still, most of of the missing persons will not be found alive. NBC mentioned tonight that many of the survivors in Bhuj are fleeing the city in fear of further collapses of large buildings, many of which are teetering. Whatever the final figures on the fatalities might be, there has been a great dying in Gujarat. ...
When I asked about where they would get the wood for the pyres, I did so with thoughts of the awful losses in Bhuj, in particular, but I also had other thoughts on my mind. I am really concerned that funerary customs in India could be really destructive at such times as this. The living still have to live, you know. Trees are good for the preservation of soil and watersheds. Has any thought been devoted in India to abolishing the pyres at funerals? I think this should be done. We have more modern methods which would do the same thing. I don't have any regard for religious beliefs or public sentiment in this matter. This must end. India is destroying itself by such wasteful burning of the forests it has left. With more than a billion people now, how can all of them enjoy this ancient right? As progressive as modern India has become, I fear it has not come far enough fast enough. Atavism kills, and that is India's damning sin as a nation.

Sorry to be an imperialist, but ... I grieve too for the losses in Gujarat. I just tell it like I see it. India needs better ways of doing things. It is still not a rich nation, but it is not exactly a poor one either on a world scale. I strongly suspect that the multistory buildings that collapsed in Bhuj were built on Soviet models under Indira Gandhi's government. The pictures I have seen support that view. All of them seem to feature large concrete panels that would have been put in place by cranes and then inadequately anchored by cement and maybe a few steel rods for each section. This is the style of construction for post-war apartment buildings all over Eastern Europe. I expect those to fall down of their own accord over the next fifty years or so even if there are no earthquakes. If the dwellings were of mud brick or stone, then destruction would have been even worse, and I think this might have been the case the oldest areas of Bhuj. The earth is democratic to the extreme at such times, and it destroys the strong as well as the weak. I suppose all of this averages out over the vast ages we have inhabited this planet, but I fear I can't see the justice in it. What? There's some kind of divine budgetary limitation on mercy? I just don't get it."
10:23 PM

1.29.2001

Thanks to Joi for helping me set up my blog!
11:38 AM

1.27.2001

Visiting the new ATC and ITW computing areas at Sewanee always leaves me very excited.
3:25 PM

1.26.2001

test
4:21 PM

People talk about the marriage of art and science. To paraphrase Whitman, where have they been? The one cannot exist without the other. Some colleagues and I are talking about forming some sort of art / computer science course. Started reading John Casti's excellent book, 'The Cambridge Quintet'. A quote from it: "I believe that there is nothing special about the material composition of our brains, insofar as thought is concerned." p.63, ISBN 0-201-32828-3
10:45 AM

1.4.2001

Blogging enters my life via an excellent radio net/broadcast on The Connection. While there, listen to a lucid series of insights on the relationship between Islam and the West by Bernard Lewis.
7:55 AM