Gone for ten days

Tomorrow I’m leaving with my family to go to England and Wales, a mix of tourism and visiting family. I’ll be gone for ten days, coming back on August 4, meaning there will be an entire week without posts–my first since starting, which is a pretty good run considering my track record with these sorts of things.

My flight to D.C. is on August 8, so posting may be sporadic after the week I get back from England, depending on the internet situation and how much free time I have. I suspect that uninterrupted blogging will resume in mid-August once The Great Job Hunt truly begins and Misson Drag My Stuff out of Storage in Charleston is initiated.

Au revoir until August! «»

Boxing

As mentioned in this post, I’m moving to Washington, D.C. the second week of August. I’ve been packing up the few boxes I’m going to mail to myself. I moved here to Germany the same way, carrying everything I could in the baggage for my flight, mailing a few boxes of stuff to myself, and putting the rest in storage. That said, I actually own very little that needs to be packed up and mailed and, in a way, what I’m mailing to myself is representative of my interests at the moment.

One box is filled with books–the same books I brought over. They’re mostly reference books (dictionary, thesaurus, a philosophy dictionary and a couple basic books on different religions) and a handful of novels (Ender’s Game, David Sedaris’s Naked, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet). Another box is filled almost entirely with games–party games, board games, video games, dice. And PixelBlocks. It’s a seemingly juvenile collection of stuff, but the fact that it’s what I carry with me when I move for an extended period of time says something about my character. It’s open to interpretation, but I point to this unsourced Plato quote: “You can learn more about a man in an hour of play, than in a year of conversation.” He probably didn’t say it, but it rings true enough that he didn’t have to.

Plato loved basketball, though. «»

Defining religion

I stumbled upon a post which casually explored the idea of defining religion, and I ended up writing a lot more than was probably appropriate. Since I’m sort of winding down on the blogging this week (more on that later), I thought I’d re-post my comment here.

Defining what qualifies as religion, while an interesting exercise, is somewhat useless in navigating the sorts of social and cultural instituations one seeks to put under the umbrella of “religion.” (Or leave out in the rain, as it were.)

Because the term “religion” exists doesn’t mean that the pheonemona described by the term exist. J.Z. Smith’s Map Is Not Territory makes that point much more academically and eloquently, along the way addressing the notion of “religion” as a Western conceit that’s only really existed in the post-Enlightenment era. Before that, religion was one of many ways of understanding the world, and, more than that, it was the way of life, with little options outside of it. When the Enlightenment brought about the notion of secularism and the separation of church and state, the contemporary concept of “religion” was born, only to distinguish it from other matters. The notion of “religion” as being thought of as the territory instead of the map grew from that distinction.

The category exists now, of course, so the task is really to define what “religion” is as opposed to evaluating groups on some cavalier notion of what practices are valid or not. (For the record, I think Scientology’s practices are not. For those reading this comment: if you’re waiting to tag me as a “cult apologist,” [and I've already written on the term "cult"] you’re missing the point.)

I argue that the best definitions of what constitutes religion are broad. My favorite two definitions come from very different sources. The first from anthropologist Clifford Geertz makes reference to one’s organization of the world, breaking the notion into five parts: “[Religion is] (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” Rather than define how a given group would look or act, Geertz describes a system which acts a specific way in relation to individuals. The other is from theologian Paul Tillich, describing “faith” as “the state of being ultimately concerned.” The definition is short, and has many detractors (and its weaknesses, for that matter) but it deals with religion in a broad sense. I interpret “ultimate concern” as dealing with how one’s identity is perceived by the self. For example, if one’s “ultimate concern” involves being hyper-patriotic (a simplified example, for the sake of space), that describes the notion of civil religion–not a “traditional religion,” and probably a concept that would slip by the “I know it when I see it” rubric.

Bestowing the term “religion” on a particular phenomenon or social group isn’t an honor, it’s merely a constructed category to help people organize the world a little better. The term itself includes all manner of expressions of good, bad, dishonest and pious. To limit the term “religion” to only those groups which seem legitimate to you, based on whatever criteria you would base that judgment, is to neuter the diversity of the human experience. «»

Fiftieth post

So this is post number fifty, which means this is my tenth week of blogging. Some reflections, in handy list form:

1. Writing daily kind of sucks. Sometimes I wonder if my aim to post every weekday means that I’m posting subpar material, but the reality is that if I put something on the backburner it gets lost, buried, and shoved onto the backburner of the backburner. Every post I think is hasty or less thought out than it deserved is a post that wouldn’t have existed anyway. I’m still undecided on which approach is better, but writing daily is busting a cycle of being afraid to write, so I’ll stay with doing over not-doing for now.

2. Content is hard to come by. Sure, there’s no shortage of things to write about, but are my remarks on any given thing valid or valuable? This has probably been the most agonizing part of writing every day. Even though I have a running list of ideas for posts, some are rejected before I even think about what to write for that day. Once I pick a topic, I’m committed to it and I explore the idea as best I can. It’s that initial commitment that’s difficult, mapped somewhere in the grey area between indecision and uncertainty. It’s a very grey place.

3. Readership is a dangerous thing. I started this blog with no real expectations in mind, with only two basic objectives: improve my writing and be read. The first I could do on my own terms, the second I thought would come slowly after introducing this blog to a handful of friends and maybe having a post or two picked up at random by an outsider. The former happened (and is happening) as planned, and the latter happened out of the blue at the very beginning of July. That spike in page views went to my head and made me self-conscious about my writing. I sort of put my head down and wrote the posts I had planned to write, all the while thinking about how any one post could be perceived by an outsider and what that could mean. Thankfully, that spike tapered off over the course of a couple days and the stats on my blog are back to usual levels, though it was sort of nice feeling like an awesome writer worthy of attention for a couple days. It would be easy to get addicted to that, ergo, readership (in that sense) is dangerous.

4. How to strike a proper tone. I don’t know what that means. Whatever style or tone I have is invisible to me, so I don’t know whether I’m consistently writing a certain way or being consistently inconsistent, which is frustrating when I’m trying to improve what I’m doing as far as writing goes. Different things are appropriate in different situations–for example, swearing on a pirate ship versus swearing at a day care (let me tell you, the kids love it). I’m not sure what sort of situation this is yet, whether it’s conversational or personal or pseudo-professional, I simply haven’t found that groove yet.

And that’s the state of the blog, kind of like a State of the Union speech with less policy pronouncements and more standing ovations. «»

News junkie

The amount of time I spend online has fluctuated over the years. I probably averaged about four to five hours every weeknight during high school, which leveled out to a more reasonable level during my first two years of college. During the last couple years my time online has spiked again, but the hours I spent chatting on IRC in my teens are now spent reading news via RSS feeds.

My consumption of RSS feeds started with a handful of fairly well-known blogs, later expanding to friends’ blogs (which kind of freaked them out a little once I showed a couple how RSS feeds worked). I now have a mix of general-interest blogs, science blogs, pseudo-celebrity blogs, friends’ blogs, comics, and mainstream news sites in my feedreader, organized and prioritized according to how often a given site is updated and how often I read that site’s posts.

My time online has increased in proportion to my appetite for these posts, which has made weekends rather lonely online. The time difference is annoying enough–the day is such that posts from the East Coast start coming in about noon European time, later (of course) if it’s from the West. That’s not the major issue, though, late on a Saturday. Everyone stops updating, save for a couple of the very active sites which slow to a trickle. According to my feeds, the only thing that really happened this past weekend was Obama’s visit to Afghanistan. There were other articles in the mainstream news sites, but I came across multiple articles on Obama in Afghanistan. The same story four times over on a Saturday is unsatisfying when compared to the weekday buffet served by all the blogs and news sites which continuously dump stories into my feedreader. In that sense, weekends are lonely online for a news junkie like myself.

This will change when I regain a social life and spend a lot less time online–approximately thirty days from now by my count, give or take a few days. «»

Economy of errors

I know very little about economics. As news coverage has switched this year from the war in Iraq to the economy, I’ve had to become at least moderately versed in all matters economic to follow the news in any decent capacity. When I came across an article mentioning Bernie Mac’s remarks at an Obama fundraiser, my first thought was, “What is Freddie Mac doing at an Obama fundraiser?” So since I know so little, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned over the past few weeks.

1. All of this mess can be traced back to greed. Not the evil sort of greed that one imagines a slick-haired Wall Street investor possesses or the sort of gluttonous, consumerist greed that the U.S. has been faulted for in the past few decades, but the greed of the international giant pool of money. That link is to an episode of This American Life that delves into the goings-on of the credit crisis and how a chain of events that started with investors looking for any investment that gave a better return than safe treasury bonds and ended with people losing their houses and the banking industry more shaken up than it’s been in decades.

2. This isn’t the end of the world. As mentioned at the end of that TAL episode, the result of the subprime mortgage/credit crisis is a national economy that is now stagnant. Growth has stopped as investors (read: giant pool of money) play a little closer to the vest in order to recoup some of the absurd losses resulting from the subprime mortgages–part of that involves investing in commodities, which is why there’s a commodities bubble right now. Anyone under thirty hasn’t known an economy that isn’t growing. Ever since the mid-80s, the U.S. has largely had it pretty good. The ’70s “stagflation” pheonomenon was the last time the country’s had serious economic woes, and this may be a repeat of that, where the economy stops for a while. All because of a series of poor decisions by people in the credit industry, the next few years are going to be a little less economically pleasant.

3. Television news is overly dramatic about any economic news. Because there’s focus on the economy, TV news plays up any news at all. Stocks down today, up tomorrow, any change in the price of oil–the coverage is thorough, and absolutely devoid of any serious analysis. Daily changes give no decent indication of what’s happening. That stocks or prices tumble or rise in the course of a day or two only indicates instability, and it’s the changes over any length of time that matter. Food and gas prices are the exception, since those rise quickly and fall slowly–any rise means that the price will stay that way for a while. Watching a report on the price of oil and then addressing what that means at the pump is absurd. Oil prices have to fall and remain stable over a period of time to mean anything to the price of gas.

4. Everyone is to blame. Now that the dust has sort of settled as far as the credit crisis is concerned, the government has started investigating fraud and blame is starting to be placed. It wasn’t one aspect of the finance industry that failed here, but a series of mistakes made by everyone down the line, from the investors who devoured mortgages to the banks who issued them to the buyer who took a half-million dollar loan he couldn’t afford. The rise in the prices of consumer goods such as gas and food can be traced to investments going toward commodities, but it’s the rabid consumption of those goods that makes it possible for prices to rise. Now that Americans have had a taste for what Europe pays for gas, the absurd consumption of gasoline has been questioned. Not at large, but on an individual basis. These faults may not be corrected since the attitude toward the economy is largely “Why are prices so high? They should go down!” instead of taking any personal action, but a glimpse at the consumerism that feeds the American economic machine may change that. It would be nice to see widespread investment in infrastructure, such as public transportation and alternative energy. But I’m not holding my breath.

That’s my uninformed, uneducated look at the economy. Maybe my picture of how the economy works is flawed, but it can’t be any more flawed than reporters standing on the floor of the stock exchange, pretending to know what’s going on and how that translates into anything meaningful. «»

Update: A New York Times article published July 19 does all this a lot better, unsurprisingly.

The narrative self

Part of actually living a life involves constructing a narrative of that life. To navigate social situations, conversation relies upon what has happened in the past, and that involves creating a narrative structure that houses certain events of one’s life in a coherent way. Where an individual was born, grew up, went to school, spent most of their life, went to college and lives now are paired with events in those places to build a story about who that individual is. Anyone over twenty has probably had that experience at a social gathering where one is left alone with another person they know nothing about, and the only thing to conversationally rely upon is that narrative structure–a nice way of asking “who are you?”

To different people at different times, this information is presented in different ways. “I grew up in the South” versus “I grew up in the South but I was born in Idaho, and I don’t have an accent.” “I majored in Religious Studies and Philosophy” versus “I majored in Philosophy and Religious Studies,” which doesn’t seem like much a difference to the naked eye, but given the type of person one is speaking with, this can be the difference between “So what are you going to do with that?” and “So do you want to be a priest?” The narrative is structured differently and interpreted differently, and perceptions of oneself and another’s perception of oneself can vary drastically based on this narrative. Like any story, the audience takes away different parts which they deemed significant and forms a unique impression about that story. The difference between the narrative of the self and “any story” is that the protagonist is real and possesses that story.

Thinking about the self in this way, I now consider what the narrative might be for any major decision I make. Since the narrative when told to others is an account of oneself, one’s life and one’s actions it makes sense to preemptively account for oneself to oneself. It’s also kind of maddening. Works of fiction are usually constructed in an elegant way, with every piece of information relevant in some way to the story–either building character, moving plot or explaining a situation, for example. Life is never that tidy, so to construct a narrative before actually living those events is a bit schizophrenic, planting expectations that may not be met. I’ve done this my whole life, planning out things before they happen only to be eventually let down, and only recently framed that act in this notion of the narrative self.

I’m okay with things not meeting predictions or expectations now, and have been for some time. But somewhere in the back of my head, I’m telling the story before the story’s happened. «»

Wednesday wiki gem #4

Something Awful pioneered the art of Wikigroaning, an act which involves comparing two Wikipedia entries with vaguely similar subject matter (say, Vegetable and Vegeta) and noticing that one is significantly longer than the other. In these comparisons, if the geeky entry on some aspect of a fictional universe is longer than its real-life counterpart, the result is a Wikigroan. The problem is notable enough to have a guideline relating to it in the Wikipedia Manual of Style, imploring writers to establish “real-world notability” and make distinct the elements of a given article that are descriptions from the in-universe perspective.

I traveled Central Europe a few months ago, and in Bratislava, Slovakia I tried a soft drink I read about online called Vinea. Vinea is like a less-sugary grape soda and a more palatable version of sparkling grape juice. I drank two giant bottles over the course of the trip, one in Bratislava and the other in Prague. After the trip, I wanted to describe it to a friend online and I searched for a suitable link–the sort of task to which Wikipedia is perfectly suited. Imagine my surprise when the article for Vinea began thus:

Vinea is a fictional planet and associated intelligent species that appear in the Yoko Tsuno graphic novel series by Roger Leloup. The humanoids called Vineans have come to Earth in the distant past due to catastrophic changes to their home planet, and at the time of the graphic novels, are in the process of returning to their planet.

A redirect at the top of the article linked to Vinea (soft drink), and I saw this version of the article, barely two sentences and unformatted by Wikipedia standards. Apparently a fictional planet in a graphic novel series I’ve never heard of (though apparently it’s fairly popular) deserves about ten times the treatment that a real-world beverage I’ve held in my hand (twice) gets. The current Vinea article is a result of my formatting the two sentences into Wiki-friendly prose.

Odds are, you haven’t heard of Vinea the fictional planet or Vinea the soft drink, so this entire discussion is pretty geeky. My point is not that things that exist in the real world should always get treatment over fictional things–the article on Romeo of Romeo and Juliet fame or Alyosha Karamazov should be longer than an article on a Slovak soft drink. Wikipedia has a way of putting the things that matter into perspective–obviously, someone cares about Vinea the planet enough to write about it at length. If it’s an insignificant subject, then an editor will eventually comb over it and flag it for deletion or paring down to a suitable length that reflects how notable the subject matter is. Eventually, a Slovakian soft drink enthusiast may expand the article on Vinea the beverage. Wikipedia may not be the best guide to what matters in an objective sense, but it’s at least an outlet for individuals to write about what matters to them. Given enough time, the borders of that Venn diagram will become clear. «»

(Incidentally, the article on the Venn diagram is longer than the article on John Venn. But really, that’s to be expected. Venn’s later work was rubbish.)

History involved itself

I’ve written about John Adams, the HBO miniseries, before, but there’s one particular scene that struck me as noteworthy. During his son’s presidency, the elder Adams is shown John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence in private before its unveiling during a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In the seventh and final episode of the series, Adams has this to say about the painting:

It is very bad history. No scene such as you depict here ever took place. [...] There was not one moment or one day where all the delegates of the congress gathered to record their signatures. [...] Do not let our posterity be deluded with fictions under the guise of poetical or graphical license. [...] I consider the true history of the American Revolution as lost.

When I first watched the scene, I thought it was in character with Adams and his later years and I thought his sentiment was accurate regarding the arts and their revisionist glance at historical events. So, I was surprised when I read that the scene was manufactured.

According to David McCullough’s own book (quoted here), upon which the series is based, “Adams’s only comment was to point to a door in the background of the painting and state: ‘When I nominated George Washington of Virginia for Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, he took his hat and rushed out that door.’”

In the filmmakers’ censure of historical revisionism, they engaged in historical revisionism to make their point, a questionable tactic, especially since it fooled me into believing those words were John Adams’s own. Taking dramatic license when producing an historical drama is arguably necessary to bring together a cohesive narrative that is dramatically and visually interesting. The line between that and historical revisionism becomes much starker when the filmmakers put deliberate words into a figure’s mouth with the aim of advancing a certain view of history. In this case, I agree with that viewpoint, but the presentation strikes me as somewhat ironic, with the ends justifying the means.

To further complicate matters, Trumball’s work actually depicts the presentation of the Declaration, not its signing as is popularly believed. Still, the assembled figures were not in the same place for such an event, making Trumbull’s work somewhat revisionist. The true history of the American Revolution may be lost, as the John Adams of the miniseries suggests, with details falling away and creative licenses eroding at the specific details of even the most major events. Whether the results justify the various licenses taken is uncertain, but I suppose the lesson that lay in this territory is that history has just as much to do with who shapes it as it does with who makes it. «»

To what I am listening, vol. 7

Scarling., So Long, Scarecrow

When I first listened to Scarling. this weekend I was shocked at how good it was. The album’s nearly three years old, yet I haven’t encountered it–no one’s suggested it, I never stumbled across it, I read nothing about it online. I somehow completely missed out, which offends me because this record represents the perfect storm of music I like. If you were to add pieces of all the music I’ve fallen in love with over the past year (a female vocalist, melodic noise rock, shoegaze influence, dark obtuse lyrics) you’d come out with Scarling. I’m in shock that no one musically-inclined thought to mention the band to me.

Then I thought about it, and remembered that those particular sensibilities don’t go over well with anyone I know. No one I know fell for Blonde Redhead or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (female vocalists) like I did, no one liked the Raveonettes (melodic noise rock) as much as I did, absolutely no one enjoyed the Cocteau Twins’ (shoegaze) record I couldn’t stop playing as much as I did, and only a handful of people I know enjoy the Smashing Pumpkins (dark obtuse lyrics) as much as I did. So as those artists didn’t impress others as much as they impressed me, Scarling. did the same and slipped under the radar.

I’ve listened to both albums this weekend, but So Long, Scarecrow was a more revelatory experience than the more abrasive, heavier Sweet Heart Dealer. “City Noise” was the first song that made me realize I loved the album, and “We Are the Music Makers” is probably the catchiest song on the record. I don’t expect anyone to have the same experience I had listening to Scarling. for the first time after my track record with this sort of music and my friends (namely, that they don’t mix). I’ll file it under “music I love, that no one else I know does,” a lonely category with which I’m happy to indulge myself.

Jens Lekman, “A Postcard to Nina”

Jens Lekman was the darling of a particular music blog last year and it took me a while to find anything in particular about him that made him stand out. This song is what finally grabbed me. The ukulele version linked above doesn’t do justice to the lush album version of the song with horn section and the subtle crackle of a record player. I’m a sucker for songs that tell a story in plain terms, and “A Postcard to Nina” succeeds in that capacity, telling a true story about Jens acting as Nina’s boyfriend when visiting her dad so that Nina could stay with her girlfriend. Wonderfully sweet in a sincere way, the song crescendoes with the repeated statement, “Don’t let anyone stand in your way.”

Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

It’s taken me about a year to finally give this album a proper listen, and I regret not doing it sooner. I love Neko Case’s voice, and, I’m afraid to admit, her angelic vocals are the only thing that keep me interested in the New Pornographers. I’ve listened to the opening strains of this album over and over, but it’s the final two tracks which hit me the hardest upon finally listening to the whole record. “At Last” is a minute-and-a-half song that demonstrates what Neko does best–a country song with excellent writing and singing, the instrumentation providing atmosphere to her incredible voice. “The Needle Touched Down” is a hauntingly beautiful way to close the album, her vocals intimate and initially more subdued and sultry than they are at other places on the album, a wonderful way to close out the record. At any given time, Neko’s alt-country solo work has the ability to floor me, and I don’t know why it took me so long to listen to some of her songs. «»