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homais @ 8:23pm: Convergence: A Nifty Feature of Paying Attention to Your Social Networks
A less wordy version of the many uses of LJ:

A few days ago, oslo posted a lovely entry that, among other things, informed me that Carl Sagan's poetic, could-never-possibly-be-made-today miniseries Cosmos is currently free on Hulu. I'd never seen it, and since I don't want my geek license revoked, I've been watching it. Even the stuff that comes off as cheesy-earnest is beautiful. I'd recommend it to pretty much anyone, even if you don't have warm and fuzzy childhood memories of it.

But sometimes the LJ effect is cooler than just being directed to a neat cultural product. Sometimes those products converge, even obscure products. So imagine my delight at finding synopsis twitter-embedding these strangely hypnotic mashups of Carl Sagan and some other similarly poetic scientists being fed through an autotuner.






And the topic of that second video, appropriately: We are all connected.

longanimity, posting in bloomington @ 10:49pm: Cat Grooming!
I hunted around in past posts for a while (read: too long for my own good) and the memories, but I hadn't found any posts concerning Cat (or general animal) grooming!

I have a medium-haired tortie kitten, who is too much of a camwhore for her own good. She's already in need of claw trimming, and the same for hair. I'd prefer not attempting this myself, since in between the paws is going to be best left to a professional.

Does anyone have a suggestion for local groomers? May as well post any other animal groomers too, so others can search this post!

Thanks!

Edit: She's just shy of 13 weeks old, so not a tiny kitten, and almost the size of your average house cat now. Eesh!

homais @ 12:11am: Storytellers, Philosophers and Pundits, or: Why I Keep Coming Back to Livejournal
People make fun of Livejournal as a kind of blog-junior for angsty kids, or at least they did during LJ's heyday, which, people keep telling me, is now over. You know, it had a reputation as the sort of place to put bad poetry, or 3,000-word incoherent whining about how the world doesn't understand you. "If I cut you, do you bleed Livejournal posts?" a character on Something*Positive asked a girl who was being a drama queen. Blogs are supposed to be what you write when you've grown up and don't want to write navel-gazing emo LJ posts anymore.

But this seems shallow and caricatured to me. Confessional writing is a deep, old genre with a perfectly respectable pedigree, and some of the best modern writing came out of it. Think our generation invented the convention of blathering our innermost thoughts to the reading public? Nope. In the 18th century, at the height of the Enlightenment, it was common practice to read people's personal letters out loud at salon gatherings. Not just famous people, either (though the famous Rousseau-Hume flamewar did make the rounds at any salon worth attending), but regular old bourgeois folk would do this. It was about confessing, sharing and coming to understand their interiority and their intimate passions. And this was the golden age of reasoned discourse, or so we're told.

There's lots of ways to write non-fiction, and lots of ways to write blogs. There are pundit blogs, specialist knowledge blogs, hobby blogs, scholarly blogs and no doubt more categories. And at least for me, what kind of writing I do is a conscious choice. Each way is a very different kind of self-presentation, and I get something very different out of those different kinds of writing. Writing a blog dedicated to political commentary and analysis would scratch a very different itch than, say, a blog dedicated to some of my stranger philosophical interests. And each requires a different way of thinking about the craft of writing, too. If you think 'writing' is a generalized skill that applies in the same way in all contexts and genres, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.

But it's hard to talk about this stuff in the abstract. So, here's my story of finding my writer's voice (see, I'm confessing. It's ok. Augustine did it too, and it got him sainted): I'm really good at analytic writing, and I'm really good at thinking in terms of abstract concepts. It's always been easy for me to move in and out of some pretty heady ideas without getting my levels of analysis confused. What can I say? I was a grad student waiting to happen. And you do get a lot of praise for that particular skill when you're in school. Or I did, anyway. But purely conceptual arguments have a way of going in circles. Even with very powerful logical and conceptual tools, you get bogged down in the arbitrariness of definitions, operationalizations, and even dodgier things. I turned away from pure theory for this reason, even if I do have the knack for that kind of writing and the formal, reasoned, confident rhetorical style that goes with it.

Ok, so I'm not a philosopher. Lots of people aren't. But it eventually became obvious that what I'm after is more specific than just 'not purely theoretical'. A professor gave me a very good piece of advice. On some question you're interested in and have read a lot about, compile a list of books that you actually like, rather than books that are 'useful', or 'important to know', or 'field-defining', or other euphemisms for "books you hate but have to read anyway". And then, figure out what those books have in common. And when I did this, I realized that what these books had in common was a good story. There was something compelling about the specific story being told, rather than the theoretical take-home point. During this period, I wrote a letter to the artist formerly known as cobalt999 that contained this:

I think of the books I've learned from and really admire, and virtually none of them are primarily conceptual. They're books where theoretical points have emerged from trying to study an actual problem. Example: I had to put together a syllabus for a class I called "Religion and Politics in the Middle East". I came across dozens, dozens of books that claimed to think through something like: what is the interaction of religion and politics? Can they coexist in a democracy, etc? And most of them were just awful - I would cite them as part of an intellectual phenomenon to be studied, but I wouldn't assign them to anyone. The juicy stuff all came from books that were about what actual religiously-oriented political groups were doing (sometimes in social-sciencey semi-controlled comparisons, sometimes written by humanists). There's theory and occasionally even philosophy, but it's emergent on the story being told. Increasingly, that's the direction I'm going in.

There's something essential to me about a good story, and about starting from that story when you sit down to write. I only know a few ways to write well that don't have some story at their core, and I usually hate doing most of those kinds of writing. Punditry is like this - even if there is some story going on, it usually gets completely lost in the, umm, punditizing. The story becomes instrumentalized. I've got nothing against punditry as such - done right, it's a time-honored kind of political rhetoric and polemic. I just hate doing it in its pure form because of the way it turns absolutely everything that isn't nailed down - logic, a story, human events - into a tool to make a point. Or if you're not a pundit, more dispassionate and less political analysis also tends to become unmoored and unsatisfying to me when it's centered too much around abstractions like "deterrence", "regional hegemons", "realists versus idealists", and so on. This is why I don't write a standard political blog - either as pundit or analyst, those seem to be the primary forms they lend themselves to. Insofar as there are blogs I love, they tend to be the ones that deviate from these trends. I suppose I could try my hand at such a blog, but the weight of genre inertia would be against me.

And the last component of my story is, uhh, me. Not everything I write has to be about me - honest! - but I dislike the pure third-person, because as a rhetorical choice it creates an impression of objectivity that, at least with the kinds of subjects I tend to write about, is simply and manifestly false. Even at my most analytical and abstract, it's been pointed out that my best writing always has something personal about it. Something that's recognizably "me". One colleague calls it a "personal tone", even when I'm writing about land reform in Egypt.

Such is my story anyway. I've come to discover a kind of writing I really like doing, and this is why I keep coming back to Livejournal. The confessional, personal style that LJ is known for works really well with my preferred blend of ideas and stories, in which the ideas emerge from the stories, rather than stories serving ideas. I can guess at why LJ encourages more intimacy than standard blogs - friends lists, and the way that comment threads are visualized make things feel like a more intimate conversation than in most blog formats I come across. And that intimacy is important. It's what makes LJ what it is.

Livejournal isn't my only outlet for that blend of the personal, the narrative and the analytic. If LJ dies, I won't be Forever Denied An Outlet For My Thoughts. But there's a particular version of this blend - closer to the confessional end of the spectrum - that I haven't been able to pull off anywhere as well as I've pulled it off here. The strange intimacy of the form, full of confessions to a finite list of people you feel so close to even though (or maybe because) you may never have met them, enables something I adore. So, for now, as long as I have such things to say, I keep coming back. Long live the next LJ golden age!

hipswiveler, posting in bloomington @ 12:55pm: Bloomington Handmade Market!


Everyone should come to this and tell all of your friends! 

homais @ 1:52pm: Backstage
I can only think of two Jewish rituals that ever affected me or made me feel anything like what religious people describe when they talk about why their religion speaks to them: one is Kol Nidre, the other is Havdalah. This probably isn't a coincidence. Both are moody, melancholy and full of foreboding.

For those not in the know, Havdalah is the ritual that is done at the end of the Sabbath. It marks the end of a holy period, and the return to workaday life. There are two special items associated with Havdalah: a decorated box full of aromatic spices, and a braided, multi-wick candle. It's a very sensual ritual, lots of minor-key singing, the spectacular candle, the smell of the spices, and, of course, wine.

I have a very strong childhood memory, I must have been about nine years old. The Hebrew school teacher let me into the synagogue's storage closet to get some construction paper for a project. While I was rooting around - what child wouldn't seize that kind of opportunity to explore? - I found the spice box, wine goblet, and the Havdalah candle just sitting there, carelessly dumped into a cardboard box on a shelf, next to a bag of plastic silverware and some paper plates. I remember thinking they looked so sad like that. I never looked at the ritual the same way again; in a very small way, I was disenchanted. In later years, when I was in charge of planning the services for the kids, the disenchantment was much worse. I could see all the little gears in the experience spinning, and it felt about as numinous as fixing a loose floorboard.

I still have trouble going backstage without feeling disenchanted. As you get older, it's something you're expected to do more and more. You can't just attend services anymore, you're supposed to help organize them and put them on. There are all sorts of experiences like this - haunted houses, graduations, any kind of show for kids, running a retail store, initiating fraternity brothers, an actual, you know, play - that require you to go backstage. At some point, you're in charge. You're the experienced person in the room, and the show must go on, even if the process of putting it on makes the event feel hollow to you. This always bothered me - isn't there some way to go backstage, which, after all, someone has to do, without the experience losing its magic?

Lately, I've been thinking about just that - enchantment, wonder, and excitement for performers and organizers, not just spectators and children. Seeing how things really work feels like it should make the experience more exciting and interesting, not less. Havdalah promised mysteries whose answers were actually interesting, not a pile of ritual implements in a box. And yet not everyone feels that sense of disenchantment that I do when they see the backstage in all its grubbiness. They don't feel that the experience has been hollowed out or robbed of its power. Or if they do, they tend to keep that thought to themselves.

I'm curious to hear your experiences with these things, O readers, if you're still out there. I have thoughts of my own, but that's another post.

homais @ 1:44am: Not Dead
I've been on a really long break from posting here. And I'm mostly glad I did, even though it seems that a decent fraction of the community I had built here has evaporated and stopped posting, no doubt for some of the reasons I stopped for a while.

But I feel like I have things to say again, and they seem livejournalish somehow. There's a kind of writing, some fusion of intimacy and ideas, that always seemed to work here and nowhere else. Something about the format, or the specific people I met here. In any case, it's a kind of writing that I miss doing. So, I'm back for now. First post goes up tomorrow.

-homais

ieatpotatos, posting in uchicago @ 11:25pm: sentence generator
Have we all seen this, mentioned here? good for shits&giggles etc.

kendokamel, posting in bloomington @ 3:52pm: PSA: H1N1 flu jab sign-up available through OneStart
If you are a student, faculty, or staff member at IU, and fall into the "vulnerable populations"*, you can sign up for a spot in the upcoming (though currently date-to-be-determined) H1N1 vaccination clinic.

You'll have to be logged in to OneStart to be able to sign up.

More info here


*IU employees and students currently eligible to make reservations are pregnant women, households with children younger than six months of age, students and employees through age 24, health care and emergency medical services personnel, and people 25-64 with a chronic medical condition that creates a higher risk for complications.

malindajane, posting in bloomington @ 9:59am: Looking for a vet...
(A particular vet, that is.)

Every time we find a competent vet who seems to really care about our kitties, they disappear without a trace. Does anyone happen to know where Shane Thellman went after leaving Bloomington Vet Hospital a couple of weeks ago? If you can tell me, you will have my eternal gratitude (and my sick kitty's).

pope_guilty, posting in bloomington @ 9:18am: Anyone notice all the straight edge graffiti around town in the last week or so?