Category Archives: Society

Armstrong. A short history of myth

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Sara also read this book recently.  I think that helped me as we had already discussed it a fair bit while she was reading it, and I had the benefit of her blog post about it.

Go read Sara’s review, which is excellent; I’ll wait.  See.  Now perhaps you don’t even need to read mine.  Nonetheless, I shall press on.

The help and benefit I am referring to is in regard to some of the assumptions the author makes.  Much of this bugged Sara and is what we discussed.  My anthropological and sociological background, and my background in mythology (as a subject), is both broader and deeper than hers to some extent.  Her background in assorted specific myths is far better than mine, just like mine is in other specific myths.  But this book is about mythology as a subject as a whole, and while it discusses assorted myths it is not about any of them.

Thanks to previous discussions with my beautiful and brilliant wife, along with reading her excellent review, I was able to approach this short book with its sometimes collapsed assumptions and high level synopses in a highly positive state of mind.

All that said, I really enjoyed this book!  I hope to reread it someday in the not too distant future and to map out some of Armstrong’s analysis in outline form as I find it valuable and would like to have it better to mind for whatever uses I might deem appropriate in the future.

Contents

  • What is a Myth?
  • The Paleolithic Period: The Mythology of the Hunters (c. 20000 to 8000 BCE)
  • The Neolithic Period: The Mythology of the Farmers (c. 8000 to 4000 BCE)
  • The Early Civilizations (c. 4000 to 800 BCE)
  • The Axial Age (c. 800 to 200 BCE)
  • The Post-Axial Period (c. 200 BCE to c. 1500 CE)
  • The Great Western Transformation (c. 1500 to 2000)

As an example of an assumption one must accept or move past, take the opening sentence, “Human beings have always been mythmakers” (1).  If one browses through the Wikipedia articles on Homo and on the Oldowan period you’ll see that “human beings” applies to our ancestors going back to at least 2.4 million years ago.

“Most models rely on social and communication networks to hold the band together. These social networks range from requiring no more communication than modern primates, to requiring more sophisticated sharing and teaching. At present, no evidence has been found that sharply divides these theories.” [From Oldovan]

Exactly!  We have no idea, nor will we ever have conclusive evidence, as to when humans acquired a form of language that not only makes possible, but uses, narrative structure.  Both are required for mythmaking.  Anyway, not really a critical issue to the story Armstrong tells but an example of some of the rhetoric that might get in your way.

One more short example so that you can make a better judgement as to whether this book is for you.  The opening sentence of the second chapter begins, “The period in which human beings completed their biological evolution …” (12, emphasis mine).  Excuse me!  Again, not critical to the argument at all but perhaps difficult for the discriminating reader to ignore.

Again, let me state that I think this is a good book, and that the argument that the author makes is an excellent one.

Each age changed mythos and humankind’s relationship to it until it was, at least in the developed West, fully eradicated and we no longer had a relationship to it.

“Western modernity was the child of logos” (119). … The new hero of Western society was henceforth the scientist or the inventor, who was venturing into uncharted realms for the sake of his society. He would often have to overthrow old sanctities—just as the Axial sages had done. But the heroes of Western modernity would be technological or scientific geniuses of logos, not the spiritual geniuses inspired by mythos. This meant that intuitive, mythical modes of thought would be neglected in favor of the more pragmatic, logical spirit of scientific rationality. Because many Western people did not use myth, many would lose all sense of what it was (121-22). … But logos had never been able to provide human beings with the sense of significance that they seemed to require. It had been myth that had given structure and meaning to life, but as modernization progressed and logos achieved such spectacular results, mythology was increasingly discredited. As early as the sixteenth century, we see more evidence of a numbing despair, a creeping mental paralysis, and a sense of impotence and rage as the old mythical way of thought crumbled and nothing new appeared to take its place. We are seeing a similar anomie today in developing countries that are still in the early stages of modernization” (122).

It is with this comment, “… as the old mythical way of thought crumbled and nothing new appeared to take its place …” that I want to point to W.H. McNeill’s Mythistory and Other Essays that I read last year.

While McNeill’s concept of “myth” is broader than Armstrong’s (each appropriate to their own contexts) he directly addresses this issue of the killing of all myth while offering nothing to take its place.  In the essay “The Care and Repair of Myth” he argues that public myth provides the basis for collective action:

“A people without a full quiver of relevant agreed-upon statements, accepted in advance through education or less formalized acculturation, soon finds itself in deep trouble, for, in the absence of believable myths, coherent public action becomes very difficult to improvise or sustain” (23).

In this, and the title essay, he scolds his fellow professional historians for their destruction of myth and attempts to show them why responsible mythmaking to replace those they have destroyed is an ethical and professional responsibility.   His main concern in the book is a rehabilitated view of myth, and while broader than Armstrong’s it is one that melds well with hers.  Whether one accepts Armstrong’s or McNeill’s concept of myth and the functions they respectively assign to myth, it is clear that humankind *needs* myth.

Sara, in her review [linked above] gives a good inkling of how Armstrong ends the book.  I agree with much of her analysis in the concluding sections but I fear this is at best a temporary amelioration of the problem and not an actual solution.

Sara and I were discussing this this morning and as she wisely pointed out this conclusion may have been primarily slanted toward supporting the series which this title is the lead in to, the Canongate Myth Series, which is “A bold re-telling of legendary tales — The Myths series gathers the world’s finest contemporary writers for a modern look at our most enduring myths.”

Nonetheless, I think there is much of value in this little book.  It is easy reading, and it is a great introduction to the riches-to-rags story, as Sara called it, that is the history of myth in human thought and action.

“Technology,” definition, history, and multiple uses of a term

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In Fall 2005 I took a class with Prof. Chip Bruce on Pragmatic Technology. One of our assignments was to:

Produce an analysis of one keyword of your choice (see Raymond Williams, Keywords A vocabulary of culture and society. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press) for examples. This keyword is not just an index term as in the bibliography, but a core concept for the field. The analysis is a short essay (1-2 pp.) on the definition, history, and multiple uses of a term, which is central to understanding a text or a field of study.

I chose “technology.” This assignment represented 10% of our grade.

I found this little piece the other day while poking around my hard drive and decided I was going to put it here for assorted reasons, if only primarily for myself so I might find it easier in the future.

LIS590PT Fall 2005  Keywords Assignment  Mark Lindner  14 Sep 2005
“Technology,” definition, history, and multiple uses of a term

Plato distinguished Techne (art) from empiriae (knack) as having a logos, a rationale which “necessarily includes a reference to the good served by the art” while knack consists of “rules of thumb based on experience but without any underlying rationale” (Feenberg).

Feenberg argues that we moderns have lost the connection between techne and the good.  “We can still relate to Plato’s emphasis on the need for a rationale, a logos, but we’re not so sure it includes an idea of the good. In fact, we tend to think of technologies as normless, as serving subjective purposes very much as did Plato’s knacks” (Feenberg).

What is the history of technology in between, and is Feenberg correct?  The OED lists several senses of technology that are of relevance to us:

1. a. A discourse or treatise on an art or arts; the scientific study of the practical or industrial arts. (1615 BUCK Third Univ. Eng. xlviii)

b. transf. Practical arts collectively. (1859 R. F. BURTON Centr. Afr. in Jrnl. Geog. Soc. XXIX. 437)

c. With a and pl. A particular practical or industrial art. (1957 Technology Apr. 56/1)

2. The terminology of a particular art or subject; technical nomenclature. (1658 SIR T. BROWNE Gard. Cyrus v.)

Oxford American lists the etymology of technology as from the Greek, tekhnologia systematic treatment, from tekhnê art.

Thus, as far as standard English usage goes technology was earliest applied to language about, or the language of, the practical or industrial arts.  Over time this meaning shifted to the practical arts collectively, and then finally as a referent to any of the individual practical arts.

It seems to me that in American usage that technology has come to shift meaning over the last half-century or so from referring primarily to technoscience or applied science to the machines produced and used by such to primarily refer to the electronic gadgetry of everyday life; personal computers, iPods, DVD players, etc.  Most “normal” Americans think of technology as normless, as Feenberg said.  Atomic bombs, depleted uranium shells, land mines—it all depends on what you do with them.  Their development and existence is morally neutral according to this view.

Philosophers of technology use technology differently than in standard usage, but even there the meaning has shifted over the last sixty or so years.  Classical philosophers of technology (Ellul, Mumford, Heidegger; et al.) thought that technology “…must not be thought of as applied natural science, that is less an instrument than a form of life, and that it must be understood as a “system” (in Ellul’s word) or as a “megamachine” (Mumford)” (Achterhuis, 3).  Ellul uses the French word technique specifically due to the narrower connotation of technology with machines.  For Ellul, “technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity” (xxv).

Newer philosophers of technology (Noble, Hughes, Scwartz and Thompson; et. Al.) have pointed out the intertwining of technology and society as “technosociety,” “technoculture,” “network of technological affairs,” and as a “social process that is extraordinarily inaccessible to us because we are so much a part of it” (Achterhuis, 6-7).

Pacey points out in Meaning in Technology that technology has both social and individual meanings.  He also points to the difference between the “political economy” of the use and development of technology and its wider role in society and, the “social construction” of technology through a “variety of “actors” responding to a complex of social pressures” (4).  Pacey’s point about the shift from the “political economy” of technology to its “social construction” is similar to the shift from the early focus on the material and historical conditions for the rise of Technology as a system to the more recent focus on technologies that impact society while being influenced by the same society.  Pacey’s book is an attempt to redirect some of the focus back onto the meaning of technology created by the individual’s experience of technology, not just of society’s experience.

Sources Cited

Achterhuis, Hans, ed. American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books, 1964.

Feenberg, Andrew. “Can Technology Incorporate Values? Marcuse’s Answer to the Question of the Age.” Paper presented at the conference on The Legacy of Herbert Marcuse, University of California, Berkeley, November 7, 1998.

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. online, 1999.

Pacey, Arnold. Meaning in Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

“Technology.” Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Is the iPad a consumption only device?

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Yesterday I finished reading Walt Crawford’s “Zeitgeist: hypePad” article in the newest Cites & Insights.

Walt did a fine job of summarizing a lot of blowhards and a few sane persons. But. The further along I got the stronger my apprehension got. Was Walt going to notice something I was noticing or was he buying into a certain rhetoric and, if so, why?

Here’s the thing. Many people, people on both ends of the iPad hype spectrum, are claiming that it is purely a content consumption device and not a content creation device. And that, my friends, is pure horseshit.

While there are some serious issues with how proprietary the device is, the limits of the iTunes/app store model for acquiring software you need/want, and the rampant DRM, and these certainly deserve some critical ink spent on them, this in no way makes the device a “consumption only” platform.

I am not sure what constitutes content creation for the technophiles and Wired editors and the likes but I believe that Walt knows better. Almost no one is producing fancy, professional-quality, full-color glossy Web magazines. We are writing blog posts, interacting in Facebook, conversing in friendfeed, posting pictures to Flickr and other image sites, writing documents and reports that end up on the Web, and so on.

The iPad will not only allow but enable one to do the vast majority of these things! Sure, you won’t be able to run Dreamweaver or QuarkExpress or … but these are NOT the only things that generate “content” [By the way, let me go on record here as to how much I dislike this usage of "content."].

According to the iPad features page it includes Safari, Mail, Notes, Keynote, Pages and Numbers, along with, of course, access to the App Store. While most of us probably do more consuming with our web browsers we also do creative work. This critique may be minor and it may not be very creative but I am not consuming it and I am creating it in a browser. I could have written this on my Touch.

The other programs are even more heavily toward the creation side of this supposed dichotomy. There are also apps for painting and drawing and many other forms of creative activity. Famous artists have even used their iPhones to create and share art.

Walt does say that “the iPad will succeed or fail largely on its own merits. While those merits may not meet my needs—and while I do believe you’re better off thinking of the iPad as an appliance, not another kind of computer, and that the closed model is dangerous—there’s no doubt its merits are real” (p. 30). Yes, I think the appliance label is useful. I certainly do not think of my Touch as a computer except in a generic sense.  I certainly do not confuse it with my MacBook and what it can do.

I am intrigued by the iPad but I highly doubt I will be buying one any time soon. I do my best not to buy 1st generation hardware/software from anyone. And I have serious concerns with the many other issues around the iLine of products—closed systems, DRM, etc. I also do not know where the iPad would fit into my way of being.

Walt finds the closed model dangerous and so do I; especially if it proliferates and closed systems become our only choices. But I also find lots of room for the closed appliance model of computing. There are an awful lot of people who could benefit from a device like this who are simply overwhelmed with a standard computer and all that that entails. Of course, most of the people Walt cited—the pundits anyway—probably cannot begin to relate to that thought.

So while the kinds of content that can be created on an iPad are reduced from what one could do with a full general-purpose computing device and appropriate software and input/output devices, it is not non-existent. To call an iPad—in general, irrespective of any particular use cases—a content consumption only (or primarily) device does more to show us what the commentor thinks they value over the truth of the matter.

For instance, Walt cites Lauren Pressley’s thinking (p. 16) “that things on the web are shifting from mass creation to primarily consumption (that is, “regular folks” are mostly tweeting, not contributing long-form content) with organizations creating more of the content ….” But since about Day 2 of the Internet that has probably been the case with organizations creating most of the (long-form) content.

Also, since when is Twittering not content creation? There seems to be a real discrepancy between what people consider not only “content” but “creation.” Until those nuances are pulled apart it is nonsensical to make such statements and to apply such labels to our devices.

In the end, I do think that devices like the iPad are restrictive in the way of content creation. But then so is my $2000 laptop. My laptop cannot help me paint a picture in oils on a real canvas, nor can it help me build a fancy gingerbread house. Now just hold on! If you want to tell me that I can find all kinds of good info on the web on how to paint, where to buy supplies, etc. that is only consumption towards a creative goal (under the current model). If you tell me I can find designs for gingerbread houses on the web then same thing. And I could do all of those with an iPad.

One thing to notice here is the complex issue of just when and how does consumption lead to/change into creation. There are no acts of immaculate conception in art/creation. It all comes from some influence; an influence that was consumed at some point, whether one knows it or not.

There are also larger issues of just who is doing content creation to share on their computers anyway. And of what we are calling content creation. Sure, precede it with long-form content, if you like. But you cannot separate long-form content until other kinds until you have delineated what content is, period.

In summary, while there are many issues surrounding the closed appliance model of the iPad to call it a primarily content consumption device, all the while ignoring what is or is not consumption vs. creation, ignoring other use cases than ones own, ignoring who is creating vs. primarily consuming, is simply to show ones biases.

In the end, once/if all these ideas are teased apart we might still label the iPad and similar devices as primarily consumption devices. I am perfectly fine with that, because then we will know what we are actually claiming.

Do I expect any of this to happen? At least on a broad-scale? Nope. No hope whatsoever. Academics will pull some of it apart, if they aren’t already, but little will filter down into the mainstream any time soon.

Unfortunately, this is an area that is rife with hype and I do not see it changing any time soon. But I intend to stay alert for this kind of framing—if one can call something framing which lacks much structure—and rhetoric so I can better assess the tools my society makes available.

Disclaimer: I am not an Apple fanboy although I am an Apple user. I have a 30GB photo iPod, a Touch, and a MacBook. I also have a 12″ PowerBook collecting dust until I possibly get around to totally reinstalling the OS and software.

But ask me about my 1st computer purchase years ago only to have Apple kill the Apple II line once they decided everyone had to have a Mac. My next and 3rd and 4th and 5th and … computers were all DOS/Wintel-based, for years after.

I think that, for now, Apple computers offer a good bargain; quality hardware and software for a reasonable price. Is there a premium? Sure there is. But I do not mind paying for quality in my important purchases. But, although far less than when I had Windows machines, I still yet at my computing devices on occasion, just as I frequently curse Steve Jobs and his (peoples’) design decisions that baffle me.

Pathways for communication : a mini-review

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Foskett, D. J. 1984. Pathways for Communication: Books and Libraries in the Information Age. London: C. Bingley.

 

I read this lovely little book [128 pages] last week. In many ways it has a lot in common with John Budd’s Self-examination and with Patrick Wilson’s Two Kinds of Power. All in all, it falls in a sort of middle ground. Budd’s book is both broader and narrower, and certainly far longer, while Wilson’s is much narrower and about the same length. Oddly, this book, though 16 years more recent than Wilson’s essay, feels far more dated. More on that in a bit.

Its chapters are entitled: Information and understanding, Communication and chronicles, Communication and society, Information and the psychology of users, Keepers and finders, Technology and culture, Theory and practice, Memory and anticipation, Looking for answers, and A reading society.

As I said above, this book feels a bit dated. Strange things is, though, I did not read that book. Early on when I noticed its datedness I asked myself what would Foskett say about that in the context of today? And somehow I managed to do that throughout the book. In fact, I got so good at it that I often just seemingly read what I think that answer would be. Thus, I may not even be qualified to comment on the book as such since that is seemingly not the book that I read.

In that regard, I think this is an important and an excellent book. Or, at least it is for one who can also manage a similar trick. For the unimaginative who can only read what is printed on the page then perhaps the book would be less valuable. I will say that if I ever teach an LIS course where some or all of this book would fit it will be assigned reading with the explicit goal of having the students update Foskett’s views; that is, apply Foskett’s criticisms and analysis to the contexts in which we find ourselves today. That, I venture to bet, would be a valuable exercise for all but the most dull among us.

Much of this book spoke to me regarding debates, discussions and contexts in which the profession finds itself today. One of Foskett’s primary critiques is that of confusing means for ends. One particular piece which I happened to note [and wish I had marked others] was the following:

The opposite of progress will occur if our effort are stultified by nonsensical theories leading to stupid practice. If ‘information’ becomes reified into a commodity subject to the laws and forces involved in commodity production and distribution, there is a real danger that quality will be sacrificed to quantity, and the information industry will produce and process large quantities of rubbish in order to prove what vast quantities it can process. We do not belong to the dismal and defeatist school of ‘more means worse’ if we wish to oppose the apparently attractive but actually meretricious school of ‘we must do it because we can’. Once more, means are in danger of becoming ends (111-112).

Communication, that is, human communication, looms large as the title would suggest.

There is also a lot of reference to the ‘paperless society,’ as that was a leading concept of the time. But it also one which still has pundits and while the term is rarely explicitly referenced anymore nonetheless it has significant impact on the thinking of many.

Another theme is the danger of contrasting the ‘librarian’ and the ‘information officer.’ In essence, they both deal with knowledge of source materials, whether or not their favored sources are physical objects.

As dated as this book may seem to some, I maintain that it is of immense relevance atill as the opening of the chapter, ‘Theory and practice,’ demonstrates:

The headlong progress of computer technology over recent decades has carried along all those of us engaged in communication at an exhilarating pace. Learned societies, publishers, librarians, have all become convinced of the necessity of making publicly available every last thought, no matter how commonplace or trivial, so that it may be indexed, abstracted, put into machine-readable form, and displayed on a visual display unit.

The benefits of the new technology are indeed not to be denied, and it would be foolish to try to keep it out of libraries. But if technology is not to become the master, then library and information science requires an advance in its theoretical foundations, and this must play an important part in the preparation of future members of the profession (75).

As I said, perhaps I did not even read the book in front of me; I read a different book. I am not sure how or why I managed to read this book far more forgivingly than many others I have read. But read it I did. I also recommend it as a valuable exercise for those who can generously apply Foskett’s critique to a more up-to-date context.

I highly recommend this book but with the caveat that you attempt to read it as if it were written today. And with that, I want to leave you with one more quote, this time from the final chapter.

What is much more dangerous is that the whole concept of Information Technology in this narrow sense means the development of a society which is thoroughy superficial in its attitude to knowledge, and which has no stability because its existence depends, not on the security of the shared points of view which add up to a cultural heritage, but on a continuous flow of separate bits of information. The individual will have no time or opportunity to digest and assimilate all these separate bits, or to build them into a coherent and integrated structure. Society will become a behaviourist paradise, and human beings will behave as if they were machines only able to act in response to external stimuli. Power will reside in those who provide the stimuli, and unless they have the time and the will to form considered judgements, progress in the global village will consist in a succession of crisis responses to the latest bits of information, no matter what their source or validity (123).

Some things seen around the Internet lately

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Drinking with the Troops

From a local blog, Urbanagora, comes “Drinks with a Soldier.” I just love how some jackass commentor tries to hide behind the shield of anonymity and call the post author a liar. Certainly there are all sorts of views on this war, including those of the troops fighting it.

Perhaps if you ever get the chance—you could try arranging the chance—you, too, should have drinks with a soldier (or sailor, airman or marine) and find out a bit about what it is like on the ground in this war.  Of course, don’t forget the millions of servicemembers still living who served in our previous wars. A patient, caring ear would do many of them a world of good.

The value of a liberal arts education

For an interesting discussion on the value, or lack thereof, of a liberal arts education and liberal arts colleges see “On Liberal Education” at the Academic Librarian blog. Wayne Bivens-Tatum critiques the views of the author of a new book on the subject, as presented in The Kansas CW.

A spirited back-and-forth between Bivens-Tatum and the book author follows in the comments. I should state up front that I agree entirely with all of Bivens-Tatum’s points and his larger argument. The book author tries to point out some flaws in Bivens-Tatum’s arguments which simply are not there. I found that rather humorous.

But the one point I was hoping Bivens-Tatum would take up was the author’s insistence that some immediately practical subjects should get substituted for liberal arts classes because students are incurring too much debt, can’t pay their student loans, have to take high paying jobs vs. the job of their dreams, have to move back home with mommy & daddy, etc. because colleges are financially predatory.

So the solution is immediately practical vocational training? Wouldn’t better financial counseling for students, laws barring credit card companies from preying on students, educational finance reform, and so many other things be helpful, too, and perhaps even more ethically important? Have a look and see what you think.

Early Mike Wallace interviews with “important people”

Via Resource Shelf comes The Mike Wallace Interview.

In the early 1960’s, broadcast journalist Mike Wallace donated 65 recorded interviews made in 1957-58 from his show The Mike Wallace Interview to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. The bulk of these were 16mm kinescope film recordings, some of the earliest recordings of live television that were possible, and that survive today. Many of these have not been seen for over 50 years, and they represent a unique window into a turbulent time of American, and world history.

See interviews with jockey Eddie Arcaro, stripper Lili St. Cyr, actress Gloria Swanson, Steve Allen, Frank Lloyd Wright, birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, Eleanor Roosevelt, novelist Pearl Buck, and many others.

Doing the dirty fictionally

Via 3 quarks daily we get a book review in the New York magazine of Robert Olen Butler’s Intercourse: Stories. Find it in a library near you via WorldCat.

Robert Olen Butler’s new story collection, Intercourse, is, as its title suggests, totally about doing it. It imagines the thoughts of 50 iconic couples as they knock the proverbial boots, beginning with Adam and Eve copulating on “a patch of earth cleared of thorns and thistles, a little east of Eden,” and ending with Santa Claus blowing off postholiday steam in January 2008 by doing the nasty with an 826-year-old elf in the back room of his workshop. But, as the clinical tone of Butler’s title also suggests, Intercourse is very much not a work of erotica. It tends to ignore messy fluids and crotch-logistics in favor of wordplay and psychological nuance.

Civilization and cultures

Also via 3 quarks daily we get Tzvetan Todorov in the Pakistan Daily Times thinking and writing to his usual standard of quality.

But if you look at this line of argument more closely, the flaw in Barnavi’s argument is immediately apparent. The meaning of the words civilisation and culture is very different when they are used in singular and plural forms. Cultures (plural) are the modes of living embraced by various human groups, and comprise all that their members have in common: language, religion, family structures, diet, dress, and so on. In this sense, “culture” is a descriptive category, without any value judgement.

Civilisation (singular) is, on the contrary, an evaluative moral category: the opposite of barbarism. So a dialogue between cultures is not only beneficial, but essential to civilisation. No civilisation is possible without it.

[There, S, I did it. And no, neither linking to the Academic Librarian nor WorldCat invalidates my effort. ;-) ]

I am a patriot

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I. Am. A. Patriot—not to be confused with a nationalist—but today, once again, I loathe my country and the vast majority of its citizens.

This great and grand country and its citizens have once again sent my child to war. I will not forgive you.     Us.

Please do not in any way misunderstand this post. I am not seeking your sympathy, your empathy, your prayers, karma or anything else. In fact, I have turned off commenting on this post.

If you feel you must pray or meditate for me and my son, or whatever makes you feel better, then please start with the millions of Iraqis whose lives we have so seriously impacted—destroyed and, yes, even terrorized. Only after that can you morally begin to consider the large numbers of American servicemembers and families who have lived with the terror and sacrifice of this war.

Those of you who asked me to pass on your various sentiments to my son when I visited should know that I did and that he appreciates them.

If you feel you must express something to me then you know the usual routes. I warn you though. If we do not know each other well enough that I can fully appreciate where you are coming from then you might want to reconsider your “need” to do so.

My close friends—those at hand and those further away—will look out for me. That I do know. The next 15-months will be hard. I did not deal well with his first deployment. At all. That was only 11 months, but no one knew how long going in (initial invasion).

He has chosen to come home on mid-tour leave next May as his birthday is then. He gets no choice over which half of May, but there it is. With any luck I’ll be driving back down to central Texas to see him again in less than a year.

SFC Lindner, do your utmost to keep your troops safe and healthy. That is all anyone can ask of you. I know that you will because that is your duty and because it is your calling. Just please do not forget to take care of yourself, too. You can only do your difficult duty if you are well yourself. I love you and am so very proud of you. The ribbon is back on my backpack where it will remain until you and 4th ID are safely back home again.

[Yes, if you must know, most of this was written on Father's Day. I love my country. But. I hate Amerika!]

Some things read this week, 23 – 29 March 2008

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Saturday – Sunday, 22 – 23 Mar 2008

Mann, T. (2008). “On the Record” but Off the Track” a review of the Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on The Future of Bibliographic Control, with a further examination of Library of Congress cataloging tendencies. , 38. Washington, DC: AFSCME 2910. Retrieved from http://www.guild2910.org/WorkingGrpResponse2008.pdf.

Sunday, 23 Mar 2008

Weinheimer, J. (2008, January 1). An Open Reply to Thomas Mann’s report “On the Record” but Off the Track. . Retrieved March 23, 2008, from http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00013059/.

 

 

DeLillo, D. (1986). White Noise. , Contemporary American fiction., 326. New York: Penguin Books.

 

Finished.

 

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature (285).

Technology is lust removed from nature. Oh man! Does “fiction” get any better that?

 

Monday, 24 Mar 2008

 

Levy, N. (2007). Neuroethics. , 346. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Read the Preface and Introduction to this (73 pp.) Man! This sure made me miss all my work in consciousness. Looks like it’d be a very good book, but I’m just not sure I can devote the time to the rest of it right now.

 

The introduction does a great job of dispelling many myths of self-hood and consciousness among other topics. One is the equation of the self with consciousness:

 

Many of our actions, too, including some of our most important, are products of unconscious mechanisms. The striker’s shot at goal happens too fast to be initiated by consciousness, similarly, the improvising musician plays without consciously deciding how a piece will unfold. Think, finally, of the magic of ordinary speech: we speak, and we make sense, but we learn precisely what we are going to say only when we say it (as E. M. Forster put it, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”). Our cleverest arguments and wittiest remarks are not vetted by consciousness; they come to consciousness at precisely the same time as they are heard by others (24).

Another is the myth of internal representation:

 

Our visual experience is as of a world that is internally represented. But the world is not internally represented, at least not in any great detail. There is nevertheless a sense in which we do possess a rich representation of the world. We represent the world to ourselves not by way of an internal image, but by having an external model: the world itself. Rather than take a snapshot of the scene and store it internally, we rely upon the actual stability of the world. We store our representation outside us (34).

 

Yes, I have only reproduced some claims here. Do not worry; there is plenty of science and good philosophy to back it all up.

 

Monday – Friday, 24 – 28 Mar 2008

 

Swift, J. (1996). Gulliver’s travels. (Unabridged [ed.].). Mineola N.Y.: Dover Publications.

For these Reasons, the Trade of a Soldier is held the most honourable of all others: Because a Soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold Blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can (185).

 

Is it really satire? And please feel free to be offended if you like. I was a soldier for over 20 years, and technically will be until I die. My son is also a soldier with over 8 years of service and is a combat veteran. Satire may well be truth.

 

Tuesday, 25 Mar 2008

 

Mazzochi, F., Tiberi, M., De Santis, B., & Plini, P. (2007). Relational semantics in thesauri: some remarks at theoretical and practical levels. Knowledge Organization, 34(4), 197-214.

 

Friday, 28 Mar 2008

 

Some articles by David Bade that have been submitted for publication. Not sure if I am allowed to discuss them yet so will hold off.

 

Mugridge, R. L. (2008). Experiences of newly-graduated cataloging librarians. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 45(3), 61-79. doi: 10.1300/J104v45n03_06.

I only skimmed this one so I will hold off from any real commenting. It is interesting to me as it is highly related to my original CAS topic, although I had hoped to go a bit deeper.

Friday – Saturday, 28 – 29 Mar 2008

Kari, J. (2007). A review of the spiritual in information studies. Journal of Documentation, 63(6), 935-962. doi: 10.1108/00220410710836439 .

I was hoping that this piece might serve as a piece of the domain analysis-integrationism connection for my CAS paper but I was wrong.

While it is possibly interesting to some, I think Kari is confused about several things. In particular, what is science and what are the limits of what it can study. This confusion is readily apparent in the article itself and not only in the confused critiques made of the literature being reviewed.

One example is this non-starter of a statement: “Documenting a spiritual occasion in an objective fashion is so much easier: all one needs is a video camera” (949). WTF? First off, most of the what could possibly pass for a spiritual occasion can not in any sense be documented in an objective fashion.

This is related to what seems to pass for the author’s view of what science is and what doing science consists of. While no formal definitions are provided, the best sense that I could get is that simply counting things and turning numbers into a statistic or two is science. Well, It is not. I also have no doubt that the author’s views are a bit less simplistic than this but nonetheless that is the sense I get from the article.

Another example that shows that the author is confused about the separation of science and other modes of inquiry is demonstrated in his critique of an article by Babb, and especially in this statement: “The above extract shows that Babb is well up on the matter, but also sometimes she apparently forgets to maintain the critical or objective attitude of a scientist” (955).

That comment is not only wrong but ignores what Babb was doing in her article [Babb, N. M. (2005) "Cataloging spirits and the spirit of cataloging." CCQ 40(2):89-122] Babb can easily be (and was) critiqued for using such a small sample but she was not attempting to do science. She was looking at title pages of books purportedly written by spirits and how our cataloging rules have evolved to handle such attributions of authorship. There is no serious sense in which that could ever be considered to be doing science.

I will leave you with the conclusion, which while it makes some valuable points also commits the same fallacy.

It is time for information researchers to start asking themselves not only how to exploit context in reaching a holistic picture of informational phenomena, but also what the empirical contexts are that are bona fide foreign to them and potentially significant to humanity. By doing so, we may open up new grounds for further research and thus widen the scope of information studies as a branch of science (959).

Read that through once or twice and tell me you can’t see the confusion. If we want a holistic picture then we must admit ways of knowing besides science. If we are only talking the empirical then we are excluding whole realms of phenomena, of human experience, and of human knowing. Information studies is not a science (and that is OK), but if we only admit the empirical then we have excluded far more than we can honestly cover.

Saturday, 29 Mar 2008

Budd, J. (2008). Self-Examination: The Present and Future of Librarianship. , 281. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited.

Started this yesterday and it looks quite good. So far I have read the Introduction and the 1st chapter: Genealogy of the Profession.

There are a few minor issues and claims that I have trouble with but they do not have much to do with (or influence on) the larger purpose so I am trying to be forgiving. I am going to comment on one, though, as it is directly related to many of my current interests.

Early in the 1st chapter Budd writes, “In order for there to be communication there has to be language; do we know what the first language was, how it came to be, who spoke it” (3)?

Unless one is equating communication and language—actually under any account—that is a complete non-starter. They are and never have been coextensive. And, as Harris so ably demonstrates, it is communication that must proceed language. The very idea of a language (in use) requires that there be communication. The simplest refutation is that most people will agree that almost every animate being on this planet communicates between others of their own kind, and often as not with beings of other sorts. The vast majority of these people will also adamantly deny any use of language, much less the capability for language, to these creatures.

As I said, not really relevant to the larger purpose of the text, but it will cause me to keep a sharper eye on his larger arguments. I find it hard to believe that a scholar with the philosophical bent of Budd could make that mistake.

Some things read this week, 24 February – 1 March 2008

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Monday, 25 Feb 2008

White, Alan R. Introduction. In White, Alan R, ed. 1968. The Philosophy of Action. London: Oxford University Press.

This edited volume on the philosophy of action includes articles by J. L. Austin, Danto, Davidson, Anscombe, and others (some classics). I probably won’t read much more of it and I think I grabbed it when I saw it in the stacks due to … oh, who knows why I grabbed it a few days ago. ::shrug::

The Introduction was fairly interesting. He primarily covers:

  • A. The nature of action
  • B. Descriptions of action
  • C. Explanations of action

The first part gives an overview of action by pulling apart ‘do, ‘action’, and ‘act’, as they are not the same thing. It then quickly narrows to focusing on human action. The last section addresses the following questions:

(i) How does each of these explanations actually explain? (ii) How are the different explanations, and the various factors that occur in each, related to each other? (iii) Are some of these kinds of explanations mutually exclusive? (iv) How many, if any, of these explanations give an explanation of a causal kind, or, if this is different, of the kinds which are found either in explanations of human characteristics other than behaviour or in explanations of inanimate nature (13)?

Here’s an example sentence from the section addressing question (ii) above:

To give the motive for a deed is to indicate that desire for the sake of satisfying which the deed was done, provided that what was done was not itself the deed which was desired, but a deed which the agent thought would bring about or would amount to what was desired (14).

Either excruciatingly painful, pure mental masturbation, or both, depending on your temperament.

Black, Alistair. The information society: a secular view. In: Hornby, Susan, and Zoë Clarke, ed. 2003. Challenge and Change in the Information Society. London: Facet.: 18-41.

Critiques the “near-paradigmatic status” of the information society. Argues that the discourse around the information society is a mirage. It is also exposed as a ‘regime of truth” whose “legitimacy, [and] sustenance, is drawn from a wide array of interested parties who, albeit perhaps not in any conspiratorial way, stand to gain social or professional recognition, if not material reward, from establishing the information society as a ‘given’ phenomenon, as an incontrovertible ‘fact’ (19).

Yes, that certainly implicates librarians and libraries.

Demonstrates that the information society fits within modernity and that there have been equally important ‘information ages’ previously.

The information society cannot be conceptualized as a post-industrial, post-modern phenomenon, for its essences – scientific progress and individual and social emancipation among them – are surely rooted in the modern societies which have flowed, over the past three centuries, from industrialism, capitalism and the Enlightenment project (33).

Also touches on the utopianism of the information society. Quite interesting and recommended.

The book includes sections on: The information society: fact or fiction? (3 chaps.); The information society and daily life (3 chaps.); The information society and policy (2 chaps); and, The information society and the information professional (4 chaps).

Tuesday, 26 Feb 2007

Read 2 more chapters and the Introduction in the above information society book.

From the Introduction:

Our idea from the outset was to let the authors have their own voice and to allow debate and discussion within the text and between the authors.

This book is intended for those people in professional practice and in the field of academic study and research who have an interest in the information society and its impact on the profession. We hope that this collection will enable the reader to consider different viewpoints and aspects of the information society (xiii).

Cornish, Graham P. Freedom versus protection: the same coin or different currencies. P. 169-183.

Discusses “three basic concepts in the information world which appear, on occasions at least, to be at odds with each other: the right of freedom of expression, the right of freedom of access to information and the right to protect what we create (mostly copyright) (169).

Brophy, Peter. The role of the professional in the information society. P. 217-232.

Discusses the impact that the information society is having in the information professions, professionalism, and professional ethics.

Tuesday, 26 Feb 2008

Abbott Andrew. (2007 preprint) The Traditional Future: A Computational Theory of Library Research.

Recommended to me by Nathan in a comment in Oct 2008. I finally got around to reading the Peter Brantley article, The Traditional Future, on 2 December. I immediately and dutifully saved the Abbott preprint and printed it as soon as I could do so double-sided (easily).

Dr. Abbott is coming to GSLIS in March to give the Spring 2008 Windsor Lecture.

The title of his talk is “Library Research and Its Infrastructure in the Twentieth Century.”

I have known that he iss coming for a while now and have held this article for reading until closer to his visit. I’m not a standard social science researcher nor a traditional library researcher (although much closer to library researcher) so I may not be qualified to comment on some of this but it seems fairly plausible, if admittedly somewhat schematic. I also do not enjoy his use of the computing metaphor. The world faces enough issues from analogizing practically everything to computers.

All in all, fairly interesting. I will enjoy going to his lecture more prepared than most. There were also a couple of connections to the rhetoric of science and division of labor, which are important ideas in my current work.

Wednesday – Thursday, 27 – 28 Feb 2008

International Society for Knowledge Organization, and University College, London. 2004. Knowledge Organization and the Global Information Society: Proceedings of the Eighth International ISKO Conference, 13-16 July 2004, London, UK. Ed. Ia McIlwaine. Würzburg: Ergon.

  • Green, Rebecca and Lydia Fraser. Patterns in verbal polysemy. 29-34.
  • O’Keefe, Daniel J. Cultural literacy in a global information society-specific language: an exploratory ontological analysis utilizing comparative taxonomy. 55-59.
  • Binding, Ceri and Douglas Tudhope. Integrating faceted structure into the search process. 67-72. (Thu)
  • Mai, Jens-Erik. The role of documents, domains and decisions in indexing. 207-213. (Thu)

I really liked the Green and Mai articles. Mai, especially, will be valuable for my CAS paper as a widening of the concept of domain analysis.

Wednesday – Saturday, 27 Feb – 1 Mar 2008

 

Toolan, Michael J. 1996. Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press.

 

Began this again. Read about half in the back half of December but had to put it aside to finish my bibliography and a new semester and ….

  • Introduction.
  • Ch. 1: On Inscribed or Literal Meaning (Thu)
  • Ch. 2: Metaphor (Fri-Sat)
  • Ch. 3: Intentionality and Coming into Language (Sat-Sun)

Thursday – Friday, 28 – 29 Feb 2008

Skare, Roswitha, Niels Windfeld Lund, and Andreas Vårheim, ed. 2007. A Document (Re)turn: Contributions from a Research Field in Transition. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

  • Ørom, Anders. The Concept of Information versus the Concept of Document. 53-72.
  • Frohmann, Bernd. Multiplicity, Materiality, and Autonomous Agency of Documentation. 27-39.
  • Drucker, Johanna. Excerpts and Entanglements. 41-52.

Saturday, 1 Mar 2008

McGarry, Dorothy. An Interview with Elaine Svenonius. 2000. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 29(4):5-17.

Sent to me by Bryan Campbell back in mid-Jan; finally found the time to read it. I knew Svenonius had done “some things” in our field, but I simply had no idea!

Saturday, 1 Mar 2008

Mai, Jens-Erik. 2005. Analysis in indexing: document and domain centered approaches. Information Processing & Management 41, no. 3:599-611. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VC8-4BN0DSN-2/2/041a56f590f2166e0305c00d5d311a73.

This article appears to be the formal, published representation of Mai’s ISKO article above, The role of documents, domains and decisions in indexing. It will be used to expand the concept of domain analysis, primarily, and perhaps also in my commentary on applications of Integrationism to LIS, in this case indexing.

Recommended.

30 mostly spurious benefits of ebooks

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Thanks to lifehacker I discovered that Read an Ebook Week is in early March. The Epublishers Weekly blog has a post which covers “30 Benefits of Ebooks,” which while containing some bits of truth, if you will, is mostly IMHO made of up bad logic and spurious reasoning.

I will not waste my time deconstructing all 30 reasons but will comment on a few of them.

1. Ebooks promote reading. People are spending more time in front of screens and less time in front of printed books.

Uh, how does this follow? We (even I) may be spending more time in front of our screens but we might just be looking at photos on Flickr, watching YouTube videos, surfing for porn or any of 1000s of possible activities which have absolutely nothing to do with reading an ebook. And while much of our online activity does involve reading it may not include reading books.

2. Ebooks are good for the environment. Ebooks save trees. Ebooks eliminate the need for filling up landfills with old books. Ebooks save transportation costs and the pollution associated with shipping books across the country and the world.

And the manufacture of all these electronic devices and the electricity to power them, including all of the many highly toxic components and manufacturing processes do no damage to the environment at all?

3. Ebooks preserve books. … Ebooks are ageless: they do not burn, mildew, crumble, rot, or fall apart. Ebooks ensure that literature will endure.

Ha ha ha ha ha. This is one of the funniest, utterly stupid comments I have ever heard. Digital preservation issues anymore? Format migration?

7. Ebooks are portable. You can carry an entire library on one DVD.

So those books I carry with me pretty much everywhere are not portable? Certainly ebooks are more portable in quantity is the point but make it more clearly then!

14. Ebooks are free. The magnificent work of Project Gutenberg, and other online public libraries, allow readers to read the classics at no cost.

“Right!” said with a proper Bill Cosby accent cause my public library charges me $5 just to walk in the door. Not!

21. Ebooks, with their capacity for storage, encourage the publishing of books with many pages, books that might be too expensive to produce (and purchase) in paperback.

Perhaps true, but it goes against any and all conventional wisdom that I’ve heard or read about the length of electronic materials read by people. I guess one could make a 2500-page PDF but who the hell is going to read it?

27. Ebooks defeat attempts at censorship. All these works were banned: Analects by Confucius. Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Ars Amorata by Ovid. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio by John Milton. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne. Wonder Stories by H.C. Andersen. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Ulysses by James Joyce. … Many of these books were confiscated, burned, or denied availability in libraries, bookstores and schools. Ebooks guarantee that readers maintain their right to read.

All I can say to this one is “Seriously WTF are you on about?” I bet I can find everyone of those at both my public and academic library. And censorship certainly exists on the Internet.

Now clearly there is some value in this list. Some of the author’s points seem perfectly valid, although there are more I could pick on. But the ones I did highlight seem egregiously spurious to me.

I would like to see the proliferation of more widely available ebooks that are cross-platform, free of DRM, and in formats that are easily migratable to new formats when required. I would also like to see some of the possibilities that the author says may come to pass do so.

Nonetheless, this silly list will do nothing to change my reading habits. I read both online and in print and I print a lot of stuff that came to me electronically. Both have various affordances even now, but many of the affordances that the author claims for ebooks are nonexistent for most ebook formats at the moment.

I despise most marketing and spurious marketing really gets my goat!

So read ebooks if they work for you. If they don’t then don’t worry so much about some of these reasons.

3rd blogging anniversary and welcome to new readers

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Welcome new readers

On the 14th of Jan, Blake posted a story at LISNews, The LINews 10 Blogs To Read in 2008. My lowly little blog was included in that list. I have at least 29 new readers in Bloglines, which means, perhaps, 80-120 total new readers since then. Of course, the fact that the list was reproduced all over the blogosphere didn’t hurt either. ;)

Now Blake’s recommendation is wonderful to me, but I wonder what people expect based on that description. It is accurate but such a small part of me, even the part shown here. Also note the methodology; I come recommended based on a sample of probably one, perhaps two if I flatter myself. :) [There's a tie-in in that previous link to the name of my first (public) blog, ...the thoughts are broken....]

So, welcome to everyone who has come this way via the list. Please check out the other folks, too.

Please feel free to comment, correct, say your piece, etc. I do not worry about whether or not you agree with me or how long your comments are. Sometimes substance requires several paragraphs.

I do moderate all first time comments, though, to cut down on spam. Links are allowed but at some number shortly after 1 your comment will get flagged as spam, which I’ll hopefully catch. I do try to address all comments, and try to do so in a fairly timely manner. But I do sometimes fail.

And you can always use the Contact Form to send me non-public comments, too [Scroll back up and use the Contact tab at center top].

Who am I?

I am finishing a Certificate of Advanced Study (CAS) in LIS at GSLIS, UIUC. I also did my Masters here just prior to this degree. Organization and access of information has been my area with a focus on classificatory structures. Some of my post-MLS classes include thesaurus construction, classification systems seminar, information modeling, humanities ontologies, Topic Maps, bibliography, and Python programming. [Full list of my 80 or so grad LIS hours is here.]

I have worked as a computer technician for the department, broadcast distance ed classes and assisted with classroom technology, both on campus and virtual, been a thesaurus maintainer, and most recently work as both the serials cataloging GA and as one of the monographic cataloging GAs.

As I hope to be done this May (my 3rd Mother’s Day graduation, hopefully) I am now on the job market. I am primarily looking for an academic job doing something related to cataloging, metadata, vocabulary work, etc. If you know of any feel free to send me a link.

I am also a “habitually probing generalist” as my tagline claims, but that may be causally based more on brain chemistry at an early age than by culturally-trained bent [Although I have assimilated much of the cultural quite well. I'm one hell of a manual citation tracking machine, for instance]. I get intensely interested in highly specific things on occasion. And in the process of diving in deep one finds so many things one did not know about. Some of that stuff is going to be highly interesting and itself lead off in other directions. What a deliciously dangerous vicious circle this is.

3rd blogging anniversary

Three years ago today …the thoughts are broken… debuted with “So, what is this about, and for?” I once had a “best posts” which I began to update quite a while back. Not a job I actually relish although I would like people to see the stuff I prefer for whatever reason I label it “best.”

Oh. Crap. That page is much older than I thought and all of the links are broken since it moved from the first blog to this one. Oh well, perhaps you can search titles if you are interested in some of my early stuff (1 Feb – 25 Oct 2005). Some day I may get that list updated but since I’m nearing 1000 posts [and taking into account other time constraints] it won’t be any time soon.

My first blog was hosted at TypePad. On 20 July 2006 Off the Mark debuted [It does include all of my previous posts at ...the thoughts are broken... but all internal links are broken]. This means I’ve been on LISHost and WordPress for more than half my online existence; that is, blogging existence and paying for hosting.

The name of my 1st blog came from a line in a Grateful Dead tune while this one was named by Richard Urban and Walt Crawford.

Since May 2006 I’ve been taking a fairly narrow path for a generalist; that is actively taking. Much of my time is taken up by this. [See this post and comments for some comments on the curse of being a generalist; and also of having an "actively wired" brain.] I am looking at what the Integrational theory of communication and language might mean for LIS if taken seriously. Thanks go to David Bade for starting me down this road.

So not an anniversary for this specific blog (although my friend, Iris, said last night that it’s the same blog with a new title. Perhaps.) but a blogging anniversary. Just to be clear.

Zotero, COinS, WorldCat, linking …

My blog has a plug-in that generates COinsS data so that OpenURL and COinS aware tools will recognize this data and do something contextual with it. For instance, Zotero (which I recommend highly) can import that data from the web page. If I click the icon [contextually variable] that shows up in my browser’s address bar the post metadata is imported: Post title, author, blog title, date of post, URL, and access date. And, no, I don’t have many of my own posts in Zotero. There are a few posts, though, that are being used in my bibliography and CAS paper so they are there.

But I also use Zotero to output COinS data to put in my posts when I cite a source, like in my weekly reading posts. And I do far more of it for print resources as it is easier and more reliable to get information in automatically. And if I can provide a resolvable URL for a web resource anyway then how important is the COinS data for them. Again, I do not have that many web-based resources in Zotero; comparatively.

I also try to link to WorldCat for stuff they have records for. By the way, they are providing data for the taking by Zotero also. A couple days ago I linked to a work record in LibraryThing that I had brought in from Oxford University being the only one in LibraryThing to have it (or claiming to have it). I got that data into Zotero from the LibraryThing work page which also gave me some data. I think, in this case anyway, that WorldCat would have been better.

So, as Blake said, I write about print stuff. I read a fair few books (mostly non-fiction) and lots of articles, to include photocopying a boatload of stuff not online. Most of it is LIS literature or related to issues in LIS.

Extraneous

Well now. I think it’s all been a bit extraneous and somehow self-indulgent so far. ;)

My blog is both personal and professional. This state has been written about and commented on many times here and elsewhere. Consider the name of my first blog, …the thoughts are broken….

Here’s a few more lines for a bit of context:

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music
Would you hold it near as it were your own?

It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they’re better left unsung
I don’t know, don’t really care
Let there be songs to fill the air

Grateful Dead. “Ripple.” American Beauty.

This is the positive view of making best use of one’s broken thoughts. I’ve been listening to American Beauty since it came out and “Ripple” has always been one of my favorites and always deeply personally meaningful. That meaning has shifted and changed and grown over the years but it has always been positive.

The other side of broken thoughts though is know as fragmentation, depersonalization and moral minimalism. [See these posts perhaps. Actually, I do have an overview post of these issues less than a year old.]

Thus, the title of my 1st blog was both a warning to myself and a positive statement of how to make things better. Changing the name for my new blog had nothing to do with considering my thoughts to no longer be broken. That is a lifetime struggle based on the way our society is structured.

In the meantime, I try to keep my chin up and gently coax a few of those thoughts into being coherent and whole. As Robert Hunter wrote 38 years ago:

Let there be songs to fill the air.