“story”
24 posts under this tag.
After an afternoon of sumptuous, unrestrained culinary indulgence, bursting at the seams, a friend of Ureña, one of dad’s best friends, liked to say, in fantastically black humor: ”Ojala hubiera muerto de niño—para no sufrir tanto.” (“I wish I’d died a child—to save myself from so much suffering.”)
”Trabajo que no da para levantarse a las 11[AM], no es trabajo.” (“A job that doesn’t pay enough for sleeping after noon is no job.”) Used to say another, rather too fond of the good life, friend of Dad’s.
People usually said goodbye to my grandgrandmother Aurora—who is now just over a hundred—with a formulaic, yet earnest, “Take care!” To which she promptly responded, ”You take care! I’m over ninety years old, what I want to do now is die!”
”Que puedes esperar Parra,” (“What can you expect Parra”) used to say Ureña jokingly to my father, ”yo me crie con tortillas de sal y chile. Yo no comi pescado, ni leche, ni jamon.” (“I was raised on tortillas with salt and chile. I didn’t get to eat fish, nor milk, nor ham.”)
 There was recently (November 2006) an article in Nature about the famous Antikythera MechanismWP, a strange Greek contraption from the second century B.C.E. that with its gears and dials is considered by some the first (astrological) computer. Nothing like it is known in human history until a thousand years later (which prompted Professor Mike Edmunds, one of the article’s authors, to regard it as “more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”). Using new advanced imaging techniques the researchers were able to discover much previously hidden complexity in the device and established it was used to model the position of the moon and probably that of other planets. The article was all over the news (in 2002, another famous analysis was released and it was also broadly covered).
Then there’s Richard Feynman and his letters, gathered by her daughter and published in an also fairly recent (April 5, 2005) book titled Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten TrackAM. And there’s one from Athens that mentions Feynman’s encounter with a funny little Greek mechanism. It’s a gem of a letter, full of wisdom about science, history, and modernity.
Of late (and not a minute too late, some will say), I’ve been studying tact. Here are two nice anecdotes I’ve stumbled on.
Charles Schwab was passing through one of his steel mills one day at noon when he came across some of his employees smoking. Immediately above their heads was a sign that said “No Smoking.” Did Schwab point to the sign and say, “Can’t you read?” Oh, no not Schwab. He walked over to the men, handed each one a cigar, and said, “I’ll appreciate it, boys, if you will smoke these on the outside.” They knew that he knew that they had broken a rule—and they admired him because he said nothing about it and gave them a little present and made them feel important. Couldn’t keep from loving a man like that, could you?
Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends And Influence PeopleAM
While he was prime minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill once hosted a posh state dinner, attended by dignitaries from around the world. At one point, he was taken aside by the head butler, who quietly informed him that Lady So-and-so had been observed stealing a silver salt-shaker and placing it in her purse. “How do you suggest this matter be handled?” asked the butler.
“Leave it to me,” replied Churchill. The prime minister then made his way across the room, pausing along the way to pick up the matching pepper shaker from the dinner table. He stepped up to Lady So-and-so, took her by the arm, and guided her out of earshot of the other guests. Then he pulled the pepper shaker from his pocket and showed it to the woman. “My dear lady,” he said in a guilty-sounding voice, “I think we’ve been seen! Perhaps we’d better both put them back!”
Winston Churchill (You can find more anecdotes from him here and here. I can’t, for the life of me, find again that article where I read this anecdote first. After hours and hours of frustration, I found this version, which I think is the one that best approaches the one that originally captivated me, in this bizarre religious tract.)
Do you know more?
I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.
With that, Danny HillisW, E introduces his idea for Aristotle, an AI tutor that will move in a smarter web he calls the knowledge web. I find his dream somewhat unconvincing, somewhat pedantically unrealistic and somewhat suspicious of oversimplification. (Even though he considers it but a steppingstone towards Neal Stephenson’s Young Lady’s Illustrated PrimerWP, ELZR, which I love.) It is from the eminent responses to his essay where there’s gold.
 Something made me cry in Harriet Brown’s One Spoonful at a Time —a long, personal story on anorexia from last week’s New York Times. I’ve been unbelievably emotional these days but blame it rather on it being a superbly written account (“The rough days were predictable only in the sense that they kept coming.”) by an extremely intelligent, rational, and honest mother trying to cure her daughter’s anorexia —and that it manages to be a fairly deep, scientific intro into the eating disorder (“Anorexia is one of the deadliest psychiatric diseases; it’s estimated that up to 15 percent of anorexics die, from suicide or complications related to starvation. About a third may make some improvement but are still dominated by their obsession with food. Many become depressed or anxious, and some develop substance-abuse problems, like alcoholism. Almost half never marry.”) while still being punctuated at every paragraph with raw, emotional portraits of desperation (“I woke with my heart pounding, full of rage and hatred for Not-Kitty, the demon who lived on air, who wore my daughter’s face and spoke with her voice.”) and hope.
In what is to date my longest translation I’ve put the story into Spanish: Una Cucharada a la vez. Please pass it along to someone who might need to read it.
As much as I truly hate domain hoarding when I’m out there looking for a spiffy domain to my latest webapp, I confess compulsive domain buying is one of my guilty pleasures1. I’m hoarding, I know, but perhaps my scale will redeem me. Those bastards—you know who you are—who hoard (“park”) thousands of domains, financing the whole murky enterprise by filling their spoils with semantically-related ads disguised as directories… well, may they be strangled to a slow, painful death by his noodly appendage.
My two most recent acquisitions are ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com.
The first domain is a phrase that has haunted me since I first read it at a local exposition2 (thanks to Andrea for telling me about it) of the work of Cultural-Revolution China’s Li ZhenshengWP. A photoreporter of the main newspaper in China’s far Northeast during China’s Mao mire, Li kept negatives of his work against orders and they may be the best remaining record of the horror. Andrew Stuttaford wrote a harrowing review of Li’s Red-Color News SoldierAM and he didn’t escape the phrase either:
More typical, and more tragic, was Wu Bingyuan, a technician accused of counterrevolutionary activities (a pamphlet). Li recalls that when Wu heard his sentence, death, “he looked into the sky and murmured, “this world is too dark”; then he closed his eyes and never in this life reopened them.” The photographs show Wu being paraded through the streets of the city. Later, shackled and bound, he’s pictured at his place of execution. His eyes are still shut. We see him kneeling, back turned to the firing squad. His eyes are still shut. The final image is of Wu’s corpse. His eyes are still shut.
I want to do something at thisworldistoodark.com that honors Wu’s memory but I still don’t know what. What I do know is that the phrase is forever carved into my memory.
 The other domain, nellodee.com, is thankfully from the opposite end of human possibilites. Nellodee is the full version of Nell, the name of the protagonist of Neal Stephenson’s excellent Diamond AgeAM, a toddler from the future slums that chances on a state-of-the-art learning machine. This book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, the book-within-the-book, is every self-learner’s wet dream: endlessly interactive, infinitely patient, all-knowing, self-adapting, story-driven, fractal (the basic outline of the book’s story is presented at the very beginning, from then on you advance the story by zooming in on any particular fragment of it, the fragment develops into a full-fledged story, and on it goes). It has left me so deeply impressed that I have to do my share to bring it eventually to life. Toki Pona seems like the perfect subject to try my clumsy hand at the Primer concept with a simple web-app—it’s a small, simple, and enjoyable subject, and I’m already sort of an expert in it. We’ll see.
So why am I telling you all this? To assuage my conscience. You see, perhaps I dawdle for years before actually implementing any of the above ideas and so I’ve configured both ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com to redirect here, to this very post, in the meantime. If you are doing (really doing, not pie-in-the-sky woulda doing) something really cool, are missing a good domain, and either of those two would be a great choice for your project, I’d be glad to give them to you. Gratis. Full-ownership. With my best wishes.
Some days ago my cousin Cris got married to Julio in a beautiful, simple civil ceremony. They’re having a (huge) Catholic ceremony come December but as of that Saturday they’re already husband and wife. It was the first time I got to see a civil wedding (in Mexico, they’re usually done privately, shortly after the religious service, a furtive formality between the mass and the party) and since I was Cris’s witness, I even took part in the ceremony itself. I loved every minute of it.
The lunch—delicious carnitas WP, F (we all ate too much)—was held at the family’s over-used reception room and most of the guests were either bride’s or groom’s family (each, as tradition has it, at opposite sides of the room) with a small contingent of the couple’s mutual friends (all looking disturbingly middle-aged from my vantage point). Chemito superstar came from Monterrey in a one-day round trip and got the bride crying :). Most anyone looked stunning. Most anyone looked happy.
The party would extend well beyond sunset with the polemic smuggling of a TV to watch the Chivas-America soccer classic and the road back home would prove an adventure onto itself owing to treacherous potholes and a monsoon, but it was the actual signing of the marriage contract that so impressed me that day. On one level, of course I was excited and bewildered and happy that Cris was (finally1!) marrying. And it was the first time it happened to someone so close—all weddings before I felt an spectator, only indirectly related to the bride or the groom.
The judge arrived, the music stopped, and we all gathered around a simple table where Julio, Cristina, and their witnesses sat—everyone expectant. The judge declared the ceremony started with a sibilant, annoying voice, asked the parts to the contract if they had come on their own will (no dramatic “Speak now or forever hold your peace.” though), and proceeded to read a long, overly politically correct text that is still a marked improvement from the 140-year-old anachronism that used to be mandatory at weddings (turns out that was only discontinued 6 months ago). They were then asked to read a brief formulaic statement to each other and finally, in a great anticlimax, bride and groom, and later their witnesses and their parents, got to sign a seemingly endless string of documents amid nervous laughs. The judged pronounced them husband and wife (”...in the name of Law and Society”), the ceremony was over, and in a roar we all came tumbling down to congratulate the newlyweds, tears sprouting all over the place.
So you see, it was actually a very simple affair—and yet dramatically different from a religious ceremony. To begin with, it felt unbelievably more intimate to me. Yes, I was the witness and I was there at the table and I loved the bride and all, but I still think people all over felt very much more involved, standing at arm’s length around us, smiling and crying at the happily terrified couple. The ceremony may have sounded formal, it was, but that’s nothing compared to the rote convolutedness of a religious service. It pretended to be nothing more than the signing of a human contract—which is, of course, what it is—and I delighted in such simplicity—it felt so unadulterated, so raw, so human. Alas, there was still, to be sure, the specter of the State all over the place2, but I was so cheerfully entranced by the absence of God that I didn’t notice it then. I was happy.
Tiempo de lluvias. Estas en tu camioneta, aburrido, esperando que toque verde, cuando un hombre en un overol rojo brillante con el logo de MerkabastosELZR y una clara leyenda de “servicio de cortesia” se acerca: “Buenas tardes, me permitiria limpiarle su parabrisas? Cortesia de Merkabastos.” Asientes sorprendido y el hombre sonrie, planta enfrente de tu camioneta un tripie que no habias percatado y que sostiene un letrero mediano anunciando que esta noche es la venta nocturna de Merkabastos, con papas y nabos a mitad de precio—y procede a limpiar tu parabrisas religiosamente. El vidrio queda impecable, tu apurado procuras unas monedas y se las ofreces al hombre pero este sonrie: “Gracias, pero este servicio es cortesia de Merkabastos. Que pase usted una buena tarde” te responde—y se marcha.
Esto me vino a la mente esta tarde, en el cruce de Periferico y Tutelar cuando un limpiaparabrisas se me echo encima a pesar de mi clara y categorica renuencia. Cuando termino no le di nada, lo ignore de la misma estudiada forma en la que el me ignoro cuando le gesticulaba que no, que no queria que limpiara mi parabrisas, pero despues me senti algo mas mal que de costumbre al darme cuenta que habia hecho un trabajo inusualmente bueno y mi parabrisas eran unos ojos recien llorados. Me molesto que algo que podia ser un servicio agradable decayera en algo a rehuir y al buscar una forma de evitar ese empobrecimiento se me ocurrio esta excentricidad mercadotecnica. Quien sabe, se antoja raro pero interesante. No seria memorable que por una vez en vez de solo robar tu atencion hicieran algo por ti?
People, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values; media is the landscape where this interaction takes place; literacy is the ability to participate consciously in it.
..what we have to do first then is understand the nature of stories and why we tend to believe them, why we mistake our stories and our myths for fact, and that’s going to be the beginning of how we can dissemble them. The moment that I got this, was, I guess I was a freshman in college when the third, and probably still worst of the Star Wars movies came out, Return of the Jedi. Luke and Hans get captured by those little teddy bear creatures, the Ewoks, on the moon of Endor, do you remember this? And the Ewoks are having their little barbecue party or whatever they’re doing, princess Leia is allowed to be free, because she’s a girl, whatever, but Hans and Luke are tied up. Do you remember how they get out of captivity? C3PO and R2D2 tell the Ewoks a story. C3PO speaks perfect Ewok, and he’s all golden, they think he’s a god. He starts telling the great story of the wonderful rebels, Luke and Hans, and how they’re fighting the imperial starship. R2D2 starts projecting holographic images of this battles, and you see the little Ewok eyes going back and forth, going “Oh my god!” They’ve never seen holographic technology, they’ve never heard a story told this well. The story so wins them over that these Ewoks not only release Hans and Luke, but they fight a war on their behalf. They fight a war against those big robot things. In which Ewoks die. What I thought at this moment—as an emerging little media theorist—was: what would have happened if Darth Vader had gotten down to that moon first and told his story, with his special effects? They’d have fought for him, I promise you! They’d have fought for him.
...and the style of narrative changed too, we started to get shows like The Simpsons, which were no longer this [the traditional crisis, climax, sleep narrative]; we didn’t care of Homer, what, is he’s gonna live or not, is he gonna lose his job or not. No, now what we’re doing in this big chaotic fractal-like media-space where we’re all talking and exchanging ideas with each other, giving away software to each other, now it’s about making connections. It’s about finding patterns in this media space. When you watch The Simpsons, the reward is not the cookie that you get for making it through the story, the reward is making an association. Oh, here they’re satiring Alfred Hitchcock. Oh, this is a satire of that commercial. Here’s, that’s… Connections, connections and openings, connections and openings. It’s no longer a beginninzg, middle, and end: it’s a series of connections.
17% of Americans believe the world will end in their lifetime and only 23% believe in evolution. Why? Evolution gives you a way out, evolution gives you an alternative to this. Rather than the preordained story, we can write another one, we can change, we can evolve, something else can emerge. The frightening thing about having an emerging narrative is that it means there’s no pre-existing story. It means maybe we weren’t put here with meaning at all. Maybe there was no intent. Maybe meaning is something that we do. Maybe meaning is something that we make, not a pre-existing condition. That meaning is made. But how? Through collaboration. Ain’t gonna get no meaning alone, it can’t be done alone in a series of consumer choices. We’ve tried that one. If you could do it that way, would we be doing this conference? No. You can’t. You only get meaning by connecting with other people. Through the discovery of connections and interrelationships.
Question: Something that resonated with me was a comment you made about [how] we need to develop a new kind of story through collective ownership and collective authorship, and there’ve been a lot of news stories that have come through various different individuals. The example was given from the X-Files that the authorship was taken over by a collective of individuals. My question would be, where do you see that threshold point where it’s taken from an individual and moved into the collective?..
The bane of my existence this question, for a long time. Because the main thing I’m studying these days is narrative: why do we construct narratives on reality? why do we need narratives? and then, how can we develop new narrative structures? I think some of you got this novel I wrote called Exit StrategyAM, and the challenge with that was I wanted to create some kind of an open-source collective experience, but I didn’t want to have the situation were if you’re letting a whole group of people write Star Trek with you, one kid kills Spock on the second page, and then you’re dead. So far I’ve found that the easiest way to do collective narrative experiments is to let the collective recontextualize the story.. the Talmudic process really.. There has to be a certain amount of agreement at the beginning: we’re going to play with this myth, we’re going to play with this story.
And I am, because it really, really, really is true: YouTube’s lonelygirl15 is the birth of a new art form.
How Gibsonian (or Laughing-man-esque) the whole video-cult esoterica was, don’t you think? (Though no one would have predicted that we would become obsessed with a (fictional) chirpy teen.) Danah boyd has some interesting things to say and the New York Time’s article on the memebomb is outstanding (but would some link love really kill them?).
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