musing |
Sunday, September 16, 2001
The story of the New York firefighters and police who ran up the stairs of the burning World Trade Centers while others were evacuating still brings tears to my eyes, even after hearing it a hundred times.
I found an address today for the New York Firefigthers 9-11 Disaster Relief Fund. NEW YORK FIREFIGHTERS 9-11 DISASTER RELIEF FUND Saturday, September 15, 2001
I woke up tuesday morning to unspeakable horror, and come wednesday I was back at work. A new day arrives and passes on by like any other.
On reflection I came to see what an absurdity normalcy has become. At dinner last night, Val, Dave and I were talking about just this. How can we go along with our normal lives while so many will never be the same? How seemingly selfish of us to get back to focusing on our own lives and work in light of this carnage! At the same time, how futile any imaginable act on our part appears! A friend pointed me to an essay by C.S. Lewis. Though the context in which Lewis penned the piece was the last great war, I find his words most timely and fitting. Here is the timeless Mr.Lewis....... "The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life." Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil... turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. ... Thus we may have a duty to rescue a drowning man and, perhaps, if we live on a dangerous coast, to learn lifesaving so as to be ready for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our lives in saving him. But if anyone devoted himself to lifesaving in the sense of giving it his total attention -- so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone had learned to swim -- he would be a monomaniac. The rescue of drowning men is, then, a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for." -- C. S. Lewis ("Learning in War-Time", in The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses) Friday, September 14, 2001
In graduate school and in my work I am trained to look at objects in a peculiar manner.
When I do my fieldwork in network operation centers I look to devices, charts, papers, and other tools, to help reconstruct work practice of the people using those artifacts. It has become a second nature for me to look at things and see beyond them to the people and communities of practice built into them. I can hardly bare to watch the news report of the past few days. The remnants of papers and other objects scattered into the winds. To me those are faces and communities. Attached to each one of those now neglected things are people whose grave prospect I do not dare imagine. And inseparable from these lives that may now have been lost forever, there are yet more people who knew and loved them. The media have been kind in not showing the more gruesome pictures of the human disaster.
I have neglected my blogs for a while, distracted by my busy life. Two days ago I was awaken to horror of unimaginable proportion. And today we are all still stuck in this nightmare.
My thoughts and pray are with us all. Hatred never ceases by hatred Friday, August 10, 2001
Hey, someone read my Sokal blog. Now that's a surprise.
I often get emails from friends reacting to my various blogs. But my rant on the Sokal hoax had gotten nada--zilch--rien, no comments whatsoever. Until the silence was broken a few days ago when my dear old friend Perre, a fellow refugee from the academy, wrote me about it. I'm glad to know I have at least a friend for every one of my peculiar sides.
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea It plainly marques four my revue Miss steaks eye kin knot sea. Eye strike a key and type a word And weight four it two say Weather eye am wrong oar write It shows me strait a weigh. As soon as a mist ache is maid It nose bee fore two long And eye can put the error rite Its rarely ever wrong. Eye have run this poem threw it I am shore your pleased two no Its letter perfect in its weigh My chequer tolled me sew. Sauce unknown Monday, August 06, 2001
I took the train to work today.
Well, it's more like, It took forever and a few more years, but I got some work done on the train. Thursday, July 26, 2001
There is a new book about the notorious Sokal Hoax. Reading a review of the book got me thinking again about the infamous incident.
Yes, that one that so fascinated the popular press, when a leftist alternative magazine Social Text published an essay written in the aureate "academic" prose, quoting a number of celebrated postmodernists: Foucault, Derrida and the likes. The article was subsequently exposed by Lingua Franca as a fake, written by one Alan Sokal, a (previously obscure) Physicist hell bent on making a mockery out of Social Science. The popular press, in a mad scramble to appease the anti-intellectual American popular culture, jumped all over the report. Once and for all they had in their hands *the* evidence exposing the hot air that was the Academy. But in so doing the press missed a number of important point. One being that Social Text was a popular lieftist magazine, not a peer-reviewed social scientific journal as portrayed in the hoax reports. Using an example from Social Text to dispell the validity of Social Science is akin to picking apart a scientifically weak exposition published in Wired magazine and pointing to it as evidence against the cogency of all Scientific inquiries. Ludicrous, no? I am not saying that Postmodernism doesn't have its share of carefully prosed PC rubbish. Of course it does, as do all other disciplines. What I am saying is, Postmodernist philosophy has its well-deserved place in the world. After all, was it not the deconstruction of previously substantiated "truth" that supplied much of the progress in the world? And is it not deconstructionism that lies at the very heart of Postmodernist inquiry? If we were to take all widely upheld beliefs as vérité absolu, there would be no progress, no advancement of scientific or any sort of inquiry. Where would we have been had Galileo Galilee not questioned the vérité absolu of his day by using his theory of projectile motion to substantiate that our earth in fact orbited the sun, and so provided future scientists with a new basis on which to ponder the state of the world. This propensity for short-sightedness and arrogance in the Scientific world, as so aptly portrayed by Sokal, is evidently what is wrong with the Academy today, "hard" or "soft" sciences alike. Not the turgidly prosed rubbish on either side, nor the barely contained mutual hostility, but this arrogance that will be the Academy's own undoing. In the meantime the popular press roars, ridiculing the frivolity of academic research.
Friday, July 20, 2001
I went bar hopping with Val and Dave last night. Yes, on a thursday night. It's not all that intentional really. First I went to meet Dave at an art opening by Peter's (a freind of Dave's) dad. It turned out we got there a bit early. Just about a week early. Yes, Dave is a dolt. (but we love him anyway) Then the two of us met Val for dinner at this little Italian place in Hayes Valley. We had a plan to rendezvous with our friend Don later that night at the wine bar. So off we went with bellies full of pasta and Chianti (the ratio of which you can guess), only to discover that Hayes and Vine was closed for an oh-so-private party until 9.30. We tried the famished children look with our respective noses pressed against the glass window begging to get in. Didn't work. So we hurled ourselves across the street to Absinthe where I consoled myself with la petite morte. Oh, contain yourself, it's just a drink! Really it was :-) Val and Dave comforted themselves with our old standby, Sidecar. We tried to call Don to let him know we're across the street, but only managed to leave a garbled message on his cell phone. (Really what's the point of having a cell phone, people, if you're not gonna answer it.) According to Don later, it said something about upjohn or up your john or some such things. Knowing full well that the message we left probably told Don to go play by himself in Timbuktu, we decided to cross the o-mighty Hayes yet again back to the wine bar to beg his forgiveness. In the meantime Don finally managed to ungarblized the clue we left on his phone, and was on his way to Absinthe. Fortunately he spotted Dave as he was flying by Hayes and Vine in his flashy chien-scented sports car, and decided that there couldn't, or shouldn't, be that many Dave-looking people in this wolrd. Don, who appeared to be the only person with a functioning brain last night, hence found us trying with all our collective might to sit up straight at the place we said we weren't gonna be.. So ended our school night odyssey with Perfection and great, if a bit disheveled, company. 
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