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Friday: Updates to this page will be done here from now on, though obviously it'll take a while to move all the subpages and pictures and bullets and fix all the wiring. What was I thinking to use absolute link names?
Thursday: My freeshell account is working, except that I can't see my test pages, but that's just a matter of waiting a system cycle and hacking until done, and then I can get back to posting content. It was time for this site to move out of university space anyway. There are several Cahiers entries that I've never been able to post because they're full of photos I don't have room for. Tuesday: My new host is bringing up a new server, so I can't move there quite yet, but I'm hoping that within a week I'll be able to update normally there. In the meantime, in honor of the academic rentrée, Ruth Carroll's academic advice links.
Friday: I've been unable to update this page by normal means since Monday; this text is being inserted by hand. I've just verified that the reason is that my host has decided to block ftp access permanently because of security concerns (see mention below of the sudden removal of telnet), and didn't tell the users. So I'm going to have to move the whole site somewhere else. After seven relaxing years of staying in one place, I have to go host shopping. Suggestions welcome. So far, www.freeshell.org, a public access Unix machine suggested by Nita on Beth's board, looks like the best choice for my needs.
And when I get it up in the new place, I'm going to add snarkout to the bookmarks.
Monday: Back since Saturday night but have been buried under preparations for these intensive courses we're giving. These placeholders will be replaced by genuine entries as soon as I get through the next day or three of teaching.
And in other news: an hour ago I suffered every traveler's nightmare of having a temporary covering for my molar root canal fall out. I'm about to call my dentist and find out what I should do to avoid resorting to local dental care, which was memorably described by Slavenka Drakulic as pulling teeth rather than fixing them. The school is good and things are otherwise peaceful. If you hear reports of fighting in Nis, it's probably just the strict Minimalists picking on the liberal GB people.
Leaving tomorrow for syntax camp in Nis, Yugoslavia, via Budapest. Since many of you just come here for the bookmarks, I added a few more for the road: turtleguy and the null device.
Reading this reminds me that I still need to update the Mafia page, but all of you who normally read it are on vacation anyway, right? I did put up some Mafia photos, none of which are good except perhaps the one taken in the dark. Somebody please take some better ones.
The Finland Alumni page is still down, so I note here that Alumni alumna Claudia has started a business.
(4) The wolf got a divorce.
A cat entry. And I don't even have a cat. Lame. I know. But I have a cold and all this work to get done before syntax camp.
Second, they've done something with the blinds at AKT. I haven't been home yet to see the result, but there were a lot of cryptic signs about the work when I left, and I have the realistic fear that they will have left us with no blinds on the windows, in the middle of summer, and this will be the final straw in my history with the place, which has anyway been strained lately by this season's neighbor, a pouty teenager who throws things at the garbage can, misses, doesn't pick them up, and can't be addressed about it because of the invisible sign over her head that says This is the real Finland and we don't talk here. Once again it's time for a few years without flatmates, or only with ones I can choose.
Third, it is July. How did it get to be July? I was counting on having at least one more day of June after I got back, to finish all the stuff I promised myself would get done in June.
The boat trip from Stockholm was amusing. In the cabin were two women: one elderly and Finnish, the other middle-aged, Ukrainian and living in Sweden. The Ukrainian woman was on her way home for a visit, and this meant of course that she had about a dozen huge pieces of luggage stuffed with presents and groceries and stuff that it would be hard for her family to get otherwise. The Finnish woman just knew that there was all this luggage in the compartment and there had to be a rule against it. First she sat and clucked for a while, then she complained to me, then she complained to the ship staff and was told people could bring as much luggage as they liked, then she sat and clucked for the rest of the trip. She did not seem to understand that socially, the Ukrainian woman did not have the option of going home traveling light, and that in the Ukrainian woman's mind, this six-square-meter cabin was immense compared to the spaces she was going to have to squeeze into on the trains. I was the only one who could communicate fully with both of them, and I didn't think literal, language-level interpretation of the facts was going to change anyone's mind, so I went up to the bar with my books and stayed there.
How different is the view in the following, from an article on fieldwork on longshoremen in (the inevitable) Routledge Cultural Studies:
And: I got it a few days before my old permit expired. This is hard to do. You have to have a really good reason. Normally they don't start processing the application until after the old permit expires, leaving you with that queasy illegal feeling for the weeks or months they're working on it. Also, you can't leave the country during that time, or if you do, you can't come back for six months. And you have to surrender your passport (or, as they put it, have it "seized") during the process. There are now about 85,000 foreigners in Helsinki, and about 10,000 of them (I estimate from my application number of 4800, in late May), require annual residence permits. The rest are EU citizens, or married in, or something.
Another Helsinki fact: According to a recent press release, the University of Helsinki web portal, helsinki.fi, is going to merge with the city portal, hel.fi, in the autumn. In other Finnish cities, the city gets the city name (tampere.fi) and the university gets a version of its initials (uta.fi). Here, the university grabbed helsinki.fi in 1987, and refused to exchange it for uhel.fi or something, probably because of the obvious U.Hell sound. Mind you, at my alma mater, people wore "Tech Is Hell" T-shirts, but not every university has that kind of reverse pride. So they're going to share. I was wondering how anyone could register a domain in 1987, but then someone pointed out that the original domain name system was probably extrapolated from the e-mail address standardization that took place around 1987, and that's what they meant.
Then I moved to New York, which is continually being extended upwards or repaired downwards, where wooden scaffolding detours are nearly as common as sidewalks. Then I moved to Helsinki, where they gut-renovate downtown buildings every decade and lay extra Information Society cables under the streets every summer. If they ever finish this city, it'll be magnificent. And most of my other travel has been done in the former Eastern Bloc, which has a big regionwide Under Reconstruction sign on it.
So it's really unnerving to see a city that isn't all torn up. A city where the maps and tourist guides from ten years ago still seem perfectly accurate. A city that seems to have assumed its final state: finished, complete, perfected. Seems inhuman somehow.
Looking for reading matter? Cubicle Girl figured out what the tax refund was all about. Ceej has a new webloggy forum format, which is supposedly not going to cannibalize the journal. (But everyone's new weblog ends up cannibalizing the journal. Shmuel's and Columbine's, for instance. Weblogs are just easier.) One of the topics in Ceej's new whatever attracted a few comments from bc, who has added some content since I last visited his page: a list of instructions for Burning Man (official site) that makes it sound like a survivalist barbecue you never, ever want to attend. Note that bc writes short simple sentences, almost without connectives, and yet the result is, at least those those who share some common background, an elaborated code.
At the time Alumni was founded, it was illegal for foreigners to form an organization in Finland. The exception was allowed probably because Alumni was founded, funded by and nominally controlled by the government. In reality, though, control soon moved to the scholarship holders themselves, who were in the unusual position of managing an organization with a substantial budget, in a foreign country. (It still seems to be unique in Finland - the other general "foreign student organizations" in Helsinki are actually run by Finns. All the foreigners have to do, or can do, is show up to activities.) Thus one of the things we end up doing is training board members, especially those who haven't run student clubs before, in standard Western parliamentary procedure - agendas, minutes, constitution. In my translation classes, we also run through the standard quorum-motion-table vocabulary, since it's something everyone in professional life should know.
However, I recently ran across this and remembered that there are other ways to write minutes.
The document comes from a 1982 meeting of the Student Information Processing Board at my alma mater. I can read almost all of it and knew some of the people. In those days, access to computers was not an automatic student right. Someone who needed to crunch numbers on the mainframe, or even just to word-process a paper, would apply for a certain dollar value of CPU time from SIPB. This time was not supposed to be spent for e-mailing or gaming or experimenting or doing nonprofit work. From today's perspective, it was as if you had to file an application to make a telephone call. And processing those applications was the most important business of the meeting. The rest was "other business" and "other-other."
In other news, Tino comes up with a universal DC adapter. Though I don't see why anyone should have to carry one around; they should be standard in every room where a person might possibly ever do some work. That would fix my usual problem of needing to recharge the phone but finding I've left the adapter in the last place where I plugged it in.
Other recent photos are up: Oulu, Tartu and eastern Estonia, and the complete set of Helsinki in the fog, which might make nice wallpaper for anybody who misses or dreams about our fair city.
The excursion for the Tartu conference was a bus trip to a region in eastern Estonia that is inhabited by people who are not only Russian speaking and Orthodox, but Old Believers, a sect that was so persecuted under the Czars and the Soviets that some of them were able to claim asylum in other countries. The highlight was a tour of an Old Believer convent. An elderly nun in a headscarf led us on a tour of public rooms crowded with daguerrotypes of early novice classes, pictures of the Holy Land, and china cabinets full of multiple massed religious chachkas, each with its story that had to be told. We also saw several small churches and the baptism building, a separate wooden clinic with a large sink for total immersion of babies and a mikvah-like swimming pool for total immersion of adults.
On the bus afterwards:
Professor #1: That nun certainly had a very powerful personality.
Professor #2: She told us that. It's because they can get a thousand cubic feet of firewood into one stack, enough for 15 months.
When children are allowed to spend too much time reading National Geographic, they grow up to take photos like this one, from the same trip, near the restaurant where we had lunch:
Recent bon mots from The Gus:
Speaking of scandals, the K*** N*** affair has, in its fourth or fifth cycle of meta, produced some reasonable reflections on trusting trust (May 22, scroll down), but in a way I think Terry has the right idea: this doesn't have to be the end of the fictional online journaler. It can be the beginning of an efflorescence of invented personas, until the Web becomes a giant Turing test. By the way, his Marvin rant is part of a subgenre born in alt.society.generation-x that includes the seminal Weaver's "Tired" rant and Kat's rant.
In local news, I'm going to be teaching a foreigners' English reading and discussion course next term. I went to see the last person who taught it, and she said the class she had was very interested in violence (reading selections on crime and punishment), and very interested in cultural stereotypes (handouts of that "The ideal European is..." thing). Agh. I hereby decree that my class is going to be very interested in other things, probably including technology and electoral politics and card games and Web journaling. And national holidays, of course.
The body count for Mafia is now four.
In the absence of microfilm, I seriously doubt many of us would be able travel to all the repositories and photograph the material or type it into our laptops from the paper copies. (Jen Bombpop gives the librarians' point of view on this - scroll down to April 12.) I also doubt that anybody would be scanning and computerizing the pages so we could read them at our desks, and if they did do it, they'd do it in a suboptimal way so that all the typography and art would be lost [1], not just the color and detail lamented by Baker, or they'd be snarfing up the intellectual property rights and then charging us at commercial rates for downloads. My department and others are busily computerizing early manuscript and printed documents, and the output of the computer age is theoretically being backed up on some giant server somewhere (and if they're not, well, that's should be the next crusade). But for 1800 through 2000, we're going to be stuck with microfilm for a long time. Better learn to thread those machines.
[1] I once had a part time job making prints from the microfilms of a Very Famous Media Organization, which was trying to repackage its most historically interesting articles, or at least those that were still politically palatable, into CD-ROMs. They gave me the Rolls Royce of microfilm machines and a brand new set of films, and agonized endlessly about the copy quality. I assumed this was because they were going to be scanning my prints, but no, it was because they were going to be sending them across the Pacific to be typed by non-native speakers who needed to be able to see all the letters, after which they would be reset in fake "vintage" typography. This Very Famous Media Organization was, of course, one of those in the habit of complaining in its pages about the loss of local jobs to the global economy. And no, it wasn't the Atlantic Monthly, although in view of both the Bush article and the most recent Baker article having run there, that would have been poetically just.
Playing a "directly imaginary" AD&D is quite a different thing. Creating the mood of horror and constant danger is much tougher in a well-lit room full of laughing people. In this case, as I have noticed, the players usually have a harder time "sensing" their character. More experienced players often get stuck in the game mechanics and tend to express themselves through rule forms. The occasions on which the players rely on external information (i.e., relevant knowledge gained form outside the boundaries of certain AD&D sessions and capabilities of their characters) are not rare, either ... Words have much greater importance because, in this case, an AD&D game entirely consists of them. The so-called "directly imaginary" AD&D requires considerable skills of storytelling on behalf of the DM ... In my opinion, a symbiosis of the two versions (i.e., a game with background support and special attention to the words spoken) is the best way to live through encounters with werebeasts, ghosts and vampires. This is probably the best way to present the Gothic horror of the game.
At no point in my sporadic D&D career did I play with a DM who could make us forget that we were high school and college students sitting in the basement of the public library, or the upstairs hall of my parents' house, or a meeting room in the university student center. Clearly the state of the science has advanced since then, and the work of the Tartu RPG Study Group has implications for semi-RPGs such as Mafia as well.
Also: I had a posted a rant here about how I hadn't been updating much because Blogger kept losing entries and photos from the archives and it was inhibiting me from pouring any more information into it. I've now fixed the problem and the archives appear to be complete. Which is good, because I just got a disk of excellent photos back (some of them now added, scroll down). If you've got a similar problem, the solution is probably here.
The pizza arrived. It looked a little odd. The crust was pizza crust, but on top of it was cream, then sliced apples, then cinnamon. I had ordered a dessert pizza. The Estonians have such a thing as dessert pizza. [1] I ate half of it, trying very hard to look as if I had meant to order it all along, like a cat who pretends that the floor just happened to be on its way from one end of the banister to the other.
The afternoon was very long, filled with plenaries with titles like "American Studies at the Turn of the Millennium." In the evening, we had a reception at the university museum, sponsored by the American Embassy, which had earlier pissed off the Estonians to such a degree [2] that the rest of the conference could have been renamed "The United States of America: Threat or Menace?" I arrived early, expecting the usual glass of wine and bowl of peanuts (must cut the deficit). There was a full buffet with risotto salad and herring in eleven kinds of sauce and jewel-like salmon in varying degrees of smokiness and unidentifiable brightly colored hors d'oeuvres. A grey haired woman in a black pajama pantsuit was circling the table predatorily. "I'm so hungry," she said. "Me too, I'm dying for something salty," I replied, and told her the pizza story. "Then let's start eating," she said. I was dubious: "Aren't we supposed to wait for the Embassy guy to make a speech?" "He's my husband," said the silver fox. "He won't stand on ceremony." I followed her in picking up a plate.
[1] I retold the story to an Estonian colleague and she said, "Oh, that place - they're very experimental. They had an egg pizza for Easter, and they had one with sauerkraut and peaches once."
[2] During the opening ceremonies, which I missed, the Ambassador mentioned some incidents in which African-American students and an instructor in Tartu had been insulted and in one case beaten by skinheads. She appeared to hold the university responsible and apparently threatened that USIA support would not continue if the situation didn't improve. This was seen as unforgivably imperialistic and high-handed, although some of the visiting Americans did allow that such incidents could be discussed in public, but only in a spirit of cooperation. I don't have to tell you that everybody at the conference, including those giving presentations on Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, and the American Indian, was white.
The last time I tried to edit something this heavily coded was several years ago when a forest scientist in my building hired me to check a few articles for him. His writing was both full of abbreviations and grammatically prolix - among other problems:
Me: I don't understand this sentence about the pH levels and the seedlings at all. Could you just tell me what you're trying to say in it?
[1] I got the job, copy editing. I couldn't afford to work there and had to turn it down. If I had gone there, the notorious Baltimore-Imanishi-Kari manuscript would probably have passed through my hands and I would have spent the next five years giving testimony.
All work in my department will stop at 4 pm, in 2 minutes. We will then have a ceremonial glass of sima, which is mead, but not mead like the Vikings drank, more a kind of light ginger ale. Then people will start to gather on the Esplanade for the lakitus, or capping of the Havis Amanda mermaid statue with a student cap. This is done by lowering a group of technical university students (teekkaris) from a crane. They are not allowed to climb the statue because she is very delicate. However, after they have finished putting the cap on her, someone else inevitably climbs her and takes it off. I have better pictures, which show people swimming naked in the fountain around the statue, but they aren't scanned.
The crowd then pop bottles of champagne (this is called the korkitus) and starts the serious drinking. This guy who looks like he's part of a Formula 1 pit crew is wearing a pair of student overalls, in his case from the computer science department at the Helsinki University of Technology. The different patches stand for different student clubs, which he is not necessarily a member of because people trade them. The many pockets in the overalls are for hip flasks. His friend is wearing his student cap - that's right, it looks like the one that guy in the Village People used to wear - which has a long tassel to show that it belongs to a student of the technical university. On Vappu there are so many people in overalls and caps that Helsinki looks like a "Where's Waldo?" drawing and you can't recognize the people you know. And you can't get in touch with them by mobile phone, because the networks are jammed.
Many university buildings around Senate Square are locked, even to keyholders, tonight, because otherwise people would come in and vomit all over the computers. I can still get into my office, though, and avoid the bathroom lines elsewhere. The younger students will party through the night and then tomorrow, everyone goes to Kaivopuisto park for a picnic, still hung over. (Why isn't anyone else wearing sunglasses?)
In order to destroy those we love
-- Tua Forsström, Snow Leopard,
"These people's approach is ... well, it's as if I said, 'I have a new methodology and it's called "Grammar."'" -- Susanna in last night's seminar. Or did she say theory instead of methodology? I think it was Scott Delancey who used to call his theory "The Right Theory." Because it was, you know, right.
Well, not to worry, I would find a good chatroom someday, he said, in the tones of a guidance counselor reassuring a student that there was life after algebra. The trick was to find a place where the people already knew each other and the environment was already thick with cross-reference.
I am now having a good chatroom experience. The group has already been talking for nine months over slower connections, and the chatspace includes a bot (software robot) named Pagina who has been programmed to add a note of surrealism. The other night I was on chat while correcting translation papers:
* Pagina insists on pistols at dawn.
The other day of note this week is Easter. At least two years out of three, I go to the Finnish Orthodox Cathedral (here - the photo above is the one in Tallinn) for the midnight service, which is one of the most spectacular experiences Helsinki offers. The opening part is restricted to ticketholders from the congregation but tourists are usually able to come inside after the ristinsaatto, which is the procession around the church with crosses and icons.
Each time I learn a little more about the service: The flames on all the candles are supposed to come from one candle held by the high priest. That's why people keep offering to light newcomers' candles. The part where the church is empty during the procession represents the empty grave after the Resurrection. The words of the hymn everyone sings are: Kristus nousi kuolleista / Kuolemalla kuoleman voitti / Ja haudoissa oleville elämän antoi. You can hear it here (click Kuuntele veisu). [1] After standing for three hours singing that song, one does indeed pass into a sort of trance. Even without being a Christian, it's usually easy for me to feel that something has happened and the congregation has just performed a spell to ensure the coming of spring and the rebirth of the earth.
This year it was cold and windy and snowing on Easter eve and I already had the sniffles, so I felt the ritual probably wouldn't be as convincing as usual and watched the Easter Service at New Valamo Monastery on television instead. New Valamo Monastery has always fascinated me in part because it's had a very commercial web page since the early days of the Web. Visiting the cyber monastery is one of the things I keep meaning to do in the summer, in the course of taking a steamboat through the chain of lakes from Kuopio down to Tampere, but I always seem to miss the short tourist season when the boats run. Keep this in mind when visiting the Arctic and near-Arctic: the high tourist season is basically six weeks in June and July, contracting even further as you get up to Murmansk, where the bed and breakfasts are probably open for about a week at the solstice.
[1] I'm going to leave this untranslated, because I think religion should be mystical and I tolerate it best when it's in languages I don't understand, such as Hebrew and Old Church Slavonic, or can tune out the meaning of, such as Finnish and Latin. Because, you know, I'm just there for the scene. I really have no interest in being called a sinner or in changing my belief system or behavior, which is what an astonishing number of English-language Judeo-Christian services still, six millennia after the Exodus, seem to be about.
Listening: U2 and college a capella. I finally figured out the secret of U2 is to set the volume to 11. These are anthems. I don't know why I never realized that before. And you haven't lived until you've heard the U Penn Quaker Notes doing "This Woman's Work" or the Brown Derbies' version of "Brian Wilson" or the Connecticut College Co Co Beaux with "Walking In Memphis."
(later:) It occurs to me that there is a whole class of caper stories like Jackie Brown that depend on the interchange of valuable and worthless goods in superficially identical containers, whose number and degree of permutation increase during the story until nobody knows what's going on. What's Up Doc?, an early Barbra Streisand-Ryan O'Neal movie, is another example. It begins "Once upon a time there was a little plaid overnight bag..." and by the end there are several of them containing, among other things, diamonds, geo-musical specimens (i.e., rocks), and dirty underwear. Another one is ismo by John Verney, in which identical looking paintings are swapped, one of them supposedly containing the authentic genius of an Old Master and the others being fakes. Sometimes I think I am the only person who has ever read ismo or heard of John Verney, but apparently I'm not.
It turns out that Verney also invented an organizer called the Dodo Pad, whose devotees like it because it is already messy and doesn't intimidate them with its blankness. Its layout reminds me of the time during the busiest period of journalism school when I came across Richard surrounded by a crowd of people in the upstairs hallway. He had a large three-ring binder with the pages ruled into time divisions (days? hours?) with several large blocks under each division, and multiple events listed in small writing in each block. "This is not a schedule," he was saying. "These are options. I can't live with those little Filofaxes anymore." Incidentally, the Vesey-Fawcetts quoted on the Dodo pages are characters from the Verney books, which some enterprising editor really should bring back into print, along with (please?) the complete works of Edward Ardizzone.
I think that sums up the conference. While I was gone (and always, for that matter), I hope you-all were reading Caterina. About jouissance, particularly.
Note that this time I did not take any of my own advice. If this blog had an upcoming appearances section, it would link to here and here.
This week's techno-homeboy epiphanies from TripleOptix. Two posts about mobile phones, and scroll down for fun with alarm clocks.
[But] These conditions obtain in many other places as well. The model for Jante was a town in Denmark. Jante, Sandemose emphasized, is everywhere. More than anything else, the description of the Norwegian mania for equality reminds me of life in a Mexican Indian village. Still, the Australians seem determined to take out a patent. The 'cutting down tall poppies' syndrome, they maintain, is a distinctive feature of the Australian national character. The Australians 'celebrate the losers,' and 'feel the urge to humiliate anyone making an outstanding, or even competent, performance'; they quite simply 'hate anyone distinguishing themselves.'
Monday, August 06, 2001
Monday: People! You are supposed to be over at the new site. I updated today. The pictures are there. The site-internal links will be working verysoonnow. True to our usual policy, no information will be lost in the changeover, not even these little notes, which I will preserve on a separate page.
. . . posted by Diana 8/6/2001 10:46:52 AM
Tuesday, July 31, 2001
Parents and anyone else wondering why they haven't heard from me: The administrators of my mail host decided last week to remove telnet access because of security risks. So I haven't been able to access mail since last Tuesday, when I attempted to send a two-line mail home from the slow terminals donated to the school by the Open Society Foundation aka George Soros.
. . . posted by Diana 7/31/2001 06:42:18 AM
Place holder for Serbia photos.
. . . posted by Diana 7/31/2001 06:30:07 AM
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
. . . posted by Diana 7/18/2001 07:08:40 AM
Tuesday, July 17, 2001
"Napoleon announced to his council that there was a spy among them and that he was going to hold his hand over the heart of each of them and say that the person he was touching was the spy and the guilty person would be unable to prevent his heart beating faster and Napoleon would recognize his enemy. The Chasid, because of his fine religious training, was able to control his heartbeat and so deceived the first lie-detector test ever invented." - Anne Roiphe (see Books).
. . . posted by Diana 7/17/2001 09:30:32 AM
Thursday, July 12, 2001
Now that's a drumset. Don't forget to go to his audio page and listen to "Maya." Via Forty-two.
. . . posted by Diana 7/12/2001 12:31:52 PM
Wednesday, July 11, 2001
Some journalers have moved on, and new journals are replacing them in the bookmarks. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
. . . posted by Diana 7/11/2001 06:15:35 AM
Sunday, July 08, 2001
"In 1911 Proust became a subscriber to Théâtrophone, a service that held a telephone receiver up at a concert, which allowed people to stay at home and hear live music on their receivers. Thanks to this novel system, Proust was able to listen to Wagner (on 20 February 1911, for instance, he heard Act III of Die Meistersinger) and to Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande (with Maggie Teyte as Mélisande)." New stuff in Books.
. . . posted by Diana 7/8/2001 09:10:19 AM
Thursday, July 05, 2001
My father: James has a big divorce case going on.
Me: I thought he was doing shipping law. I thought that's what his firm did.
My mother: There isn't enough shipping law left in Boston to keep anyone going. All the wharves have been turned into luxury hotels.
Me: So it's my brother the divorce lawyer. Ha.
My father: He prefers that we call it 'family law.'
. . . posted by Diana 7/5/2001 11:47:37 AM
Linguists' example sentences #1: Charles Fillmore, 1971
(5) The wolf didn't get a divorce.
(6) I accidentally broke your wolf.
. . . posted by Diana 7/5/2001 05:18:11 AM
Wednesday, July 04, 2001
Fourth of July place holder.
. . . posted by Diana 7/4/2001 11:51:43 AM
The latest models in the world of geometric origami, with a special movie (which does not move on my computer) of Jeannine Moseley's Pulsar. Via my father. Background in my origami story and here if all this is new to you. More models and pictures here. This is the only fold of Jeannine's that I still remember and do occasionally instead of playing trashcan basketball; there's one on my desk.
. . . posted by Diana 7/4/2001 11:39:18 AM
Tuesday, July 03, 2001
Tired of the usual smileys? Try these Japanese anime smileys. You might also want to read the previous post and the one before that. Via American Dialect List. And: I found this hilarious. The cats of my youth used to make similar faces, though I interpreted them as contempt ("silly primates!") more than anger. Via Slumberland.
. . . posted by Diana 7/3/2001 11:26:00 AM
Sunday, July 01, 2001
I got back two hours ago and things have changed. This is against the rules. Nothing is supposed to change while I am away. First, my supervisor has moved several huge bookcases full of his books and journals and papers out of our office and into his new one. This will disturb me for a few days, in the way that moving the food dish upsets a dog, but it is in the long term a wonderful change: S. and I have all this space now, and I can take my books and papers from home into the office, freeing me to move out of AKT into what I envision as a string of nice sublet apartments. Because once you get the books and papers out of there, I really don't have that much stuff, and I ought to be able to do that kind of thing.
. . . posted by Diana 7/1/2001 03:45:54 AM
Place holder for Denmark photos.
. . . posted by Diana 7/1/2001 03:45:37 AM
Wednesday, June 27, 2001
We have one terminal for 60 desperate people in the summer school dormitory so I've given up trying to get any access there; this is being written on a university Barbie Mac that lacks telnet. This enforced Internet diet (cf. recent Caterina entries) is probably a good thing since it leaves more time for pondering the big questions like To what extent does contemporary smart talk about "embodiment" work to confound contemporary smart talk that emphasizes the social positioning power of distinctive discourses? (actual workshop topic, first week).
. . . posted by Diana 6/27/2001 03:37:34 AM
Saturday, June 16, 2001
I can't believe I didn't know about Resource Shelf. Hours of fun, if you're not careful. The newspaper digitization project is particularly exciting, though there's nothing at the site yet. Now off to summer school in Denmark.
. . . posted by Diana 6/16/2001 06:25:24 AM
Friday, June 15, 2001
This week we had a guest lecture about Computer Mediated Communication, or in plain English, what we're doing right here. It never fails to amaze me how many "experts" on this subject manage to present the Internet as a relic from outer space, defining terms like modem and chat room and Eliza, presenting abbreviations like F2F as evidence of Internet-hipness, never stopping to think that perhaps the audience has a more sophisticated understanding than they do. I am also struck by their tendency to reproduce one another's data and (very cautious) ideas, as if collecting some fresh e-mails were a project requiring the resources of a trip to the Trobriand Islands, and coming up with insights into distributed environments were a gift given to one person per generation.
The culture I write about in my forthcoming book was already invented, and represented, mainly by its practitioners, long before I arrived in San Francisco. Not only are West Coast longshoremen, and particularly in San Francisco, a notoriously opinionated and self-conscious community, they have also constructed a fairly comprehensive, self-defined culture, which they have written about extensively. They have also photographed the culture and painted murals depicting it as well. The account contained in my forthcoming book is therefore not my exclusive invention or representation of longshore culture. Instead, it is often a dialogue between my understandings of longshore culture and the longshoremen's conceptions of it as they have 'invented' or constructed it. The dialogue, moreover, was sometimes explicit and self-conscious. For example, Herb Mills regularly read my field notes and commented on them ... I then recorded Mills's reactions to the field notes, as well as my responses to his comments, and included them in the analysis.
Now this is responsible social science, and I'm sure the longshoremen were able to recognize their community in the resulting book. Whereas I have yet to see any work on virtual communities that approaches the thickness of ethnography and depth of analysis in The Hacker's Dictionary and similar emic/intracommunity productions.
. . . posted by Diana 6/15/2001 07:14:25 AM
Everything is possible once the bus comes.
. . . posted by Diana 6/15/2001 03:12:28 AM
Thursday, June 14, 2001
If I had access to a scanner, I would scan my new residence permit, which I got from the police today. It takes an entire page in my passport, and next year I'll have to get a new passport because with six years' permits, a Romanian visa (also full page) and a hell of a lot of stamps, there's almost no room left, even with the extra pages inserted. The permit is printed on pink and blue currency paper seeded with various holograms, diffraction gratings, threads, watermarks, fluorescent and radioactive markings. It has a lion (symbol of Finland) and a bull with some stars around it (probably symbol of the EU). It is magnificent. I feel like I should get a medal to go with it.
. . . posted by Diana 6/14/2001 08:18:11 AM
Monday, June 11, 2001
Prol was left cold by Stockholm, and I think I share her feelings, although maybe not for all the same reasons. See, I grew up near Boston, which is permanently under construction. The Red Line Extension, the waterfront projects, the new South Station, the Big Dig. At all times, one or more quadrants of the city are hostage to the Perini Corporation's cranes and bulldozers. All for a better future.
Typical Boston streetscape
. . . posted by Diana 6/11/2001 02:49:10 AM
Saturday, June 09, 2001
I just finished a paper. Now I get to put away all the books and papers I used for it. This is a wonderful, transcendent moment, and it might actually result in a clean desk.
. . . posted by Diana 6/9/2001 07:18:59 AM
Friday, June 08, 2001
Finland Alumni, the foreign student organization that supplies me irregularly with friends, trips, and an outlet for suppressed executive tendencies, was founded in 1969 by the Ministry of Education in connection with its foreign scholarship program (later CIMO). The idea was that Alumni would organize excursions for current scholarship holders to the major sights of Finland (including in the first year Lapland, a mental hospital, and an Alko factory) and would circulate a magazine to keep them in touch with Finland after they returned to their home countries as "alumni" of the scholarship program.
. . . posted by Diana 6/8/2001 02:59:41 AM
Tuesday, June 05, 2001
With this photo, I became a Friend of Jezebel's Mirror, one of the last since it is soon going to be converted to The Mirror Project. I have also been a Friend of Meg's Shelves. If I were going to do my own parallel-photo experiment, it would be called Friends of the 55 Bus (number unfortunately not readable in the picture), in honor of my primary transportation for the last seven years, and that of foreign students living at Antti Korpin tie generally for the last thirty years. People would send in photos of other number 55 buses around the world, and then we could post all the photos and have a contest to guess which cities they were in. Perhaps we'll be able to do something like this if Finland Alumni ever gets its own domain.
. . . posted by Diana 6/5/2001 06:44:24 AM
Friday, June 01, 2001
Continuing the series of hints for conferences: Always go on the excursion. Even though you don't like tour buses, even though you really need the hour to yourself, even though your paper isn't finished, even though you have no interest in the local champagne cellars or cathedral or open-air museum of peasant life. Because the excursion is where people bond, and where the hierarchy breaks down as everybody regresses to age seven under the school field trip constraints. I finally became convinced of the value of the excursion during Ipra '00 when I ended up having coffee with the Nottingham discourse psychologists, whom I wouldn't have met otherwise, on a bus trip to Gödöllö, the palace that belonged to Princess Sissi of Austria-Hungary.
Me: We didn't really get a lot of answers, though. Like, where did she learn such fluent English? All she would say was that it was before she joined the order. And how did this place survive the Soviet period? And where does the money come from? There aren't that many Old Believers left. And why do they have chrismation right after baptism, instead of confirmation later on? And why do they pile up the wood like that?
Me: Yeah, but why? It must be a nuisance to get up on a ladder and unstack it again, and they've certainly got enough room on the land to pile it lower.
Professor #1: She's not living in the modern world.
Me: Au contraire, I thought that was a very modern answer. I expected her to say something like, "Because it recalls Christ's agony on Golgotha," but no, she replied in numbers: fifteen months, a thousand cubic feet of firewood, bigger is better. They do look like burial mounds, though.
Young Fulbrighter: They look like phallic symbols.
Professor #2: You should have said that to her: "Do you have an open mind? I'd like to suggest something..."
. . . posted by Diana 6/1/2001 12:49:57 PM
Thursday, May 31, 2001
As a foreshadowing of the next entry, have a look at these digitized and colorized photos from the last days of the Russian empire. The colorization comes as a shock; I think we all do believe, like Calvin's dad says, that "the world was in black and white back then." This one is like a montage of Andrew Wyeths. Via Forty-two.
. . . posted by Diana 5/31/2001 03:21:02 AM
Monday, May 28, 2001
The British election season has opened and Tim has declared that he wouldn't mind running at some future point, making him the second journaler after Rob (scroll down to "Book of Dork") to contemplate a career in politics. Really confessional online journalers are the ideal political candidates because they've already told so many of their secrets online that there isn't much scandal left to worry about.
. . . posted by Diana 5/28/2001 05:52:34 AM
Thursday, May 24, 2001
Holidays not blogged lately: Polish Constitution Day (May 3), Cinco de Mayo, Israeli Independence Day (May 14), Norwegian Constitution Day (May 17), Holy Thursday and Bermuda Day (today), Argentinian Revolution Day (May 25). Among others. On the other hand, Cahiers Intimes has been reanimated: April and May entries are up, and a photo for March. Happy Bermuda Day.
. . . posted by Diana 5/24/2001 11:32:38 AM
Wednesday, May 23, 2001
The excellent French police procedural drama La Crim' (voir aussi ici and here) is showing occasionally on TV5 now, and all I want to do is watch it. Like one of my least favorite movies, Dead Again, it keeps cutting away from the actors so that you're never quite sure what they look like and you have to keep watching in the hope of finding out.
. . . posted by Diana 5/23/2001 12:11:22 PM
Monday, May 21, 2001
Nicholson Baker is indeed a hero (see also NYRB and NYT versions) for trying to save bound volumes of newspapers, bound volumes should not have been destroyed in the process of microfilming them, and it is sad that there is nowhere that has "all the books," all the periodicals and all the ephemera. I wouldn't dispute that for a minute. However, on behalf of researchers everywhere, it's time somebody stood up for microfilm. The system never achieved what Vannevar Bush predicted for it, true. The business of threading the film through the spindles is sufficiently finicky that many people give up right there, and the films are sometimes out of focus, missing pages, and covered with sticky blobs of dust. But I couldn't do my PhD without microfilm, which gives me the ability to print out my own copies of pages from two centuries' worth of Euro-American newspapers, right here at the Helsinki University Library.
. . . posted by Diana 5/21/2001 10:10:30 AM
Saturday, May 19, 2001
James D. McCawley's Dates in the month of May that are of interest to linguists misses Bulgarian Alphabet Day, May 22, 865: Cyril and Methodius invent the backwards N, the backwards R, and the squashed-fly letters, and get them accepted as the national writing standard. More bad linguistics humor here. You can see that I'm trying to get in shape for the Egg school.
. . . posted by Diana 5/19/2001 07:32:52 AM
Thursday, May 17, 2001
"There are claims that the small cultures imagine, manufacture, then live in their own success abroad, whilst the rest of the world continues to ignore them. Are there no greater claims to an allowable lunacy and melancholy in the fringe? How could I misinterpret that? Could the melancholy beauty of Finland be so filmed as to forget cruelty, injustice, incest and darkness? Could the melancholy be filmed as dreamed? (Chekhov and Bergman?) Or did I dream all this in the Locomotion Bar? Finland as a culture, of course, has no privilege in angst, collective sickness, loneliness. Will we need to go on saying this?"
-- Roger Connah, "Filmed as Dreamed"
. . . posted by Diana 5/17/2001 07:38:20 AM
. . . posted by Diana 5/17/2001 04:05:57 AM
Tuesday, May 15, 2001
The last Tartu conference, two years ago, contained a paper on Dungeons & Dragons which I was of course avid to hear, having been one of the first wave of D&D players, even before Advanced D&D. Since it was scheduled opposite my talk (of course) I couldn't go, but the contents have now been published in the conference proceedings, Negotiating Spaces on the Common Ground: Selected Papers of the 3rd and 4th Tartu Conference on North-American Studies, eds. Krista Vogelberg and Raili Pöldsaar, and I exhort any Routledge scouts who may be reading to take a closer look at it; the authors are Berk Vaher, Mait Siigur, Jaak Tomberg, and Lemmit Toomet:
If an AD&D game is played as a ritual, several outside factors can be included in the process in order to create the gaming mood. At my game sessions, I have usually turned off the lights, lit candles, used a black velvet tablecloth and played the appropriate background music. The soundtrack has to fit into the background and not dominate over the words spoken. In my opinion, ambient (e.g., Aphex Twin) and quiet shoegaze (e.g., Slowdive) are best suited for such occasions. This alone can create the perfect mood for playing the world described above. The playing process can also be supported by a detailed acting out of other (non-playing, imaginary) characters of the narrative, and sound effects by voice minitations. The "ritual way" of playing AD&D greatly reduces the attention paid to words - the created background of the game supports the players' imagination so that words become just another component of the whole activity.
Portrait of Juri Lotman in one of the university lecture halls.
. . . posted by Diana 5/15/2001 09:26:52 AM
Wednesday, May 09, 2001
TARTU - I arrived at lunchtime on Monday and went into a pizza parlor that looked like the only place that could serve me in less than an hour. I pointed to the cheapest pizza. It was not called Margarita, but Dolce Vita or something. This should have tipped me off. I did not bother reading the list of ingredients, which I was sure would be tomato sauce and cheese. I was capable of reading the list of ingredients. My menu Estonian is perfectly adequate. I want to emphasize that.
Piibi-Kai and Liz at the reception.
. . . posted by Diana 5/9/2001 11:18:03 AM
Friday, May 04, 2001
What I've learned from proofreading a medical dissertation on arthritis:
Nicola: What I am trying to say is that this guy whose work I'm talking about is stupid.
Me: Ah.
Nicola: But not very stupid! Because, you see, he is on the board of the journal and he has a lot of influence in different ways. You know.
Me: Uh.
Nicola: But still he is stupid. And that's what I'm trying to say.
. . . posted by Diana 5/4/2001 11:31:19 AM
Monday, April 30, 2001
Today is Vappu, the First of May, or rather the eve on which the celebration starts. May Day celebrations in modern industrial countries are descended from a one-day strike in Chicago in 1886 (corrected, via GirlHacker). It will be interesting to see if the anti-global-capitalist protesters manage to revive the political content this year. Usually in Helsinki there's just a very, very small parade of Communists with red flags, scarcely noticed amid the central activity of - what else - drinking.
. . . posted by Diana 4/30/2001 05:53:09 AM
Today is also Queen's Day in the Netherlands; as in England, it is not the Queen's actual birthday, just a nice spring day to pretend it is. The British don't get their Queen's birthday off, but the Dutch do. See prol's descriptions for this year and last year (permalinks aren't working so scroll down to April 28). Her description of last year was actually what got me started weblogging in the first place; I wanted to link to it as my first entry, but by the time I figured out Blogger it felt too late. At that time her weblog color was orange too. Official site here, with programs for the entire country and news of the royal wedding also taking place. Which will not be in the Finnish news, since it will be eclipsed by the news of a famous jazz pianist's wedding.
. . . posted by Diana 4/30/2001 05:41:07 AM
Sunday, April 29, 2001
3.
we dress them up as fools in the
Nocturnal Theatre. And they rise in revolt!
We stand there like clowns ourselves!
Masked into dream they were even more
themselves. Tender-footed felines. Strong,
uncorrupted. They are going to deceive us.
That which we call time deceives us.
I myself for example am the sort of person
who continues to wander up and down
the short familiar stretch between high-rise blocks
with the too-difficult music in my bag and
an objective, growing despair at
being myself. At not being able to be someone
else. It is October with metallic
air, metallic sky and the banished
loved ones who walk with us in the smoke
of our breath. We look at them,
we must never lose them again.
trans. David McDuff
. . . posted by Diana 4/29/2001 05:52:51 AM
Thursday, April 26, 2001
This week's holiday is Administrative Professionals Day, formerly Secretaries' Day, as described by Dana. Although I no longer have to answer other people's phones, take other people's Fed Ex packages, send other people's faxes, do other people's photocopying, empty other people's wastebaskets, and so forth, I did do a fair amount of this in almost every job I had in the United States, and so I'm logging this in solidarity with my sisters and brothers still in the trenches. As Andrei Gorz said in Paths to Paradise: The Liberation From Work, for some people, the ability to order other people around is the major satisfaction of their job. (Actual quote coming when I find the book. It should be on the wall of every cubicle in the land.)
. . . posted by Diana 4/26/2001 05:33:51 AM
Wednesday, April 25, 2001
Only short takes today:
The Pasta Night guest tree.
. . . posted by Diana 4/25/2001 05:13:30 AM
Monday, April 23, 2001
Charles Fillmore, in "Ideal Readers and Real Readers," a study based on reading comprehension tests:
Oddly enough, in view of the time and expense that goes into the construction of reading test items, we are dealing in this research with seriously flawed texts, texts which frequently require of their readers an uncommon degree of tolerance and cooperation. The testing industry, we have come to realize, has created a new genre for English written language, a genre whose characteristics are determined by very unnatural requirements of lexical choice, grammatical structuring, and synonym alterations, these dictated, I presume, by the intention to test knowledge of particular vocabulary items, the need to produce something which fits accepted readability formulas, which avoids gender or ethnic stereotyping, and which satisfies copyright laws with respect to the percentage of material that needs to be modified in the case of passages taken from the trade literature.
That should be some comfort to people taking the LSATs, TOEFL, etc. (this line added to close ugly space)
. . . posted by Diana 4/23/2001 10:18:44 AM
Friday, April 20, 2001
At the last conference, I discussed Internet research with a virtual ethnographer. We talked about homepages, guestbooks, forums, journals ... and was I into chat rooms, he asked? No, I said, I'd never had a good experience with chat rooms. People seemed to lose all their brains when they got into that mode. Even people who were clearly intelligent in their other virtual activities seemed reduced to exchanging bad puns and bwahahaha!s.
[diana] Pagina, what would you write to correct this: "Suutarinen reminds that modern-day textbooks are magnificent in design, but the relation of learning and know-how can hardly be considered"?
I am thinking of making Pagina my teaching assistant.
. . . posted by Diana 4/20/2001 02:53:13 AM
Sunday, April 15, 2001
Tax day. Once again, I seem to owe no taxes. This depresses me. Someday I will make money in the United States again. Someday I will be rich enough to pay taxes to my government, instead of sending them a plaintive letter about how I already paid taxes on my grant and freelance income in Finland, and my investment managers seem to have managed to lose my taxable investments (which were minuscule to begin with, less than a month's rent in most cities) in the recent crash you may have heard about. Do not invest with friends, however charming, that's my new advice.
. . . posted by Diana 4/15/2001 11:02:05 AM
Monday, April 09, 2001
My annual spring productivity burst has started. Everybody watch out! Must get as much as possible done before the nights disappear.
Reading: Edward Said, Janet Malcolm, Margaret Drabble, other finds from England. Reviews on books page.
Watching: Jackie Brown: more fun with logistics from Quentin Tarantino. Taped West Wing and Sopranos episodes from last week. Some people on MightyBigTV just pointed out how euphemistic the language on West Wing is: "Toby heard there's a piece of paper." "I'd help you out but I've got, you know, a thing." "Tell Josh to pick a guy." This slang is ripe for co-option by civilian speakers.
Living: I was charmed to find that my new flatmate Kirsi, like the recently departed Helga, observes SecraTerri's Rule of Incredibly Groovy Living #45,292: For the first hour of the day ... the world is silent. Or the first twenty-four hours, even better.
Hair: Back to the Alice in Wonderland look from when I was 14. Let's talk about my productivity instead.
. . . posted by Diana 4/9/2001 11:23:25 AM
Friday, April 06, 2001
When I started writing on the Web, I swore to myself that I wouldn't write any entries with titles or opening lines like "So very tired" or "Still behind" (or the "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" sort of title, which annoys me for some reason) but the fact is that I am terribly behind on all communications, logging, etc. and likely to remain so for a few days. I did put up a Cahiers intimes entry about the Oxford trip, though. And there are still many pages of absurd sign language that might be added to it.
. . . posted by Diana 4/6/2001 07:16:22 AM
Thursday, April 05, 2001
Eminent Oxonian to Boomerish American: My dear, how clever of you to think of writing a book about the Internet! However did you come up with the idea?
. . . posted by Diana 4/5/2001 01:58:53 AM
Tuesday, March 27, 2001
Hints for conferences, part 1:
. . . posted by Diana 3/27/2001 08:11:11 AM
Monday, March 26, 2001
I'm always reluctant to quote books and journals here, because I feel as if I'm destroying them. Or at least degrading them from their respectably citable native format of library-enshrined dead trees to the dodgy status of "something I found on the Web." But there's so much good stuff in this one journal alone, I can't resist:
Norwegianness is often characterized as a preference for togetherness and equality. We behave timidly and unassumingly, as if mutually dependent on one single, tightly woven community, mobbing anyone attempting to stand forth. 'Thou shalt not believe that thou art any better than us,' 'thou shalt not believe that thou art something special' - these are the fundamentals of the 'Law of Jante,' formulated by the novelist Axel Sandemose, corresponding, according to the propaganda for wage inequalities, élite schools, and sharper elbows, to the very core of our backward and provincial mentality...
The article as a whole is about Norwegianness as a utilitarian quality, consisting of whatever the state can invoke to sell its product, in this case study the Lillehammer Winter Olympics, abroad.
--Anders Johansen, "Soul for Sale," in Routledge Cultural Studies
. . . posted by Diana 3/26/2001 05:49:42 AM
Friday, March 23, 2001
The family tree of Boston bands, from Helena. So if I've met Roger Miller, because we were two fifths of the pit orchestra for the HSSP production of The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd (my first and last involvement with musical comedy), am I one degree of separation from all these people? That would be Birdsongs of the Mesozoic and Mission of Burma Roger Miller, not King of the Road Roger Miller. And if I worked with two members of the Underachievers (formerly Kinetic Ritual) in my disastrous first job, can I use that to triangulate?
. . . posted by Diana 3/23/2001 01:30:57 AM
January 2001, February 2001, March 2001
December 2000, November 2000, October 2000
September 2000, August 2000, July 2000
June 2000, May 2000
prolific, vodb
daily doozer
dan bricklin
girlhacker
tehshik
ev
monstro
erica
caterina
sperare
mutability
leather egg
little yellow different
nine
squirrel bait
girlhero
dlevy
slumberland
ill-repute
swallowing tacks
mighty girl
helena kim
precocious
saturday night palsy
ultrahang
vues du ciel
suodatin
the null device
metafilter
blogger
Spies, forums, 3WA
Xeney, old forum
That other forum, new
Columbine, weblog
Shmuel, weblog
Rob, forum
Kymm, forum
Susan, old
Kismet
Dawn
JenWade
Jette
Miriam
Jessie
Steph
Shiitake
Astrogirl
Chinacat
Fedward
Koogle
Krapsnart
Blivet
Miguelito
Katfish
Mr. Bad Example
Cubicle Girl
Turtleguy
Badsnake
Bear
Terry
Jon-Jon
Matthew
Finland Alumni
PIC Project
