Transformers 2, or How to Piss Off Even Midnight Moviegoers

I don’t walk out on films as a matter of principle, but this film took awful to levels I’d never seen before.

Who I thought I was

This morning I dreamt I was going to a workshop about the use of technology in academic research. I was with people who reminded me of my colleagues and coworkers in the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia. A dozen of us, newly acquainted, tromped across a green while animatedly talking about our expectations for the workshop, what we would learn and who would be there.

I had a feeling the workshop would barely exercise the skills we already possessed. Walking into the room, we found the other group had already arrived, and I found myself keeping in check my judgements of them as being simple and inexperienced.

The long desks were arranged in rows. In the corner, two adjacent screens were mounted at right angles to each other. People seated on the long edges of the desks faced one screen, while people sitting at the ends of the long desks could face the other screen. The way in which people had already spread out, however, made it difficult to find space in the less-conventional/not-as-well-preferred end seats. I puzzled for some time about not being able to find a space at one of the ends.

The dream’s scene shifted to a darkened room with a single screen and folding chairs, with the already present workshoppers on the auditorium’s left. As I and my cohort sat down, I thought about the differences between our two groups, differences crystallized for me by the fact that my group had been more rigourously educated at elite institutions.

A woman found an open chair next to me and asked what the presenter meant by her last comment. I said “declension” to explain that the situation the speaker had described could be explained by the recent financial crisis and the resulting decline in personal and collective wealth. After considering for a second, she nodded understanding.

When I woke, I was immediately aware that my terse response was, on one level, nonsense, given that the preferred meaning of declension is the identification of the variations of nouns and adjectives in Latin according to case, number, and gender. My go-to dictionary tells me declension is poetic for a condition of decline or moral deterioration.

Later this morning, I realized that this dream reflects some of the anxieties I have after recently creating a Facebook account and receiving friend requests from people I haven’t spoken to in twenty-five years.

Before signing up, I emailed one old friend that I am too maladjusted to have a Facebook account, that I was too sensitive to negotiate the messy flux of relation and memory that Facebook presents, too much an introvert to have a healthy and uncomplicated response to our inescapable mortality. I said that I worried about hearing from people only to be disappointed in who they've become, who they never were, or who I wish I had been. Many an academic’s assessment of social phenomena is conditioned by just such reflexive beanplating.

When I received my first friend requests, I was stunned by how much some of my childhood friends and acquaintances had changed. Oppositely, I was also shocked by how little one friend’s appearance had changed. I browsed through that friend’s photos, coming across a portrait of her and her husband. Her face seemed unchanged, and looking at the closeup of the two of them was like looking into the past, like coming across a portal to a sensibility that was alien, intriguing, and unattainable, illusory. I wonder if some people have a similar reaction when they see my picture.

There are so many things I want to say about my recent foray into Facebook. While I still feel that it’s a walled garden and I am reluctant to contribute photos, video, and text to the site because it is a for-profit concern that gives me little real control over the disposition of those assets I place on its servers, I also see how powerful a social tool it is because it enables the inexperienced to communicate with each other easily and frequently. I also want to use the word “promiscuously,” as in a network device that operates in promiscuous mode. On Facebook, one can see messages directed at friends even if one is not directly connected to the messager. Facebook encourages people to connect to each other by promiscuously communicating information to recipients not specified by the sender. I don’t have anything concrete to say about seduction on social networking sites like Facebook except to say that the communication I’ve so far seen is friendly and good-natured as opposed to aggressive and predatory.

I told Pam that in the last four days I’ve spent on Facebook, I’ve seen more pictures of Latino/Latina, Asian, and black people to whom I’m connected (at one or two removes) than I have in that last sixteen years since leaving California. Connecting to people who I knew in Monterey, CA, even though now they are scattered across the nation, puts me back in the fold of rich racial and cultural diversity. Not just black people and white people, but lots of all kinds of people.

My reaction while browsing the profiles of long lost friends has surprised me. I’m deeply awed by the families my childhood friends have started and grown. One of my childhood crushes handles firearms; one friend has worked for a non-profit for abused children; another has a spouse who is in Iraq; some of my friends have lost siblings. I look at their faces and the faces of their families and I’m amazed and excited. I find part of myself naively lapsing into a belief that things aren’t so bad, that there is good in the world, that people have integrity and often act selflessly.

But this reveals so much about me and my own general assumptions. I realize I’m not exactly who I think I am. Connecting with people I knew long ago, even in this on some levels superficial way, is so far a positive experience. Remembering and reigniting my love for them brings me back something I’d somehow lost in myself.

Friction and Its Discontents

Those of you who know me in real life probably aren’t surprised by my blogging hiatus. Those of you who know probaby aren’t either. I suppose I’m the only one whose surprised.

In the last year (has it been that long?), I made some important decisions about the path of my academic career and that decision—not to pursue tenure at my current instutition—continues to ramify effects in my life. My personal life has also changed, a change which is the one thing I can without question say is for the better. There have been so many changes, so much change in everything.

As an introvert, my main strategy for dealing with trauma and change is to get by myself pronto. So, yeah, no blogging. I do keep a journal and the quality of my journal writing for the last sixth months has been really low. For example, four days ago I began I’m feeling almost next to useless. A few weeks before that I ended an entry thusly:

You get the picture.

In addition to the changes in my emotional and professional life, there’s also been change in the tools I use to do my research and my writing. In December I undertook an enormous project both as a proof of concept and as a means of development. At present, there isn’t a lot of content in my undead repository. The work of that repository exists in the underlying structure and tools used to construct it. The Tinderbox document which generates that page is relatively large (5.5 MB), and the 34 external templates which control its output total 9,500 lines of code (a meagre 464 KB!). There are also thirteen internal templates contributing another 100 lines or so of code. I spent many days in the main branch of the SFPL at 100 Larkin Street working on the document and the repository, and I cannot wait to get back.

After Pam and I returned from California, the winter quarter blew. Me. Away.

In early March, Eastgate Systems began making substantial changes to Tinderbox’s parsing systems. The conversion of my existing Tinderbox documents and the PERL program (tbx) I use to generate new Tinderbox documents required significant rewriting. I also continued refining my digital workflow, venturing into AppleScript Studio and writing a program, Finder Files to Tinderbox, that generates a Tinderbox document whose notes link to user-specified Finder items.

But I wasn’t updating any of my websites.

As I’ve mentioned, much of my digital silence was due to my introvert’s reaction to change and uncertainty. And though I wasn’t adding new content to my websites, the work I was doing on the tools in my digital workflow (the Tinderbox documents, the PERL scripts, unfamiliar software) was in fact preparation for the projects I’ve started and new foundation for projects I’ve been considering.

In particular, I am incredibly excited to begin my series of screencasts detailing my digital workflow (it's coming, I promise). One of the problems with updating this website is that I use Tinderbox to compose the entries and then publish to the MovableType backend from inside Tinderbox. The problem part is that Tinderbox's communication with MovableType is just this side of broken. (Tinderbox is incredibly versatile, but it has many shortcomings. I live with these shortcomings because I cannot do my work without it.)

This means, for example, that if I want to include a video I 1) compose the entry in Tinderbox, 2) post the entry to MovableType, and 3) use BBEdit to add the HTML code (which Tinderbox munges): a multiple-step multiple-application process that requires debugging and much file-wrangling.

In short, there was a lot of friction in my blogging process and the reason I use and make the tools I do is to reduce such friction. Here’s where all that behind-the-scenes work comes in.

Over the past two years, I’ve abstracted the process by which I generate HTML files so that I can use Tinderbox to generate them. My undead repository is one example of the power of this approach. I also use Tinderbox to generate my course web pages: this spring term an African-American Literature course and Principles of Textual Analysis course.

In the last two weeks I decided to shift development away from MovableType to Tinderbox and today I completed that process. I considered that this new site would not be able to host comments and so decided I would replicate or excerpt posts from the new site here in order to use MovableType as a commenting platform. The proper solution came when I realized I should shoehorn the new material here and use the new site as a scratch pad.

This is the first post using this new system.

I open my new Tinderbox document. I export its files to my machine and then copy and paste the HTML from there to here. Yes, my machine is ugly. I’m not sure if it will stay so, but I’m pretty sure this is the way forward.