Twitter profile for Jorn Barger/ Robot Wisdom

since i've got 3 twitter accounts going
and none allows a real profile
i'll post a combined profile here

http://twitter.com/robotwisdom
is personal/miscellaneous

bkgd image: my 1st pc [pic source]

http://twitter.com/robotwisdom/favourites
are all faves, mostly humorous

http://twitter.com/rwaux
is a mirror of my linkblog

rwaux icon source [flickr]

http://twitter.com/rwaux/favourites
is the serious tweets from my favorites
artistic or useful or deep

http://twitter.com/jornbarger
was a special purpose experiment

http://twitter.com/jornbarger/favourites
is still unused

My version of the ideal Wikipedia bio [RWx]

Highlights of RWx

Hipster Theory 2.0

"No one goes there any more, it's too crowded." --Yogi Berra

i want to explore
the concepts of 'hipster' and 'hip'
especially as they relate to web 2.0

silence-mystery-charisma

the road less travelled

drugs-illegal-secrecy

taboos-occult-illuminati

smart-difficult

nonconformist-courage-originality

obscure-research-luck

vs: popular/easy/safe/accessible

Village Voice

Whole Earth Catalog: access to hipness

hippies vs hipsters

UK music scene hipper than US

local US music scenes (Seattle, Atlanta)

Usenet: alt.folklore.urban, alt.religion.kibology, alt.fan.warlord

fearless exploration

mastering exclusivist (Net) technologies

Factsheet Five, BoingBoing, ReSearch

linkblogging

open communities

1948: Anatole Broyard "A Portrait of the Hipster" [GgBks]

1957: Norman Mailer "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster"

To the editors of the NYRB

Grammar, logic, compassion and research skills fail Sarah Boxer simultaneously when she writes that my website is "full of writings about James Joyce, artificial intelligence, and Judaism as racism [...]".

Wouldn't you guys rather be heroes than villains?

Jorn Barger
Robot Wisdom auxiliary
robotwisdom2.blogspot.com

Wikilink biography

[i think hresume would work better with links to wikipedia articles on the schools and businesses, where available. this is a design experiment to see how much biographical content can be boiled down to annotations on wikipedia links.]

the format is: [link] [relationship] [dates] [keywords]

1953 birthyear

Springfield, Ohio birthplace 1953 mercyhospital

Yellow Springs, Ohio hometown 1953-1966

[Vernay Laboratories] job 1958?-1966 father

Antioch College job 1955?-1964? mother

Antioch College school 1958?-1962 labschool

folk dancing activity 1959?-1970? family

Cincinnati Reds fan 1960?-1965

Frank Robinson fan 1960?-present

Ken (Barbie) 1961 toy

Fred Gwynne creditedwith 1962? play

Midsummer Night's Dream 1962? actor

[Mills Lawn Elementary School] school 1962-1964?

Swingle Singers concert 1963?

ice skating sport 1963-1966

Malvina Reynolds met 1964?

[John Bryan Junior High] school 1964?-1966

Heathkits hobby 1964?-1968?

Minivac 601 computer 1964?

Person: Jorn Barger

[del.icio.us home] [html]

[about]


[Wikipedia biography] [own template] [more]

education:
elementary
highschool
early reading
college1
college2
college3
college4
later reading

occupations:
The Farm
AI programmer


works:
neologisms
AntiMath
Solace: a textbook of romantic psychology

internet autobiography

website1 [sitemap1]

blog1 [blogmap1]

linkblog1
linkblog2

faves:
books [more]
music [more]
movies
videos

Popular artists I can't abide

Renoir
Cezanne
Seurat
Rolling Stones
Johnny Cash

The best of RobotWisdom WebLog

[links updated]

Dec 1997

17Dec

first post:

A thread about gangs on chi.general led me to this reference source on Chicago gangs: [Wayback] which offers a ton of details-- names, symbols, alliances-- you never see anywhere else. In the newsgroup discussion [new url], "Tommy the Terrorist" wisely suggests that if gangs have corrupt cops watching out for them, then their territorial boundaries ought to match those cops' precincts' boundaries as well.

18Dec

I enjoy "Dilbert" (http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/) as much as the next nrrd, but FAIR's Norman Solomon is arguing that it's sneaky capitalist propaganda. See his regular column in the Portland Alliance for May 1997: [new url]. (Many of Solomon's other commentaries are archived [new url] at DejaNews [GoogleGroups].)

23Dec

The next time you're headed for the library, spend a half-hour with Danny Yee's book reviews first: [new url] He has excellent taste...

Sam Smith... offers a nice fantasy of what a real newspaper should be, USA Tomorrow at: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/usat.htm.

Salon.com... offers a cute new (though obvious) gif

25Dec

YAY! One of my favorite culture critics-- Candi Strecker-- has found a niche on the Web, at Tripod. [Wayback]

One of my very favorite singers, Mary Coughlan, a smoky Irish blues singer, formerly very obscure, now has a harrowing biographical sketch online at [Wayback] . "...during one point in her set Mary kept the audience transfixed as she sang 'Strange Fruit' without musical accompaniment, If you were to drop a pin you would have been beaten up for it... The greatest, sexiest redhead since Rita Hayworth" -The Times

JM Graetz was present at the creation of the first videogame, Spacewar, and tells it like it was: [new url]

At least someone is trying to keep an eye on netnews society: [new url]

27Dec

Michael Parenti is a GREAT political speaker who's put out a lot of tapes (on the net in RealAudio format, if you can handle that). His newest book, "Blackshirts and Reds", is an attempt to rehabilitate communism. From the preface at [new url]: "U.S. leaders have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private profit system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism." ...the book's first chapter document[s] the forgotten story of how Mussolini and Hitler were funded by rich capitalists, to crush the labor movement. And there's a horrendous compilation of the statistics of American misery ("37,000,000 regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs"): [new url] And a nice dismantling of the myth of free speech in the USA: [new url] The three [one] online chapters of his "Against Empire" give[s] a taut portrait of recent US imperialism, [new url]: "In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals and other natural resources. That is why the Europeans went through all the trouble to steal and plunder them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor--and it is because of the pillage they have endured."

Among many outstanding essays on another site: [new urls]

Parenti spells out explicitly his prescription for healing the USA, and debunks terrorism hype especially against Libya.

28Dec

[pending]

29Dec

[pending]

Gorillas make gorgeous representational art! [new url]

Toward a unified model of information

[thoughtmesh edition w/extra links]

my whole life since
maybe 1969
i've been struggling to write
a single book

with an evershifting shape but always
a psychology text
that at least sketches an outline
of human motivation
viewed thru a literary lens

like 'the sims XVI'
in textbook form

like solace perhaps
a composition of extracts
of nuances

like brainfeathers or finnegans wake
everyman's everyhistory

like laws of form or antimath
built up elegantly
from a single bit

like a pattern language for literary patterns

like polti or roget
a classification of plots
of story skeletons

like knuth a catalog
of data structures and algorithms

like cyc
a knowledgebase of common sense

like adler's syntopicon
an inventory of philosophies
wisdom marked up for robots
like the semantic web

a hierarchy of metadata
most urgent first

a constitution
for some possible utopia

and now centered on
colored lines in spacetime

x normally longitude-space
y simply ordinary time

with one line per
true human lifestory

and now with a suggested
simple first coloring

white for happy familymembers
all alike

blue for sad
red for bad

yellow for sickly
or better
for enslaved?

 
 
 
 
 
 
.

My favorite videos

Carpark North:
[backgrounder-Flash]

Elis Regina:


Sia:


Daft Punk:



Spike Jonze:


2005 hurricanes:


Sigur Ros:


Tilda Swinton x3:


Kate Bush:









Outkast: [no embed]

Jorn Barger (Wikipedia template)

born 1953 springfield ohio

1953-1966 yellow springs ohio
island of avant-garde culture in sea of cornfields

50s hipster household: butterfly chairs
jazz LPs, folk crafts
wheat chex, local art

nyc magazine and newspaper subscriptions:
new yorker, sunday times book review and arts section
later: village voice, new york magazine
also: the reporter, saturday review
esquire, ramparts
i.f. stone's weekly, science newsletter
krokodil (russian language humor magazine)

saw jfk during 1960 campaign stop in dayton

arguable bacon number of 3
having played a squirrel elf
to fred gwynne's 'bottom'
in 1961 midsummer night's dream

stanford-binet iq in 1962 was 185
hypersensitive androgynous quiet
compulsive reader lazy eye
annual unrequited crushes

literally unable to express anger
before age 20

4th grade teacher complained
'no pride in good work'

1st computer was minivac 601
c1964

baseball fan (reds, frank robinson)
beatles fan (john)
heathkit hobbyist, av club
fastest iceskater in class

moved to bemus point ny 1966-1970
anti-vietnam
accelerated math/science
graduated valedictorian a year early

considered physical sciences unchallenging
targeted psychology instead

jamestown (ny) community college
antioch college
new college (sarasota fl)
university of buffalo
read the texts and skipped the tests

rejected experimental paradigm
instead fusing computer simulation
with literary standards of description

real progress hinging
on spiritual self-knowledge
via krishnamurti especially

esquire magazine in 1972:
"a righteous interpreter of our times"

1974 a turningpoint [more]
pynchon nabokov
robert stone
walker percy
g spencer brown

compiling a database on index cards
of 'literary indications'
brief insightful literary descriptions
of human behavior

database gradually took cyclic shape
heaven-fall-hell-
rise-by-conformity
rise-by-experiment

morphing into
an ungainly poem called 'brainfeathers'
that turned out to closely parallel
finnegans wake

food co-op coordinator, tofu maker
six months on the tennessee farm [more]


View Larger Map

1978 was another turningpoint
cybernetic psychology = robot wisdom
scientific theories of snowflake formation
atp mechanics
and atmospheric physics [more]

omni magazine's 'world hardest iq test'
qualifying for the four-sigma society
and attending their convention in san francisco

anti-math story-notation language [more]
and epiphany of 'missile command' arcade game
as programmable platform for anti-math

self-taught apple2 machine language
worked on arcade conversions for apple, c64 and atari
(now in chicago area)

burned out as coder
did telephone sales and customer service
at pc network and elek-tek

relished the chicago dance/theater scene
performing member of excite dance collective
nonperforming member of jellyeye drum theatre

unrequited romance inspired 'solace' [more]
cybernetic/analytic anthology of quotes
about romantic love
(also some original jazz songs
and settings of poems by Stevens, Graves, and Cavafy)

hired as research programmer [more]
at roger schank's ai lab at northwestern university
scored 780 math 790 verbal 800 analytic on GREs
phd program dangled as carrot
(prof birnbaum: "you're unique
in having worked out which
are the important issues of a.i.
on your own")

fractal-thicket indexing discovered and suppressed
(birnbaum: "the problem is
that none of us
are smart enough
to apply it")

(arguable erdos number of 7
for tech report co-authored with schank: cite)

fwake-l mailing list about finnegans wake
led to deep research into joyce manuscripts

publications:
journal of computer game design [etext]
interactive entertainment design [etext]
european joyce studies [etext]
james joyce quarterly [bookreview not online]

usenet enthusiast 1990-2003
(google groups shows 9430 posts
all thoughtful)
lightningrod for a-holes

quoted in Time 1994 [etext]
arguing the Net is
good for prose style

consulted for chris crawford 1997
on erasmatron story-engine [more]
requiring macintosh upgrade
leading to belated discovery of www
and 17 december 1997 coinage of word 'weblog'
(a smallish one
among hundreds of ongoing neologisms: more)

online profile by julian dibbell
twisted facts and quotes
to fit a lazy thesis

gigantic brouhaha about criticising israel in 2000
(incl a contemptible campaign
of intimidation and character assassination
that continues to this day)
led to shift from mostly-blogging to mostly-joyce-studies
rethinking ulysses and the ellmann biography [more]

later mostly-richly-linked-timelines-experiments

covered 'codecon 2005' for the register 1 2

wired magazine published a libelous fiction
by paul boutin

mostly abandoned
punctuation and capitalisation [more]
in late 2005

currently extending graph theory
to accommodate human psychological complexity
via 'worldtree' graphs [more]

and exploring 'discourse patterns' [egs]

 
 
 
 
 
 
.

The Barger Canon

i distrust all best-books lists
because it's impossible to be completely honest
under the pressure of peers' sneers
in rejecting consensus classics
and admitting guilty pleasures

but i invented a countertechnique
for sorting favorites
where you imagine that any pair of authors
have each released a new work
touted as comparable to your favorite
among their earlier works

which would you try first?

by this test
escapist pleasures bubble up
while remorse-lit plummets

but i wouldn't call this a canon
just a reading list

for a ranked canon
you need to believe your omissions are justified

and you need to ask which of the two
candidate authors
you'd recommend others read first
assuming they're eager to
know
confront
have their eyelids pried open

weighing payoff vs effort

(the remarkable range of overlaps with bloom
are marked "(bloom)"
while effective escapism
ie payoff much greater than effort
is graded "(escape+++)"

the year i discovered each work
is also now noted "(2006)"

and known etexts are linked)

1. israel shahak (1999) [fan]
   
   "jewish history, jewish religion" [etext]
   and "jewish fundamentalism in israel" [etext]
   
   if these accurately reflect the hebrew press
   the gentile world is
   perishing of gullibility
   
   
2. william blake (bloom, 1974)
   
   start here
   [full etext]
   
   
3. wallace stevens (bloom, 1970)
   
   just 23 short poems [links]
   
   
4. "zen flesh, zen bones" (1970)
   
   
5. barbara o'brien's "operators & things" (escape, 1981)
   
   
6. pynchon's "crying of lot 49" (bloom, escape, 1974) [etext]
   
   
7. robert stone's "dog soldiers" (bloom, escape+, 1974) [fan]
   
   
8. krishnamurti (1972) [fan]
   
   the "commentaries on living" especially
   
   
9. "laws of form" by g. spencer brown (1974) [fan]
   
   
10. ulysses, finnegans wake, ellmann, annotations (bloom, 1968)
    
    browse first, then lean on my pages
    
    
11. roget's thesaurus (1965)
    
    
12. gravity's rainbow (bloom, 1974)
    
    
13. iris murdoch "a word child" (escape+, 1977) [fan]
    
    
14. nabokov's "strong opinions" (1974) [fan] [etexts]
    
    
15. robert stone's "a flag for sunrise" (bloom, escape, 1993) [fan]
    
    
16. nabokov's "lolita" (bloom, 1974) [etext]
    
    
17. iris murdoch "the black prince" (escape+, 1977) [fan]
    
    
18. early 'peanuts' by charles schulz (escape++, 1959)
    
    
19. walker percy's "love in the ruins" (escape, 1974)
    
    
20. mortimer adler's syntopicon (1986)
    
    
21. mcelroy's "ancient history" (1976) [fan]
    
    
22. le carre's karla trilogy (escape++, 1979) [fan]
    
    
23. ralph pape "say goodnight, gracie" (play) (1982)
    
    
24. renata adler 'speedboat' (1976)
    
    
25. nabokov's "pale fire" (bloom, 1974)
    
    
26. dawkins' "selfish gene" (1976)
    
    
27. polti's "36 dramatic situations" (1986) [outline]
    
    
28. harold brodkey's "stories in an almost classical mode" (bloom, 1988) [fan]
    
    
29. blanche mccrary boyd's collected fiction (escape, 1977) [fan]
    
    
30. patrick o'brian's aubrey-maturin series (escape++, 2000)
    
    
31. kingsley amis "lucky jim" (escape+, 1977)
    
    
32. christopher cerf's "world's largest cheese" (1969)
    
    
33. feynman's QED (1985)
    
    
34. le carre's "looking glass war" (escape, 1976)
    
    
35. pynchon's "against the day" (2006)
    
    
36. graham greene's "the comedians" (escape, 2005)
    
    
37. joseph heller "catch-22" (escape++, 1967) [page images]
    
    
38. bill james's harpur and iles series (escape+, 2004)
    
    
39. cf hockett "man's place in nature" (1976)
    
    
40. gribbin's "schrodinger's kittens" (2004)
    
    
41. jl austin (1975)
    
    
42. robert anton wilson's historical illuminatus trilogy (escape+, 1991)
    
    
43. pirsig's "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" (1975)
    
    
44. jim harrison's "sundog" (escape+, 2004)
    
    
45. lynda j barry's comics (1983) [recent]
    
    
46. "the ape within us" by frans de waal (2007)
    
    
47. joyce's "stephen hero" (2001) [annotated etext]
    
    
48. peter bowen's gabriel du pre series (2004)
    
    
49. dickey's "deliverance" (escape+, 1971)
    
    
50. stone's "children of light" (1986)
    
    
51. martin amis "other people" (1990)
    
    
52. murdoch's "the sea, the sea" (escape+, 1978)
    
    
53. tom wolfe's "bonfire of the vanities" and "a man in full" (escape+, 1987/1998) [fan]
    
    
54. castaneda's "teachings of don juan" and "separate reality" (1971)
    
    
55. robertson davies's "deptford trilogy" (bloom, escape+, 1977)
    
    
56. jeff dorchen "ugly's first world" (play) (1991)
    
    
57. peter dickinson "tulku" (&ccccc) (escape++, 1979) [fan]
    
    
58. stone's "outerbridge reach" (escape, 1992)
    
    
59. melville's "moby dick" (bloom, 1982) [etexts]
    
    
60. tolstoy's "anna karenin" (bloom, 1975) [etexts]
    
    
61. colin wilson's early fiction (escape+, 1988)
    
    
62. william wharton "dad" (&c) (escape, 1982) [fan]
    
    
63. philip pullman's "his dark materials" trilogy (escape+, 2002) [fan]
    
    
64. tolstoy's war and peace (bloom, 1975)
    
    
65. robert bly "little book of the human shadow" (1990)
    
    
66. finkelstein's "bible unearthed" (2001)
    
    
67. doctorow's "ragtime" (escape++, 1975)
    
    
68. graham greene "a burnt-out case" (1985)
    
    
69. martin amis "london fields" (&c) (escape, 1989)
    
    
70. jd salinger's works (bloom, 1968) [etexts]
    
    
71. walker percy "the moviegoer" (bloom, escape+, 1974)
    
    
72. kingsley amis "stanley and the women" (escape, 2007)
    
    
73. "the 100th boyfriend" by daly and skeels [Az] (1992)
    
    
74. peter redgrove's "black goddess and the unseen real" (1989)
    
    
75. fink "social philosophy" (2006)
    
    
76. gospel of thomas (2001) [etexts]
    
    
77. le carre "a perfect spy" (&c) (escape+, 1999)
    
    
78. grass's "tin drum" (bloom, escape, 1967)
    
    
79. michael gruber/ robert k tanenbaum's karp-ciampi series (&c) (escape++, 2004) [fan]
    
    
80. thomas harris "red dragon" (escape++, 2007)
    
    
81. colin harrison "afterburn" (escape+, 2007)
    
    
82. carl hiaasen's "stormy weather" (escape+++, 2006)
    
    
83. ruth rendell's "a judgment in stone" (&c) (escape+, 2007)
    
    
84. murdoch's "nuns and soldiers" (&ccc) (escape, 1980)
    
    
85. flaubert's mrs bovary (bloom, 1988)
    
    
86. grif stockley's fiction (escape, 2006)
    
    
87. jeffery deaver's fiction (escape+++, 1998)
    
    
88. stone's "damascus gate" (1998)
    
    
89. mcelroy's "lookout cartridge" (1975)
    
    
90. ward just's fiction [fan]
    
    
91. pinter's "homecoming" (bloom, 1973)
    
    
92. conrad's "nostromo" (bloom, 2004) [etext]
    
    
93. gibson's "pattern recognition" (escape+, 2003)
    
    
94. thomas mcguane's fiction (escape+)
    
    
95. graves' "white goddess" (1981)
    
    
96. minette walters' "acid row" (escape+, 2004)
    
    
97. joseph wambaugh "golden orange" and "black marble" (escape, 2007)
    
    
98. michael connelly "the closers" (&ccc) (escape++, 2006)
    
    
99. scott turow's fiction (escape)
    
    
100. julian jaynes "origin of consciousness" (1977)
     
     
101. nicholson baker "the mezzanine" (escape, 2004)
     
     
102. dan brown "da vinci code", "angels and demons" (escape+++, 2004)
     
     
103. elmore leonard "stick" (&ccc) (escape+++)
     
     
104. thomas perry's jane whitehead series (escape++)
     
     
105. george v higgins's fiction
     
     
106. vance bourjaily's "now playing at canterbury" (&c) (1977)
     
     
107. patricia highsmith's "a suspension of mercy" (&c) (2006)
     
     
108. brodkey "first love and other stories" (1988)
     
     
109. greg iles's fiction (escape+, 2007)
     
     
110. berger's "little big man" (&c) (escape+)
     
     
111. franzen's "the corrections" (2002)
     
     
112. eric ambler's "the levanter" (&c) (escape+, 2006)
     
     
113. james purdy's fiction
     
     
114. maupin's "tales of the city" series (escape+, 1994)
     
     
115. joyce maynard's fiction (escape+)
     
     
116. mary mccarthy's fiction
     
     
117. madison smartt bell's fiction
     
     
118. wright morris's fiction (bloom)
     
     
119. barbara pym's fiction
     
     
120. graves "i, claudius"
     
     
121. vonnegut (bloom, escape+, 1968)
     

• Skinner's "Walden Two"
  
• Tufte's "Envisioning Information"
  
• Alexander's "A Pattern Language"
  
• EO Wilson's "Sociobiology"
  
• Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science"
  
• Stephen Gaskin's talks and sermons
  
• Joni Mitchell's lyrics
  
• Wade's "Before the Dawn"
  
• Dawkins' "Ancestors' Tale"
  
• Penrose's "Emperor's New Mind"
  
• Sinuhe
  
• Amarna letters
  
• Kleist essay
  
• lynn kostoff "a choice of nightmares"
  
  

Autobiographical calendar of reading (part two)

[part one]


later 1980s

Kate Bush

Wenders' "Wings of Desire"

Tufte's "Envisioning Information"

Lynda J Barry (comix)

modest successor to Peanuts

Harold Brodkey

awesome prose

Moby Dick

Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal

bonobos bonobos bonobos

Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations

via Joyce, or a.i.?

Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon

[fan]

WordPerfect 4.0

billgates is satan

love poems

[fan]

especially graves, millay, teasdale

Peter Redgrove

The Black Goddess and the Unseen Real [Az]

Mary Daly's Wickedary

[Az]

Blue Velvet (film), Twin Peaks (tv)

canonical

Spy magazine

Inside Macintosh docs

Penrose's "Emperor's New Mind"

for the physics and math, not the AI

MoMing (dance venue)

Alexander's "Pattern Language"

Ward Just

[fan]

George V Higgins

John Carpenter's "They Live"

LISP

early 1990s

Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky film)


Reservoir Dogs


Jacques Rivette (films)

[fan]

also Peter Greenaway

Jellyeye/Bryn Magnus/Shu Shubat (theater)


Oobleck/Jeff Dorchen (theater)


Curious/Jenny Magnus (theater/music/performance)

Mary Zimmerman (theater)

Cyc (ai)

[fan]

WZRD's latenight freeform, Suspended in Gaffa (music shows)

introduced me to several of my favorite female voices
Stewart/Gaskin, Marta Sebestyen [fan], Mary Coughlan [fan]


Robert Bly

Iron John and especially 'the little book of the human shadow' (jungian psych) [Az]

netnews, alt.religion.kibology

smart, fast, hip, funny
especially Lisa Pea (Elizabeth Higgins)
James 'Kibo' Parry
David Pacheco
Joseph Michael Bay

Michael Parenti

discovered via Pacifica radio show on WZRD

later 1990s

Herring's editions of Joyce's Ulysses notebooks

Martin Amis

a trouble child

Scott Turow

"The 100th Boyfriend"

Altavista

[fan]

Ana Voog

web exhibitionist

Armistead Maupin

via the pbs miniseries

Israel Shahak

worldtransforming (gulp!) [fan]


Jeffery Deaver


Thomas Perry



early 2000s


The Bible Unearthed

intro to the new biblical minimalism [Az]

Patrick O'Brian


Philip Pullman

[fan]


Google

i wear their cap

Jesus Seminar, Crossan, Ehrman

[fan]

Get Your War On

Dan Brown

Dominick Dunne

Bill James, Peter Bowen, Lynn Kostoff

obscure literary crime

Dean Baker, Sam Smith

political/economic sanity on the Web

Michael Connelly

Wolfram's "New Kind of Science"

Jim Harrison's "Sundog"

[Az]

The Sims (a.i.)

Schrodinger's Kittens

quantum weirdness resolved! [Az]

Flaubert

[fan]

Malcolm Brown on Irish history

a must-read for joyceans [fan] [Az]

Never at Rest

fine bio of Newton [Az]

Conrad's Nostromo

some little paperback on graph theory

[Az?]

Carl Hiaasen

Minette Walters

later 2000s

Franzen's Corrections

Ning.com

Gruber/Tanenbaum

[fan]


Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith

[Rendell fan]

[Highsmith review]

Colin Harrison

[review]

Against the Day

[comment]

Joseph Wambaugh

Thomas Harris

Wade's "Before the Dawn"

human origins [review]

Greg Iles, Grif Stockley, Stephen White

school of Turow, mostly


Kinneavy's Theory of Discourse

[comment]

Overheard in X

the pulse of contemporary speech

Double Tongued Word Wrester

the pulse of neologising

Social Philosophy by Fink

the socioeconomic context of ethical theories [Az]

Ayn Rand's Fountainhead

sillily romantic
but accurate about persecuted idealists, imho

Ernst Mayr "The Growth of Biological Thought"

best-yet inquiry into realworld scientific method

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.

Autobiographical calendar of reading

[i did one of these for joyce]

if i compiled a personal 'canon'
the primary criterion would be
how often, day to day
i'm reminded of an artist's work

(so i'm including
influential performers
along with authors)

pre-1960

Peanuts

by my 'canon' standard (above)
Schulz is certainly in the top 20
for his portrait of childhood in the early strips
is surely unequalled

(pogo left little impact)

New Yorker cartoons

Chas Addams and Saul Steinberg especially

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans

early 1960s

Walter R. Brooks' Freddy the Pig-Detective

i read all these
and tried to write my first fan letter in verse:
i like freddy/ i think he's steady
i like jinx/ i think he... stinks?

Phantom Tollbooth

Andy Griffith

stamp collecting

Beatles/ Richard Lester/ John Lennon

In His Own Write, Help, and Hard Day's Night especially [Lester fan]

Hardy Boys

Heathkit

their manuals and catalogs
along with Edmund Scientific
were an enduring influence

world almanacs

devoured them

coin collecting

Martin Gardner's mathematical recreations

a very positive influence
monthly in Scientific American
and collected in books

James Bond

Ian Fleming's sexual kinks
in smuggled paperbacks

baseball stats

i spent the summer of '65
graphing baseball stats

Mad magazine

rather too lowbrow

Minivac 601

a programmable 6-relay computer
designed by Claude Shannon

later 1960s

Lewis Carroll

via Martin Gardner

Yes I Can by Sammy Davis Jr

one of the first grownup books
i remember reading

Freud's Interpretation of Dreams

easy to interpret
an older girl's dream:
her friends were sliding down a log
into a pond
but she was scared of splinters

Tolkien

Roget

a lifelong fascination

Asimov's Intelligent Man's Guide to Science

Ray Bradbury

rare literary scifi

Wff'n'Proof

a logic game i played alone
aided by a programmed textbook on logic

Estes model rockets

not very successfully

Super-8 moviemaking

Ulysses, Ellmann

my sister introduced me to a constrant stream
of hip lit borrowed from the public library

Catch 22

surprisingly enduring

Tin Drum

Barbarella (movie)

Autobiography of a Yogi

via the Sgt Pepper's cover

Donald E Westlake

comic crime novels, soon outgrown

Sondheim crosswords, Springbok jigsaws

the composer, in the late 60s
created elegant weekly crosswords
in the british style
for New York magazine

Vonnegut, Brautigan, Castaneda

60s inevitables

Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In, Music Scene w/David Steinberg (tv)

Dick Cavett (tv)

Christopher Cerf's "World's Largest Cheese"

brainy silliness i adored [Az]

"One Million" by Hendrik Hertzberg

bold visualisation experiment
200 pages each with 5000 dots [Az]

Finnegans Wake, Norman O Brown

Firesign Theatre

meets the 'canon' criterion

Luscher Color Test

inexplicably fascinating
slow to outgrow

astrology

started c1967 when my sister
ordered a computerised horoscope
finally outgrew in 1974

at best provided random noise
i could project personality theories onto

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones

[Az]

early 1970s

Incredible String Band

their lyrics easily make my canon [fan]

Wallace Stevens

Rider-Waite tarot

Psychology Today magazine

challenged me to my life's work

Arthur Koestler

Act of Creation, Ghost in the Machine
provocative multidisciplinary thinking

Samuelson's Economics

computer simulation

Jay Forrester, Bucky Fuller's World Game, Antioch College seminar

Janov, Perls, Ouspensky, Gaskin, Wilhelm Reich

fringe psych/ occultism

a course at antioch
called 'science and experience: east and west'
introduced me to various fringe schools

American Heritage Dictionary

with proto-indo-european roots!

Joyce Carol Oates

soon outgrown

Updike

gradually outgrown

Durant's "Story of Philosophy"

Robert Altman (movies)

probably canonical

Krishnamurti

the ultimate koan
there is no path [fan]

Whole Earth Catalog (WEC)

portal to much good obscure reading

Bucky Fuller

especially "Intuition"
(anticipating my theory of whitespace)

Pinter's "Homecoming"

American Film Theater series

Skinner's "Walden Two"

John McPhee's early nonfiction

G Spencer Brown (GSB)

Laws of Form
and Only Two Can Play This Game
via WEC [fan]

Pynchon

with Joyce, the topmost in my canon

Nabokov

slowly partly outgrown [fan]

Robert Stone

[fan]

William Blake

especially his marginal annotations [fan]
in Erdman's edition [Az]
probably via GSB

AN Whitehead

outgrown stylish obscurantism (Process and Reality)

JL Austin

philosophy done right

Michael Polanyi's "Personal Knowledge"

also Stephen Toulmin

later 1970s

Scott Joplin's Bethena

a ragtime novel

Joseph McElroy

[fan]

Iris Murdoch

[fan]

Renata Adler

her first is neglected genius [Az]

Robert Pirsig

Tom Wolfe's Painted Word (etc)

[Az]

Robertson Davies' Deptford trilogy

Vance Bourjaily

readable but unfashionable

Mary McCarthy

Peter Dickinson

wonderful mysteries and kids' books [fan]

le Carre

[fan]

Walker Percy

especially Love in the Ruins

Joni Mitchell

definitely canon [fan]

Wright Morris

James Purdy

Thomas McGuane

Joyce Maynard

Barbara Pym

Stephen Gaskin's books and sermons

Blanche McCrary Boyd

[Az] [fan]

Selfish Gene; Sociobiology

worldchanging

Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness

faded if not outgrown

Mark Vonnegut's Eden Express

firsthand drug psychosis [Az]

Velikovsky

not the astrophysics
but the chronologies (now outgrown)

Kleist's "On The Marionette Theatre"

[etext]

early 1980s

White Goddess, Robert Graves

Mary Beth Edelson (art)

goddess-installation in Buffalo 1980

Operators and Things

canonical
via WEC i think [Az]

Man's Place in Nature by CF Hockett

[Az]

Robert Anton Wilson, Colin Wilson

unrelated literary twins

William Wharton

[fan]

Elmore Leonard

topnotch crime escapism

Steve Wozniak, Bill Budge (code)

i learned my bad programming habits
from Woz's brilliant
Apple ][ machine language monitor

my good habits from Budge's tutorials in ?Softcell

Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake

useful but outgrown

Feynman's QED

SCTV, Monty Python (belatedly)

especially catherine o'hara

WXRT w/Bobby Skafish

Steppenwolf's Say Goodnight, Gracie (tv)

[IMDb] good luck finding it

[part two]

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.

Warum ich so weise bin

I often complain to interviewers that 'weblog' is the least interesting of my many neologisms. Here's a sampling of others:

1. meta-expressive (1974) = inauthentic, expressing an image rather than a reality
   
   
2. noofog (1974) the stupefying side of the noosphere-- pressure to conform making us blind (cf negative intelligence, below)
   
   
3. ron riddles (1975-friv) riddles where the answer is a portmanteau of two phrases eg 'TS Eliot Ness' (Who wrote 'Sweeney among the Untouchables'?) or 'The arm and hammer throw' (What's the intensest sport at the leper olympics?)
   
   
4. priorating (no date) rating by priority
   
   
6. [Greek letter phi], [Greek letter psi] (no date) philosophy, psychology (abbreviations)
   
   
7. junk-food vegetarian (1977?) no meat in soda or potato chips
   
   
8. filters, speeds, and scales (1978) three exercises for deepening understanding of any given phenomenon-- picture the world as pitch black except where the phenomenon supplies a bit of colored light (this directly led to the tree-of-life/worldtree visualisation); picture the phenomenon at microscopic scale, at macroscopic scale, slowed down and speeded up
   
   
9. literary indications (1978) images from novels or other literature that capture some nuance of human behavior, i used to save these on index cards that i then sorted and re-sorted
   
   
10. cybernetic psychology, robot wisdom (1979) a scientific methodology that builds from literary indications (qv) to computer simulations of realistic human behavior
    
    
11. appublication (1979) making public
    
    
13. pyschology, spychology (1979-friv) bad psychology, good psychology
    
    
14. antimath (1979) a simple notation system for story-skeletons, based on comic strip conventions [more]
    
    
15. cx. (no date) contrast (cf 'cf')
    
    
16. lifelines (1984?) a cross between antimath and feynman diagrams, evolved into worldtree model [more]
    
    
17. friv (1985) frivolous
    
    
18. romantic psychology (1988) narrowly, the scientific study of romantic love; broadly, the complement of cognitive psychology [Solace]
    
    
19. storycycle (1988?) compilation of literary indications into a (usually) cyclical monomyth [more]
    
    
20. fractal-thicket indexing, semantic topology (1991) a generalisation of antimath that builds complex content by repeatedly creating 'cross-products' of any simple hierarchy with itself [more]
    
    
21. usual stories (1992) a way to defuse AI's 'frame problem' by considering any content-node to imply the full usual storycycle of that content-item [more]
    
    
22. task-savvy applications (1993) applications with enough a.i. to guess what you're trying to do [more]
    
    
23. confabulating arranger (1994) a model for interactive fiction in which the past is created backwards [more]
    
    
24. alt.music.alternative.female (1994) newsgroup [newgroup]
    
    
25. misery pizza, misery burritos, etc (1994?) ersatz entrees using lowest-possible-cost ingredients: white bread, ketchup, american cheese food, pork'n'beans, etc
    
    
26. the responsible party (1995) semifictitious 'conservative left' political party
    
    
27. naive witness (1995) heuristic visualisation of unprejudiced guy-in-the-street [more]
    
    
28. chase-down design (1995) writing webpages so they start by cutting-to-the-chase [more]
    
    
29. parent test (1995) judging political candidates (etc) by whether you'd want them as parents [more]
    
    
30. static a.i. (1995) knowledge representation [more]
    
    
31. skeptical correctness (1995) jumping to conclusions based on 'scientific' prejudices [cite]
    
    
32. self-knowledge horizon (1995) what alan watts called 'the taboo on knowing who we are' [more]
    
    
33. AI complementarity principle (1995) the idea that an expert system capable of understanding a domain should equally be able to generate a simulation (or a vision sytem to generate an image) [more]
    
    
34. pork'n'beans vegetarian (1995?) it's not enough pork to bother paying double for the vegetarian beans
    
    
35. w3* (1996) trick for distinguishing search keywords from ordinary words [more]
    
    
36. full-disclosure capitalism (1996) capitalism might not be so bad if businesses were fully transparent [more]
    
    
37. negative intelligence (1996) internet phenomenon where bad ideas drive out good [more]
    
    
38. philosophy lab (1996) the idea that philosophical ideas could theoretically be tested in an advanced computer simulation of human behavior [more]
    
    
39. propanoia (1996-friv) the unfounded fear that a Usenet newsgroup's messages don't propagate to your site [cite]
    
    
40. pride cycle (1997) the storycycle/monomyth behind Finnegans Wake-- hero sins, falls, rises via conformity or experiment [passim]
    
    
41. hypertext lab (1997) the notion that web-design theorists ought to use their sites to experiment with new design ideas [more]
    
    
42. elvis index (1997) search-engine popularity ranking normalised to standard term 'elvis' [more]
    
    
43. weblog (1997) a log of interesting web readings in reverse chronological order
    
    
44. ?* (1997?) uncertain. eg '?x' is short for 'x (?)' (after Herring)
    
    
46. gotcha-links (1998?) web links that without warning entrap you in (eg) slow-launching helper apps like Acrobat [more] a special case that throws you out of your surf history is the ejection seat
    
    
56. e-communication, e-video, e-audio, s-text, h-text, h-audio, h-video, p-text, p-video, p-audio (1998) electronic/spoken/handwritten/printed communication/audio/video/text [more]
    
    
57. new game (1998) an approach to finnegans wake via close reading of manuscripts in the order they were written [more]
    
    
58. liquid page (1998) later and more widely called 'liquid html' [more]
    
    
59. xhtml (1998) my original proposal was better than what They ended up with [more]
    
    
60. project-proposers anonymous (1998) 12-step group for people who have better ideas than follow-thru [more]
    
    
61. nuppies (1999?) compulsive one-uppers [cite]
    
    
62. iq infinity (1999?) heuristic for studying joyce-- that he knew everything
    
    
63. en-passant linking (1999) web links that can only be detected by (eg) blue underlined text [more]
    
    
64. one-layer web design (1999) making portals that flatten out all web resources so they're a single click away, by linking every useful subpage of a site, not just the main page [more]
    
    
65. resource pages (1999) sifting thru all web resources on a given topic and linking all the best ones in an organised way (search engines should someday do this automatically) [more]
    
    
66. mournography (1999) orgies of exploitative sentimentality after tragedies [cite]
    
    
67. first-cut parser (1999) document-parser that finds a likeliest interpretation for each segment of a text [more]
    
    
68. stripped-grapes web-design (2000?) tables of contents (etc) that link to subpages with no description but the page-title [more]
    
    
69. url-hacking (2000) studying the structure of complex urls so you can customise them [more]
    
    
70. content-centered web design (2000) web-design that foregrounds the content rather than the design (eg avoiding sidebars and other distractions) [more]
    
    
71. text buttons (2000) a design philosophy that tries to minimise hard-to-read blue underlined linktext by isolating the link at the end of text, with a single word description, usually of its document type [more]
    
    
72. hyperbolic linking (2000) topically closer pages should have more links on a given page [more]
    
    
73. phat (2000) high-bandwidth (of webpages)
    
    
74. information density (2001) eg 'faqs' are high density [more]
    
    
75. text-blocks and separators (2001) alternative to uptight 'hierarchies of containers' model of text [more]
    
    
76. minoan illuminati (2001) mostly tongue-in-cheek reconstruction of Bronze Age Crete, emphasizing their remarkable disdain for giant ego-monuments [more]
    
    
77. jumpbar (2001) a row of offsite links at the top of a blog (or any page) so you can quickly jump elsewhere if there's nothing new there [more]
    
    
78. mindwrestling (2001) ESP-based power-struggles [more]
    
    
79. content stubs (2001) interface elements that can be expanded to reveal more content/choices (eg menus) [more]
    
    
80. contemplation-factor (2001) how many calories does it take to contemplate something [more]
    
    
81. html-junk (2002) webpage cruft [post]
    
    
82. ToC-footers (2002) putting site-links at end of (one-column) document [more] rediscovered 2007 [blog]
    
    
83. the Necessary Web (2002) just the faqs, sort of [more] [more]
    
    
84. W3C secession (2002) top-down amateur a.i. has got us on the wrong track entirely, time to start over [more]
    
    
85. the pragmatic web (2002) semantic web optimised for relevant content [more]
    
    
86. action hypertext (2002) web-authoring tools should accommodate dynamically evolving pages [more]
    
    
87. the Joyce police (2002) cruising joyce-sites for errors and issuing citations [more]
    
    
88. EWRs (2003) epiphanies-while-reading [less]
    
    
89. etymogeny (2003) a way of sorting words/concepts according to when the nervous system became capable of dealing with them [more]
    
    
90. page memory (2003) the universal ability to recall where on the two-page spread an interesting bit occured [thread]
    
    
91. v* (2003) very (eg vshort, varcane, vfriv)
    
    
94. Philosophy Markup Language, History-of-Science Markup Language, Rhetorical Markup Language (2003) what they sound like [more]
    
    
95. goldfarb's conjecture (2003) the illusion that text styling should be associated with semantic markup [more]
    
    
96. grand metasynthesis (2004) aka The Singularity, but with an eye to the sorts of problems that will actually have to be solved along the way [more]
    
    
97. crystal tags (2005) hypothetical elaboration of nntp (network news transfer protocol, ie usenet/netnews/newsgroups/DejaNews/GoogleGroups) to replace email, blogs, and newsfeeds [more]
    
    
98. view-scaling (2005) optimally fitting the view of any object to the allocated space [more]
    
    
99. hoaxtop (2005) negroponte's olpc (a cellphone designed by the proverbial committee) [more]
    
    
100. Gg* (2005) Google (eg GgW = GoogleWeb, GgI = GgImages, GgN = GgNews, etc)
     
     
101. I'm-an-idiot day (2005) confess a weakness on the 13th of every month? [more]
     
     
102. weather giant (2006) visualisation of height of weather-phenomena via imaginary giant [more]
     
     
103. zipless blogging (2006) effortless blogging, interface-wise [more]
     
     
104. yahoo zodiac (2006) a more-or-less disciplined theoretical visualisation of a web ontology [more]
     
     
105. radial ontology (2006) any visualisation of an ontology that puts the root (of the 'tree') at the center [more]
     
     
106. heraldic barcodes (2006) schematic icons that encapsulate a lot of metadata for easy human scanning [more]
     
     
107. OS avatar (2006) inevitable interface feature where your OS tracks your current state [more]
     
     
108. self-conscious computing (2006) building debuggers' TRACE function into hard- and software at deepest level [more]
     
     
109. radio goggles (2006) visualisation experiment intended to explore why radio reception is so unpredictable [more]
     
     
110. pluripedia (2006) an evolution of wikipedia where multiple versions of each article are ranked according to your circle of trusted referees [more]
     
     
111. mini-blogs (2006) a 'view' that should be available on all web2.0 sites, allowing you to publish your own edition of the site's ongoing content, and to subscribe to others' miniblogs [more]
     
     
112. Glass earworms (2006) insane atonal earworms [more]
     
     
113. Polti vocabularies (2006) catalogs of (eg) plot skeletons [more]
     
     
114. worldtree (2007) was 'tree of life' (2005) 3D-worldlines visualisation of unique tree of life on Earth [intro]
     
     
115. discourse patterns (2007) a pattern language for rhetoric [more]
     
     
116. jLo notation (2007) shortening a two-word phrase by appending the lowercase initial of the first word to the capitalised last word
     
     
117. wBu (2007) GWBush = Pere wBu, wBu Roi (apologies to aJarry)
     
     
118. floaters (2007) blog-posts postdated so they stay at the top
     
     
119. meretocracy (2007) government by the most meretricious
     
     
120. tag portals (pending) the idea that any site with tagging should encourage taggers to create a portal-page for each tag, that gives an overview of everything the tagger thinks is important about that tag
     
     
121. net scouts (pending) incentive program for net.illiterate adults via 'merit badges'
     
     
122. Smithee dreams (pending) dreams with abysmal 'production values' eg plot holes, lousy special effects
     
     
123. dissipedia (pending) a wikipedia of links to negative criticism of ideas/people/etc
     
     
124. hypodata (pending) eg footnotes (cx metadata)
     
     
125. hypertext mashup language (pending) inevitable evolution where web markup allows multiple pages to be customised and/or combined
     
     
126. chronogram (pending) a graph with time as the Y axis (flowing up) and space as the X
     
     
127. .5* (pending) semi- (eg '.5friv' = semifriv)
     
     
128. pagestream (pending) eg your browser history, or your linkblog, or a page of search-engine results
     
     

.