Kylog

A few nights ago I saw Vandana Shiva speak as part of the World Affairs Council of Oregon lecture series. During her talk, I found her a very muddled thinker, who often confused slogans (”soil not oil”) with actual thought. Nonetheless, she did have some buried points about biodiversity and she has certainly accomplished a lot, so I was willing to accept that her strengths lie in inspiring the choir rather than advancing anyone’s understanding. Then the Q and A started, and I got actively pissed off. A number of the questions were insightful attempts to get at related issues or explore tradeoffs. She would have none of any nuanced thought, and just found ways to return to her core slogans. Her commitment not to think led her to say some positively inane things (”women don’t need education …” because we can learn so much from grandmothers.) Ouch.

Anyway my purpose here isn’t primarily to rant about Vandana Shiva. She was in a milieu that loved her — they must have had trouble selling out the talk because there were droves of 20-year-olds with knit hats and batik skirts who (according to a conversation I overheard) got free tickets to the talk. So I think she was preaching to the choir, and that does serve a purpose. Or does it really? That’s what I want to think about.

A few days later I was continuing to dip into the very enjoyable Journals 1952-2000 of Arthur M Schlesinger Jr. A passage leapt out at me, about his thoughts after meeting with some members of the New Left. Writing in 1969, then a 52-year-old lifetime liberal, he found himself contrasting the leftist ideology of his youth with that of the present day (neither of which he was aligned with):

“How does all this compare with the left of my youth? … Many of the Stalinists were exceedingly well read; some even, outside politics, had cultivated tastes. The New Left seems to have read nothing and relies entirely on the proposition that feeling and acting are all that matter: the deed will eventually produce the doctrine; the act of revolution will lead to the program. The Stalinists believed that the end justified the means; the New Left believes the means will create the end.”

The Stalinist comparison doesn’t mean that much to me, but the piquant critique of the New Left really reverberated for me. The idea that “the deed will eventually produce the doctrine” seemed to describe quite aptly Dr Shiva’s sloganizing approach of “act now, think later”. Morover, the New Left may seem a long time ago, but progressive thought is still recovering (barely) from the New Left. And there is still a dominant strain among liberalism today that will show up for the march, but is devoid of any doctrine greater than “we hate Republicans” or “recycle”. This is a continuing source of frustration for me. And somehow the confluence of reading Schlesinger and squirming through Shiva’s non-answers to her faithful audience brought me to this epiphany that we are still shackled by the New Left.

Boy this was painful.

My takeway is that the packaging and/or documentation of cacti could really be improved. This all took me several hours, mostly headbanging through forums. Everything I needed to do was *somewhere*. But it wasn’t easy to find. Sigh.

So running Thunderbird 3.0 under Fedora 11, I couldn’t get it to launch chrome correctly. It would just start a new chrome window (not a new tab) with the default start page (blank page for me). This was the behavior despite:

setting chrome as my default browser

going into Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Config Editor (or alternately ~/.thunderbird/ /prefs.js) and overriding the protocol-handler entries for http and https. I tried both specifying /usr/bin/google-chrome and specify xdg-open. No dice.

Grrr. The missing magic:
gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command -t string "/usr/bin/google-chrome %s"

#!/usr/bin/env python

import rlcompleter, readline
readline.parse_and_bind('tab: complete')
del rlcompleter, readline

I really enjoyed this book, probably as much as any contemporary fiction (not that I read much ;>) of recent years. The only other contender would be The Known World, but save that for another day. So, some notes.

Love the names: Rupp and Cain seem right out of Waiting for Godot, Daniel Riegel is suitably quasi-regal quasi-biblical, Bonnie is just spot-on prairie, Gerald Weber is spot on as well (and at least the same character counts as “Oliver Sacks” hee hee, the Gerald possibly a nod to Gerald Edelman), the slightly off Karin, Karsh the Shark, not sure what to do with Schluter, ….

Love the organization, 5 chapters built around the central puzzle/theme trope of the book, reproduced here b/c I kept flipping around looking for it:

I am No One
but Tonight on North Line Road
GOD led me to you
so You could Live
and bring back someone else

It unfolds nicely as the story unfolds, with the great epigraphs from Loren Eiseley and Aldo Leopold to mark the sections.

The plot is quite crisp, deftly mixing family drama, the mystery of the event, and a rich cast of characters with conflicting motivations and impulses, etc. And though, there is a consistently Powers-ian voice throughout, the per-character instantiations of that voice range widely and effectively.

Best, I love that this is a fiction writer who can unabashedly engage with “science” with a rich, sympathetic, critical set of frameworks. The implicit critique of Sacksian psychiatry is long overdue (one of my college professors, Arthur Quinn, wrote a similarly critical essay on Sacks 20 years ago, but it slipped beneath the waves as far as I know) — what Powers has done here is worth thorough consideration. The engagement with neuroscience and consciousness is compelling (a theme for Powers? the only other book of his I’ve read is the AI’d Galatea 2.2, and the interleaving with ecology is really provocative (Edelman again?).

Oh and can I just say: a few weeks earlier I attempted to read Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and had to put it down as just too hackneyed, cloying, predictable, etc. Just bathing in 9/11. Powers’s book on the other hand is truly and elegantly a post-9/11 book — informed by it, framed by it, could not have been written before it, and yes avoids any easy entrapment by it. Hurrah!

Perhaps more detailed thoughts will follow … ;>

The time is always right to do something right. –Martin Luther King

Weird but true. When I down/up-load some torrents (esp w/ many peers?), my 2.6.17 (FC5) Broadcom tg3 driver goes belly up. Here’s a thread about the problem:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=476368

FMI, on FC5 the best place to address this was to add

ethtool -K eth0 tso off

as the penultimate line of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-eth, just before the final “exec” line.

These are just the basic things I forget, after everything is set up and installed.

4 windows:

n800:
ssh root@IP (192.168.0.5 at home

sbox:
/scratchbox/login
export DISPLAY=:2
af-sb-init.sh start
gcc -o maemo_hello maemo_hello.c `pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0 hildon-libs` -ansi -Wall `pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0 hildon-libs`

Xephyr:
Xephyr :2 -host-cursor -screen 800x480x16 -dpi 96 -ac

Edit:
cd /scratchbox/users/kylo/home/kylo

http://repository.maemo.org/stable/bora/maemo-scratchbox-install_3.1.sh

Installation was successful!
—————————-

You now have Scratchbox 1.0.7 ‘apophis’ release installed.

Scratchbox cannot be run as user root. Instead, use your normal login
user account. Add additional scratchbox users and sandboxes with the
following command (outside scratchbox with root permissions):

# /scratchbox/sbin/sbox_adduser USER yes

Running this command will create sandbox environment for that user and
add user to the ’sbox’ scratchbox user group.
You will need to start a new login terminal after being added to the
’sbox’ group for group membership to be effective.

Scratchbox service must be started for CPU transparency to be functional.
Run the following command (outside scratchbox with root permissions):

# /scratchbox/sbin/sbox_ctl start

Add this command to e.g. /etc/rc.local file to start scratchbox service
at boot time.

Login to scratchbox session using the following command (as user):

$ /scratchbox/login

Refer to scratchbox.org documentation for more information re scratchbox:
http://scratchbox.org/documentation/user/scratchbox-1.0/

Good advice, like a secret, is easier to give away than to keep. (264)

“If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well,” said Rilke in sharp defiance of the future industry of TV and self-help-book exorcism. (288)

Great elaboration of Camp:

Camp is not in rugby football.
Camp is not in the Old Testament.
Camp is not in St Paul.
Camp is not in Latin lessons, though it might be in Greek.
Camp loves colour.
Camp loves light.
Camp takes pleasure in the surface of things.
Camp loves paint as much as it loves paintings.
Camp prefers style to the stylish.
Camp is pale.
Camp is unhealthy.
Camp is not English, damn it.

But …

Camp is not kitsch.
Camp is not drag.
Camp is not nearly so superficial as it would have you believe.
Camp casts out all fear.
Camp is strong.
Camp is healthy.

And, let’s face it ….

Camp is queer. (136)

And summing up his adolescence:

Didn’t Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust. Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also, in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make:the pain and terror we will take from others’ shoulders, our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false.

There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination. (297)

Paston School lived up to all my prejudices, as things always will to the prejudiced. (299)

To Myself: Not to Be Read Until I Am Twenty-Five

I know what you will think when you read this. You will be embarrassed. You will scoff and sneer. Well I tell you now that everything I feel now, everything I am now is truer and better than anything I shall ever be. Ever. This is me now, the real me. Every day that I grow away from the me that is writing this now is a betrayal and a defeat. I expect you will screw this up into a ball with sophisticated disgust, or at best with tolerant amusement but deep down you will know, you will know that you are smothering what you really, really were. This is the age when I truly am. From now on my life will be behind me. I will tell you now, THIS IS TRUE–truer than anything else I will ever write, feel or know. WHAT I AM NOW IS ME, WHAT I WILL BE IS A LIE. (301)