Between the Past and the Future

I'm a strong believer in journal keeping. I have a book out form the library about altering books. This craftswoman (artist?) takes books, any kind of book, and "alters" them by adding things to the pages, painting them, cutting holes, turning them into mosaics and montages and shadowboxes. Browsing through made me think about all the paper journals I've kept over the years, the pictures scribbled in margins, the occasional page consumed entirely by one big word, photographs and ticket stubs tapped in. honestly, I collect journals. I have three or four empty books around most of the time in anticipation of filling them. Right now I'm within the last twenty pages or so of the journal I've been filling and it's hard to not just put it down and start on one of the new books. The current one is a faux-leather hard-bound brown book with a palm tree embossed on the cover. The next is a small yellow soft-bound leather. I bought it almost six months ago in anticipation. I love to have something physical to hold onto. While I very much do appreciate the capacity for storage the internet affords, it lacks something of permanency and share-ability. While I can send my URL to anyone on the globe, I cannot share this website with those who will come long after our culture has wiped itself from the face of the earth. Because I don't own the hard drive these are stored on I may not even be able to share it with people surfing the internet two years from now. I would like to leave something for my children and grandchildren to hold in their hands.

Harold Innes described technology as being a balance between space and time. Space based technology is more concerned about bringing communication to as many people at the same time across as great an area as possible, while Time based technology is more concerned with the permanency of information. Television is a purely space based technology, it rolls incessantly on without regard to wether or not you're keeping up. All it wants is as many people receiving the signal as is possible. The internet is a little more moderate in its stand, being somewhat concerned with information hanging around a while, but the sheer fickleness of the infrastructure, the propensity for hard drive wipes and corrupted data, belies the fact that it's the people using the internet who want the information to remain around and not the medium. If it were the medium, it wouldn't misplace so much stuff. DVD is certainly a more time-based technology, the pitch for its space-based marketing being that it will last. Then, of course, we come to the most time based of all, stone carvings, metal plates, books, and scrolls. We have the art, wisdom, poetry, warnings, music, lore, government, economics, and religion of ages past encoded into these mediums. While there is most certainly a place for both in any culture, it is important that every civilization find some balance between the two. As humans we need both. We hunger for change, but thirst for permanency. I have heard it said that this is why God gave us the seasons, to give us a constant rolling change, but the security of permanency in that cycle. I digress though. I feel that our culture in many ways has glutted itself on space. It has become drunk with the capacity of its technology to reach every corner of the globe. I fear that there might not be much left of our wisdom and folly for our grandchildren to dig up as they build their cities over top our bones.

Is it in my mind or on the page?

I finished up a short essay earlier today for my school application. After I was done it suggested by the parent-folks that I put in a bibliography. I didn't cite or quote anything in the essay, and the entire thing was written off the top of my head (simple question about the differences between image production in motion-picture film and television/video). In my communications theory class last semester, I grilled the TA about this same concern: at what point is something coming out of my head and when is it cited? Now, quotations are obviously cited. Something that you read yesterday so you could write the essay is cited. But what about something i read four months ago on my own? It's not like I was born being able to infer the mechanics of television, so I had to read it all somewhere at some time, but when does it become my knowledge? Due to the complexity of the information I present, I'm going to create a bibliography from some of the websites I frequent, because they've apparently had a running problem with plagiarism at the school, and I'd like to play it safe because I want to get accepted.

Where?

I wonder where the bigger mess is, Iraq, the White house, the house of Commons, or my bedroom floor. not intending to be flippant, but this place is a mess. However, in digging through a pile, I found my MGB "Victory Through Sheer Volume" shirt that I bought at Edgefest '99, and my Tragically Hip "Phantom Power" shirt. Oh yeah, I'm styling old school today.

Something I've meant to mention

I ride the train to and from school for an hour in each direction, giving me an excessive amount of time to stare at whatever ad has been pasted up in front of me. About two weeks ago I had an hour to ponder something. A community group in the city has been running ads for an Abortion support group. The ads are not openly anti-abortion, they are aimed at helping those affected by abortion. The tagline at the top of the ad reads "Have you or someone you know been hurt by an abortion experience?" I feel this really is a worthy cause as I doubt there are many people out there who will say that abortion is a light subject that will have no emotional repercussions on those involved, mother, father, friends, and family. It is a serious subject that really deserves a lot more respect than it is given (the current state of things being that each side is boiled down to either pro-life or pro-choice, each grossly inaccurate of the median standpoints most of the populace truly has.)

Next to the tagline, someone had taken a permanent marker and written "anti-choice is anti-woman."

Next to that hateful slogan was written by a respondent "1/2 of those killed would have been women."

Something to chew on.

New Words

Created a new word in Linguistics yesterday.

We were discussing word-formation processes and as we were discussing eponyms someone asked "what about words like Darwinism?" The teacher was at a bit of a loss, and it seemed like there wasn't a term to really describe those types of words specifically. So I shot out "wouldn't they be some kind of eponymous derrivation?" Half the class laughed at me because I'm that know-it-all kid, but then the teacher got all bright-eyed and wrote it down on the overhead. Eponymous derrivation is now in the lecture notes.

At the Last Possible Minute

I spent this weekend past trying to write an essay for my film class. I wrote the majority of it Monday morning, the day it was due. This is not for lack of trying, really. Most of you who tried to get a hold of me can attest to the fact that I was bored witless sitting there trying to write this essay all weekend. I eventually did get some kind of quality inspiration on paper, but now I wonder, what triggers that inspiration? Does it just require a time investment, i.e. If I spend 14 hours trying to write the essay I will eventually reach that point of inspiration? Or is it based in closeness to the deadline, i.e. even if I were to have the entire thing written long before hand, I would wind up scrapping it and re-writing becaus of a last minute realization that what I'd written was uninspired crap, that the true inspiration doesn't come until just before the deadline?

Proximity in time and space

Today in linguistics we discussed compound words and polysynthetic languages. I then decided that microwaves and ovens will be referred to both as a cookingbox. To specify one or the other it will be nuclearcookingbox and thermalcookingbox. I don't suspect it's anywhere in the near future, but oh yes, somewhere between the future and the cavemen that follow is my neuclearcookingbox. Mybe it seemed funny this morning because I was still recovering from the last lingering kiss of a weekend of medication.

Mine and Thine

I found free food on the train. Someone on their way to work left their brown bag of lunch on the floor when they got off. There was an orange, a fruit roll up, and a granola bar. I'm thinking about how my good fortune came from someone else's bad day.

A day

I had a lot I wanted to say about the revolution of film by Steve Jobs and Canon and somethign about the debate that's going to occur at school, but I'm wrecked from my recurring lung infection, so I'm going ot go to sleep. I did go to Linguistics, but came home early because it would do me no good to try to sit through an Iranian film while I can barely comprehend English. One last note: Morphophonemics is an awesome word.