Dandelife: blogging about the past?

Dandelife describes itself as a "social biography network." Very interesting concept. The idea of "blogging" your stories of the past, your memories, strikes me as potentially very fruitful. I'm interested in seeing how they work the publishing angle. People who want to do this seriously will want their content to be very portable. I also see the potential for extensive educational uses (think of it as an easy entree into oral history-like applications for students and their families).

Related sites of interest:

Sponit: basically one-off blog entries.


Panraven (just got a beta invite): sophisticated multimedia storytelling; format mimics a printed book with multiple pages per story and flexible text and image layouts.


Then there's always the "datablogging" site Reger.com, which I've been curious about for some time.

Martin Parr's collection of boring postcards

From

and

Martin Parr, Boring Postcards ($20) and Boring Postcards USA ($25), both published by Phaidon.

A new take on social bookmarking: Meshly

Meshly: social bookmarking via IM

• I am really digging this service. It's the quickest and simplest way to post bookmarks to a central repository that I've found yet, and the social aspect of the service is simple and clearcut, too. Appears to have a small but strong community around it. This is a link to my personal page. I wish it supported auto-bookmarking to del.icio.us, and I wish the RSS feeds included permalinks to bookmarked pages.
   - post by nathanrein

Sky

0424071718

The "Not So Big House": links & resources for human-sized living

This is a great book.

clipped from www.notsobighouse.com The Not So Big House books by Sarah Susanka, bring to light a new way of thinking about what makes a place feel like home—characteristics that many people desire of their homes and their lives, but haven't known how to verbalize. The inspiration for The Not So Big House came from a growing awareness that new houses were getting bigger and bigger but with little redeeming design merit. The problem is that comfort has almost nothing to do with how big a space is. It is attained, rather, by tailoring our houses to fit the way we really live, and to the scale and proportions of our human form. Two must-read articles about this topic include Cultural Creatives: The Rise of Integral Culture, by Dr. Paul Ray and a recent interview with William McDonough in Newsweek magazine entitled Designing The Future.

I'm a sucker for this kind of thing

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Payphone ad for anti-depressants

Payphone ad for anti-depressants

Spotted this today. Struck me as odd.

"Configurable culture": music, capital, and social construction

An interesting clip from the Annenberg Center's weblog.

clipped from weblogs.annenberg.edu DIY Media Weblog DIY Media Seminar: Aram Sinnreich on Configurable Culture Aram Sinnreich succinctly astonished those who attended the DIY Media seminar at the Annenberg Center for Communication on March 22. The two mandalic powerpoint slides above were fractal crystallizations of his thesis in progress. In a little more than fifteen minutes, Sinnreich deployed an array of theoretical and empirical tools in pursuit of an issue first posed by Plato when he claimed "Musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited....When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them." (On the same slide, Sinnreich quoted The Lord Mayor from Yellow Submarine right below Plato: "The Meanies captured everything that maketh music.")

In conjunction with teaching RELS-327 ("Religion and Violence"), I have been rereading Inga Clendinnen's Aztecs: An Interpretation. I really like her work and always have since I first read it. It's provocative and challenging, even though I am also perfectly aware of the fact that she doesn't have the kind of academic credentials for the study of Mexica religion that earn real respect in the field. I don't think she knows any Nahuatl, though she doesn't come right out and say so. Still, though, despite the fact that her interpretation is far from canonical, it has a kind of immediacy, depth, and urgency that I think is really appropriate and useful for a course like this one. A couple of years ago, though, I also picked up a copy of Davíd Carrasco's City of Sacrifice and finally, this semester, I started to read it. I'm not very far into it yet, but I am really impressed.

Carrasco's reputation around Harvard was that he was something of a rock star. Graduate students who worked with him noted that he frequently compared himself, primarily in terms of popularity, with Cornel West. Others said that his teaching was, well, scintillatingly interesting, but that undergrads tended to walk away without a clear sense of what it was they were supposed to be learning. For a while there was this story that circulated around the department about how he showed a video clip to his undergrads of a group of monkeys performing something that looked very much like a religious ritual. The grad students said that student reaction to this tended to be a lot of buzz and fascination -- they talked about "the monkey experience" -- but no discernible, measurable, concrete gains in skills or knowledge. This used to be something of a cautionary tale for me. I thought I knew better than to fall into this trap until I started teaching, myself. Then I discovered that it's a less clear-cut problem than I thought. It's harder to avoid than I expected, and -- more problematic -- I found that there were times I wanted an effect like that. I wanted to present students with a provocative, interesting, even mysterious problem or idea, and just let them mull it over, and the fact that there wasn't a tidy take-home message to walk away with didn't prove that I was thinking superficially about teaching outcomes. But I digress. The point here is that Carrasco had a reputation for a kind of superficial flashiness, not for analytical rigor.

This book has surprised me, then, because of the breadth and complexity of Carrasco's knowledge. Within the first thirty pages, he draws perceptive connections linking Tenochtitlan to Italo Calvino, Charles Long, Merleau-Ponty, Michael De Certeau, and Paul Wheatley. What I'm finding particularly striking is the sharp contrast in the fundamental stance toward the material that Carrasco adopts as opposed to Clendinnen's. Clendinnen writes like a historian. She begins by trying to bring the sources to life, by trying to thrust us into the middle of everyday life as experienced by the Aztecs. She is perfectly forthright about acknowledging the limitations of her ability to do so, but she tries anyhow. She operates like a painter, aiming at a layered, vivid, complex and many-sided picture of the society, its physical environment, and its mentalité. Her use of language is artful, and she seeks a visceral response from the reader. She hardly ever really talks about "religion" in any conceptual or abstract sense.

Codex Mendoza, frontispiece

Carrasco, however, uses the canonical language of the "Chicago school" of American religious studies. He uses Latin (orientatio) and Greek (archè) like a good Eliadean should. I keep expecting him to start talking about sacred centers, noumena, ontophanies, or "the wholly Other." I am now particularly sensitive to this kind of thing because I have also recently been toiling through Tim Fitzgerald's Ideology of Religious Studies, and Fitzgerald has a tendency to scoff at this kind of talk -- he thinks it's a more or less meaningless substitute for careful social observation. He does not, as Clendinnen does, start by trying to plunge the reader into an alienating, disturbing, dramatic world of violence, theatricality, and movement. Instead he begins by carefully circling around the key concepts he wants to talk about, primarily the concept of "city," along with the theme of center versus periphery. He constructs an elaborate contextualization of his own work, setting himself into a broad intellectual lineage of religious-studies discourse on urbanization and colonial societies. He begins his analysis not with a mise-en-scène but with a close reading, focusing on structural elements, of the frontispiece of the Codex Mendoza. He uses this to build a self-conscious and elaborate textual structure in which he will then go on to situate his work.

Well ... it's late, and I've kind of run out of steam here. I do think that the contrast between Clendinnen, who is really a historian with a kind of journalistic style, and Carrasco, who is a religionist through and through, is pretty instructive and says something about the nature of scholarship -- at least, one particular kind -- in religious studies -- at least, this particular branch of the discipline. I'm not sure whether what it says, ultimately, is positive or negative. But it does strengthen my sense that there is a canonical, disciplinary foundation for religious studies more generally, and in my view that can only be a good thing, even for people (like Fitzgerald) who have made it their business to mount a fairly devastating critique of that foundation.

Ulysses via Twitter

I'm really becoming hooked on Twitter. This is one of the strangest phenomena I've come across yet. A line or two from Joyce's Ulysses every twenty minutes or so. At first I thought it was too annoying to deal with and wanted to "un-friend" the service, but gradually I find I keep coming back to see what's new.

clipped from twitter.com About booktwo Name: booktwo.org Bio: Literature + Technology Location: The future, perhaps Web: http://www.booktwo.o... out. Also hearses. To heaven by water. Perhaps I will without writing. me o'er the ferry. Cheaper transit. By easy stages. Houseboats. Camping 42 minutes ago from web auction but a lady's. Developing waterways. James M'Cann's hobby to row about 1 hour ago from web down. Hire some old crock, safety. Wren had one the other day at the about 1 hour ago from web Moyvalley, I could make a walking tour to see Milly by the canal. Or cycle about 1 hour ago from web reeds, over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs. Athlone, Mullingar, about 2 hours ago from web on his raft coastward over Ireland drawn by a haulage rope past beds of about 2 hours ago from web Their eyes watched him. On the slow weedy waterway he had floated about 2 hours ago from web dropping barge, between clamps of turf. On the towpath by the lock a about 3 hours ago from web

New bug going around

I think I got this ...

clipped from www.cbsnews.com New Strain Of Norovirus Hits Hard CDC Reports A Sharp Spike In Norovirus Cases BOSTON, April 1, 2007 In 25 years of practice, Dr. Robert Schreiber, physician-in-chief at Hebrew SeniorLife, says he has never seen anything so contagious. "The bug was the worst we have ever seen in terms of outbreaks," he said. "The way it's spread, despite the fact we were prepared for this, demonstrated that we were dealing with something new. We have had flu outbreaks here that were nothing compared to what we experienced here."