PostModern Jetlag

I’m too jetlagged to respond to AKMA and Tom Matrullo’s latest entries in the Post-Modern AKMA blogthread. In fact, I’m too tired to copy and paste the links; they’re both in my blogrolodex to the left. Both are excellent.

I’m in Shanghai with my 11-year-old son. We slept about 4 hours on the plane and about 4 hours last night, which is not nearly enough. We spent the morning walking to the Yu Yuan Gardens on the other side of the river. I can’t tell the real Chinese from the preserved Chinese to the re-created Chinese. (I’m talking about the buildings, not the people, you wise-acres.) One part of town struck me like a Chinese Chinatown, that is, an attempt to build a place that would meet the expectation of tourists. But, lacking language, I can’t tell.

Anyway, Shanghai at first glance is complex, vital and amazing. So far, Hong Kong seems like the place most like it. But it’s amazing how empowering lack of sleep and knowledge are when it comes to making sweeping generalizations.

Must sleeeep….

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Accidental Communities

Joe Mahoney writes in response to my comment that “a community is a group of people who know one another and care about one another,” which was in response to Clay Shirky’s article on whether communities scale:

Richard Ford once said that he liked community a lot better in theory than in practice. That’s my experience as well. It’s also that of many people I know. It’s a peculiar word, in that I think of it as conveying something which in real life is rarely delivered: i.e., people knowing and caring about each other. In its most common usage, the reality it signifies seems to be people who are tossed together because of affinities that are less deep than those strong attractors that get people communicating without physical proximity on the web: E.g. my neighborhood community vs. the people I share poetry with on the net. Certainly the former are people with whom I have concerns in common: property tax, trash collection, noisy parties. But if it goes deeper, that’s likely to be accidental. The latter are people I interact with because the affinity comes first and proximity doesn’t matter. I’m thinking the web stands a much better chance of making community live up to its semantic implications than the non-web. It’s a community I embrace in practice as well as in theory.

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Small Pieces Nicely Reviewed

There’s a cool review of Small Pieces (my book) by John Moran in The Hartford Courant.

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Gift

We drop letters into a box
Wring the gray water from a sweater
Clap too long at our daughter’s class play
Scrape pink gum from our black soles
Jostle the flour jar and pour more in

And spring happens.

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Hallmark for a Realist

If you can dream it, then it can be
Except of course in reality
Which wouldn’t be a problem except
That’s where the banks and girls are kept.

["Women" just didn't scan. Neither did "potential love interests." And the equating of women with banks and money is offensive. In fact, I withdraw the whole thing.]

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Post-Modernism Post

Steve Himmer at OnePotMeal responds to my question for AKMA. Steve writes (forgive the long quote):

Yes, we need to recognize that using the POMO toolkit we can dismantle anything down to its core and beyond, and the beyond includes dismantling the theory itself … But if we decide that deconstruction does offer something worth pursuing, than we have no choice (as I see it) than to determine our arbitrary starting point and deal with that shortcoming in our theory and work by acknowledging the deconstructable method by which we arrived. It’s not an ideal solution, but it is a real one, one which offers an escape (albeit tenuous and temporary) from the quagmire of spiraling questions upon questions.

In effect, then, what we are saying is, ‘I am choosing to start my questioning here, and these are the results of that beginning… these may not, however, be the results I would get if I started my questioning there, which is just as valid a launch-point as here. That, I think, is the value of treating all interpretations as fictive…

To which I respond: Well done! My only quibble is with the word “choose” since our starting point is not a matter of choice. I am an American, 20-21st Century, English-speaking Jewish man, and I can never escape that starting point. Even if I rebel, I do so as an American, 20-21st Century yada yada. And while it’s possible to transcend and transform one’s situation to some degree as Newton and Picasso did, it still occurs within the situation: Socrates’ pal Alcibiades couldn’t have been Newton or Picasso. So, not all starting points are equal because only one of them is mine. (And, of course, I am that starting point’s more than it is mine.)

Tom has also replied to my question for AKMA. He wonders whether I’m too focused on “hermeneutics,” i.e., the study of the act of interpretation:

…much of what is original in lit-crit and lit-theory in the past 25 years or so has more to do with an openness to the act of reading in a broader sense than “just” interpreting the “meaning” of a text. Genial insights into the subtle arsenals of poetics and rhetoric suggest that the encounter with a text is less than adequate to the extent it focuses exclusively on what can be said “in other words.” That is, the effort of rigorous translation leaves out something essential to the experience of reading, and to the generation of audiences.

Great point. I need to think about it more. My initial reaction is to clarify what I mean by “interpretation.” I don’t mean in the way in which a translator interprets. Rather, I take it as “taking something one way and not another.” The “taking” absolutely doesn’t have to be intellectual or linguistic. That’s why hermeneutics (in my understanding) applies not only to texts but also to things — I take the twig as a way to scratch my back although tomorrow I might take it as kindling. (The Deconstructors have proposed — haven’t they? — that the entire world is a text; I’d lean the other way.) But Tom’s comment is deeper than that and this is a hook I don’t want to squirm off of.

Tom also questions whether I’m dismissing the folks worth reading (Walter Benjamin and Derrida are Tom’s examples) by equating them with the nattering “neener neener”s. And this is one hook I think I can clear safely: I wrote my 1,600 question to AKMA precisely because I don’t dismiss those others. Sorry if I implied otherwise…

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Post-Modern AKMA

I was going to write a review of AKMA’s book, What Is Post-Modern Biblical Criticism?, but he’s blogged a review of my book, so running a review of his book would look a little too hand-washy. Instead, I’ll just say that this is the clearest introduction to post-modernism and deconstructionism that I’ve read. Yes, it happens to use biblical interpretation as its topical area, but it applies far more widely. AKMA is a clear, entertaining and generous writer, but you knew that already because you’re reading his blog, aren’t you?

So, allow me to expose the depths of my inability to understand post-modernism (“POMO”). Perhaps AKMA can be enticed to help pull me out of my hole…

…Continued

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Note to Self: Screw Yahoo

Don’t forget to turn off the permission-to-spam Yahoo has granted itself. Click “off” all 15 topics Yahoo’s new privacy policy says you want to be spammed about, and then tell Jerry and Dave that we will not will not be spammed by mail, even mail delivered by snail, and we will not will not be spammed by phone, we must not be spammed, now leave us alone!

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New Security Problems with IIS

Internet Security Systems Security Alert April 10, 2002

Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities in Microsoft IIS

Synopsis:

ISS X-Force has learned that Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) is affected by ten new remote vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities vary in severity from mild to critical. A remote attacker may exploit one or more of these vulnerabilities to cause a target Web server to crash, execute arbitrary commands on the server, or gain complete control of a target IIS server.

1. Heap Buffer overflow in ASP chunked encoding routines (CAN-2002-0079)

…

Other security problems with IIS that have been recently discovered:

Flattery gets you root access.

It can be bribed with hockey tickets.

Say “I’m going to tell on you!” and it will run away and leave all its passwords on the ground.

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BlogChat

Even as I type this, I’m chatting with Brent Ashley and Tim Aiello. Chatting in the Internet sense. They’ve developed a very cool chat capability you can stick right on your blog page. Open source, of course. If you’re interested in trying it out or finding out how you can participate in the beta, go to Brent’s site.

Gotta get back to chatting…

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