lightsinthedistance-modernlife

he truth is a big truth, very big. It is big like the sky. It is true. Fire burns—true. There is one truth, even on the relative level; it is just reflected in different ways. It is like the story of the ten blind men and the elephant. One blind man says the elephant is like a tree trunk, one says it is like a leaf, and so on, but really it is just one elephant. Likewise, truth is not relative truth, but it is one truth, which includes different discoveries. --Trungpa Rinpoche

 Greg Smith offered opening remarks. The 2013 Ohio Natural History Conference took place last Saturday and it was a blast! In case you missed it and want to read about what was discussed, check out my live tweeting of the event on Storify . I was joined in my live tweeting by Sam Evans and Rafael Maia and between the three of us, I think we covered the conference pretty well. This year's theme was " Natural History in the 21st Century and Beyond ," which encompassed the broad topic of how today's technology affects how we tackle the study of natural history. Presentations broached some far-ranging topics, from how museums are adapting, to how DNA barcoding is changing our concept of what a species actually is, to the use of smart phone apps for tracking invasive species. Each talk was apropos to what's happening in the field now and brought up good points to ponder, as well as success stories. I highly encourage you to check out the tweets from the conference ...

Some of you have been getting a bit shirty about my post on that. Thanks for proving my point! To wit: "Everyone knows that nature writers are self-reflexive" means: (1) You have admitted my basic observation. (Yet Ecocriticism is predicated precisely on denying it, viz Jonathan Bate's struggle against Hartman, who made the same claim about Wordsworth.) (2) You are claiming that I shouldn't mention that nature writers are reflexive. (3) (2) has the force of an injunction to be silent. "Of course everyone KNOWS that x" just is a perfect example of postmodern rhetoric, a symptom of cynical reason. And I'd go on to say that Wordsworth is the only one in the bunch who truly gets the Romantic irony involved in being explicit about narration. Yet Wordsworth like Abbey hide the fact that a female amanuensis is nearby to inspire and transcribe their wilderness narration... And like I say, when I first pointed this stuff out in 2007, I was threatened with physica...

...this game where you play a virus . Very similar logic to the book's basic object of study! Thanks to Ajay Kurian!

“Best.” It means “Best wishes, but I can't be bothered to type six letters, so not really best wishes.” It is like ending your email with a splat of Vaseline or Marmite. Or a googly eyed face that turns out to be on a middle finger raised in insult. As I learned at school and still practice, there is a sequence of signoffs. It goes: Yours faithfully [which you keep if you are talking to Gandhi or other luminary who is truly cool] Yours sincerely With best wishes Yours “Best.” It's a sonic and social splat. No wonder we all hate one another.

For some godawful reason I updated my author page at amazon.

Jayme Yeo just landed a job. I am totally not responsible for that but I did train her up a bit for the campus visit.

What's in it? Professor Wolfe gave it to me.

"Hey Salazar, you f--king fascist, you want to outlaw magazines? Come and f--king take them. Are you will to kill the f--king outlaw magazines, because you will f--king die." A Colorado state rep heard this on his voicemail this week while preparing a law to restrict the amount of bullets you can have, mandatory background checks etc. Which proves a point I keep making about Wayne La Pierre and his shouting potato performance: "The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." A bad guy with a gun is precisely a guy with a gun who thinks he's a good guy with a gun.

As someone who lives two blocks away from the Rothko Chapel I couldn't let today pass without acknowledging it's the anniversary of his death . Blimey if Jonathan Jones only figured out that Rothko's death gave his paintings gravity, he wasn't looking at the paintings. You can see why the Catholic St. Thomas's University (round the corner too) opted not to use Rothko for their chapel (Philip Johnson instead). His paintings and the chapel space are the real thing. And what is that? Disturbingly intimate raw flesh, of course.

I just sent these links to a colleague of mine involved in the whole MOOC business (against it, in the colleague's case). Feel free to copy and paste.  They are very well reasoned pieces by our Ian Bogost:  http://www.bogost.com/blog/moocs_are_marketing.shtml http://www.bogost.com/blog/mooc_rhetoric.shtml http://www.bogost.com/blog/educational_hucksterism.shtml http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/inequality-in-american-education-will-not-be-solved-online/267189/ Pith lines: " We collectively "decided" not to fund education in America. Now we're living with the consequences. Lost on those who mount such defenses is the fact that running these online courses costs  more  rather than less money in the short term (Georgia Tech's Coursera faculty are taking on the task on top of their normal work), and doesn't produce any direct revenue for anyone, not even Coursera." " Citing enormous enrollment numbers against very small numbers o...

That's absolutely right Joe Palermo . I lived through that decade and it sucked. The UC system won't recover for another decade after that $1.6bn cut it sustained in 2009. This is exacerbated by: (1) Stupid fools who just want to win and think that they can get mileage from hating on a black president. (2) A media "debate" about "bipartisanship." Compromise after compromise comes from the Democrats, while the GOP digs in its heels.

...a thing I haven't experienced since 2003. The quarter system gives you a long summer. And we structured our teaching so as to be able to have a quarter off each year. But that quarter always included graduate advising. So say you had the fall off. You teach a ten week term starting in January. Then you grade a compulsory exam and final papers. This massively eats into your spring holiday. And you also have to prepare two more classes for the spring. This was a common scenario as most people wanted that space in the fall.

“Our policies have caused our credit downgrading. Therefore, we should continue with those policies.”

Here is an aspect of one part of Ecology without Nature : Thoreau is about ponds and woods and fruits ... and Thoreau. Leopold is about wolves and mountains and farms ... and Leopold. Wordsworth is about fells and sheep and trees ... and Wordsworth. Narrative is about events and people and plotting ... and narrators. —The part after the ... is what nature writing is blind to. This blindness repeats the structure. Here I am writing about wolves and mountains. Here I am writing about a desert. Look, it's me, in a desert, writing. Did I tell you I was in a desert? I am in a desert. It doesn't much matter if you upgrade Nature to Nature 2.0, all flowy and pantheist and squishy and embedded. The same structure happens. Because you have not yet seen the whole thing, the whole of your Nature writing thing. When I was threatened (the only time I have been) with physical violence, for a stance I took (this stance), it was by a writer for an ecocriticism journal, who gave out his email a...

Q&A Q: isn’t this just like previous religions? Weber: disenchantment of nature within religions Enchantment of nature within science science erodes long standing religious metaphysics and it is easier or harder to incorporate it  transcendent divine beings have a hard time vs Buddhism (not theistic) Zammito: how does it evolve?  organizational level? Taylor: Where are the institutional expressions? university as global environmental milieu the sublime; how is it expressed today? that kind of affective connection has all sorts of institutional expressions some evidence that the world religions are coming around to this Q: evolutionary time and apocalypticism But part of what is interesting about so many world religions is that they are very developed views of eternity or the immortal or the completely permanent what are the views of eternity native in this movement? A: Ishmael by Quinn. He argues that the world’s religions are involved in some way in divin...

Jeff Kripal introduces.  “dark” = deep or profound and something ethically ambiguous and even ethically problematic upgraded mysterium, sacred; alluring and terrifying; awesome and potentially deadly Bron:  1859 Darwin knew the disruptions to conventional faith that his work would have he had left behind his belief in god not wanting to leave readers with a loss of meaning “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank...” section at the end of the book if you had been around at the axial age would you have recognized what would become the dominant religion I think this is emerging today again--I call it Dark Green Religion 1985: Val Plumwood canoeing; crocodile rammed her canoe she understood she was prey; broke past her sense of superiority  the crocodile taught the philosopher a lesson William C. Rogers, ELF, asphixiated himself << setting resort building in Vail on fire in 1998 learned he had been betrayed; charged for terrorism, facing life i...

In Zagreb, recently and soon .

I haven't read this entirely yet . Thanks Cliff! It looks most good.

...and here is a brief diagram of how Goth relates to Kant, black metal and constructivist art.

In my Anthropocene Aesthetics class. I wrote this on the board and liked it. It's about "Pictures of You" (Cure) and Charlotte Smith, who invented Goth.

There have now been over 5000 looks at Realist Magic   since it was published.

Do you know the insect species that inhabit your backyard? What about a local park or nature preserve? How about your county? These are important questions to think about. If no one knows the animal diversity in their area, then why would they stop to think about protecting that diversity?  Some of the most interesting animals are very specialized and need certain habitats to thrive; without those habitats, they'll disappear. I think we can all agree that nature is important, and having a knowledge of your local species (of insects, mammals, birds, plants, fungi...) is empowering. You can see ecological connections and gain a new-found respect for your fellow organisms, just from being able to identify species and know what's around you.  A Luna Moth ( Actias luna ) soon after emerging from the ground. Its wings aren't yet ready to fly--you can see how small they are. With this topic in mind, I've been working for the past few months on gathering together pictures and i...

...it is called Curve.

Why are the Welsh so good at (dance) music? Because they are on fire.

Attendance is compulsory:

My friend Jeff talking on things spiritual.

Nice one . Deft Rumi deployment.

What is the post-modernity (as opposed to postmodern) philosophical style? The top way of being right since the late eighteenth century has been cynicism. I am smarter than you because I can see through you better than you can see through me. After this, if there is an after, philosophy in post-modernity (I would say an ecological era) must be a kind of Benadryl: allowing me to tolerate greater levels of contradiction and ambiguity. This is one of the merits of Derrida, notwithstanding the authoritarian argument that a divine authority is impossible (the “radical atheism” strain). Discuss.

Just had a long chat with one of the many astonishingly intelligent Rice undergraduates. He had questions about Realist Magic (already!): awesome, unbelievably good questions. Viz: 1)Would it be fair to say that the aesthetic nature of withdrawn objects is related to Derrida's notion of différance?  2)When you describe a poem as located in the future, do you mean the written-poem-object or the performed-poem-object? (perhaps both?) For me it seems as if the word poem always waits (in the future) for you -the reader, so that when you arrive, you realize that you are waiting also -for something to arrive. Sometimes when a poem is read (by myself or another), it seems as if an impossible answer was given -materialized in the breath and vapor of the speaker, but immediately lost as soon as one awakes from the silence. All that remains is a memory of a memory of presence. I am hesitant to flatten these into equivalent aesthetics. Perhaps I am misunderstanding what you mean. I have bee...

...in Realist Magic I make quite a big deal out of Aaron O'Connell's discovery of coherence in a visible object. Now behold, Heisenbergian uncertainty in a visible object . Remember folks--according to the Standard Model (correlationism) this shouldn't be happening.

A disturbing BBC documentary shows that child murder (usually by very close relatives) is three times higher in the USA than in other countries such as Britain, Japan, Germany, France. Why? Two possible explanations stand out: --massive wealth discrepancies. --culture of violence fomented by "foreign policy" It was also notable that Britain had the lowest rate of the sampled countries. National Health? You get free nurse visits after a baby is born. Everyone gets them. At risk families can be spotted. This is close to my heart because --parent --wife is CPA for the Children's Assessment Center which works with abused children (instead of having them sent to the police) --mum used to be consultant for at risk kids' day care centers in the UK. Prevalence in UK and USA of social workers not seeing obvious signs.

I like my job so much I put in another in a series of very full days. I'm being trained up as director of undergraduate studies. Last time I did this the job I was at had 1200 English majors. Rice has 77. Nevertheless, my line so far has been--"I'm the new director of undergraduate studies. Run for your life."

Your brain is not reality.

From the BBC . You can see them with x-rays, because their wavelength is so tiny.

An essay for Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson, on Avatar . Gerry made some very helpful comments, which I'm incorporating. I like making bespoke things for people according to their specs.

...for you. Tammy Lu is a bit of a genius.

With Jane Bennett and a host of others! The Secret Life of Plants ______________________________________________________________________________ Natania and Antonia: We propose a joint presentation that explores the gradual passage of vegetal ontology out of the domain of metaphysics and into that of imaginative fiction, both early modern (in literature) and modern (in film). We will investigate the animated plant—including such figures as the sentimental cabbage, the humanoid vegetable, and the sexy flower—as a character that comes to bear the weight of speculations on the position of being (human beings included) within a spatio-temporal framework subject to infinite, inhuman expansion. In other words, we will explore vegetal encounters, in fiction, as a way of thinking through the problems of interplanetary travel, on the one hand, and human extinction on the other. Our source texts will include one of the earliest of European science fi...

The house remix of Robin Thicke's “My Life.” Its writer sent it to me just now. The bass line reminds me a little bit of Derrick May. There are many interesting things about this tune. For starters, it's Robin Thicke, who is so channeling Michael Jackson. If you think about how the African American singing voice is the dominant mode, and that forms are like viruses, you can see that Thicke somehow was fantastically susceptible to it. I mean I grew up with Jay K from Jamiroquai (my brother was nearly his drummer, sad), who was channeling somewhat. But this is just extraordinary. When I first heard the tune on the credits to Despicable Me , I assumed that it was indeed from the later 70s, so deft was the simulation. But "simulation" is an old postmodern concept for what this is. No. It's totally real: it's a strand of code and it's been reproduced. And who can't like a song about meeting one's perfect mate on the dancefloor (I did), superimposed on i...

... on the other hand, chimps aside ...

Craig Hickman with another great post , this time on the thing I just published.

They realize that they are chimps . Not lab animals.

Rolf Nowotny has an art show for which he asked me to write a piece. It's in NYC tba. It is called "Ecology, Dark, Weird." Here is the opener: Like a noir detective, humans have discovered that they are the culprits who ended the world. The philosophy that thinks this thought to the fullest extent possible is dark ecology. The darkness is not to do with ignorance, but precisely with its opposite: knowledge. Humans now know enough to encounter a reality stuffed full of entities that outscale them in every sense. Moreover, some of these entities are created by humans, such as Plutonium 239, whose half life is 24.1 thousand years, and global warming, whose amortization rate is 100 000 years. At that time scale, ethical and political theories based on self interest, however broadly defined—to include, for instance, the entirety of human beings on the planet and all their nonhuman agents, enemies and friends—begin to malfunction in a drastic way. For instance, it is better in ...

Just wrote this for Volume . Here is the basic argument: This essay is a caution against the notion that we are indeed about to enter a “brave new world”—a thought that has defined the human as such for about five hundred years. The concept of “next nature” precisely (though unconsciously) states the paradox: what is being thought here is simply a “new and improved” version of the same old thing, a repetition. How well has that been working out for the last two hundred years, namely the inception of the Anthropocene? The Anthropocene, in case we need reminding, is the radical intersection of human and geological time that began with the inception of the steam engine in the later eighteenth century. Since then, humans have deposited a layer of carbon in Earth's crust that is now found in deep lakes and within Arctic ice. The term Anthropocene was recently ratified by an international consortium of geologists. Before I suture gizmos to my flesh, I think a re-examination of what being...

We are trying to create a Buddhist world, an enlightened society, and one of the principal ways of doing that is for each one of us to become sane. Once you have understood, studied, and practiced, you might actually have to do something. Together we might need to wake up the whole world from its sleep and create an enlightened society in accordance with Great Eastern Sun vision. So we should appreciate one another. We should appreciate that we are going to create a wakeful world. --Trungpa Rinpoche

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Probably later today.

Someone is wondering how anything can occur in an OOO universe. Really, the question should be the other way around: how come we have allowed models forever that find it incredibly difficult to explain why and how anything happens at all? Realist Magic  is about that . See the cover? See the cover?!

For my smalls, in particular the female small, Claire. 2.14.13.

By David Thomas Smith .

It's now February, and that means it's almost time for the Ohio Natural History Conference! I've attended the conference since 2009 (with the exception of 2011) and it's always an event I look forward to every year. Last year in particular was a great year, as the theme for the conference was citizen science. There were many great speakers talking about their projects, and I presented two posters. I wrote about my experience in a post last year and also live-tweeted all the talks (except for a few that I missed.) The conference is a wonderful opportunity for anyone interested in natural history in Ohio to learn about research going on in the state and is great for networking. On top of that, there are booths set up where you can get great deals on books and other things. I won a silent auction last year and picked up a great book on weeds for $6! You can register for the conference here for an early-bird rate of just $20 if you register by February 10. After that, re...