Jackson > Recent Status Updates

"The camera is low on the pavement: Dad must have crouched in the road to take it. the man is bending down... and between the thumb and first finger of his bare right hand he is offering a crumb of bread to a sparrow on the kerbstone. The sparrow is caught mid-hop at exactly the moment it takes the crumb from his finger. And the expression on the man's face is suffused with joy. He is wearing the face of an angel."

"when citizens are subjected to the humiliation of extreme poverty and social isolation, they can muster neither self-respect nor the respect for others on which civil society, markets or streets depend to function. Citizens will not participate if they have no impact; they can have no impact if elites dominate all of social life...leading only to unsustainable technologies linked to limited isolated interests."

"Civilization... is taken as a general term to cover law, order, justice, urbanity, civility, rationality... it currently implies effort to further the arts and sciences and to improve the human condition by continued advances in both technology and responsible government. All these terms of admiration and praise... have now become ironic: at best they represent a hope and a dream that have still to be fulfilled."

"Strange, isn't it? To have dedicated one's life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one's life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one's labors utterly forgotten?"

"Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realize how unspeakably beautiful all this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure, and saw that I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing: swarms of insects dancing in slant-rays of August sun..."

"ritual & language & social organization... probably man's most important artifacts from the earliest stages on... man's first concern was to utilize his overdeveloped, intensely active nervous system, & to give form to a human self, set apart from his original animal self by the fabrication of symbols-- the only tools that could be constructed out of the resources provided by his own body: dreams, images & sounds."

This book is positively BLOWING MY MIND. It's so well-researched and Montgomery is a masterful manipulator of language and really drives home what might be clinical or heady ideas and studies-- he finds the thread between psychological and physical health as it relates to movement, environmental psychology, crime, social habits, happiness, history, cleaner environment, advertising and economics. Seriously.

"I have been a traveler my whole life, & yet at moments like this I feel completely untethered. There is a such a wave of loss it borders on grief. There is so much unknown down the road I feel disorientation bordering on vertigo...But there is another part that cannot stay still for long & needs to be out and away. That thrives on new topography and smells and rhythms, & wakes up and comes alive only when I travel."

"Was I supposed to do another Big Thing? Or could I do some small things for a while? Was it enough to string together things of any size until I died? Did it matter, as long as I had friends, family, a community?"

"Something about music urges us to engage with its larger context, beyond the piece of plastic it came on-- it seems to be part of our genetic makeup that we can be so deeply moved by this art form. Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolate thing. It's whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day."

"Do you think the biggest troubles in life are a result of doing or not doing things?" <-- this is why I read.

...bending my steps again to the pond ... appeared for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to school and college; but as I ran down the hill to the reddening west, with the rainbow over my shoulder ..., my Good Genius seemed to say,--Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day,-- farther and wider,-- and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving.

So far this has been another lovely book to savor so that I can get as much as possible out of Rubin's insights by self-reflection and application.

'We can already see that projects that use particularly spectacular visualisation techniques are well-publicised in magazines and the blogosphere. Is there a danger of catering too much to short attention spans while at the same time cruising on technology's aura of objectivity?'

"'Human' is not a fixed concept but a construction constantly under challenge and revision. Although... one might characterize certain aspects of the digital humanities as posthuman, the shift should be understood contextually as part of a long history of the 'human' adapting to new technological possibilities and affordances. Technologically enabled transformations are nothing new."

"The first wave of digital humanities work was quantitative, mobilising the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, stacking hypercards into critical arrays. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character."

I want to point out the past tense vs. present tense usage here, which signifies we're in the 2nd wave. -J

Klocubar (2011) argues that mobile, accessible database technology creates epistemological agnosia akin to Hegel's observation that human rationality involves a suspension of the subjective relationship between human and the world. The agnosia is technologically induced - by having the world of knowledge at our fingertips we will miss the world itself.