On Ritual Time

May 15, 2011 By

When was the last time you coordinated a rendezvous with someone saying “I’ll meet you before sunset?” I did that with my New Orleans host, Dimitry Lukashov because he keeps Shabbat, and I wanted to make sure I got to his place before he turned off his phone, in case I got lost.

You should try a sunrise or sunset based  rendezvous sometime. It is interesting to look at the sun as an actual practical time signal instead of just a maker of beautiful sunrises and sunsets. Very calming. Scheduling around natural times tends to add a natural fuzziness which can be relaxing or anxiety-provoking depending on your relationship to clock time.

Post-Shabbat on Saturday, we went downtown, wandered past Bourbon street and the touristy French Quarter to a nightlife block preferred by the locals (I forget the name). I felt my age I guess. It was still too chaotically “happening” for me.  We wrapped up the evening with a 1:00 AM breakfast at a famous local diner.

I am starting to feel my age. One of Dimitry’s housemates (he’s a graduating Tulane senior) said to me, “you’re staying with Dimitry, right?…. and are you kinda older?” That cracked me up. “Yup, much older,” I said. It is curious how blogging gets you connected to people in age-agnostic ways. The ribbonfarm/Tempo readership seems to span the age range 18-70. In almost any other context, I’d find it very weird, as a 36-year old, staying with a college senior. The blog/book road-trip context reduces it to “only slightly weird.”

Hard Takeoffs and Landings

This morning, I left New Orleans after a creole-inspired brunch. The restaurant had the biggest selection of hangover drinks I’ve ever seen, including a very complicated DIY Bloody Mary bar. I am afraid mine wasn’t very creative. Dimitry’s (on the right) was a work of art. I can’t do okra in a drink though.

I’ve been mulling Alain de Botton’s evocative description, in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, of the tempo of industrial age workdays: “the hard takeoffs and landings of coffee and alcohol.”

In New Orleans, where the day seems to start around noon and end around 4:00 AM (the town allows you to walk around with alcohol containers on the streets and there is no legal last-call time), Alain de Botton’s description must be modified for New Orleans to “the hard takeoffs and landings of alcohol. Period.”

Though the city has great coffee, overall it is a far more relaxed place than any similar-sized city in America I’ve been. The locals have a curious self-perception of the city as actually being part of the Carribbean. An embassy for island time in the middle of mainland time perhaps.

I am also surprised by the number of people I am meeting on my travels who have quit coffee. Maybe we are heading towards a softer tempo age.

 

 

 

 

The Author’s Journey and the Blogger’s Journey

May 14, 2011 By

I am in New Orleans, ironically pretending to be an author in the traditional publishing-industry sense of the word. I am sitting in a seriously cliched writerly cafe, the Rue de la Course near the Tulane University campus. Jazz is playing in the background. Its the sort of coffee shop that conforms to your expectations of an archetypal artsy coffee shop so well, it is surreal. Like The Simpsons’ idea of an artsy coffee shop.

If I grew an instant goatee, slapped a beret on my head and called myself a flâneur, (a self-descriptor preferred by a certain celebrated evil twin of mine),  I’d be a perfect parody of a writer. A tres French writer at that. The only way I can continue sitting here (and I want to because it is actually a very nice place and the coffee is good) is to do so ironically.

Jokes aside, being in this coffee shop, doing what I am doing, got me to a serious breakthrough concerning the difference between being a blogger and being an author, a question I’ve been pondering ever since I started out on this road trip to promote Tempo nearly two weeks ago. Though I have now published a book, I view myself (and usually introduce myself/prefer to be introduced) as a blogger, not “author” or “writer.” It isn’t really about what medium you use or how you write. It is about how you view yourself. Author is a profession within the publishing industry. Blogger is a trade practiced by an individual. Professions and trades both wrap around a skilled craft and a specific way of seeing the world (the “art”), but there the similarities end. Blogger and Author are very different archetypes that lead to very different narratives. Specifically, Author leads to a standard redemption narrative, while Blogger leads to a life-as-performance-art narrative.

So here we go; my first serious and long post on this blog. And yes, it may be a bit confusingly self-referential for those who’ve read Tempo, since it i s a book about archetypes and narratives, but I am sure you’ll be able to keep everything straight. If you haven’t read the book, you should probably read this post first.

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Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia

May 14, 2011 By

This is a guest post by Stefan King.

In 1990, the art historian Camille Paglia provoked feminists and post-modernists with her controversial book Sexual Personae.  Paglia’s goal was to show the pagan patterns of continuity in western culture, and to expose feminist ideals as misguided wishful thinking. Now, two decades later, it is time to dig Sexual Personae out of the cultural compost heap and see if something interesting has grown there. Paglia has a highly sensitive intuition about great works of art, and she is a talented psychoanalyst of artists. The value of the book lies in those intuitions, which we can now study with the benefit of hindsight.

The Venus of Willendorf

The grand narrative of western archetypes, or “sexual personae” as Paglia calls them, starts with the Venus of Willendorf, a small statuette from the Stone Age. It is a faceless lump of feminine flesh, possibly a fertility talisman. It contrasts perfectly with anything civilized: there is no line, no shape, no stillness, and no Apollonian light. In those times, nature’s domination of humanity was total.

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Functional Fixedness and Kata Learning

May 12, 2011 By

I am spending a couple of days here in Atlanta with Ho-Sheng Hsiao (Hosh). He invited me to join him for the monthly meeting of the Atlanta Ruby User Group (ALTRUG), and I jumped at the opportunity, since for whatever reason, a lot of programmers (and I think Ruby programmers in particular) seem to read my writing. The event provoked a fertile trail of thought on the nature of learning.

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Freytag Staircases in Nashville

May 12, 2011 By

One of the key concepts in Tempo is something I call a “Freytag staircase” (the term is derived from “Freytag triangle,” a well-known model of simple narrative structures). I am working on putting a glossary for the book online, but I am mentioning it now because the Freytag staircase is a way to visualize birth-to-death life narratives and use the visualization to frame your decision-making. And the reason I am bringing it up is that I never really thought about how it might work for people with different religious beliefs. In Nashville, where I bunked with musician Micah Redding of the Redding Brothers and his wife Emily,  I dropped in on a very interesting local meetup (Micah and Emily are part of it) devoted loosely to debating religious themes from a wide variety of perspectives.

 

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The Car/Truck Ratio

May 11, 2011 By

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The drive down the center of America from Detroit to Nashville is fascinating. Among the interesting Tempo-related things I noticed was that the car/truck ratio was much lower than on the coasts. Correlates to the lower population and greater presence of logistics industries, and gives driving here s very distinct feel. It’s like being in a forest of semis instead of an open road.

Week 2: Ann Arbor, Nashville, Atlanta, New Orleans

May 9, 2011 By

Post your comments over on the original post on the Tempo blog.

I am in Ann Arbor, MI as I write this, preparing to head south tomorrow. The plan is to wander down to New Orleans over the week, and then start up along the Mississippi next week. For the coming week, I have Atlanta plans nailed down and Nashville and New Orleans plans almost nailed down. According to Google Maps, Dayton, Cincinnati, Lexington, Knoxville, Montgomery and Mobile are along the route. If you suspect you are within a reasonable band off this route, give me a holler.

Here are links to my the posts I liveblogged on the Tempo blog during the first week. Delay-blogged rather.

Some reflections on Week 1 follow, for those interested in the metatext.

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Week 2: Ann Arbor, Nashville, Atlanta, New Orleans

May 9, 2011 By

I am in Ann Arbor, MI as I write this, preparing to head south tomorrow. The plan is to wander down to New Orleans over the week, and then start up along the Mississippi next week. For the coming week, I have Atlanta plans nailed down and Nashville and New Orleans plans almost nailed down. According to Google Maps, Dayton, Cincinnati, Lexington, Knoxville, Montgomery and Mobile are along the route. If you suspect you are within a reasonable band off this route, give me a holler.

Here are links to my the posts I liveblogged on the Tempo blog during the first week. Delay-blogged rather.

Some reflections on Week 1 follow, for those interested in the metatext.

[Read more…]

Time Travel for Ghosts

May 9, 2011 By

Situation awareness and mental models are much weirder phenomena than people realize. In Tempo, I mostly talk about their non-weird, intuitively obvious aspects. The weirdness comes in when you start to become conscious of, and understand, the logic behind some of the seemingly odd things the brain does. A commonly cited illustration is Proust’s madeline. It makes no kind of logical sense that a specific kind of cookie should be the starting point for a process of gradually uncovering a lifetime of memories. But it makes a great deal of narrative sense. This is one reason fragmented memory landscapes are a popular plot device with film-makers. Movies like The Machinist and Vanilla Sky come to mind (I’d like to compile a list of such movies and rewatch them. Any other suggestions? I vaguely recall a movie with a fragmented-memory type plot that had the motif of scissors running through the story).

One of the best ways to understand how situation awareness and mental models work is to return to a place of significance in your life after a very long period of absence. You will experience the surreal logic of your mind. The best description I can come up with for the experience is “time-traveling ghost.”

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Darwin, Some Rationalists and the Joker

May 8, 2011 By

After my little trip into the Laurentian mountains, it was Ottawa for me yesterday. There I met up with reader Alex DeMarsh and a few friends he’d pulled together from a local Less Wrong meetup, at the pleasant Fox and Feather pub. Reading left to right, we have Corey, Alex, Miranda and Ben. Alex and Ben are ribbonfarm/Tempo readers, while Miranda and Corey had never heard of me.  I like that kind of ratio of (digitally) familiar and unfamiliar people. The meeting was very interesting, since it helped me further clarify how the idea of narrative rationality that I have developed in Tempo relates to traditional notions of rationality.

For those of you aren’t familiar with Less Wrong, it is a community of rationalists associated with the Singularity Institute. I admit I was rather wary and curious at the same time. The Less Wrong world seems to overlap significantly with my readership. I have no idea why. Quite often, a new reader will mention Less Wrong and ask whether I read the site. The answer is, I don’t. I have looked a bit, but have never been able to get into it, even though they discuss a lot of the themes I discuss on ribbonfarm and particularly in Tempo. I suspect I am in a sort of evil-twin relationship with the Less Wrong philosophy of cognition and decision-making. When I said this at the meetup, one of the attendees remarked, “…and you’re the evil twin.”

I have a pleasant ongoing email conversation with some of the folks behind Less Wrong (Michael Vassar and Jasen Murray), but though I like lots of bits and pieces of the thinking that seems to emerge from the community, I sense that my intellectual DNA is fundamentally different in some deep way that I haven’t yet figured out.

To my pleasant surprise though, the meeting was a great deal of fun. I guess I was sort of expecting an inquisition by a panel of Spocks given the views I espouse, but it was mainly a freewheeling open-ended discussion that went down plenty of interesting rabbit holes. Beer, nachos and bad geek jokes flowed freely.

Building on the evil twin theme, a big meme for the evening was Batman rationality vs. Joker rationality. The Batman vs. Joker (Heath Ledger version) sheds a surprising amount of light on questions such as whether you should want to live for ever and whether rational people necessarily want good things for everybody.

I wish now I’d recorded the conversation. Suffice it to say that we explored some very fertile territory, and a good time was had by all.

I am now less wary of the lesswrongers than I used to be. They bring a healthy sense of doubt, irony, aesthetics and skepticism to their passion for rationality. I expect I’ll continue making fun of them on occasion though. I can’t help myself. A dedicated group of world-saving, optimal-living optimists with a deep faith in the power of rationality suggests far too many irresistible jokes to someone with a bloody-minded sense of humor like me.  I expect they’ll actually succeed in their effort to save the world, and I’ll go to atheist hell where Richard Dawkins’ ghost will torture me.

Following the pub meetup (which included a game of darts where I came in dead last), we moved to a party somewhere else in Ottawa and returned rather late to Alex’s house, where I shared the futon for the night with his cat, Darwin, who likes to sit inside dresser drawers. I took this amazingly evil picture of Darwin that I am itching to post in an intelligent design forum. Dawkins bless camera flashes and cat corneas.