Tuesday, March 27, 2007

EPluribusUnum, or Women's History Month

I'll tell you all about my messiah complex later on, but for now want to talk about now, and bring to your attention some services that came to my attention this afternoon. This week, Flavorpill, which you should just go-Ogle, is promoting a free party at Webster Hall by two "activity-enabling orgs," MyOpenBar and HeyLetsGo. Were we not in haste to go get some reading done, we would think about the inefficiency of spaces between words. Both of these are social networking services. They collect people by collecting email addresses. They are party-minded objective spirit, which I have been given to understand is a fancy pseudonym for social institutions. Oh wait, we had the thought while we were writing: losing the spaces between the words is a way to draw attention to the objectivity of the service, to articulate what they do. EPluribusUnum, as it were.

Also, there is GoodReads, where you can post what you're reading, what you were reading, what you want to read. Why not? Claire, I imagine, will never forcibly collect those syllabi from the rest of us, anyway.

As these media show no sign of slowing their reciprocal proliferation and consolidation, one can merely hope that the soft, Mac-white anaesthesis that they radiate is not, as the ice-pick Modernists have feared, malignant. As objectivity draws itself together with all the inevitability of a dying star, let us aspire to actually *using* it, to reaching into the instantaneous transference of information and grasping inside that magnificently-organized storm an equally human hand.

By which I mean, nothing more than my class of seven women continuing the conversation about art criticism when my male teacher ran out of the room with a nosebleed, and nothing less than recreating our political system online, if that's what it fucking takes. Speaking of which, ladies, do me a fave and talk about HISTORY with one another. Whatever strand you want -- music, hairdos, marriage, education, weapons, politics, philosophy, philanthropy, philadelphia, the rocky mountains, judaism, elephants -- just talk about it.

14 comments:

mark said...

software engineers (java devs, of note) will often omitSpaces(), heh.

actually, come to think of it, APhraseInThisForm is referred to as being in CamelCase*, which perhaps refers to the humps. (the lovely letter humps.)

if the first letter is lowercase, its camelBack. (maybe got...)

mark said...

oops. wikipedia says lowerCamelCase is correct and not camelBack. i recline corrected.

Anonymous said...

i totally want to hear about the messiah complex.

out of curiosity (as to what you're reading/thinking here), why does that long list of topics fall under the category of history?

THE FIRE BOSS (aka EFF BEE) said...

mark: yes. clearly, the NoSpaces trend says InternetMarketability. it is the saleable result of object reference coding.

a.s.k.: i have been reading adorno and his translator. not hegel, except between quotation marks. i have a suspicion, which we should maybe talk about on saturday, that women are not asked often enough to think historically. i was in this cafeteria the other day, and the two advertised activities for women's history month were a body image focus group and a discussion on queerness. where is the history? i wondered.

all those things i listed have history, yes? their contents and/or social functions have changed. this is true of more or less everything, from what i can tell. i figured people reading this might be partial to some subset of my list.

Anonymous said...

hegel is best read between quotation marks, in my opinion. it is for the best. i was kind of wondering if 'history' in your post was to be understood as 'Spirit.'

i'm not sure i concur about women not being asked to think historically. of course, my older sister is a historian, so maybe it's just not a part of my experience?

and yes, all of those things have history...i think i was reading you improperly, as understanding them as categories to be subsumed under the broader category of history, full stop. at which point i'd have to object, if only because my disciplinary loyalties tie me to a field that likes to set itself up as 'queen of all the sciences' king of the castle or some such nonsense (meta-physics, anyone?). at any rate. saturday, yes. we shall discuss. before/after a most historically informed musical experience.

Claire: said...

Claire, I imagine, will never forcibly collect those syllabi from the rest of us, anyway.

ppptthhh, i say. one hopes that i would not have to force them out of you, that when or if you ever trip over them again you'll think "ah, claire was trying to compile these back in the day, perhaps i will take a quick pic of them and email them on over" or some such.

i have a couple of yours, fb, from your post about interp theory, so you have less to send me.

how are things? i miss you!

K. Ross Hoffman said...

all of this is good.

i notice that we omit unnecessary spaces between words in spoken language, which is often otherwise less efficient.

am i/how do i be party minded objective (?) spirit?

i'm you eMail re: Silly FunSav(i)ours

THE FIRE BOSS (aka EFF BEE) said...

r: you are spaces and then some. i's gotta be back in town here by satradayeen, but whate'er i can accomplish avec toi before then, i think i will. schmaccomplish.

c: i miss you too. to the extent of dreaming about you now and then. someday i'll get back on skype and then it'll be like: HOLLER! in the meantime: send me a note?

a.s.k.: english for you. i'm not sure i'm not talking about spirit. i had a big metaphysical frying pan moment (wham!) on saturday night when i shouted at julie: "history is subjective!" you and ta soeur, je pense, do a very good job of being historical. you wind up in rooms with spivak. tho many of us would, for years, never presume to think History could be thought, nor spoken. earlier i wondered, "maybe it's not women. maybe it's people who grow up with air conditioning." i think the boyz get a step ahead by mediating so many of their relations by objects.

K. Ross Hoffman said...

wwtf?

[what's with the french]

[just wanted to say that]

Anonymous said...

so marketable.

in dev world, i usually use_underscores(). this recovers no ground spacially, but for some reason is pleasing to me. code, like history, is subjective.

domain names with underscores are universally eschewed (and hypens should only be used when necessary). it is interesting (to me) to note how a domain name can be translated easily into RadProse through creative use of punctuation. ah, punctuation!

Anonymous said...

One of my greatest fears (and not without grounds) is that I will someday get one of my trademark nosebleeds in the middle of giving a lecture. And I doubt that my students will be so self-directed.

Mark, way to represent the coder population. I, too, am partial to underscores.

Rebecca said...

i spend a lot of time talking about history, it seems. it's definitely central to furthering my RadicalFeministObsession (TM), and judaism comes in for the treatment on a regular basis as well. why, just last night i gave a capsule history of judaism in euro-american culture for the last three hundred years!

(it was a bit rocky. and i sounded like a KnowItAll. guilty.)

but isn't that part of what gets in the way of women talking more about history? sure, as the NYT would say, it's hot to be smart. but it's more important to be hot.

K. Ross Hoffman said...

WhatIfWeWroteLikeThisAllTheTime?

it can be intimidating to talk about history (for everybody i think, or at least some boys too) b/c it's something we feel like we're suppose to know about but often don't. (which is a catch-22, since we learn about things by talking about them.) that's true of a lot of things.

rebecca, i admire you for talking authoritatively about things, even if you may not always be certain about them, and even if makes you seem like a knowitall sometimes, because that's still pretty cool. (and it's hot to be cool.)

even moreso, i just love it when people are interested in things, regardless of whether or not they know about them, because it reminds me to be interested in things too. (and things are interesting!)

do we get to hear about the messiah thing?

THE FIRE BOSS (aka EFF BEE) said...

reb: right. i wonder according to whom did you sound like a know-it-all? i would love to hear your "Judaism Since 1700" lecture.

i think that there have been and continue to be gender differences in relationships to knowledge. however, these days i'm less inclined to talk *about* that claim and to skip straight ahead to encouraging lots of knowledge among everyone i can think of. mostly want to avoid the thinking about because i am finding it way too hard to conceptualize a right relationship to knowledge, whether it should look more like this model or that model. just, yes.