Asakiyume mita

The first part is an appreciation of a nice display of a great picture book, Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History, by Vashti Harrison, in a beautiful setting, the Silvio Conte Nature Trail in Hadley, MA.

The second part is a querulous complaint about a similar but poorly done nature-trail-storybook display.

( Little Leaders picture book display )

( the querulous complaint )

Now I know several of my friends on here have no interest in/actively dislike Twitter, but I do like it, so my thoughts these last few weeks have turned to 🎶How-do-you-solve-the-problem-of-the-owner.🎶

And I got to thinking, why not crowdfund a buyout? World's largest Kickstarter--$44 billion! Since Kickstarter doesn't take donated money unless the goal is met, and since $44 billion is not likely to be met, people could donate without worrying that it was a scam that was designed just to enrich whoever was behind the Kickstarter. And it would be a great gimmick, worthy of coverage on the news, especially if it picked up any steam at all.

And if it *did* pick up steam, then maybe serious organizations might consider for real whether they'd be willing to put money behind a serious attempt to revive the mortally wounded platform.

The money could be put in trust, only to be used to negotiate a purchase once a board of responsible people/organizations were in place to do the negotiations and run the future organization. There have to be some people who'd be interested who aren't nightmares--former employees of Twitter, maybe? And people who've been involved in running other social media platforms? And maybe people with interests in/experience with foundations or nonprofits?

But as I spun this fantasy out, I started thinking, If this effort got any coverage whatsoever, it would be two seconds before all my social media were hacked, my bank account drained, and vicious slanders and horrible things posted in my name or about me.

Well that doesn't sound great!

What if I did it anonymously? First thing would be to get a new email--I could do that through Duck Duck Go--they're always advertising about being super private. --One of my internal voices.

And how long do you think it would take the forces of the Dark Net to link that account to you? --A very skeptical other internal voice.

Not long, probably --The first one, sullen.

All things come to an end; maybe lots of decentralized, little social-media sites are, in the end, better --Yet another internal voice, one that's good at making backing down from grand plans sound not like timidity but like wisdom.

... Anyway, if I do launch discover someone has launched a kickstarter, I will let you know. ;-)

I've been musing on self-awareness and on humans' desire to have machines be self-aware ever since the story about the guy at Google came out. My thoughts have run in all kinds of directions. For instance: about relationships up and down the awareness scale. Most of us likely have had relationships with beings more self-aware than we are (parents are generally more self-aware than toddlers, and all of us have been toddlers and had parents or others filling that role), and most of us likely have relationships with beings that are less self-aware, and/or differently aware, than we are.

Those relationships are not only with living things but with nonliving things: we have feelings about and express ourselves to our computers, phones, cars, coffee makers, microwaves ... These might not seem like relationships because they're so one-sided, but I think they are: we interact; they respond to our inputs; we respond to theirs. We don't expect our microwave to discourse with us on anything, but we do expect that if we press a button, it will shoot microwaves through something and heat it/cook it for us. We're happy when it meets our expectations and disappointed or worried or annoyed if it doesn't.

What I'm trying to suggest is that we have relationships with all kinds of things of different levels of awareness, and we're generally fine with that. But the more like us something or someone is, the more we seem to want its/their awareness to match ours. Misunderstandings that arise with people very close to us show how much we expect or depend on those close ones' awareness matching ours. But sometimes it doesn't. We say a thing, and to us it's pregnant with meaning and import, and the person we're talking to replies, and we feel they've understood! Their thoughts are running the same way, and their response shows that! Only to discover later that no, they were *not* thinking in the way we imagined, and furthermore, they had no idea that what we said carried so much weight for us.

Or we can be on the other side of that--having an innocent conversation one day, only to find out to our alarm that it had all kinds of other meanings for the other person.

Those differences are painful, but it would be a weird kind of tyranny, a kind of Borg-ness, to expect another human being to understand and respond to us perfectly ... impossible really, given that we can't even say, ourselves, what a perfect understanding or response would look like.

I was thinking, if a machine/AI could be so cleverly programmed that it could duplicate human-type reactions, human-type non sequiturs, human-type self-absorption from time to time, but also human-type friendly queries, supportive remarks, gratifying curiosity and so on---all based on code--would it matter that it was code that was generating those responses and not whatever it is that generates those things in a human? Could being in relationship with a machine/AI on its own terms mean accepting its machine-ness and not requiring it to duplicate organic human-ness?

What do you think?

Across the sky, wispy white vertebrae from some decomposing heavenly beast.


photo by Flickr user Jen Scheer; cirrus vertebratus is an actual cloud type, apparently

"Sky creatures never stink when they decay," granddad says, "because they're half made of light. Down here we're made of heavy stuff and we stink when we decay. But the sky creatures have no sweet fragrances or intoxicating aromas, either. All the tantalizing scents we love come from the fact that earthly flesh is rich and heavy.

On Thursday I sat in on a workshop critiquing some recent papers relating to Timorese culture. (It's one true blessing to come out of this pandemic: people from all over the world can meet and talk with ease via Zoom: participants were in Japan, India, Brazil, Timor-Leste, Canada, and the United States, and I, a non-academic, was allowed to audit.) All of the papers sounded fascinating (the one that critiqued NGO activity as, in some regards, a continuation of colonialism had me nodding like a bobblehead doll, as it's something I often think).

But what seized my imagination was Alberto Fidalgo Castro's discussion of the concept of lulik, which usually is translated as "sacred," as in uma lulik, sacred house. But Alberto and others point out that it's not that some things are lulik and others are not: anything has the potential to become lulik. He referenced an earlier paper of his (which I tracked down and downloaded) that gave five everyday cases of that--like the case of the knife. In the paper he writes:

One Thursday, when I was drinking breakfast coffee in the kitchen, I couldn't find a spoon to help myself to some sugar, so I used a knife that was on the table. Ms. Rosita saw me, and scandalized, she asked me to stop doing that and ordered her son to find me a spoon. I didn't want to cause any trouble, so I told her that it wasn't necessary, that the knife was fine. Ms. Rosita was surprised at my response and explained to me that I couldn't take sugar with a knife, because it was lulik: it would give me an ailment of the heart¹

In person he was more detailed: he said that a knife is for cutting, and if you stir in sugar with a knife, you are cutting the coffee, and this will cut your insides, your heart.

In the paper, another example was when he came back to the house where he was staying and, being tired, rested his head on the table. In this case he was told

Kole, ba toba iha kama. Toba iha meza ne'e lulik ("If you're tired, go sleep in your bed. Sleeping on the table is lulik." I sat up right away and asked why it was lulik to sleep on the table. They told me, Ema mate mak toba iha meza ... Ita ema moris, toba iha kama ("It's the dead who sleep on a table. We living people sleep in beds")²

I realize as I type this out that the people are saying the situation is lulik, not the object, whereas when he was talking about the concept, he seemed to be stressing a transformation in the object, too. I don't know whether it's accurate to say that both things are true or if it's even a distinction that's made in Timor, but that's what my mind fixes on: how the status of the object changes when it's misused--it seems so very, very applicable to so much of life.

¹ Alberto Fidalgo Castro, "Personas y objetos en Timor Oriental: Relaciones lulik entre entidades," Ankulegi 21 (2017), 30 (my super rough translation).
²(same, 31).

On Thursday I picked up Wakanomori from the airport--he's back from the UK. We stopped around 7 pm at a rest stop on I-90, and as I was coming out of the bathrooms, I noticed a Verizon payphone, and on it, this remarkable sticker.



It starts with a blessing and a prayer, then turns to special needs: a job, help with Social Security and EBT (for people overseas, this is government food assistance), and then on to the lesser financial deities.

After snapping the photo, I wandered back to the table where we were eating, but my curiosity got the better of me. What happens if I press *10? What happens if I press *12? Or any of the others. So I went back. I picked up the receiver, but there was nothing.

It said on the machine that it was 50 cents for a local call, so I put in two quarters, but they fell right through and came out the coin return. I felt more than disappointed; I felt bereft. A scam and a prayer--but then the phone goes and doesn't even work. When I wrote about it on Twitter, a friend said, "This feels like a metaphor for ... something," and it really does. There's some kind of archaeology of desperation and last-ditch hopes there.

Today Wakanomori ran the Hartford Marathon. With this marathon, he's run a marathon in every New England state (not to mention several in New York). But two people running in today's marathon were using it as a capstone for running a marathon in every state, so there are always new goals to achieve.

I kept myself entertained by limping around Bushnell Park, which is not named after a corporation, as I darkly suspected (there is a Bushnell Corporation, but it's headquartered in Kansas), but after Rev. Horace Bushnell (1802–1876), who in 1853 proposed a park for the city.

I spent some time on this carousel (video is under 10 seconds)

Watch on YouTube

--riding this horse, whose magnificently lolling tongue I admired:



The horses all had really horsehair tails ... I was reminded a little of sartorias's Marlovens.

Along with horses, the park had some charming frogs:



They have spouts in their mouths and were in a playground area, so I'm guessing they add a fun water component in warm weather.

The marathon was tremendously well resourced. Here is a helper:



But initially I was in some kind of a mood--maybe partly because of the evidence of poverty around the place we spent the night and on our walk from where we parked.

Not evidence of poverty; just a mood-appropriate image from some cornice


( my grumble )

But everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves at the park, and after writing a letter and watching a fountain and seeing a monarch butterfly high up in the air--and riding the carousel--so was I. As I leaned on the railing in the spot I'd claimed at the finish, a young woman came and stood nearby for a while.

"Do you know how I can get over there?" she asked, pointing to the other side of the street.

"I think you just have to walk along until you come to a break in the barrier, and then you can cross," I said. "Do you have someone running?"

"No, I'm just visiting, and it happens to be a marathon," she said, laughing. Then, a moment later, "I admire their spirit."

Me too. It's not a zero-sum game. It's possible to have both public bathrooms AND marathons.

"Pra não dizer que não falei das flores" is the name of a Brazilian song. It means "So it can't be said that I didn't speak of flowers." It's also known as "Caminhando" (Walking). I came across it originally as part of a medley of songs sung by Chico César, a Brazilian reggae singer. (The whole medley is just wonderful and I listen to it all the time.)

When he segued over to "Pra não dizer que não falei das flores," my heart was grabbed by the lyrics:

Caminhando e cantando e seguindo a canção
Somos todos iguais, braços dados ou não
Nas escolas, nas ruas, campos, construções
Aprendendo e ensinando uma nova lição

(Walking and singing and continuing the song
We are all equal, arms linked or not
In the schools, the streets, fields, buildings
Learning and teaching a new lesson)

Especially that last part: learning and teaching a new lesson.

Then it got to the chorus, and he just pointed to the audience, and they sang the whole things without him. They'd done that earlier with his song "Mama Africa," but only after he'd sung it through once. Here he just turned it over to the audience, and they belted it out. (If you start here, you can hear that.)

It was clear they knew it *so well.*

So I got curious about the song. And it turns out it has an amazing story behind it. Wikipedia tells me that it was composed by Geraldo Vandré, who sang it at the Festival Internacional da Canção in 1968, where it was "the most applauded song of the night"--but only came in second place, because the army felt it was too critical of the government (at that time Brazil was under a military dictatorship). The next day, playing the song was banned, and all recordings of Vandré's performance at the festival were destroyed. Vandré himself had to go into exile.

Geraldo Vandré, as drawn by Jeferson Nepomuceno


Wikipedia says (though it's marked as "citation needed"), "'Walking' is regarded by many as the true Brazilian national hymn" and that it is "sung emotionally and in a spontaneous way by a large number of people."

That chorus, by the way:

Vem, vamos embora, que esperar não é saber
Quem sabe faz a hora, não espera acontecer

(Come, let’s go, for waiting is not knowing
The one who knows makes the time and doesn’t wait for it to happen)

(Here's a 1968 recording of the audience joining in with Vandré singing--I've set it to where the audience joins in.)

It really does seem to have anthemic stature. Here's a link to the whole song, sung by Vandré (not live).

Here's an image that's used on Youtube for a remix of a version of the song as sung by Simone, a well-known Brazilian singer who was--so Wikipedia tells me--the first to record it after censorship was lifted.



I think it's a cool image... and/but also, as someone who writes about a country that honors Abstractions, it's interesting to me that Order and Progress are what made it to the national flag ... they seem ominously predictive of the struggles Brazil has had. ... Not that "Liberty and Justice for all" as a slogan guarantees that anything like that will be what the population actually gets, but...

... okay, gonna just drift off now.

Here is one of my next-door neighbors, obliging me by recreating the pose I saw her in while she was playing with her dolls. I thought she looked like an Easter egg, waiting to be found.



That was Saturday. Then yesterday she and her sister were sporting these shirts that said JUSTICE in sparkles! (Hiding the face for privacy; that way I don't feel weird sharing the photo publicly)



I was amused/bemused. I think it's great that capitalist forces now think justice is marketable enough to mass produce on kids' clothes! But I feel like maybe one of those semiotics guys would have something to say about the representation of the word justice versus the actual thing. Like, where and how was that shirt produced...

Which ties in a bit to the next tale of the Polity. (In my case, You Know You're Writing Something When ... someone can say anything about anything, and you say, "Mmmmm, yes, that reminds me of my story because--")

Speaking of stories, I really enjoyed Nicole Kornher-Stace's time-loop-heist-gone-wrong story:

"Getaway," in Uncanny.

You’ve seen enough movies to know this is supposed to go one of two ways.

Either:

The loop breaks when you realize you’re an asshole, you get your shit together, you find your best self. To do this, you almost definitely need to find the other person on this timeline who’s looping too, and then you help each other, cut each other loose, go home together best friends forever. Roll credits. Piece of cake.

Or:

You have to find the anomaly that’s causing the loop and fix it. But you’re about two hundred percent sure you’ve got the anomaly pretty well pegged, and nothing you can do does fix it. Dilemma.

Which brings you back to option 1.

Only thing is, you’re pretty sure you’re not any more of an asshole than everyone else, and you reckon that if every asshole got pulled out of the main timeline and slingshot into their own personal self-realization pocket universe or whatever, it might be something of a topic of conversation when they rejoined the collective reality.

--really loved that paragraph about the pocket universe of self-improvement

I wrote this brief essay on bridges in Susanna Clarke's faerie for Apex Magazine back in September 2010. How long, long, LONG ago that seems now.

Anyway, there's been some interesting conversations among my DW friends about Clarke's short-story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu, and on sovay's suggestion, I thought I'd repost it here:

In “Tom Brightwind, or How the Fairy Bridge Was Built at Thoresby,” a short story of Susanna Clark’s in the collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu, the fairy Tom Brightwind is persuaded to build a bridge connecting the depressed little town of Thoresby to the outside world.

He promises to do it in just one night. Not hard, you say, because he is a fairy. True, but what was interesting to me was how he did it. He didn’t magic up a bridge out of clouds and air. He didn’t even magic up masonry and float it into place. No: instead, he uses his magic to summon horses and workmen from their sleep, along with an architectural student (who comes equipped with a book that has an image of a bridge by Piranesi, which is to be their model), a stonemason, and an engineer.

The engineer must direct the workmen to build the bridge. It doesn’t go smoothly:

By two o’clock Henry Cornelius [the architectural student] was in despair. The river was not deep enough to accommodate Piranesi’s bridge. He could not build as high as he wished. But Mr. Alfreton, the master mason, was unconcerned. “Do not vex yourself, sir,” he said. “Mr Wakely [the engineer] is going to make some adjustments.

But eventually the bridge is built, and the enchanted laborers all find themselves drifting back to sleep (the story doesn’t tell us how or when they make it back to their homes again).

I was intrigued by this method of building the bridge, especially given the fantastical fairy bridges in Faerie itself, as conceived by Susanna Clark in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. In this excerpt, the (human) magician Jonathan Strange describes one such bridge:

Then suddenly I passed under an arch and found myself upon a stone bridge that crossed a dark, empty landscape. The bridge was so vast that I could not see the end of it … It was much higher than any bridge I have ever seen in this world. The ground appeared to be several thousand feet beneath me.”

That bridge, I fancy, was not build by architects, stonemasons, and laborers roused from their sleep. One can’t imagine them knowing how and where to begin to build such a thing. That bridge, moreover, lies along the “King’s Roads” in Faerie:

The King’s Roads lead everywhere … They were built by magic. Every mirror, every puddle, every shadow in England is a gate to those roads.”

So a fairy bridge, built in Faerie, is built by magic, and is beyond real in all dimensions and attributes. But a fairy bridge, built in this world, even by magic, must adhere to the laws of physics, must take into account statics and stresses and load-bearing members … and river depths. So maybe that’s why, even when built by magic, a bridge in this world requires an engineer, a stonemason, and many workmen.

Then again, maybe it was all down to the whim of Tom Brightwind. What do you think?

Image is "A View of Part of the Intended Bridge at Blackfriars, London," and I use it for illustration purposes ... can you guess why? I will tell: it's because it's by Giovanni Battista PIRANESI