A Few Reasonable Words

Too bad we can’t see it (only audio in the U.S.), but still a lot of fun. Gromit, once again, saves the day. You also get to hear John Adams’ “Short Ride in a Fast Machine,” always a rush. Only up through Sunday. So if you need a giggle, go for it now.

Meandering around Microsoft Research’s amazing AIDS Quilt app (subject of a future entry), I found “Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench,” which intrigued me as I thought it was for the study of workflows in general. Not quite that, but still interesting. It’s a tool for scientists to manage and visualize the workflows that inform their research. From their site:

With Project Trident, you can author workflows visually by using a catalog of existing activities and complete workflows. The workflow workbench provides a tiered library that hides the complexity of different workflow activities and services for ease of use.

An increasing number of tools and databases in the sciences are available as Web services. As a result, researchers face not only a data deluge, but also a service deluge, and need a tool to organize, curate, and search for services of value to their research. Project Trident provides a registry that enables the scientist to include services from his or her particular domain. The registry enables a researcher to search on tags, keywords, and annotations to determine which services and workflows­—and even which data sets—are available. Other features of the registry include:

• Semantic tagging to enable a researcher to find a service based on what it does, or is meant to do, and what it consumes as inputs and produces as outputs.
• Annotations that allow a researcher to understand how to operate the registry and configure it correctly; the registry records when and by whom a service was created, records its version history, and tracks its version.

Would have to see it in action to understand it, but an intriguing idea. Arts and humanities researchers would probably balk–starting with the word workflow–but they have a similar deluge of data/services problem.

The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski on why he’s a poet and not a philosopher:

I realized early on that I’d probably never be a real scholar, an archivist, an academic. I didn’t read my way scrupulously through the assigned texts—which weren’t just Soviet, hence scarred from birth by the sins of shoddiness, duplicity, and monotony—but also included classics of philosophy. I didn’t stroll slowly and sedately through the lanes of printed pages, snaring key quotes with the aid of a pencil before transferring them to a notebook or index cards, the indispensable carapace of the true student. I daydreamed, dropped the book, forgot it, and drifted on to something new, and when I came to, I found myself in another place and time, in Portugal or Chile, on the shores of the Mediterranean, in the Middle Ages or the first decade of the nineteenth century.

And so my assigned reading dragged on at a snail’s pace. I never finished anything. I wasn’t a good student. Descartes lost patience, Aristotle looked askance. They already knew that this was no young philosopher poring for hours over the pages of their immortal tracts. It was only a poet, a dabbler who couldn’t refine a concept or elaborate new nuances in existing categories if his life depended on it. The poet is the philosopher’s older brother. Older, but treated for all that with a certain indulgent hauteur; men of learning view him as frivolous, flighty. A person who doesn’t spend ten hours a day in stuffy reading rooms can’t possibly be taken seriously. A person who makes things up as he goes along. Writes out of thin air instead of cobbling new books from old quotes, footnotes, rereadings of ancient texts. He sits in front of the typewriter with eyes closed, like a clairvoyant. Closer to astrology than to science. He’s prone to dubious enthusiasms; at times he sings, laughs, or cries while shut in his own room. True scholars wouldn’t do that. Scholars don’t close their eyes at their computers. Just the opposite—they prop them open.

From his notebook-like memoir, Another Beauty. Daydreaming while you are supposed to be reading philosophy is something I know well. No scholar myself, either, but every few pages of his beautiful book, I come across a passage that makes me get out my pencil and journal to copy it down.

Work: Although it’s a less familiar topic for poetic treatment than say, love, death, or immortal beauty, there are a fair number of wonderful poems about work. Here are two poems that I encountered recently. I was struck by the echoes between them, and they have stayed with me. Short pictures of lifetime stories.

First, Gary Synder, whom I was lucky enough to hear read at MIT this last Spring. If he reads anywhere close by, GO!

Hay for the Horses

by Gary Snyder

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
—The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds—
“I’m sixty-eight” he said,
“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that’s just what
I’ve gone and done.”

Progress

X.J. Kennedy

Sundays we’d stroll to the railroad track,
My white-collared father and I,
Where he’d gaze after freight trains billowing past
And deliver himself of a sigh—

“If I still worked for the railroad,
I’d retire with a pass. I could ride
To any place in the country,
And the country, they say, is wide.”

Yet for thirty years my father
With fountain pen wielded power
At the boiler factory in Dover,
Keeping track of each man-hour:

He would total up columns of numbers
In a flash with astonishing skill
And never a man’s pay envelope
Fell short of a dollar bill.

He would hike to the bank every Thursday
To fetch payroll cash in a sack,
The insurance company insisting
That a blue steel pistol he pack.

How the neighbors would taunt and tease him—
“Hey, Joe, would you pull your gun
And shoot it out with that stickup man?”—
“No, I’d throw him the money and run.”

He continued to add up numbers
In his head till there came on the scene
A formidable robot rival,
The Burroughs adding machine.

My father saw that his number
Would be up soon. As he feared,
Anybody could tug on a handle
And an accurate total appeared.

They broke the news to him gently,
They professed their profound regret
And presented him, not with a pension
But a pen-and-pencil set.

For a time he displayed it proudly
Till the pencil had to be tossed,
When it wouldn’t quite twist as it used to
And the cap of the pen got lost.

For more than eight thousand mornings
He had walked to his job past a sign
Where the Women’s Christian Temperance
Union had posted a line

Ill fitting the situation
Of the obsolescently skilled:
Life is no goblet to be drained
But a measure to be filled.

Being able to use my laptop as a window into astronomical images continues to amaze me. (Made me sign up for Slooh, which allows you not merely to see these astonishing images, but to operate a telescope half a globe away).

Two pix to contemplate today:

Bad Astronomy’s piece on Alan Friedman’s image of the sun “in the light of hydrogen” (which blogger Phil Plait explains in his engaging way.)

And for sheer “the heavens above us” beauty, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is hard to beat. Today’s is a shot of the Milky Way over Monument Valley.

Heard from a 91 year old friend who grew up in Brooklyn (and I could easily see uttering such things on the street), but also in David Minkoff’s Oy!: The Ultimate Book of Jewish Jokes

Sadie, an elderly Jewish lady, is leaving the Garment District to go home from work. Suddenly a man who has been walking toward her stands in front of her, blocks her path, opens up his raincoat and flashes his wares in all their sordid glory. Unruffled, Sadie takes a look and remarks, “This you call a lining?”

Many, many more at , his web site.

A sample: “Jewish telegram: Begin worrying. Details to follow.”

What the Jewish Buddha says:
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single “Oy”
Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as a wooded forest. And sit up straight! you’ll never meet the Buddha with a posture like that.
There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never visited, you never called and you never wrote. And whose fault was that?
Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage, however, is another story.
Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. But also be aware that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.
Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Forget this and attaining enlightenment will be the least of your problems.
Drink green tea and enhance your life. Experience joy with the first sip, satisfaction with the second sip and a Danish with the third sip.
Though only your skin, sinews and bones remain, though your blood and flesh dry up and wither away, yet shall you meditate and not stir until you have attained full enlightenment. But first, a little nosh.
Accept misfortune as a blessing. Don’t wish for perfect health or a life without problems. What would you talk about?
Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bubkes.

Some crazy German classical radio station I was streaming played a great bit of Gershwin from an album from Stéphane Grappell. Two great violinists from different worlds.

YouTube wouldn’t cough it up, but I did find this bit from a BBC piece on how they got together with a fun version of “Jalousie,” which apparently kicked off the collaboration. I think it works because neither is trying to sound like the other–the distance between the smokey jazz club and the concert hall: maybe not so far after all.

And for good measure, a wonderful version of “Autumn Leaves” by Grappelli and Oscar Peterson

A nice documentary on graphic designer and teacher Inge Druckrey. Online on Edward Tufte’s (surprisingly clunky) site. Found via John Gruber’s reliably elegant one, Daring Fireball.

In trawling around looking for somebody who has tips on WordPress workflows for writers (a much more enticing task than actually writing blog posts!) I found a couple of interesting extensions of WordPress.

The first is PressBooks, which seems to be a gussied up WordPress implementation designed to output books in any format you could want. The “about” blurb from their web site:

“Pressbooks is a simple book publishing tool that makes it easy for authors and editorial teams to generate clean, well-formatted books in multiple outputs: .epub, print-ready PDF, InDesign-ready XML, and of course HTML. We’re in public beta, meaning PressBooks is good enough for professional book production, but we’re still improving things.”

They also have a sample book, which, with almost inevitable “meta-ness,” is called Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto. Comprising a collection of readings, it has, I report more in sorrow than in anger, one chapter titled, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Metadata.” (I’m pretty into metadata, but I think it’s a no-no to rip off Raymond Carver’s great title, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” unless you are in Nathan Englander’s league as a writer. Although, as unpoetic literary pilfering goes, I suppose Paul Krugman’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Quantitative Easing” takes the cake.)

Back to the topic, PressBooks seems an interesting gizmo, although I wonder if this current advent of so many tools to get digital content into print form will be short-lived. It seems like middleware that could very well be obsolete as digital and print publishing formats settle down.

The other one I found is Anthologize, which seems to be a lo-fi version of the same idea, but is the engine behind National Novel Writing Month (how’s your training going? It’s this November), and seems oriented towards local history, family use, and a wonderfully described category of “artists, writers, and enthusiasts!”

Still didn’t find anybody who has worked out a good workflow for writing in WordPress, though, my original quest.

Tipped off by TLS to poetic translations of Classical Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Turkish poems by historian Bernard Lewis, I did what I do, and found it in the Takoma Park Library.

Pretty wonderful, herewith some samples:

Lord, of your grace all that I hope is this–
keep the realm of my pleasure prosperous
avert from me the calamity of chastity
and keep far from me the doom of repentance.

‘Ubayd-i Zakani

They said be patient, patience will bear fruit.
I suppose it will, but in another life.
I have spent my whole life being patient.
I’ll need another life to reap the fruits.

Daqiqi

One grey hair appeared on my head
I plucked it out with my hand.
It answered me: “You have prevailed against me alone–
What will you do when my army comes after me?”

Yehuda Halevi