Sep 19 2008

I Am a Strange Loop

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Douglas Hofstadter • I Am a Strange Loop I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
Publisher: Basic Books
Year: 2008
Pages: 436
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What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
№59

I was vaguely aware of Douglas Hofstadter by reputation: his reputed magnum opus, a dense 1970s work called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Brain Braid, has been the subject of much praise and adulation. My brother, who read the work in question in the context of a college course, read and apparently enjoyed this new work by Hofstadter somewhere in the time surrounding the death of our father. It is from that recommendation that I picked the book up.

Before I started throwing adjectives or grades around, I should expand upon the context at play here: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden BrainBraid was, if I may condense it thus, an exposition of Hofstadter’s thoughts on conscious and the nature of Self-with-a-capital-S. Despite the acclaim which this book earned him, Hofstadter was perturbed that much of his thesis was largely ignored or misunderstood, and so almost 30 years later comes this latest book about Self, and if I might guess1, I would wager that none of the imprecision or vagueness or…. opaqueness… has been resolved in that span.

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  1. Please note, I have not read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Brain Braid[↩]

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Sep 19 2008

Friday Random Ten CLXIV

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The “R.I.P. David Foster Wallace” edition

Friday Random Ten

  1. Arcturus - [La Masquerade Infernale #06] The Throne of Tragedy
  2. Novembre - [Dreams D'Azur #09] Old Lighthouse Tale
  3. Regina Spektor - [Songs #03] Prisoners
  4. Everon - [Bridge #12] Bridge
  5. Spoon - [Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga #08] My Little Japanese Cigarette Case
  6. Ours - [Distorted Lullabies #07] Medication
  7. Nine Inch Nails - [Still #03] The Fragile
  8. Sleeping At Last - [Keep No Score #11] Dreamlife
  9. Sigur Rós - [Ágætis Byrjun #10] Avalon
  10. Foo Fighters - [Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace #01] The Pretender

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Sep 15 2008

David Foster Wallace is dead

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David Foster Wallace

Why do all the writers I like kill themselves?

David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest and a lot of other things, as well as one of the most ferociously intelligent and talented writers I have ever had the pleasure of reading, hanged himself on Friday, September 12.

Wallace, who wrote with an explosive, ironic, but deeply serious passion about subjects ranging from tennis and politics to mathematics and cruise ships, was found dead by his wife in his home Friday night, according to the Claremont, Calif., police department. The 46-year-old author apparently hanged himself.

“He was the best of our generation, and his death is a loss beyond describing,” Richard Powers, winner of the National Book Award in 2006 for the novel The Echo Maker, told The Associated Press on Sunday.

He really was a fantastic writer. I still haven’t had the guts to get through the 1′000+ page Infinite Jest, but his essay collections are some of my favorite nonfiction, bar none.

There is one notable falsehood in AP’s report, though:

Asked what Wallace had been working on at the time of his death, [longtime editor Michael Pietsch] offered no specifics, but said: “He was always writing something. He was always doing something ambitious.”

I distinctly remember reading that Wallace was working on his next big piece of fiction (not short stories like Oblivion, but more like Infinite Jest). I know he probably has lots of unfinished writing that may eventually be edited and released, but this still sucks.

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Sep 14 2008

Hocus Pocus

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Kurt Vonnegut • Hocus Pocus Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut
Publisher: Berkley Trade
Year: 1997
Pages: 336
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What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
№58

Written in 1990, Hocus Pocus may be considered one of Vonnegut’s “later” works, his most famous stuff having been written in the 1960s and 1970s. But the book still has a particular staying power, even if reading it in 2008 makes it seem somewhat antiquated, as though Vonnegut was still writing a 1960s novel in 1997.

The story of Hocus Pocus revolves around the character of Eugene Debs Hartke, Vonnegut’s portmanteau of a famous socialist and a famous anti-war Senator. To describe the basic plot of Hocus Pocus in the crudest and simplest of terms, Eugene is a man to whom shit happens. More importantly, this shit happens entirely because of Time and Luck, two capital-letter forces whose influence is both pervasive and undeniable.

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Sep 12 2008

Friday Random Ten CLXIV

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The “Spore is completely underwhelming” edition.

Friday Random Ten

  1. Ulver - [Lyckantropen Themes #07] Theme Seven
  2. Amorphis - [My Kantele #01] My Kantele (Acoustic Reprise)
  3. Paul Hindemith - [Orchestral Works 3 #05] Concert Music for Strings & Brass Op 50 (1930) Part II
  4. 5ive - [5ive #03] Baron
  5. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - [Murder Ballads #07] The Kindness of Strangers
  6. Opeth - [Deliverance #05] Master’s Apprentices
  7. The Smashing Pumpkins - [Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness CD2 #07] Thru the Eyes of Ruby
  8. Elend - [Sunwar the Dead #05] The Hemlock Sea
  9. Sigh - [Imaginary Sonicscape #10] Requiem - Nostalgia
  10. Between the Buried and Me - [Colors #05] Ants of the Sky

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Sep 11 2008

Creating an admissions dashboard

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This entry pertains to work done in the context of my employment. Please remember, however, that any opinions expressed on this blog do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or co-workers.

The Problem

Admissions needed help. They had been moved from their former product, Exeter, to Banner’s1 native admissions module. But Banner’s interface stinks, and there was no decent way for counselors to do, well, anything. They relied on daily reports run out of an Excel pivot table by the executive directory of admissions, and therefore they lived on paper. The counselors needed a better way to get their work done and stay on top (figuratively speaking) of their recruits.

Enter my department. It fell to us, after some discussion, to build a tool that would be initial for undergraduate counselors, to let them slice and dice their data as needed. After a pilot run, it will gradually be expanded to include graduate and transfer admissions, as well as reporting tools for directors and and other muckity-mucks.

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  1. Our main administrative system is Banner, developed by Sungard HE[↩]

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Sep 10 2008

Wednesday’s Word L

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continually / continuously
adv. non-stop; without pause

If you’re like me, you’ve probably used these two words interchangeably. They have the same root, after all, are both adverbs, and as far as you know, mean precisely the same thing.

Anymore, to a great degree, that’s true, since modern usage has more or less collapsed their respective connotations into a single synonymous pair of words. But to purists, there’s still a difference, and it used to be more widely-understood.

Here’s the difference in a nutshell:

  • Continual refers to something that is recurring; e.g. the sun continually rises each morning.
  • Continuous refers to something that is unceasing; e.g. my heart is continuously beating1.

Both words ultimately come from the Latin continuus—”uninterrupted”—but Old French absorbed it twice. Continuer (continuous) is from the 13th century; continuel (continual) is from the 14th century.

There are a couple of pairs of words like this in modern English (mostly notable “special” and “especial,” though you so rarely see anything but the adverbial form of the latter nowadays).

  1. Knock on wood.[↩]

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Sep 05 2008

Friday Random Ten CLXIII

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The “Fixing Subversion” edition.

Friday Random Ten

  1. Zao - [Where Blood And Fire Bring Rest #08] For A Fair Desire
  2. A Fine Frenzy - [One Cell In The Sea #02] The Minnow & The Trout
  3. The Grand Silent System - [Gift Or A Weapon #11] Nova
  4. Isis - [Panopticon #03] In Fiction
  5. Maudlin of the Well - [My Fruit Psychobells... a Seed Combustible #02] A Conception Pathetic
  6. Immanu El - [They'll come, they come #05] panda
  7. Avenged Sevenfold - [Waking the Fallen #09] I Won’t See You Tonight part 1
  8. Andrew Bird - [Weather Systems #01] First Song
  9. Sigur Rós - [( ) #08] Popplagið
  10. Ottorino Respighi - [Pines of Rome - Fountains of Rome - Roman Festivals #12] The Epiphany

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Sep 02 2008

The Mother Tongue

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Bill Bryson • The Mother Tongue The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Year: 1991
Pages: 272
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What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
№57

Bill Bryson is a noted fan of the English language. My first real exposure to him was a $0.25 hardcover copy of Made of America1, which was all it took to cement a deep and abiding love for everything the man writes. The Mother Tongue is his first attempt at linguistic writing, and while perhaps I didn’t enjoy it as much as Made In America, it is nonetheless a wonderful book.

Bryson starts by considering just how versatile, how widespread, and how confusing the English language is, and how these very traits seem, to some degree, mutually exclusive. Yet puzzingly, a language which is relatively recent in its current incarnation (certainly recent compared to its Latinate cousin and its Germanic forebears and ProtoIndoEuropean great-grandfeather), has managed to become a force to be reckoned with throughout the world. Ironically, and I couldn’t help but notice this, Bryson’s message in the book—that English is, also ironically, the new lingua franca–is to some degree going away. Certainly, if conservatives are any trustworthy source, America itself is today being overrun with Spanish-speaking immigrants other “impure” dialects.

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  1. Actually, this is not true: A Walk in the Woods was recommended to me as a young man, but I could not then appreciate the book, and returned it to the library mostly unread.[↩]

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