Local Landmark Those of you who made it to pages 4 & 5 of my Behind the Curtain saw the Aztec Hotel, a local historic landmark. Over the weekend, the L.A. Times had a story about the hotel's history.
Mandelbrot Monk Hal says that the Mandelbrot monk thang is a hoax. I gotta say tho, it's a hoax for which I feel alotta affection!
It's a hoax, a fact we should have clued into by the date of the article: Apr. 1, 1999. More obscure clues include the village of "Irrendorf" ("loony village" in German) and a monastery named after Umberto Eco. One we did catch was the Monk Thelonius, although we dismissed it as coincidence.
Doc on Self-Definition Doc Searls reflects on the theme for today at PC Forum: Define Yourself
Who you really are is what you can't redefine.
You can change your name, your business, your mission, your methods, your ownership, what you make and sell — pretty much everything. But you can't change where you come from. Your life, whether you're a business or a human being, is anchored somewhere. [....]
Definition therefore requires respecting first purposes. Even if you don't have a dead white guy on the wall in your foyer, there's a ghost whose spirit still drives your company forward. Don't cross it.
Spring Plant Life Analogies Of course, I find it interesting on the human angle more than the corporate one. I've been walking about and watching spring unfold. I see deciduous trees that, until last week, were just trunk, branches and twigs; now they're setting forth those tenderest of leaves again. I'm seeing new growth everywhere, on smaller plants, too.
As I contemplate a container garden on my patio, I've been thinking about plants that blossom at different times of year (How nice to plan for blooms now and then later and some more after that, no? Don't concentratethe blooms all at once, but spread 'emout over time, for sustainable beauty.)
Beyond the mechanics of planning around the seasons, there's the simple marvel that this type of plant knows to bloom in March, whereas this other one blossoms in June, and that other one in September. How do they know that? They are following their nature, they are *not* reinventing themselves. There's a cyclical process that, to the shortsighted, might seem like reinvention (fall color! A reinvention! oh.. then the leaves blow away, and all is bare! another reinvention! Look! verdant growth! Another reinvention!), but is actually how the plant exists.
I've been thinking about speciation (is that a word?), not in the way that Garret was contemplating the endless taxonomiccategorization of kingdom/phyla/genus/species, but I've just been marvelling at the way that this or that one follows its own path, it has its own shape, it has its own preference for ideal living conditions....
We humans are the same way. Our lives have cyclical processes that may be similar to the cyclical unfurling of plants. We put out new shoots, we bud and blossom, we dust our surroundings with pollen, attracting those who would fertlize us (or we would fertilize), we have times of fruitfulness and generating seeds, and we resting from all of that for a time in gnarled dormancy. And begin it over again. Yes, that's a plant-life analogy, but it's human life I speak of. Like fractals, the cycles may be self-similar and recursive, and exist at different scales—daily cycle of awake and sleep, a cycle of several days or several months, the yearly cycle of seasons, larger cycles that encompass years, or decades, or lifetimes.
(hm! 'Spring' —that metal thing — is a recursive cycle, an encircling helix that comes around again and again and again and again.)
As spring unfurls, and shoots and stems and leaves and buds appear, I contemplate those things that give my life unique shape, those things that distinguish me from other lives. History (as Doc notes) most definitely plays a part.
Authoritative? Well, it says right here. . . The Future of the Book reviews Adrian Johns' The Nature of the Book, tracing the business and practices of publishing in the days of yore (you know, those days we all look back with dewy-eyed romanticism, when everything was puddle wonderful).
Johns' book is a counterpoint to print culture as a given. It reconstructs the role of print in terms of its textual mutability, exploitation of authors, captive production means and illicit and corrupting distribution; the dissembling role of print.
When did I lose whatever regard I had for a book as being intrinsically authoritative? Probably in my ol' graphic production days when I learned how to spec type and lay out pages for print—if this is all it takes to get something in print, then any fool can get his or her words published. Caveat Reader! [via BookNotes ]
Spike A peek at my referer page shows a spike from View From The Heart. I went to see why. Duh.
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