Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Robert Musil and Paul Ulrich Villard


Is the "Ulrich" of "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften" from Paul Villard, namely, Paul Ulrich Villard ?




Monday, December 24, 2012

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Ernst Nolte on the modern West


An effective reply to Ernst Nolte advancing Heidegger's whitewash of the Nazi regime in Poland would be that the modern Pole's had defeated the Bolshevik army - and decisively so, as demonstrated by the terms of the Peace of Riga.

This leaves untouched the assessment of the mechanization of increasingly remote warfare with the persistence of mass human slaughter.

It also should be replied that the "West" has its roots in the the geometry of Egypt, the arithmetic of Babylon, the Semitic script and the Arab numerals : these are what the technical inventors in Asia did not produce.

The very possibility that a Jew named Jeshua, a former stone-cutter called "Nazarene" raised in Roman-occupied territory, was an itinerant healer formed further east in adulthood as a Buddhist healer, should put Heideggerian history to rest.  The realization of what Heidegger borrowed from the teacher of his Japanese student should complete the reassessment of Heidegger, original thinker, as a perverter of Luther-convert Husserl's later phenomenology.

That leaves all of the interesting issues open: why modern science did not emerge in China, Korea or Japan; the evolutionary role of aggression within groups in the perpetuation of slaughter; the fate of other hominid species; why the elephant could not be respected in western China in light of the fate of mega-fauna elsewhere; today's Japanese resistance to the facts of genetics and the migrations in southern Asia; the explanation of the racial myths of the nation-states; ...

The formulas of the butchers in Kampuchea were from doctrines out of Germany taught in forming doctoral students of economics in Paris.  The fanatic suppression of representative democracy and individual dissent in the name of inspired doctrines and personality cults is what unites the regimes of Bolshevik Moscow and Nazi Berlin.  The intolerance of even suspected or merely possible dissent has itself no connection to "technique" or "modernity".  Lenin's Cheka and the restored death penalties have their parallel in Germany less than 2 decades later as does the suppression of Mensheviks with that of the SA.

A more useful comparison than the SS with Khmer Rouge would be Stalin and Mao in the extermination of peasants prosperous enough to have time for opinions and policies in local matters and in fostering a provincialism incompatible with central dictates.

And to come full circle: the Russian attitude to the Poles cannot be equated to that of the Nazi racialists on the fate for all Slavs.

As for the big question: the German cities closed to Jews had not needed Cossacks to invent Pogrom - and long before the Reformation.  So much for the Swabian insights of Martin and Ernst Juenger in philosophy of world historical process according to an imagined Heraclitus and an imagined Parmenides.

Footnote: that the doctrine of the Tao became a religion with a godly pantheon might have troubled Herr Heidegger in his version of Buddhism at second-hand.




Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Aida/Web markup in Smalltalk (again)


I hate reinventing the wheel ... as the man said, you are likely to get a flat. It should be a Unicode character: the wheel with one part of circumference 'flat'.

Here is some AidaWeb Smalltalk code:
streamHtmlTo: aStream for: aRequest on: aSession
| tag |
self prepareToHtmlStreamingOn: aSession.
type = #paragraph ifTrue: [tag := 'p'].
type = #break ifTrue: [tag := 'br'].
type = #ruler ifTrue: [tag := 'hr'].
aStream nextPutAll: self ident, '<', tag.
self streamAttributesTo: aStream for: aSession.
aStream nextPutAll: self tagClosing, self eol.
But Curl markup uses "hrule" and not "hr" and a '{' and not a '<'.

Markup neutrality is not so hard to achieve - without massive duplication of classes - especially in a language such as Pharo Smalltalk with Traits as mix-ins.



Friday, November 30, 2012

Asus 900A EeePC with Puppy linux on SDHC


Getting a suitable linux for my old Asus Eee PC 900A netbook has been a bit of a trial.

Chromium OS was a LOCK-N-FREEZE disaster. Android was only marginally better. There is no straight Ubuntu that is not quirky and a wifi nightmare. And there is the worry that some update to ACPI settings will leave the fan disabled and the Intel Atom CPU toasted.

Today I finally have what MAY be workable: Puppy linux for Eee PC. I have one basic version on the SSD and a version with some add-ins on an SDHC chip.

 Two web pages were essential :

From the latter, I install the drivers (the first and then the group-of-4.) Click DOWNLOAD but don't download when prompted : opt to open in the default package installer. You will have to start with an ethernet cable and use the simple connection tool once the drivers are in place for wifi.

The default browser is SeaMonkey, so on the expendable SDHC chip I have installed Chromium. Firefox is also available as a package already listed for download in the pakage manager. So far, so good ...



Saturday, November 24, 2012

glade moonglade


The Dirge to Herman Melville's Clarel has "moon-glade" ?




Variation auf kein Thema


1.13  »Die Tatsachen im logischen Raum sind die Welt.«

Durs Gruenbein S. 49 of Falten und Fallen

see: Wittgenstein and the propellor (Manchester ?)

Newton's pebble

Falten See : Melville, "Clarel" 'rose'

LW the rose versus the petals ;Melville and gender, desire

life after Tract. L-P.

Fallen : The world is all that is the case. »Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.«

Unfall : see S. 48  The case of man.  The case of a man. The cases of men. In the case of man. In case of accident,

Ambulance and Unfall : the opening of Musil, The man without Qualities.

Two men at sea : Melville, The author of The Aeneid. – "Virgil, quick come see …"
Melville as mystic. Peraonal history and fiction. Posthumous fame.



Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Romney binder


"If we are going to have women in the workplace ... "

Let him go lick his wounds - AGAIN.

Friday, October 5, 2012

Quintilian aule

In his advice on remembering through loci and images, is not the 'forecourt' of Quintilian's memory architecture also our Aule ?

ad herennium

De institutione oratia

Thursday, September 20, 2012

XP update

When Windows is done applying security updates, I do not accept their prompt to RESTART.  I accept the CLOSE option instead. Why?

Because Process Explorer shows a great deal of MS activity and it continues for some time.  As those processes complete and terminate and all goes quiet, then I do a restart from the PE menu.

Browser Launch

My startup page for my browsers is a LOCAL plain HTML page (one of my aule-pages) and yet IE and FF take a great deal of time before they can render that HTML.

But what if I want to read the notes that I have left in the page as text ?

If I want to go out on the internet, then tell me to wait.  But to sit looking at a blank screen ?!?

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Patent Troll

The news of a patent troll leach having attached Laminar Research was disgusting.  States must move to disbar lawyers conspiring with software patent fraudsters. Feds must go after backers for conspiracy.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Express 2012

MS Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop has this as minimum platform requirement: Windows 7 SP1 x86 or x64

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Bryde baleen

Walking past an image of blue Bryde's whale (said to be a baleine 'baleen') with an agin' blue Concise Oxford in my hand, I land at the sofa open at 'cummer', from commater and almost forget to confirm dace. There is no mention of chub, let alone Saskatchewan dace. Then recall cumshaw.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Bookmark Tagging


When I save a web browser or e-doc reader bookmark with a tag, the logic should be simple in this one respect.

If I am tagging into a "Nihongo" folder in which the only tag beginning with 'd' is "dictionary", then typing 'd' should bring up that tag at the top of the list and not 'Darfur' from my 'Geo" or "International Relations" folder.

Surely someone working with tagging for semweb app's will get this simple logic in place.

In truth, the suggested tag that I receive in Firefox is "dARPA" for the tag "DARPA". Yet nothing in the "Nihongo" folder or it subfolders is tagged "DARPA".

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

lucid dreaming

last night: jolt during lucid dream; looked to where might have banged head, but entering through doorway .. tic? petit mal?

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Japanese kanji


If you are learning to read Japanese, I have two web pages in plain HTML (no Japanese font, no JavaScript.)

One web page is for the joyo kanji and one is a page of the Henshall kanji.

Both can be used with the Curl applications for Joyo kanji recall and Henshall kanji recognition (but for these, the MIT Curl browser plugin* from Curl.com is required.)

Images of these pages and app's can be seen at http://kanji.aule-browser.com where you can pick some pages by clicking on images of that page.

Versions of my Curl kanji pages with interactive mnemonic features are coming soon!  Android mobile app's are in the works at logiquewerks.com.

The pages and app's above all use the dictionary definitions found on-line in kanjidic2.

* that plugin is called the Surge® RTE (RunTime Engine)

Friday, July 27, 2012

Springpad security


While trying to get Springpad to run this morning, I made an error in my passphrase on the penultimate attempt. Now running, Springpad came back wiith "Incorrect password for user tel-et-tel". Wrong ! 

The correct response would be  "Incorrect user name or password."   OR.

What can a private notebook be worth if the vendor is that slack?

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Pynchon and Gaddis : 3 google novels


Three novels in plain-HTML google book viewport iframe ONLY.

Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" in plain-HTML wrapper for the google book at
http://books.aule-browser.com/gravityrainbowsrc.html

William Gaddis' "JR" http://books.aule-browser.com/gaddisjr.html and his "The Recognitions" at http://books.aule-browser.com/gaddisrecog.html

Now back to my improved alternative epub reader ...


Saturday, July 14, 2012

Screen Play


There is no mention of 'Huguenot' in Galsworthy's Forsyte books but there is a derisive remark about a governess in the more recent screen adaptation.

Unless a bit of on set nastiness or some tasteless interjection by an actor, it may be an excess of screen writer wit: Henry James'  "The Turn of the Screw" has an acting-governess styled "Grose".




Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Curl Knowte Pages


There is a Curl equivalent to http://www.aule-browser.com/knowtepages/index.html now available at http://www.aule-browser.com/knowtepages/index-curl.html.

The former is comprised of 4 HTML text areas and the latter is comprised of 4 Curl TextArea instances placed within PanedWindow instances.

What Curl offers is a variety persistence options without JavaScript.

Index.html above is safe to copy to your local machine as a simple source inspection will reveal.  To the best of my knowledge, the text areas will re-size only in Firefox or Pale Moon or an equivalent.  TextArea persistence during an HTML session may depend on your Firefox configuration (whether a closed tab can re-open with the text content intact.)

Below is an example with one area using RichText.


If your browser settings require a HTML wrapper for Curl, you might use this link.

A page with fully resizable widgets (vertical and horizontal) is here.




Pale Moon Browser


I have been running tests on the Pale Moon alternative Firefox build and I am very pleased.

One high point for me is that a layout error in Firefox 13 is not present (it affects my Curl kanji review applets when minimizing the browser to the size of the applet.)

Pale Moon is recovering memory after Tools | Clear Recent History which is a welcome change.

This build may be the answer for any netbook running an Atom processor with the Windows 7 starter version.

The wikipedia article on Pale Moon is here.




Tuesday, July 10, 2012

matsuri notes


My notes for the Japanese matsuri kanji page ( 祭り ) started at knowtepages.aule-browser.com as shown below (the re-sized text areas are using a Firefox feature.

I do not add JavaScript or use cookies in those pages - but what Firefox is doing to preserve the content if I accidentally close the tab - that's another matter. "Unclose Tab" restores the content.





Knowte Pages


I have added some web pages to serve as scratch pads over at http://knowtepages.aule-browser.com/index.html

The pages are PLAIN HTML ( as in NOT HTML5 ) and use no JavaScript, no cookies and no pluings.

But they can be re-sized – which I find very useful – if run in the Firefox browser.

These are session only notes that go POOFFFF!!! if you exit the browser.

I find them handy for holding google translate results and wiktionary results during a Japanese Kanji study session.

I may add variants with JavaScript or calls to an API as simplenoteapp.com

For another option, try kl1p.com which runs the code from defunct cl1p.com

The task-specific browsers and site-specific browsers at aule-browser.com have toolbars with a variety of annotation options.




Sunday, July 8, 2012

HTTP HTTPS


(my last two Facebook posts today – after Tweets on same ...)

How can a PRIVATE notebook on the web open in HTTP and not HTTPS ? But it did and does. Is this why we are to rely on Google and/or Microsoft ? The problem here is not "browser plugins" but something rather more obvious. SpringPad.

Death of the plugin ? SpringPad page in Firefox 13 web browser does not even know that I have their plugin running ! More like a plugin coma. Time for wake-up call? ( see SimpleNoteapp.com for alternative API ) Oh, death of the API's ? End of the programmer ? The End of design, too, I suppose ? Imagination dead. Imagine.




Saturday, July 7, 2012

Plugin Death


The end of Flash on this device or that OS is not the end of the browser plugin.

Those who have an interest in this plugin-death buzz also want their browser to become the OS or their OS to have a, err, plugin, err API-based component rendering HTML5 - ah hell, just have the OS based on HTML5 (call it HTML5-on-the-chip kinda-like LISP-on-a-CHIP, right ? Use the 5th core. Exclusively. Right.  First exit. To South Park.

The user without access to plugins is the dream consumer who cannot tell a computer screen from a TV or a real football game in progress from a simulation of the rained-out game. Or a Perl Parrot from a mature VM,

And also - those escort services at Vegas-style electronics shows -  they, too, will be an imagined thing of the past. Left. Any exit. Also to South Park.

We do apologize: anywhere in the above where we mentioned HTML5 as we meant HTML. This will be repaired when Ruby 1.9.4.01 becomes Ruby 2.1


Saturday, June 30, 2012

keyboard quote


If you are using Windows Language facility with optional keyboard layouts, you may encounter odd behavior with entering quote marks or quotation mark characters. Check first that you have not flipped to International from US for the EN keyboard.

The keyboard icon should offer you the choice. The odd behavior is to facilitate entering accented characters.

A search using  Windows keyboard Language  should get you a useful suggestion from the web mavens.




Monday, June 18, 2012

Japanese kanji by grade: gold on indigo


The Curl applets for Grade-based Japanese Kanji were updated today.

Here is an example with both a popup menu and the FIND panel:



The gold-leaf on paper dyed with indigo motif is one that I first saw in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts collection. In fact, 'indigo', as the boundary between blue and violet, cannot be displayed on computer screens.  My choice is created using HSV parameters sent to the Curl classes for Color and Background.  The 'gold' is also not the www standard.  Results will vary depending on your software and hardware.




Saturday, June 9, 2012

NASA's other remnants: web trash


If you have an older browser such as IE 8 you will be able to see what NASA has left partially visible on the internet: http://ipp.nasa.gov/innovation/Innovation24/QualityofLife.html

If you have a newer browser, the half-missing HTML may leave a blank page until you request to view the page source.

Here is a snapshot:




Innovators at NASA need more than just the Dragon capsule to take out the trash: not everything published by NASA deserves a place to drift in an internet orbit.

There are still people using Google to find hope in the invention of this convicted Blue Cross fraudster and known fake-MD quack who may once have been a vet assistant.

Did someone delete one half of this page?  Will it persist as a web archive?

Note: the "Doctor" in question has no medical credential of any kind and his Foundation was used to defraud Blue Cross - for which he has been convicted in Louisiana.  His "invention" was grossly over-priced and failed to obtain a patent.  Was a journalist innovating here?


Linkedin passwords

My two twitter posts this A.M. were the question:

Q  is http://linkedin.com still accepting dumb passwords from users ?
#linkedin

and the answer:

G. Robert Shiplett ‏@rshifflet

linkedin rejected 2 moronic efforts but allowed me 'password~2' Do any pass-phrases begin with 'pass' + 'word' ?
#linkedin

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Firefox urlencode lapse, or ?


I was validating an HTML page at kanji.aule-browser.com today when I hit a few URL errors in anchor links.

The URL's were added ad hoc for kanji from pages found in Firefox and the URL copied out of the address field.

Oops!  These URL's are for kanji stroke order diagrams and the URL includes a Japanese character.  The URL comes back from Firefox address bar "COPY" with the kanji character urlencoded. But: the URL includes a param following an ampersand and THAT was not encoded.

According to w3c the URL is not valid unless the ampersand is escaped (but the links were tested and worked fine ...)

Once the ampersand was escaped,  the HTML validator stopped objecting - but the "?" for the start  of parameters was still not escaped!

Here is what Firefox returns:

http://www.sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/icampus/u/akanji.jsp?k=%E9%9A%A3&o=e99aa3

Here is what the HTML validator insists upon:

http://www.sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/icampus/u/akanji.jsp?k=%E9%9A%A3&o=e99aa3

Notice that %26 is not what is required for this URL to work correctly.

http://www.sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/icampus/u/akanji.jsp?k=%E9%9A%A3%26o=e99aa3

Firefox reports the URL on my web page as

http://www.sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/icampus/u/akanji.jsp?k=%E9%9A%A3&o=e99aa3

The HTML anchor attribute on the page is now set to

href="http://www.sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/icampus/u/akanji.jsp?k=%E9%9A%A3&amp;o=e99aa3"


The kanji is




Friday, May 11, 2012

Kanji Recall

The "Henshall" kanji Curl applet at my kanji study pages now will remember where you were last in the set  -  at least as long as the Curl Surge RTE plugin is running ( a session cookie is being used.)  You can even change browsers from, say, Firefox, to Chrome, and Curl remembers which Kanji you were on.

If you have a request for different behavior or a different kanji set, then forward your request to infoATaule-browser.com where the "AT" is our @ mail symbol.

Note: the applet requires the MIT Curl browser plugin from curl.com or curlap.com

Curl has a forum at communities.curl.com

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Secular Religion


We are just in from a great performance of Haydn's "Seasons" here in Fred'ton.  The work was performed in a large wooden church which may have inner buttresses causing acoustic issues.

Regardless, I got to wondering about how many of us miss choirs.  Here was a piece which could be performed on Sundays through the year: Spring for 3 months, then Summer and so forth.

The problem is with the arrangement for the close of Winter.  At my age, it is already striking in how the work moves inevitably to this end.  The finale is a trio with double choir.  It begins with the baritone/bass and then the tenor and finally the soprano. The Trinity.  No question.

The Trinity, like physical ascension, like Divinity of a man - all of these are deal-breakers.  Not to mention the virtuous maidens, the plowman in the furrow. But, oh, that verdant Spring, verdure and then praise of Sun and praise of Wine !  And ending with the traveller, salvation, and the final Amen.

Just think what a small city Vienna was in 1801 !  Not even the Vienna of Musil's Ulrich and the suburbs.  So it is sad to think that even in Papa Haydn's work, a work so close to nature, the secular cannot quite find even seasonal anthems and processionals and recessionals and some more regular occasion for the diapasons, the dithyrambs, the recitations, high, piercing clarabellas - all of which we miss in secular life - between concerts.



Friday, April 27, 2012

Study Kanjidic2's Henshall Kanji dictionary entries


I have an app up at http://kanji.aule-browser.com/ for reviewing/studying/learning the entries in the Kanjidic2 which are numberwed for Henshall's "Remembering the Kanji" book.


 
I will add a Heisig equivalent today or tomorrow depending on how this grippe progresses ...




Monday, April 23, 2012

Firefox Perapera for Kanji


I am finding that my two pages testing edict and edict2 as UTF-8 encoded text are also a great test of the Perapera Japanese-English dictionary plug-in for the Firefox browser.

Of course, the plugin required the compilation of the dict ... but it clearly hints at more uses for the content of EDICT2 than as some single text file out on a server.

I have posted two versions of each of EDICT and EDICT2 as HTML pre text:
edict white-on-black
edict black on white
edict2 w/b
edict2 b/w
Kanji dict plugins to read an English gloss are available for your web browser.

Note: each page may take a moment to load as there are some 162,000+ entries.


Monday, April 2, 2012

Ezra Pound's periplum for periplus?


Is Pound's 'periplum' merely for Greek periplus ?

An article misses prunus (also cherry) and the orchid of Mauberley - a different view when comparing Zh "plum" and Zh "sea"

as in    and    not to mention venom   毒液   -  or even  poison  毒藥   - and then there is perineum.

Note that 'sea' may also serve as 'beach', depending upon point of view in a poem.

Pound has his fun with us when we fail to look for the symbol, or 符號 .

Note the frequency of the "peri-" prefix in Russian ... and our occasional reliance on prunes.

Casual gardeners insist on distinctions of cherry and plum ( compare prunus and the  malus  of the Romans) ; see rank and "apricot".

I await  a scholar to correct me, leaving me road apples as the itinerant master rides off to another skirmish or recent hanging.

Defeated, having given his ear, 
his wound unbound,  he went unshod,
avoiding the road and the inns.






Sunday, March 18, 2012

Tsvetaeva Poem Markup


Just as I am deciding on how I want to present the text used in Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire", I find myself looking for a source list to David McDuff's Tsvetaeva translations: I find none.

One of the poems must have resisted his efforts.  Translators write a forewords and such to advise readers of the challenges they faced.

A web page of translated poems in markup should offer some options (the McDuff book is in a second edition but still lacks 2 pages of sources to offset 25 pages of introduction.)

One option would be to indicate the "shape" of the original.  Consider this instance from McDuff:

“The demon in me’s not dead,”

as a translation of ( phonetic stress added by me )


Жив, а не у́мер
Де́мон во мне!


I am relying on the following Russian-language Wikisource page: Tsvetaeva 1925, which gives the poem entitled by McDuff as "The Demon in Me" as  «Жив, а не умер…»,  but without stress (UNICODE combining characters are inserted AFTER the stressed vowel in my excerpted lines above.)

If, in fact, her two lines were reduced to his one, there is no indication.  One simple way to achieve this is with a Shape in the Curl language. 


Thursday, February 23, 2012

Lively TclTk


Lively-Kernel meets Tcl/Tk?

My latest install of Tcl/Tk 8.5 from Activestate left a link in Windows to Tk demos.  One is named "A Celebration of Rube Goldberg" and should impress Self-as-JavaScript  fans of Sun LivelyKernel or Avocado.

Regardless of the grief in getting Tcl with OO out of 8.6 beta, the demos are a great presentation.  I continue to use Html Viewer 3 (Tcl/Tk's hv3 browser) as a light-weight browser when my laptop's sole-core is over-loaded with a few of today's greedy app's wildly swapping in and out (and no, the worst offender happens not to be from Microsoft.)

Btw, Squeak Smalltalk is working to get their base image down to about 10Mb.  Remember when shared DLL's were to keep us all happy below 640K ?  Gates' Hades, Hades' Gates.

PS: I have added a label/tag for Pharo Smalltalk - now the preferred ST for Seaside?

PPS: here is the Avocado blog: there.



Sunday, February 19, 2012

Gesture Control


What Westerners, Europeans and others may not appreciate is how often native Japanese-speakers use gestures to disambiguate kanji when speaking due to the great number of homonyms in their morae-based language.

Will gesture-control of devices lead to such combined speech+gesture identification?



Monday, February 13, 2012

Katakana Stroke Order & Direction

Animated stroke order and direction at http://www.umich.edu/~umichjlp/Katakanapro/index.html


Hiragana and Romaji vowels with macrons


Ā ā Ī ī Ū ū Ē ē Ō ō

ん わ や ま は な た さ か あ み ひ に ち し き い
ゆ む ふ ぬ つ す く う
め へ ね て せ け え
お よ も ほ の と そ こ お

ご げ ぐ ぎ が
ぎょ ぎゅ ぎゃ

ぞ ぜ ず じ ざ
じょ じゅ じゃ

ど で づ ぢ だ
ぢょ ぢゅ ぢゃ

ば び ぶ べ ぼ
びょ びゅ びゃ

ぽ ぺ ぷ ぴ ぱ
ぴょ ぴゅ ぴゃ

[vu] ゔ

See:  http://www.umich.edu/~umichjlp/Hiraganapro/

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Russian Poets wiki

ru.wikipedia.org can be a pain when saving links and when trying to find a poet.

Today, I find Brodsky missing from a list of 20th Century Russian poets (perhaps a Putin fanatic has relegated him to "Soviet" or American or emigré.)

Цвета́ева


http://goo.gl/WBbGA
http://www.stihi-rus.ru/1/Cvetaeva/


Ахма́това

http://goo.gl/CXlKC



Бро́дский

http://goo.gl/QiH6d



Ло́сев

http://goo.gl/jHU0P

Monday, February 6, 2012

sidle, amble


Poets and writers of Fredericton heard a novelist and then a poet describe protagonists who were not equine first "sidle" then "amble" (no, not in dialog.)

Did no one watch "Buck" after "The Horse Whisperer"? Would Robert Redford know the difference?

So long as there are horses on bridle paths in New York's Central Park, writers and poets should know which word is for the gait of a horse before they trot to the podium.

Of course, dialog would be another matter.

Hint: without sideways motion or motion along the side of, say, a bar, there is usually no sideling movement - and then there are horses working under fine horsemanship and moving in cross-steps ... sideways.


HTTPS defeated by Google

More bad news:

https://search.google.com/ is redirecting to http://www.google.ca/ for my own good, naturally ...

But hey,  https://mail.google.com/mail has been over-llooked for now up at the view from the mountain ...

But Google will find a way to defeat your choice to use that HTTPS URL in personal home page links - and it is for your own good, after all.  Google knows best.


HTTPS Google redirects to igoogle as HTTP

One change to tasks on the igoogle page and WHAM! SLAM!

https://www.google.com/ on my home page - MY link - is redirecting to HTTP  google.com igoogle.

From HTTPS ?!?

I go HTTPS to prevent a redirect to google.ca due to my IP being identified through a Canuck router.

Where the hell is the warning such as that GMAIL throws up for content that is not HTTPS in mail ?

BUT: https://google.com/ can flip up a certificate warning in IE as it redirects to www.google.com/ig


Monday, January 23, 2012

legato, then rubato


re: Jan Zwicky

Two terms for music and metaphor: legato and rubato

see etymologies, both curious.


Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Graves and Valéry: the German economy in two pre-war's


Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That (pre-war economic jingoisms )and Paul Valéry in Regards sur le monde actuel on his visit with Henley, London, 1896, from 48 years later (The Review) : statistical mechanics/thermodynamics metaphor; hierarchy; Prussian ways and mores, economic warfare.

Economic warfare and Gus W. Weiss on the Farewell dossier ( l'affaire Farewell fiction) ; Fidel Castro on economic war (2007) ; the curious fate of Vetrov (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Mitterand in Ottawa)

The later London of Ford Maddox Ford

Heinrich Böll's Irish Journal and the Irish view of Germany and Germans

Ireland software bubble/real estate bubble in Cork ; Nabakov on time and the bubble (the philosophers, Pnin)

economics and real estate waves ; 1979/1980 collapsing sand heaps and catastrophe theory

Durs Grünbein poem : divorce hotel

Le Devoir philo  ·  Nabokov note Card 68


Sunday, January 15, 2012

Derek Walcott Venus


This will be small-minded.

First, an aside.

I could not help but notice a strange parallel between Robert Graves in the trenches (1915?), the bombardments, (Goodbye to All That) and Elizabeth Smart's (1938?) kangaroos in a garden (on the subject of time).

Now, the unwelcome gristle.

Walcott "North and South" (1981) has Venus rising in an opening stanza that also carries both a full moon and a sunset.

Through the weeks, you might speak of Venus rising in the west (when first seen at sunset.)  But the rising Venus of morning is the only rising Venus, whether, as he reminds us, she survives translation or not.

Poetic license ?  Not with the planets.

More a question of knowing eastern and western, whether to your north or to your south.

Geddes has a photon flashing innumerable times among crystals in the snow.  Can he escape knowing that a photon takes millions of years to translate from the solar core to the shell of the sun ?  Was this his parallel? What is the poet to know of the local inferno ? The flipping magnetic poles ?



Friday, January 13, 2012

Robert Musil - William James


re: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften


Might Robert Musil have had some idea of William James' intense relationship with his sister, Alice James?
Wm James d. 1910 ; marriage 1878

There should be a Musil note on pale-fire-cards.blogspot.com


Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Jan Zwicky, Wittgenstein and Form


I was thinking that had PART ONE had the single line page headers and PART TWO had double-line page headers ... too obvious? A one unit and then a two unit length line as page headers? Golden ratio lengths? Imagine the unexplained subtle elegance of the book without the PART pages themselves being required as partitions.

§

What about a poem which opens with a left indent to
I wonder if it is the case that 
    [and then stanza(s),
    finally ending with
    a right indented ]
        I think that it is so.
Imagine starting to see this as a recurring form in poetry magazines, anthologies.

A paradigm case of  the ugly: a single quote from misguided Ernest Gellner Words and Things, 1st Ed. ?

Dal segno al coda would require us to use U+1D10B as the non-printing HTML UNICODE escape sequence &#1D10B;

The printer or the author was selective in the LW segno chosen?

It was not the segno



Repeat:
And then to the coda.


Zwicky, Wittgenstein, music

IN 1992, would it not truly have been "fresh air" if, instead of the praise of Ronald de Sousa, the U of T Press had broken with good form and marketing and placed a dissenting view of the book on the back cover of the paperbound edition of Kan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy? On a tasteless dust jacket for an oh, so expensive hardcover destined for the shelves of libraries and so, discarded?  And then from the stacks to storage?

Consider that not a single page is colour - in a book of so many reproductions.  Not even the addition of colour to the bass clef.  Or the alto clef of the Mozart.

The music extends only across Wittgenstein's taste.  The melody of Ben Jonson's 1616 "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" cannot find a place in the narrow band from Bach to Bruckner's 7.

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner. Where is that Haydn piano sonata? The Weber clarinet?

Among post-Wittgensteinians, a question of good form?  Listen - can you hear it?

Hopefully another edition would include links to fine interpretations of each selection included.

But is it assumed the reader can read music?  Yet we could not have the Kant with the original German?  This was Toronto Studies in Philosophy.  They had published Fackenheim.  Who are these readers of Wittgenstein who cannot read him in German?

It is as sad as those books of Haiku in translation with largely blank pages and not so much as a romanji version of the original.  No special typesetting required (beyond a few diacritics.)

What explains the absence of Suzanne Langer?  A failing of her editor?  A misplaced set of note cards?  A mis-labeled box of index cards?  A single set of large file cards used on a plane while travelling back from an APA conference - and then misplaced?

Should this post be re-worked with an eye to form, to ensure balance, to allow thought to etch the mean plate of experience?

Wittgenstein — said to have interrupted a performance of a Schubert quartet ... a question of style.  A shoebox of notes, perhaps not quite in order.

— § —

note: the 2003 Gaspereau Press volume has the author's name in a subtle red on the title page.
v. Rorschach colour shock; red-inked seals, kanji, on Japanese prints, 朱印

Monday, January 9, 2012

Zwicky, Woolf and metaphor

It is curious to find so much Wittgenstein in Wisdom and Metaphor - but no Woolf.

Whatever you may think of Virginia Woolf choosing to name Miss Briscoe 'Lily', we do have (following the heavy-handed "virginal" for "Miss Brisk")
"as the night wore on, white lights parted the curtains"
which, in the 'white' for the 'dark', we have a metaphor perhaps stronger than the Haas bowl of dead bees.

Consider Lady Ki No Washika, "No".  The Graeme Wilson translation is as follows:

It’s not because I’m now too old,
More wizened than you guess.. 
If I say no, it’s only
Because I fear that yes
Would bring me nothing, in the end,
But a fiercer loneliness.
as a counter-part to the Haas.

Woolf: "a serious stare from eyes of unparalleled depth"

What was the Woolf's view of that other painting, the one by Courbet?

わしか

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor

Jan Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor does not cite Gaston Bachelard's closing observations on metaphor in his Psychoanalysis of Fire.  For that matter, Bachelard is not mentioned in her Lyric Philosophy.

I hold no brief for Bachelard, but his Poetics of Space is cited by way of an epigram to one of her books of poetry ...

I think of these two large books as bound note cards otherwise well-suited to electronic editions in an annotation-friendly ebook viewer or reader.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Wikipedia's shiny-clean Austria

I have added a discussion note to the de.wikipedia.org page for Bregenz, Austria.

Since 1559, Bregrenz had been excused from housing Jews by an Imperial ruling.  A wealthy Pole built a chateau, but no Jews on the Bodensee?

But also no articles in de.wikipedia.org on any of the Nazis who administered the area known as Vorarlberg - of which Bregenz is Landeshauptstadt. Link 1. Link 2.  No Franz Hofer. No article on a Hans Dietrich, Kreisleiter.

Kreisleiter Hans Dietrich did not merit the shortest page of documentation.  Are there no historical documents.  Is this actually Bulgaria and not Österreich?

But there are documents. And there was a lack of effort to pursue Nazi collaborators in Austria even in the course of official denazification.

The URL of my discussion comment will fail if it is deleted by an editor, so I have kept a copy.

This is a regular problem in wikipedia where articles on cities are cherry-picked by city staffers and "patriots for tourism".

The big problem is the content from wikipedia articles is pulled into "information" pages by various web sites.  Think of it is "revisionism-by-neglect".

The article distinguishes between "sons and daughters" of the city and "Distinguished citizens" but does link to one Nazi and only one: Irmfried Eberl.  Yet the English Wikipedia article on Austrian denazification indicates that some 40% of KZ staff were Austrian as was the Nazi leader and some his worst henchmen. Yet only one from Bregenz - too notorious to ignore. But then by 1928 he was in Innsbruck, so you see, Bregenz is not implicated. Almost squeaky-clean. Could almost be Swiss.

One Hofer is mentioned; but not this one. See: die Gauleitung von Tirol-Vorarlberg

There were no Roma or Sinti in Bregenz. But it was the region's capital ...

The answer: from 1938 to 1945 Austria ceased to exist and in that Anschluss period, no history was made.  Nothing happended.  At least not in Bregenz.

see: Aktion T4.

"Arisierung","Entjudung" der Wirtschaft im Gau Tirol-Vorarlberg happened in the district, but the capital city of Vorarlberg was not involved. The last Jew left they don't remember when and the one Nazi got drawn into all that way off over there in Innsbruck.  Nothing but us Ehrenbürger here - and the Söhne und Töchter der Stadt  and among those few who were
Personen, die in Bregenz gelebt oder gewirkt haben - any Nazis either weren't there or went back to Germany after the war (and as we said, they weren't really there - they may have been in the district ...)

siehe: Rolf Steininger, Sabine Pitscheider (Hg.), "Tirol und Vorarlberg in der NS-Zeit", StudienVerlag 2002, S 319-340

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

wordlist Object Icon

The sourceforge.net wordlist page should be useful for anyone working in English on a lexicon with a text-oriented language such as Rebol 2, Red, Icon, UNICON, Converge or Object Icon.

I will be using a wordlist with Curl (the Curl web content language has a wrapper for zlib and has async loading so that a wordlist divided across zip files can be loaded astutely.)

Monday, January 2, 2012

Beguile Betray mandalot

Robert Graves' "To Beguile And Betray" has the line
of jealous hankering for the mandalot
which must be commented upon somewhere ...

see: mandala, mandalotus weevil