The block quotation is a typographic device used to designate an extended quoted passage, appearing as a distinct verical element. The <blockquote> tag dates to the first draft of HTML.
BLOCKQUOTE.org is a web site. The web site belongs to Justin Skolnick, a web developer and current graduate student living in Chicago.
The Twitter feed serves RSS.
Men love jargon. It is so palpable, tangible, visible, audible; it makes so obvious what one has learned; it satisfies the craving for results. It is impressive for the uninitiated. It makes one feel that one belongs.
from Walter Kaufmann’s Prologue to Martin Buber’s I and Thou
Some folks came to town for a music show. How many came shouldn’t have been a surprise, but the bodies that arrived to fill the space of a friend’s apartment with their substance were of a number I’d never witnessed there, and this is true even without counting the regular bodies.
Afternoons and evenings the neighborhood street traffic showed thin by all modes of transit. If Lincoln Park wanted to stage the coup on Wicker Park, etc., that it’s plotted since its first move to infiltrate North and Milwaukee Avenues with brand-name boutiques, sushi, and little puppies, these last three were the days to do it. Their loss. Every one of my sub-40 neighbors accompanied by their long-distance friends shuffled, trudged, and pedaled down to Union Park under storm clouds (“No rain! No rain!”) for three days of self-love and music.
Had one asked where Justin could be found among the revelers, the correct answer would be on the periphery, sponging off the generosity of friends when all I’d contributed to the cause was a single bottle of Oberon, appropriate to the season but a posteriori less so the occasion, and for two late, rapid hours Friday. Truth is, the festival’s eventuality met my notice many times prior to the fact and I failed to respond in earnest, since lately I’ve enjoyed no surplus of time, attention, or income. In that tripartite objection my stubborn mind stands, and there I stand.
It’s possible that I could be of a mind to attend shows, and to somehow afford to attend shows, and it’s probable that it would be a good time. The last judgment finds its basis in experiences of like kind achieving that outcome. I want to say on these grounds that I make a valid point. One may grant that the world is potential, and I may assent to the proposition. The existentialists said a man must not be judged, however, on the grounds of his potential but on his actual existence. Thus somewhere between those two poles, whereby potential action is or is not a criterion of personal identity and worth, lies a third point describing where I am as a consumer of music.
Not that this tarnishes my appreciation for the thoughtful and even artful turn rock music has taken in recent years. There’s no doubt in my mind that if I devoted a few hours each week to seeking and listening to new music it would cause me pleasure, no doubt also amplify my reception of the band names littering the neighborhood. I even think modern music could benefit from my active engagement. Seriously. I’m a generous person and I have a lot to contribute.
On Saturday I purchased the three tracks off Bitte Orca spared an excess of that grating falsetto. Of the three I bought, iTunes says the song I like best is the song everybody likes, and that affirms me.
Preemptive rejection’s so hot.
Rev that unsymbolic engine
until they eye my parking spot.
Preemptive rejection — so haute!
Detach me from her mighty coif.
[Commence epic invocation.]
Preemptive rejection’s so hawt:
Rev the unsymbolic engine!
(November, 2005)
In the third of Descartes’ six Meditations on First Philosophy either he has taken flight from reason or I have missed something. I suspect that if there’s a link, it’s on the page I rushed through before the singleminded masses would push me and all creation from the train when the doors opened to the platform. In the interest of preserving the embodied life I have enjoyed so many years, they left me no true option but to become one with them down the platform, up the escalators, and out to the street.
Somehow the book remains dangling from my hand when all of a sudden I find myself at the end of a line for tea, and when just as suddenly a line forms behind me.
The woman who will order after me wears a short blue summer dress. She is so tall that she is capable of reading over my shoulder the title of the book that I now rest on the counter, and she remarks, “Some light morning reading,” grinning. I reply with words that are not as extraordinary or apt as the words that come to mind in two minutes when I’m seated and watching her stride west on Randolph Street.
Once I sit, with my book and a cup of tea too hot to drink, my phone reports that I have enough time to divert myself with the commuters passing the enormous windows — but only that, not enough to hunt the text with due attention. I put the tea on a table and the book in my bag.
Descartes here meditates on the possibility, at this point in the text by no means certain, that things exist external to himself. “But what then am I? A thing that thinks.” He observes, he senses: still neither act suffices to convince him the world takes place outside his own mind. He reports feeling heat; I ease my hand from a steaming paper cup and turn my view away from the gleaming ivory white sky. The cup and the sun could be my own work — the book, the woman, and the crowds all my device, the creative product of my thinking self.
I remember an acquaintance once responded with a measured breath how frightening the thought of solipsism is. This, coming from someone who didn’t live by measure, whom I knew as a speeding train laying out its own tracks in time to ride them. It was my response to smile. I could and still can imagine more frightening things than a world wholly contained within myself.
A more frightening thing is how the idea of solipsism might motivate someone who is not myself to act within the world that I also inhabit, action of the kind Andre Breton called, “The purest surrealist act,” of “walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly.” History advises me to add, DO NOT DO THIS. Certain ideas license antisocial behavior, many on the grounds that human society is basically false, and if false then actions are meaningless.
As one touched by trauma, I must say that actions are very meaningful. There is another mode of thinking that’s much more insidious and much less articulate than mere solipsism. I won’t name it; I don’t need to; it’s incredibly familiar.
I’m just thinking, as I sit watching well-dressed people pass by the hundred toward the towers that stretch higher toward the sun here, in Chicago, than anywhere for hundreds of miles. I’m thinking, as cars and busses pass, as the el screeches stopped. I’m wondering how many places we all come from this morning, how many places we’ll go back to at night.
What I’m thinking is how strange it is that we all come to this one place at right about the same time, do things in the towers at the same time, and leave for our own places at the same time. And I’m thinking about how singleminded we all become to ensure that these things happen at the right times, how everything else in the world impedes our daily progress towards these ends — and how counterproductive it is to view oneself as one more impediment among countless impediments.
Descartes, I think, sitting in that soft, cool chair before work on Friday — Descartes and his logic can wait for the weekend. It seems best to sit quiet, let my mind spin down to a reasonable cycle, watch the people on the sidewalk. A few spare minutes to collect myself and gather my thoughts, I reason, might be for the best.
Right as I opened a book at a coffee shop, a Stevie Wonder song happened, and it made me close the book. It was a book for school, for a final exam I’ve still got to complete. The song made me stop and groove. I was grooving along to Stevie Wonder in a coffee shop.
When I put down the thick book, I thought about the song. The first thing I thought was, what a powerful song to command my attention!
After that I thought about the future time when I wouldn’t have to read books I didn’t like simply to demonstrate my mastery of the writer’s vocabulary (books, like blogs, are language games) and my submission to the professor (classes are another kind of game). It occurred to me that in the future, the book I put down to listen to the song could have less power over my class identity, or professional designation, or consequently the value of my thoughts relative to the rank and order of society. The book could even be a work of fiction, like a novel or ancient history or systematic theology. Whatever it was, I could close it and put it down because the book would have no power over me. I could cede my attention to the song without the threat of penalty.
Then I began thinking about having the song, and ran through a mental catalog of venues that might have the song. These included a library, a record store, iTunes, friends. I soon assigned each venue a number of qualities according to a system that on immediate reflection appeared quite robust and silly, at which point I laughed and gave up the idea.
I didn’t need to have the song. The reason I didn’t need the song was that I already had it, right then as I was listening to it, in the coffee shop. All that thinking had forced me from the experience of enjoying it. The groove became thin because I wanted to possess it. And that is how I almost lost the song.
What I did then was to listen and let it do what it meant to do to me. The thing that it did was to make me dance this morning, two days later, in my kitchen where none of you can see me, as the chorus played back in my head. I could have it on my computer, and on the iPod that I really use for internet and games and not for music, but then it wouldn’t exactly be in my head, as a thing learned is in my head.
The Stevie Wonder song is just that: a thing learned. It plays back seemingly of its own accord. Sometime its melody will emit from my pursed lips as I walk down the street. People may hear that, and look, and wonder what’s on my mind, and hypothesize about what I’ve got churning up there, and what sort of person I am by implication. That’s something people do. It won’t stop the whistling, and it won’t stop the dancing. Whatever that says about me is fine.
Slept in. Read some junk on the interwebs. Signed for a package. Took a walk to the lake and looked at it for a long, long time. The Sox on WGN.
What I ate for lunch today was pb&j. about 6 hours ago from web
Portuguese? No question. Though it was less clear that those seated within earshot could bear witness to a bus ride conversation between friends so much as “Desafinado” spoken in three parts by turns.
Then I came home and took a long nap.
Now that books are finally entering the world of networked, digital text, they will undergo the same transformation that Web pages have experienced over the past 15 years. Blogs, remember, were once called “Web logs,” cultivated by early digital pioneers who kept a record of information they found online, quoting and annotating as they browsed.
With books becoming part of this universe, “booklogs” will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public.
Steven Johnson, “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write”
Moreover . . .
In this world, citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today.
Man, what a great idea. Like, if I was building a web site these days, I would totally build a citation engine into the admin system. Now, I’d have to think carefully about how that could work on the database level, to leave room for changing needs in document citation, and that would take some serious planning. Mindful of cultural tastes and values, I’d have to roll things out on the front end slowly, so that one day it just seemed natural to have citations on a blog post — natural, that is, outside the academy. And, most important, I’d have to give the site a clever but totally descriptive name, something memorable.
I sure wish I’d thought about that.
MLA eschews URLs in an update for this wild new “information age” of ours:
The seventh edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, released Tuesday, states that the Modern Language Association no longer recognizes print as the default medium, and suggests that the medium of publication should be included in each works cited entry.
“Style: MLA, Updated.” Inside Higher Ed, via Ars
Hint hint, friends.
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