Scratchpad

Confession of a Filthy Dilettante

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13 Feb. 2008

I find myself finally having to admit that I'm not a Democrat any more. I've been drifting away from the party for several years now, and a number of events that have taken place in the last few months have finally come to a head. I've broken with the party. It's over. Fuck you. I wish I could say it was good while it lasted, but I can't even do that. I'm still liberal. I still have tendencies. But I can't date you any more.

Will I still have friends after this admission? I'm still the same person you've always known and I'm sorry if I haven't treated you right during this whole thing. I'm sorry if I lashed out at you because of my own identity crisis. I mean it. It wasn't your fault. It was me. I hope you can understand.

I suddenly think I must know what it feels like to be a pedophile - I crave something impossible, and I wish I didn't. I wish I could just be happy with having what everyone else has, and with being content with comfortable, safe conversations, able to connect with ordinary people and have the same discussion again and again, stroking my ego with its familiarity, with its mirror reflection of myself, telling me, "Yes, you're right, you're brilliant, you're so smart, everyone agrees with you." But that conversation disgusts me. I want to have it, but when I do I find myself furious at its impotence, its uselessness, its inability to spark even the slightest arousal in me. It's boring. It's cold. It's like having sex the exact same way over and over and no matter what I do I can't force myself to enjoy it. I sneak out at night and I go to listen to conversations I've never had before with strangers I will never meet again, and it excites me. The not knowing excites me. The thrill of the chase excites me.

There. I admitted it. You've become boring. Tired. Slow and sloppy in your cyclical, smug self-satisfaction and I am nothing but a filthy dilettante. You will never satisfy me. You little insular communities are all the same. You blow your wad after five seconds. There's no finesse, no tease, no build up, no excitement. I'm not leaving you for another party. I'm leaving you for another game altogether.

All I want is to discuss possibilities. Ideas. I crave to hear new ways to do things. Is the system broken? Let's fix it. Let's come up with alternatives, options. Let's experiment and tweak and alter and play. Test, feint, parry, recoup, flex, adjust. Tinker. Tease. Explore. Let us explore. Please. I want to explore. I cannot be the only person who wants to explore. I want to taste new foods and see new places and meet new people and for the love of all that is holy in this world I want to hear a new idea that I have never heard and I want to hear the journey you took to get there, and then I want to take it all apart and put it back together again. I want you to ask me hard questions and let me ask them of you in return. And sometimes, I want you to leave me alone so I can ask them of myself. I want you to be unafraid of making mistakes, and in so doing stumble upon something phenomenal. I would like you to seduce me slowly with your thoughts, not fuck me in the ear with your tired quickie sound bytes.

I'm tired of you telling me what to think, what to wear, how to live or eat. I am not a baby bird. I do not want to eat my food prechewed. I do not need you to do it for me; I can and want to catch it myself. Because, quite frankly, prechewed food is vomit. You are throwing up on me and you think that I should be titillated or at the very least grateful that you've saved me all that hard work. "Hey, man, everyone else does this. Why can't you be normal? This way is easier. It's normal to want to do it the easy way." Well, guess what? I am not fucking normal - I actually like to work for what is mine. I like my knowledge hard-earned, thanks, and I'm tired of your regurgitations.

I'm tired.

I'm fucking tired. I have a headache. I'm on the rag. I'm not in the mood. I am not hungry for your leftovers. I can't be a Democrat any more. I can't call myself a feminist. I'm damn sure not going to call myself a Republican or a Libertarian or anything else you have a label for, because the instant I put any group's labels on myself, all their buddies come out of the woodwork and start gang banging me with their assumptions, nodding their heads and staring at me with glassy eyes and refusing to actually chew the meaty heart of a matter, while they assume I am doing the same. I feel dirty when I lie and pretend that I am one of you. I am tired of that feeling. I would like to feel alive and true again. I would like to live well on ideas, not eke out a meager existence on your safe platitudes.

Silos

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23 Jan. 2008

I finally decided that after being in NY for four months it was time to check out at least one local lesbian hangout, albeit with trepidation. (Honestly, could there possibly be a less interesting scene in the entire world than a lesbian bar? If so, morbid curiosity impels me to keep looking for it.) So I popped on down to a little joint in the West Village, sidled up to the bar, turned to my left, and to my complete non-surprise saw another Sarah Lawrence grad from my class on the stool next to me. We'll call her H.

Needless to say we got to talking (if nothing else, it's hard to shut a Sarah Lawrence student up) on a whole host of topics, including words, neighborhoods, experiments in group ethics, pulling people off of subway tracks, girlfriends, the Internet, waiting tables, tiny apartments. You know, the usual topics for liberal arts geeks who get together. All in all, quite an enjoyable evening, and I had to scold myself for expecting it to turn out badly.

Even so, I was - and have remained - particularly discouraged by one aspect of the conversation. We were talking about words. I believe her friend asked whether a particular word was a real word or if she was making it up, and the bartender, who was a weird, veritable font of random trivia and aspires one day to be on Jeopardy, indicated that it was. Then the OED came up and we started talking dictionaries and made up words. I suggested that if H. was really as intrigued and simultaneously disgusted by made-up words as she indicated, she should check out the Urban Dictionary.

Now, as an aside, I find Urban Dictionary wonderful and fascinating and hilarious, and although I used to be rather uptight about "proper English," I've since come to embrace how wonderful and rich language can be through the process of evolution. Sure, there are certain words that I abhor and refuse to use (I'm thinking mostly of business-ese here...the utilizes and synergies and concretizing), but, on the whole, I think that playfulness and ingenuity are admirable traits in all other areas of life, so why not with language?

So, having divulged that about myself, I shouldn't have to tell you that I was pretty crestfallen when the bartender piped in with, "Urban Dictionary? Oh my God, that is the worst fucking site ever. I fucking hate that site. It's an affront to the English language. It's illiterate, ghetto central," or something pretty similar.

I felt like I had to come to the site's rescue. "Well that's the point, isn't it? That's what makes it so fascinating. I mean, it's precisely because these aren't the types of words you would use that it's so wonderful. This isn't stuff you're going to hear from most of your friends or the circles you normally run in, it gives you a little window into a whole different culture." Which is true, but I know that my defense came across as pretty lame.

And then, what the fuck out of the blue, H. comes at me with something about how everyone thinks the Internet is so wonderful but it's not, because it leaves out whole swaths of the population. Essentially, she came at me with the access argument, but couched in slightly different terms. Her implication to me was how could I be defending the Internet as being great when there are so many minorities who aren't represented on it? (As if that's the Internet's fault and not society's fault, but I haven't quite got to that part of the story yet).

Now, that's fine, that's all well and good, I've heard that argument a million times before, but the part that really slapped me at the time and which has only more persistently been seeping into every pore and just nagging the hell out of me ever since is that we were just discussing a website frequented by and essentially made by these very same "underrepresented minorities" she was purporting to defend, and she and everyone else in the conversation was trashing the site as being an illiterate piece of shit. But more to the point, they were making it very, very clear that they absolutely, positively do not go to those sorts of websites.

So the bit that's really started to nag at me is just how accurate is the party line on underrepresented groups on the Internet? And I do mean party line - I hear this argument stated as fact all the time on any number of the mailing lists I'm on, in articles in the Times, on Slate, Personal Telco...everywhere. (And by everywhere, I mean everywhere there are liberal, white, educated folk who have the white man's burden to make sure everyone gets access, or at least talk about it whether or not they are actually trying to do anything about it.) After watching the conversations in such places carefully over the last several years, after studying topics like viral marketing, after listening to endless political rhetoric, I've become keenly aware of how truths wax and wane and become more true within closed communities and it's become very, very hard for me to accept anything as fact just because I hear it a lot. If anything, the more I hear something the more suspect it becomes in my mind. I've come to hate taking anything for granted, least of all my own beliefs.

So that's it. It's been bothering me like mad ever since I had this conversation. I've been on some crazy sites during my love affair with the Internet. Forums haunted by professional mercenaries. Social networks comprised of miners and welfare moms. Porn sites. I came across a blog the other day by and for perfume industry professionals that practically bordered on scent fetishism. Black power sites. Sites from school kids in rural Appalachia. Sites from African-American expats living in Africa. Latino dating sites. I even looked at a couple of neo-Nazi sites once...for a few minutes, anyway. Even I have my limits. But mostly I just stick to my little corner of things and chat with the folks I know and who have similar interests to my own. And that's the part that bothers me. Here we are talking about underrepresented this and unfair that and no access and human rights, and from what I've seen (and this extends beyond H., to be fair to her) most of the people doing the talking aren't willing to explore the very corners of the Internet they claim don't exist.

So is it that they don't exist? Or are they there and are we just too damn ignorant and self-important to know they do exist? Do we actually want to know they exist? Or maybe we want them to have access, but only if the pages they make look and sound white?

Read More....and then Shut the Fuck Up

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21 Jan. 2008

You know, if I have to read one more single fucking article or hear one more whiny lament about how reading is dying, I am just going to pull out some batshit crazy whupass on the mother fucker that dared to snivel out that ridiculous platitude yet again.

  1. Books are not the only form of reading, you fucking dipshits.
  2. Not everyone in the world has the leisure time to sit around reading all day. Some people have to actually work for a living doing all the things you rely on having done but are not able or willing to do yourself. When you learn and actually begin to do every single one of those things, come back to me and we'll rediscuss why reading is more important than all of those other things.
  3. Please note that historically, reading by the dirty unwashed masses was done as a means of personal and economic betterment. In other words, necessity and personal gain. Reading by the rarefied few was done for fun. The same is still true.
  4. Please note that both types of reading in point three are just that - reading.
  5. Stop only counting "acceptable" forms of reading in your bogus studies. It makes them painfully meaningless.
  6. Stop conflating change in reading habits with decline in reading habits.
  7. Pick a line in the sand and stick with it. Twats like you were decrying the death of reading over a hundred years ago. Then they were doing it 80 years ago. Then 60. If you are all to be believed, no one left in the world even understands the concept of a letter, much less has the ability to actually read it. Pick a definition of "death" that you can actually quantify and prove to me - one that doesn't involve comparison of others' reading to your own.
  8. Read a book on the history of reading, for the love of god.

Cometbus Guide to Used Bookstores in NYC

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20 Jan. 2008

I've been pestering S. for this list of cool used bookstores in NY ever since I left Portland. It is from the special 2006 25th anniversary issue of Cometbus (issue #50), and I haven't been able to track down a copy of my own, or even another copy of the list online. Thankfully, she finally found her copy buried under thousands of books of her own.

My goal is to visit everyone of these as a start to compiling my own list of used bookstores here in NYC. Please e-mail me ('holla,' at this domain) if you have any personal favorites to recommend).

Skyline Books

13 W. 18th St

Bookoff

14 E 41st St (near NYPL)

Community Books

143 7th Ave, Park Slope, Brooklyn

Uncertain if this is the same one referred to in Cometbus, but looks promising either way.

Clovis Press

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Closed. One story says it's been turned into a wine bar by local gentrification efforts.

Spoonbill and Sugartown

218 Bedford Ave, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

7th Ave Books

Park Slope, Brooklyn - Closed

Brooklyn seems to be hard hit in the book realm.

Park Slope Books

Park Slope, Brooklyn - Closed

Another gentrification fatality.

Junk

197 North 9th St, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Alabaster Bookshop

122 4th Ave

Westsider Rare and Used Books

Broadway between 80th and 81st, Upper West Side

Unoppressive, Non-imperialist Bargain Books

34 Carmine below Bleeker

Accidental CDs

location unknown, probably defunct

This used to be on Avenue A but then moved around the corner to St. Marks to squat in "the Cave." The landlord evicted the entire building with a sledgehammer about 5 months later. Unclear what happened to Accidental after that, but their original location is supposedly now a bakery that makes dog treats.

Gotham Book Mart

Closed!

After roughly 87 years in business, this one closed in summer 2007.

The Two in One Shop

52nd near 9th Ave, Times Square - closed?

I can't find any reference to this online or in the Yellow Pages, so I'm thinking it might be gone.

Mercer Street Books

206 Mercer St, NYU

12th Street Books

11 E. 12th St., Greenwich Village

UPDATE: Moved to 179 Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn in July 2008

86 Books

276 12th St, Park Slope, Brooklyn

Unclear if this is the same store mentioned in Cometbus.

Housing Works

126 Crosby St near Houston

Always a winner. Beautiful, delicious, charity.

Heights Books

109 Montague St, Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn

The Strand

I should not have to tell you how to get here

Ah, a classic. Probably the first used bookstore I visited in NYC, all the way back in college. Because of its size, The Strand is great if you are looking for something specific, but it can be claustrophobic with all of the traffic and definitely isn't the place to go if you are looking to get lost in quiet stacks of books.

East Village Books

99 St Mark's Place

The Thing

1001 Manhattan Ave, Greenpoint, Brooklyn

The Vortex

222 Montrose Ave, Bushwick, Brooklyn

This used to be around the corner from The Thing and was (is?) run by the Thing's wife

List additions:

Adam's Books/Unnameable Books

456 Bergen Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn

Tiny but enjoyable selection of art, history, philosophy, and lit books. They also have a nice rack of what look like artists' self published zines? I went here looking for an obscure title by Jenny Perlin that they carry. Very cool.

Quick Notes on Digital Scholarship

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15 Jan. 2008

I had a truly pleasurable conversation with some faculty members recently about the possibilities that Web x.0 has for academia. I'm sad to say it was far to short to really delve into the endless possibilities that are out there, and for all the enjoyment I had, I also left feeling terribly dissatisfied at how little we were able to even scratch the surface.

So, if you'll bear with me, I am just going to throw an off-the-cuff list up here right now so that perhaps next time I get the chance to have such a great chat, some of these things will be more at the forefront of my mind and I will be able to pluck at them more quickly without grasping....

Network growth

Tools that allow you to discover like-minded researchers you may not have previously known about.

del.icio.us, vanity searches, any site containing "who links here" (Technorati, RSS subscriber lists, etc), blogs, mailing lists, Citeulike

Network maintenance, solidification

Tools that allow you to connect with existing contacts and strengthen your professional bonds.

social networking, facebook, friendster, blogs, mailing lists, RSS

Research tools

Anything that makes research - both online and off - more efficient, easier

Amazon bib-builder (Turkel) and other sites containing "users who looked at that also looked at this" functionality, Zotero, Citeulike, spiders, RSS, metadata, standards, programming, data viz, Yahoo Pipes, mashups, Swivel, intelligent agents, automated searches, distance collaboration

Public service

Tools that make work accessible, transparent, and meaningful to the public.

Upcoming, Google Calendar, blogs, YouTube, alternative publishing, Second Life, mailing lists

Reputation building

Technically, any of the above! If people know you and you are producing good work, your reputation will increase. This means not just churning out papers, but also putting yourself in the public eye and playing nice with colleagues, collaborating with folks at other institutions, and providing work for the benefit of the public. What good is a brilliant paper if no one else knows it exists?

I know this barely touches on all the possibilities, but it's a down and dirty list of what came to me in the last 10 minutes. There are, of course, dozens or likely hundreds of other possibilities.

Breakthrough!

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5 Jan. 2008

I've been struggling for years to identify how all my academic interests "fit." What the fuck do a fascination with the things we take for granted, con men, social engineering, truth, fluidity, hackers, cooperation, design, play, desire, manipulation, cognition, hci, communication, culture wars, academic irrelevance, art, hatred of Foucault, new media, internet, pedagogy, food, knowledge, information, pirate radio, and,...well, any of it have in common with each other? I've been becoming more and more aware of connecting threads for the last year or so, narrowing in on...something...but I think I've finally put it all together, and well, in the last few days.

In large part, this was sparked by a discussion we've been having on the iDC mailing list. I tend to avoid speaking on the list because, frankly, it's a lot of postmodern shit and wankers trying to one up each other - all the stuff I really hate about academia blown into proportions of unfathomable magnitude. But I stay on it, because now and then some real gems come through and really make me look at things in a new light or slap my head with realization "Ah ha! So that's how it all fits!" At any rate, the current conversation is about the One Laptop project that's recently rolled out of MIT and whether it's more imperialist pig crap that we're dumping on the third world that will oppress its citizens for years to come.* I was struck - I mean, really struck, struck enough to comment on the list about it - that members of the list were actually discussing possible solutions to how the project should be rolled out to avoid this. Solutions that involved proper pedagogical practice. For third world countries. That members of the conversation have in many cases never been to or studied. I was absolutely floored by the arrogance - all couched in thoughtful academic rhetoric and concern for these cultures - that somehow we could develop answers for the citizens of these countries about the correct way to adopt these technologies.

Okay, no. Scratch that. I wasn't floored. I was unsurprised. But I was flaming pissed. This is precisely the kind of bullshit that I have thought is making academia so hated and detrimental to the regular population. Its overriding belief that it has the answers to everything, but also its inability to see when it is being grossly, obviously, transparently hypocritical. Here I exchange the political definition of imperialism with the social definition - an attitude of superiority, "father knows best" - but the conversation had a terribly imperialistic tone, even as it was about avoiding imperialism.

And that's when I realized how vitally important to me a sense of equality and fairness in my relations to others is. I mean, I knew it mattered, but I didn't quite realize how central it was to my outlook on life. I haven't been that pissed in a long time and I rather (okay, only just a little) regret taking it out on the list. But it really brought to a head all of my discomfort with academia, with class stratification, but really just with how fucking shittily people treat each other on a day to day basis, even when they have no real need to. I have enough money to be comfortable though not rich. I'm better off than a lot of people. So I've never understood what I could gain from being condescending to those who aren't as fortunate as I am, whether consciously or unconsciously. Being on the other side of the equation - including my brush with homelessness and the time I spent living in a rural area - no doubt amplified this considerably. I actually know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the contemptuous stare (and I use "the" for a reason - if you've ever received this look for being poor, you know exactly which one I am referring to), so I'll be damned if I'm going to be responsible for giving that look to another person.

And all of this led me to realize just how all those disparate interests I listed above fit together coherently. My two overriding interests are information (which I knew) and interaction (which I hadn't quite put a finger on). Period. Everything above is related to the interplay of those two ideas.

Check it out:

  • Cultural assumptions about knowledge and information. The history of information.
    • How does what we believe about information (ie - "knowledge is power," "ignorance is bliss") inform how we talk about it today?
    • What are the roots of those beliefs?
    • Should we be taking these things for granted, or should we rethink some of these ideas at a very fundamental level? Are the assumptions getting us anywhere?
    • How do our beliefs about information affect our interactions with others? Politics? Daily life? What struggles do they underpin?
  • Propaganda, cons, social engineering, play, desire, design.
    • How do people use an understanding of psychology and cognition to advantage in daily interaction?
    • How is information presented to maximize results, whether for good or ill?
    • How do our actual uses of information affect our interactions with others? Politics? Daily life? What struggles do they underpin? (see above for comparison to beliefs)
  • Communication and academic/public stratification.
    • What could academia learn from the answers to the questions above?
  • New media, the Internet.
    • Okay, I just really fucking love the Internet, because in many ways it embodies all the other ideas - information, design, struggle, community, interaction - in one messy package.
    • Also, I like to make pretty things on it.
    • And useful tools for using it. Based on my own assumptions of information and what it's good for. I should probably take a hard look at those assumptions.

* Note: Please be aware that many members of the list would probably disagree violently with this interpretation of the conversation.

Iteration in bash

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4 Jan. 2008

I'm a terrible programmer, mainly because I only try to do it when I really need something, instead of just sequestering myself in a room with cheesy puffs and Dr. Pepper for 2 weeks to just do it already. So I find myself having to keep notes when I do anything successfully lest I forget when I need to program again 6 months later. Even the really, really simple shit. Sigh.

Changing file names quickly in a Linux directory with a billion files:


for i in $(ls -1 s_*.gif);
do (( n++ )); mv $i file$n.gif ;
done

Play

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19 Dec. 2007

Quick notes before I forget. To flesh out later.

Play.

  • E15 doing the interface that I've been thinking of? Kind of. But not quite. Too busy. Too arbitrary.
  • But interface is playful, interactive, exploratory. This is why it works.
  • Push/pull/osmosis learning (boyd). "As media opens up a culture of osmosis and makes pulling information fun, youth are increasingly disconnected from the world of push." Those who play will naturally pull.
  • Something mentioned on AoIR list about friend networks working initially while people were still intrigued by novelty? Or in Leonardo article? Use of networks falls off sharply after exploration phase (are my other friends on here? who can I find?) ends.
  • Leonardo 40.4 "A pleasure Framework", Brigid Costello. Elements of play are creation, exploration, discovery, difficulty, competition, danger, captivation, sensation, sympathy, simulation, fantasy, camaraderie, subversion. what have I been doing in my work? Which do I respond to? Which should a curatorial interface have?
  • Suspicion that my dissatisfaction with current tools like zotero is that they have none of the above. Learning is work, a job. Professionalized. Only professionals will use. How to build a tool that all will use?
  • I really, really hate school when it is work. Just realized this is why I am really afraid to go back. The other day I was reimbued with the exhilaration of discovering new things. Been missing quite a while. How to sustain that?

Knowledge Paths

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18 Dec. 2007

Oh, man. I found this excellent e-mail to Litza as I was cleaning out my Inbox the other day (to put the direness of my need to clean my Inbox into perspective, the conversation below is about 2 years old). I'm still really obsessed with this idea although it kind of fell by the wayside. On a positive note, I think a lot of other stuff that's floated across my desk the last couple of years gives me a few more words to explain it with and possible actually do it at some point.

Litza: What do you mean exactly by the web interface "allowing the presentation of multiple sources at once on the screen"? Can you give me an example where this is done? Do you mean data sources? I like the idea of showing full paths -- do you mean "downstream" paths (where the user can go) or "upstream" (where the user came from) paths? That offers some interesting possibilities and challenges.

Alexis: Well, right now, to follow a link to related information, you have to actually leave the site, or open something in a new tab. Why not click on a link and have a window on the same page appear, so you can look at things simultaneously? I mean, that's how people see connections between ideas. I don't think it's done anywhere else yet, although there are some people trying, in various ways, to create systems that do this (like Ted Nelson). I guess you could create a whole new system to do it, but you could also do it on the Net as is, using existing technologies as "complex" as CSS (kludgy as that would be).

Note: this idea is something I was trying to get at in a comment on the NYPL Labs site just a mere month ago. The screen should be a workspace, not merely a reader. In some ways 2.0 has made this much more of a reality, but rarely do interfaces allow us to manipulate the information itself - we simply play with the design of things. There are a few exceptions to this, mashups being a good example thats really starting to explode a lot more.

As far as the concept of a workspace, it is totally unnecessary but I would love to implement the above using touch screens instead of mice.

(...continued) As for paths, I am referring not to where users have been (although that is okay), but rather how ideas are connected. Kind of like a flowchart. And each part of the flowchart is a link to something about that, and when you click it it opens in the window you are looking at, and you can still see the path and the new data next to any other windows you have open. If you are talkin about, I don't know, text mining, you might want information on Natural Language Processing, spiders, mapping, neurology, XML and Java and show how they are connected, and let users look at all of them together. Not the best example, but it works for the time. And then if they want to get really excited about the XML angle, you could have a finer path to go into more detail about XML, with its pros and cons and history and examples and technical specs.

Note: I finally have a succinct word for what the fuck I am talking about here. I want users to be able to actually curate their own libraries.

(...continued) On a grander scale, what about a system where everyone could create these sort of thought-paths, and you could access anyone else's thought-path on a topic and pull the actual thought-paths into your site to supplement/expand your own? Like maybe you are good at broad overviews of things (text mining), but the finer details of XML are not your forte - just find someone who is an expert, and pull their thought path to your site for those that want to follow that particular thread.

Note: The curated subjects are modular and reusable, probably by using XML.

Which is better - to think about food, or to eat food?

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17 Dec. 2007

Dan Cohen had an interesting blog post a few days back that I've only just bothered to read. Of course it turned out to be quite fascinating, which just goes to show that I should keep on top of these things better.

At any rate, the post in question is on digitization and repatriation. Specifically, he asks if digital objects, photos, etc. are so finely detailed that they convey as much information as the original object, should museums give back stolen artifacts and keep digital versions of the object for scholars to look at?

The interesting offshoot of this, at least as far as I am concerned, is the question posted by a reader "Which is more valuable - information about an object, or the object itself?" Scholars, naturally, would tend to say the information. Without information, an object is simply a pretty trinket. But when you imbue it with meaning, when you investigate it and understand it, then it obtains actual value.

Although I actually agree with this on a very gut level, as both a fake-scholar and...well...okay, fine an information fetishist, are you happy?....I also differ very deeply from many academics I've met in suspecting that this is a personal obsession and not, in fact, some sort of fundamental truth. I also suspect that this is likely at the core of the public's distrust and turn from academia (another topic of personal fascination and dread). The public, on the whole, doesn't care about ideas. They care about what they can do with those ideas. Ideas, knowledge, information for their own sake are simply wanking. But put those things to good use, and then we have something to subsist on.

So which is better? Cooking up a wonderful and delicious meal and being content in the fact that it's there and we know it's good? Or actually enjoying the fruits of our labor by eating the damn thing?

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