Creative Capacity meeting? dang!

I should have checked Twitter earlier- right now the mayor-elect is wrapping up a Creative Capacity meeting at PNCA. Dang- I'd love to be at that.

I've signed up for his mailing list, anyway, so hopefully I'll find out about things like this sooner.

The Gettysburg Address

I know you've read it, but read it.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Also, my genius finanical bailout plan

(I absolutely love this- since when has CSPAN had so much theater!)

I feel like as long as the government is being generous with the bad-debt forgiveness on Wall Street, they should spread the love over here. As many people as owe money to Sallie Mae and Fannie and Freddy- we should all get, say, $25k in government debt forgiveness. It would make a huge difference for those of us who are earnestly making our payments, would increase the likelihood of people actually paying off those debts, and would generate taxpayer good will toward the bailout.

late edit:
So, I've been doing some research, and I'm learning all about the economy (tangent: damn, could they possibly use more codified language to explain this stuff? It reads like deliberate obfuscation- they intend for it to be so boring and incomprehensible that nobody can really penetrate the meaning of all this stuff).
So here's a quick summary of what I understand:
Shortselling is a way for me to make money if I don't own a stock and think that stock will decrease in value. I call up a friend of mine who has that stock, and is a long-term investor, and borrow, say, 1000 shares of that stock from them. I then sell the 1000 shares, wait a week or so, buy them back at the decreased rate, and return them to my friend the long-term investor. If I sold them at $5 a share and buy them back at $4, then I've made $1000 and my friend is in the same position they would be in anyway. So, back in the day when stocks were literally pieces of paper, you used to have people running all around with wheelbarrows of borrowed stock, so that someone could shortsell it.
Naked shortselling is the same thing, but I haven't actually got the stock I've borrowed. It's as though I know my friend will lend me the stock if I ask them, but I don't actually have it in my hands. So say I sell 1000 shares of stock that I don't own and haven't actually borrowed, and then say that I wait a while for the stock to go down (it's a week later but I think it may still go lower, so I haven't bought back the borrowed stock)... there's no real penalty for this. Someone eventually calls my broker and points out that I sold stock I don't have, but no one has to actually do anything about it. It's been going on forever, to save people all that wheelbarrowing.
A credit default swap is where I make a risky loan to someone, and I didn't get any collateral from them to cover the potential loss. If I make a bunch of risky loans, my cash flow gets strapped and I have all these potential losses out there. So I find someone to assume the risk, and pay them to do so. So if I loan person X $1000, and expect them to pay me $10 a month plus interest until it's repaid, I then find person Y and ask them to pay me an agreed percentage if person X doesn't come through. I pay person Y $1 a month to assume the risk for me. If X pays me, all is well and I buy the debt back from Y, and all I've lost is a portion of the interest. If X doesn't pay me, Y pays me my percent, so I still get, say, $400 back of my original money. People use CDSs to hedge risky loans. The problem with credit default swaps is that they encourage people to make riskier and riskier loans. Eventually I'm in a position where not only can person X not repay my loan, but person Y can't be relied upon to pay me back either, and there's no collateral tied to any of these transactions, so there's no way to recover any of it from anyone. What's more, if person Y agreed to cover 40%, I may have also hedged the debt with persons Z, Q, and L, so that this bad debt is spread all around. There's about $58 trillion dollars in this market (twice the size of the stock market, up from $44 trillion a year ago), and Christopher Cox thinks that's the next impending crisis. (Hey, turns out there's no IRS rules for reporting income from these transactions, either, so probably a bunch of people have been making a fortune and not paying taxes. Lovely.)

Here's a couple paragraphs from Money.com:

While such contracts have legitimate uses, some fear that the protection they offer could lead market participants to take risks they might not otherwise. Just who is using the instruments and who is backing them aren't clear, however. Also unclear is whether the parties who sell the protection to swaps buyers have the financial strength to make good on their promises, since there are no minimum standards for capital strength or liquidity.
...
Opportunities for credit-default swaps to be abused in insider-trading or market-manipulation schemes are an issue as well. Since credit-default swaps may be used by speculators as well as those seeking protection against a credit default, regulators worry they could be a powerful tool for manipulators. The SEC announced last week that it is investigating whether brokers, hedge funds and other money managers might have used credit-default swaps to pressure stock prices lower, producing profits for short sellers.

I have to say, I'm really interested in all this. It's really captured my imagination, and I can't wait to see what happens next.

InfoWorld has a great summary of the Terry Childs case

Sorting Out Fact from Fiction in the Terry Childs Case

I find this case just fascinating.

Of course management wants to hire employees with independence and initiative, so that things can be "just taken care of." And yet to delegate means to lose control, and it's not uncommon for there to be just this sort of panic when someone realizes how little control they actually have.

What's hilarious and charming about this case is how unwarranted the panic is- the network is, and always was, stable and operational- and the unspeakable technical ignorance that every aspect of this case reveals. It's clear that his supervisors had no idea what his job actually was or what's common practice in the industry, and now the court system has no idea how to articulate, let alone prove or disprove, the crimes they are accusing him of.

Sunday night updates

The kitten is bigger and stronger now- his hands and head move in a more determined fashion, and his voice is getting more strident. Adorable!

Mortal Engines- it's an interesting world, so I wish it were a better book. Of course, it's "young adult", but I wished for more complexity and richness. All the characters think in exclamation marks! Oh no, that's a mean guy! How could he act like that! I'm upset and confused! Someone should rewrite it with a heavy dose of Gormenghast, all that ancient weight and ponderous energy...

Bobbsey Twins- actually did a quick shot today, the first one in all these months of talking about finishing this short. So that's one down, 47 to go.


Let's close the weekend with a poem, shall we?

Eavan Boland- The Women

This is the hour I love: the in-between
neither here-nor-there hour of evening.
The air is tea-colored in the garden.
The briar rose is spilled crepe de Chine.

This is the time I do my work best,
going up the stairs in two minds,
in two worlds, carrying cloth or glass,
leaving something behind, bringing
something with me I should have left behind.

The hour of change, or metamorphosis,
of shape-shifting instabilities.
My time of sixth sense and second sight
when in the words I choose, the lines I write,
they rise like visions and appear to me:

women of work, of leisure, of the night,
in stove-colored silks, in lace, in nothing,
with crewel needles, with books, with wide-open legs,

who fled the hot breath of the god pursuing,
who ran from the split hoof and the thick lips
and fell and grieved and healed into myth,

into me in the evening at my desk
testing the water with a sweet quartet,
the physical force of a dissonance--

the fission of music into syllabic heat--
and getting sick of it and standing up
and going downstairs into the last brightness

into a landscape without emphasis,
light, linear, precisely planned,
a hemisphere of tiered, aired cotton,

a hot terrain of linen from the iron,
folded in and over, stacked high,
neatened flat, stoving heat and white.

The Road

In that long ago somewhere very near this place he'd watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.

Question: why do you think there aren't any quotation marks or apostrophes in the dialogue?

Esozone

Esozone

hmm.

I have to admit that I'm curious what they think the future brings. I spend a lot of time with people who anticipate a certain kind of future for society and technology, and it would broaden my horizons to include other viewpoints. Plus a couple of my old boyfriends will probably be there.

On the other hand, magikal people make me tired. I feel like their entire perception of reality is based on minute power exchanges, and it gets pretty boring. I may just poke around their website and skip the conference.

just look at her clothes...

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

Kitten!

A few weeks ago a friend of mine took in a stray cat, and I was watching her last week while he was out of town.
Monday night while I was hanging out with her, I realized that she was pregnant, and yesterday morning when I checked in on her, she had given birth!
One of the kittens was dead when I got there, but I spent most of the day hovering over her and the survivor- she's a remarkably social cat, didn't mind me handling the kitten at all, and needed to be coaxed a bit to hang out and nurse him. Pictures!




It's hard to tell what's happening in the last one- she's completely wrapped around him, and his little face is poking out. squeee! ^_^
These pictures are a few hours apart, and you can't really see how much rounder his belly got during the course of the day, but you can kind of see his ears unwrinkling and his face fluffing up.

Vanessa is coming!

My incredible friend Vanessa is coming to Portland in October for a butoh performance and workshop. The website isn't always current, so I'll paste from the email:

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17 (PORTLAND)
8 p.m.
PERFORMANCES by YUKO OTA and DEATH POSTURE with percussionist Matt Hannafin, & MIZU DESIERTO BUTOH THEATRE with guest musicians
The Headwaters: kinesthetic laboratory & center for international exchanges in the arts @ Disjecta:
8371 N. Interstate Ave. pdx 97217

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18 (PORTLAND)
PORTLAND BUTOH WORKSHOP WITH
YUKO OTA
10 a.m - 6 p.m
The Headwaters: kinesthetic laboratory & center for international exchanges in the arts @ Disjecta:
8371 N. Interstate Ave. pdx 97217

Amazing post by Roger Ebert

I typed this title a bunch of times, trying "amazing post by Roger Ebert about-- credulity and irony? about the role of the audience member as participant? about modernity?" It's not that easy to summarize.

This is the dawning of the age of credulity

From Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie

This is a really interesting and often-quoted parable:

"The palace of power is a labyrinth of interconnecting rooms,” Max once said to his sleepy child. She imagined it into being, walked towards it, half-dreaming, half-awake. “It’s windowless,” Max said, “and there is no visible door. Your first task is to find out how to get in. When you’ve solved that riddle, when you come as a supplicant into the first anteroom of power, you will find in it a man with the head of a jackal, who will try to chase you out again. If you stay, he will try to gobble you up. If you can trick your way past him, you will enter a second room, guarded this time by a man with the head of a rabid dog, and in the room after that you’ll face a man with the head of a hungry bear, and so on. In the last room but one there’s a man with the head of a fox. This man will not try to keep you away from the last room, in which the man of true power sits. Rather, he will try to convince you that you are already in that room and that he himself is that man. If you succeed in seeing through the fox-man’s tricks, and if you get past him, you will find yourself in the room of power. The room of power is unimpressive and in it the man of power faces you across an empty desk. He looks small, insignificant, fearful; for now that you have penetrated his defences he must give you your heart’s desire. That’s the rule. But on the way out the fox-man, the bear-man, the dog-man and the jackal-man are no longer there. Instead, the rooms are full of halfhuman flying monsters, winged men with the heads of birds, eagle-men and vulture-men, man-gannets and hawk-men. They swoop down and rip at your treasure. Each of them claws back a little piece of it. How much of it will you manage to bring out of the house of power? You beat at them, you shield the treasure with your body. They rake at your back with gleaming blue-white claws. And when you’ve made it and are outside again, squinting painfully in the bright light and clutching your poor, torn remnant, you must persuade the skeptical crowd- the envious, impotent crowd- that you have returned with everything you wanted. If you don’t, you’ll be marked as a failure forever."

Excerpts from Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

This will probably seem long, but I just adore her writing...

I’m grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.

Nevertheless, I would advise you against defensiveness on principle. It precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level, it expresses a lack of faith. As I have said, the worst eventualities can have great value as experience. And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.

And old Boughton, if he could stand up out of his chair, out of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, would abandon all those handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he doesn’t have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having. If Boughton could be himself, he would utterly pardon every transgression, past, present, and to come, whether or not it was a transgression in fact or his to pardon. He would be that extravagant. That is a thing I would love to see.
As I have told you, I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father’s house—even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge. I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that’s all right. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance, it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?
It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. That is what I said in the Pentecost sermon. I have reflected on that sermon, and there is some truth in it. But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

The Diamond Age

I just finished it a minute ago, so I'll need some time to mull it over and come up with a fully-formed opinion. My initial thoughts are positive- I really like the richness and complexity of the story, and how it continually doubles back on itself and tells itself again, refining as it goes.
I'm struck by how much diversity he envisions in the world- I tend to see culture becoming more homogeneous, and I think it's wonderfully optimistic that people maintain their distinctness in this future.

The ancients who wished to demonstrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things... From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.

Twitter

Okay, so I've created a Twitter account. I suspect it might be one of those things that I join and check out and then lose interest in (hello Tribe, MySpace, Yahoo Groups, Okcupid, Facebook, Friendster), but some of them stick. If anyone wants to tweet with me, let me know.

Events!

There are so many interesting opportunities to learn and share in this town. There's always something going on, and I'd like this blog to be a space where I keep track of what's coming up, and share those opportunities with others.

I would also like to share my response to those things here, to continue the conversations begun over coffee or drinks, and fan the flame.

The library is having a "Read the Classics" book group, with discussions led mostly by professors from Reed. It sounds amazing, and I'd love to participate, but the groups are limited to 25 people, and fill up immediately. While 25 is a good number for group discussion, I wish they would have more groups or sessions, so I could get into one.

The problem with using my google calendar to track these things is that it isn't really collaborative- feel free to suggest an alternate widget, or let me know about events I should publish.

Inspiration every day

As sometimes happens, I feel like I'm on the brink of something, that my mind is verging on something, sifting through the detritus of experience, almost almost some pattern emerges. It's on the tip of my tongue...