This week is turning into a very busy one for me, and even though I haven’t had time to respond properly, I did want to acknowledge a few folks that have left comments on my site or sent me e-mails. Most of my evenings this week will go toward working on a research proposal for my Exploring Place: History class, for which I’ve decided to study the history of and community that has developed around Oakland Cemetery, which is near my home. I spent most of Sunday afternoon on a guided tour of the cemetery, then went back as evening set in to take some (like, 150) pictures. I hope to wade through the pictures also over the next few days and get them out on Flickr. Anyway, I didn’t want anyone to feel like I was ignoring them or disregarding the time they spent contacting me, so here are my shout-outs and link-backs:

Chef Tom: Thanks for the Le-Le-Lemon Cheesecake recipe. I picked up the ingredients tonight and will be making it tomorrow night, to serve at a dessert-party for my best friend’s 50th birthday on Friday. I think it’s going to be excellent!

Karen: Thanks for the e-mail; I’m glad you joined BlogCatalog and I look forward to neighorhooding with you. I also wanted to mentioned that I read your article Peter the Great…Right Brained Learner? — and I think it’s great.

Morgan: Thanks for you interest in my writing and my studies; as well as for your e-mail reply and kind offer to help. I’m sure I’ll take you up on it, and please do keep an eye on my site and comment any time.

Cooper: Thanks for the provocation… heh heh heh … and your comments on War as a Spectator Sport (Part One). There will be a Part Two, down the road a short spell (next week, probably) and we can continue the conversation.

Jon: Thanks for your comments on War as a Spectator Sport also. It’s interesting how differently we see the photographs, and I’m sure I’ll write about that in the second part of the article. Subjectively, of course. Great site you have, and I really like your writing. Between the waking and the dream was pure pleasure to read. Oh, and thanks for the book recommendations; I will look for “The Psychology of Music” but may pass on Bloom since I’ve read parts of it and may not care to invest any more time in it … ya know what I mean? 

Kukuh: I got your e-mail and the draft article and took a quick look at it. Fascinating stuff; will be glad to help if our schedules mesh okay. I’ve sent you a message on BlogCatalog.

Bye for now!

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes:

To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems good in itself to acknowledge … one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned … when confronted with evidence of what human beings are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood…. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.

Sontag’s essays in Regarding the Pain of Others and On Photography have always impressed me, for — among other reasons — the way she moves effortlessly from the public experience of photography to the way we experience it in our minds, and the connections she makes between the two. I was browsing through both books earlier this evening, in an attempt to better frame some comments on a Vogue Italia “photographic essay” described by Cooper in Is Rape In Vogue? You Tell Me.

The images in the essay are generating some discussion about — among other things — whether or not they are pornographic, whether or not they glorify rape, whether or not they glorify war, whether or not they have any aesthetic significance.  I could probably pick any of these, choose either side, and make a compelling and passionate case for or against. What I cannot do, however, is rescue the photographs themselves from what they really represent: the exact sort of psychological immaturity, superficiality, and demonstration of ignorance that Sontag is referring to. The photographs — by virtue of their distance from anything that would actually cause us to consider the realities of war — become little more than the kind of cliche aptly illustrated by their worn out title, Make Love, Not War.

It’s not, of course, necessarily true that all photography of war reflect it’s subject realistically, and I wouldn’t make that claim about photography of any subject. But that doesn’t mean choice of subjects doesn’t matter; the photographs are all integrated under one title, showing obviously related themes that were the explicit choices of the artists involved. As with all art, it is the artists’ choices that are fair game for evaluation and critical assessment.

The photographs don’t strike me as being about war at all. If I pitched a tent in my back yard, donned some military fatigues, slapped some mud on my face, and brandished a squirt gun (even a really big squirt gun), you wouldn’t call me a soldier. You might think I was playing soldier, and question my sanity, but that’s about it. The “soldiers” in these photographs seem about as soldierly as me and my tent; in both the actual appearance of the photographs and the way the models are portrayed, they’re only playing soldier too; or not even playing soldier, just playing.

The images of the men, though, are at least not overtly offensive. The men are, in nearly all the photographs, shown as happy, alert, enjoying an experience in the moment. In the women, however, there’s something else, made even more apparent by contrast with the appearance of the men. In photo after photo, the faces of the women suggest one of two conditions: semi-consciousness or pain. From the America’s Top Model mannequin-like pose in image 3, to the distraught and unfocused or visibly pained eyes in almost every other image, the women are most definitely not being portrayed as living the experience in the same way as the men. Disheveled, dirty, confused, and in pain, the women are so succinctly reduced to objects for the amusement of the men that the conclusion that the images glorify rape is a reasonable one, if not a wholly accurate one. At least early-modern attempts to objectify women (as toys for men) usually showed them looking good. Vogue Italia – in treating us to a helping of soft-core, military-style, repetitious, dull, and vaguely annoying porn — can’t be bothered, and instead serves up images that include … yes, you guessed it, mud wrestling….

To be continued….

A few days ago, cooper left a comment on my post Why We Study History, in which she said:

… it would seem if we truly used history correctly we would not repeat it so often….

Since then, I’ve been carrying that thought around in my head, considering different ways that I might respond. This is not my response.

She’s absolutely right, of course; it’s impossible to study history over any time period longer than twenty seconds, without noticing cycles in human actions and reactions that seem to generate essentially the same social and cultural conditions. Clothing and hairstyles change, and dialogue and postures shift a little, but the broader results often seem about the same. Keeping my generalist hat on for a moment, let me just leave it at this: history repeating itself is as much a cliche as it is an actual historical condition; and as both of those things, it deserves a healthy dose of skeptical analysis.

And that is actually my main point, about all I could explore in this tiny post. When we talk of history repeating itself, we can’t stop there. We can’t really start there, either…. instead, I think we would need to latch on to some specific element of the cycles we’re trying to unravel, and, starting there, pull all sorts of interdisciplinary tricks to search for common threads and relationships among history, science, art, literature, economics, politics, and technology. It’s these things, along with the philosophical ideas that mold them and drive them forward, that define historical cycles. I can’t think of any theoretical reason why history has to repeat itself, or why history, as cooper stated, has to dictate anything … yet it would seem it has and still does, in cycles that are getting shorter and shorter and shorter….

… well, not programming exactly;  we (meaning: I) have spent way too much time on that today as it is. However, I have gotten the load time on the home page of this site way, way down … from about 16-18 seconds to a pretty consistent four or five. Considering that there’s still a lot of content here, that’s pretty good. I might as well confess that the main thing that motivated me to do this was that I was getting annoyed accessing my own site, which is a pretty strong indicator that my visitors might have felt that way too.

So navigating here is a little different now. The Newsgator blogroll and news headlines are each on their own separate pages: My Blogroll and My News, and there are navigation links from the header and from both sidebars — plenty of places for you to click to get there and take a look at the work of some very fine bloggers. My Blogroll links will take you directly to site home pages; My News shows excerpts from some of the most recent articles in each category, all with links you can click to read more. If you’re interested in links or news only from a particular category, see the “My Blogroll” and “My News” listings in the sidebar, from which you can go directly to that category.  You can use your browser’s back button or click the category heading to return to the home page.

More on this later perhaps, but I should mention that belonging to the BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog communities is introducing me to a whole lot of new and extremely good blogs and fascinating people that I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise — but I’ve not yet added them all to my Newsgator feeds so they don’t show up on the new pages. I think I’m still trying to figure out the best way to pull all these resources together in one place (or a few tied-together places); or at least, trying to figure out the best way to spend my time between newsreaders, blogging communities, social networks, stumblingupons, diggs, twitters, and a few other things. Still, I’m comfortable with the idea of just jumping into all these activities and sorting out the priorities as I go along. If you’re reading this, and you’re a blogger, and you haven’t joined BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog, please do so, and let’s connect.

A couple of lessons I learned from this last set of tweaks:

(1) if you’re an Amazon associate and are including Amazon links in your site like I am, watch out for the “Product Reviews” script. The script is new (I think) and provides a small window with product and review information when you mouse over an Amazon text link. It’s very nice, actually, I liked the way it looked and the images and info it provided — but I removed it from my site after numerous tests showed it was adding as much as three or four seconds to the page’s load time. Your experience may certainly vary, but I would experiment with that script before using it.

(2) If you’re modifying your WordPress templates …well,  don’t even think about changing anything until you’ve made a copy of the files you’re planning to change. I’ve always been obsessive about saving work-in-progress with tools like word processing and spreadsheet software, but for some reason haven’t been doing that with files like sidebar.php. Believe me, ignore this advice and just one time accidentally paste something on top of thirty lines of code and realize it just as it’s too late to stop yourself from pressing the save button … and you’ll wish you had that copy! It’s great to have nice, clean home pages … but not so great when they’re nice and clean because most of the content isn’t showing… yipes!

I’m going to be making a few changes to the home page of this site over the next day or so, so apologies in advance to anyone who stops by and notices some wonky behavior. I plan to move the Blogroll and My News sections out of the sidebars and to their own pages, with various links from the main page, to improve load times. Right now it takes as much as 16 seconds for the entire page to load on a DSL connection — which is way too long. I expected that would probably happen when I embedded the Newsgator blogroll and headlines scripts to begin with, but I wanted to watch it for a while and see how things went.

Here’s a nice article with some tips on speeding up your load time, where I learned about Numion’s Stopwatch tool — a nifty utility that can show you how long it takes to load any web page.  Another one I came across does a in-depth diagnosis of your page and displays optimization suggestions; it’s the Web Page Analyzer.

It was interesting to try the tools with several browsers, and see the performance variations. Firefox consistently came in as the slowest — by four to six seconds, sometimes more. Internet Explore was next, and Opera — which I just started using on occasion a couple of weeks ago — was the fastest by far, loading my main page nearly 50% faster than Firefox.  Firefox still rocks, though.

Stay tuned….

From the Project for Excellence in Journalism comes a study describing differences between the kinds of news stories featured on the web sites of traditional media outlets, and those featured on user-driven sites like Reddit, del.icio.us, Digg, and Yahoo! News.  The authors of the study describe it as providing some initial answers to the question: “What would a world in which citizens set the news agenda rather than editors look like?”

The study is certainly worth examining in detail; one of the things I noticed immediately was this:

The three top categories for news stories presented by the media outlets the study examined were: foreign news stories, disasters and accidents, and U.S. foreign affairs. The three top categories among the first three user-driven sites listed above were technology and science, lifestyle, and government.

I might have liked to see technology and science separated for the purposes of the study, though I can understand the difficulties in making that separation. I would expect, however, that the technology-orientation of user-selected stories was stronger than that of science. Regardless, it’s not at all surprising to me that stories tagged on sites like Reddit, del.icio.us, and Digg are heavily weighted toward technology: I think the simple fact that the technology is still new to so many people is reflected in a sometimes restless and nearly frantic gathering around stories that help us all understand it and use it better.  I know I’m abstracting from personal experience here, possibly a little too much, but when I look at at my own stories on del.icio.us, I see a pattern that very closely mirrors the results of the study. Why? Well, because like so many people I’m trying to understand how to use the technologies, trying to find the best ways to use them, and I’m still asking myself questions like “What the hell is StumbleUpon for anyway?”

As is the case with all emerging technologies, though, this discovery phase is only temporary (good luck defining “temporary”); and if the authors conduct the study again in a few years, I would be very surprised if the categories of user-tagged stories don’t start to shift. While it may still not necessarily reflect the selections being made by traditional media, I’ll bet you’ll see a convergence between the two. The study lays some excellent groundwork for the future research; and that may even be more valuable even than it’s current conclusion:

For now, the percentage of Americans who rely exclusively on news from user-driven sites is just a fraction of what it is for mainstream news sites. And in this increasingly fragmented era, many who visit Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit may also be reading the online versions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. But whether or not we see further divergence between user-driven sites and mainstream media over the next few years will surely remain a key question for researchers, journalists and of course, citizens.

Standing amid the wreckage of the World Trade Center

Sometimes it seems like we were all standing there then,
and are standing there still.

September 11 Magnum In Motion Photo Essay