//A Map of the Saturday

What is a day but a 24 hour journey?

French Garden: Destination as Journey

On some days, this journey is direct: one wakes up with a map, an agenda. From A - do laundry-  to B - mail books - to C - finish ProjectC. Like in a French garden, paths are direct.  Pleasure is a binary condition derived from reaching the destination: the completion of said goals.  Days like show wars recognition these are enjoyably crisp and easy to grasp.

Today was not such a day.

English Landscape Garden: Journey as Destination

Today was the other type of day, like a pleasant meander through an English Garden. Unlike the stricter and more formal French-garden type days, English Gardens days are looser and more open to interpretation. Value judgements arie useless on such days, and one can only capture it as a quality. The following text is a way to express the day's quality and to use it as a thinking machine.

The morning saw Mike Harrison and David Pearson drop into 631 Vernon. I never expected to see David again after San Francisco, but he has been consistently friendly whenever he drops into LA. One appreciates such gestures.

founder, apc

more quips:

Rules of Style

Interview

To JM:

Joanna, you cheating rat. You take my bike, never return it (but constantly say you will), and now, you avoid me. What a weasel you are. This tells me you are of small spirit and poor character. I am sad and disappointed that a friend can mistreat the trust given to them. You no longer have my respect or regard in any matters. No good can come from knowing you: you add no joy or smiles but stir anger and bile.

A temporary tribe

Deeply thudding beats sonically agitate the ocean of bodies. We pulse like one muscle in spasming twitches. Shaman guides lead us through tight corridors of treble so they might deliver us to echoing caverns of deep sonic space. We raise our hands and caress the viscous, syrupy air, saturated in boysnoise.

We are all drenched in sweat and honey love and smile with toothy ecstacy grins.

The beats taste lumpy in the throat far past the end. It sits in the base of the spine. 

*the object is just the residue
“In traditional philosophy, you have subjects who interact with objects in some way, for example by perceiving them.

For Deleuze and Guattari, being a subject or an object no longer matters; the relationships are primary--hence the rhizome, which is not nodes plus roots but rather just roots. These relationships are related to "flows." Almost anything can be said to flow, but D&G focus on very particular and everyday flows: money, shit, air, milk.

A D&G machine is composed of smaller machines, each of which sits on a flow and interrupts it. Their examples are the anus, the mouth, and so on. Thus a human body is a classic D&G machine.
But every machine is a part of a system of machines, and between them they integrate every sort of flow. Therefore there can never be a starting point and an ending point for a process: the flow is simply transformed through the interruption, it cannot be said to have a "final cause," and any attempt to limit the flow--for instance, portraying desire as something originating with a subject and ending with an object--is a camouflage operation for the actually unlimited flow. The physicality of machines makes it look like there are actually beginnings and endings in the flow, providing us with an illusion of production, consumption, et cetera.
If we see past this property of machines, we can understand that we are never "molecular" or "nomadic" or whatever: we are only "becoming-molecular," which is a state of constant flux that is far from equilibrium.

I think that this relates substantially to the main thrust of Deleuze and Guattari's work, which is the production of a tenable alternative to the power/knowledge world articulated by Foucault.
Foucault believed that knowledge is always a form of power, but he took it a step further and told us that knowledge can be gained from power, producing it, not preventing it. Through observation, new knowledge is produced. In his view, knowledge is forever connected to power, and often wrote them in this way: power/knowledge. Foucault's theory states that knowledge is always a form of power:
Knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of 'the truth' but has the power to make itself true. All knowledge, once applied in the real world, has effects, and in that sense at least, 'becomes true.' Knowledge, once used to regulate the conduct of others, entails constraint, regulation and the disciplining of practice. Thus, 'There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time, power relations (Foucault. Discipline and Punishment, London, Tavistock, 1977, p27.)
For him, power acts as a type of relation between people, a complex form of strategy, with the ability to secretly shape another's behavior. As power/knowledge accumulates, it moves toward a lopsided equilibrium.
Thus, for Foucault, a subject is always created and delimited by the knowledge-power dialectic.
But by describing the subject as a system of machines that function as interruptions allows us to see past this dialectic of control, where there is a beginning and and end, and instead focus on the fluidity of flows: where did it come from/where is it going/what are its mutations along the way”.
(All opinions welcome.)
mashed up and edited from http://ask.metafilter.com/59479/What-is-Deleuze-and-Guattaris-abstract-machine & http://www.moyak.com/papers/michel-foucault-power.html

two-minute rule

Try dealing with stuff immediately.

When encountered with something, make a decision on it immediately

David Allen suggests a two-minute rule: if the task can be done in less than two minutes, do it now. If not, add it to your errand list.

excerpt from http://zenhabits.net/once/

Thinking Machine: Frankenstein’s Atlantis

“[Alchemists] promised impossibilities and performed nothing.

The modern masters promise very little. They know that  metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera.

But these philosophers whose hands seems only made to dabble in dirt have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places.” –M.Waldman

The tension between the grand, futile masters of imagination – alchemists who seek “chimeras of boundless worth” – versus the wormy, limited ambition of the modern philosopher is one theme that curries the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Frankenstein himself, before his modern education, was fed on texts by “Cornelius Agrippa”, a ‘scientific quack’ from a prior period. Through lack of thorough scientific method, C.Agrippa made grandly imaginative inductions on the relationships between causes and effects, which I assume are all wrong in effect but interesting in conclusions and when extrapolated.

Frankenstein’s Creature is the resolution of this opposition: born from grand imagination and realized through the accumulated piecemeal discoveries of the modern sciences.

The creature, realized by the pursuit of 'glory’ – that loosely-defined quality that drives men to new horizons in its insatiable pursuit- desired only the opposite: not the glory of discovery, but a stable companion ‘to go live with in the jungles of South America, never to be seen again’. This part, I am unsure of how to regard.*

Frankenstein’s desired to give human life, yet what he made was more than ‘human’. Held back by the grotesqueness of his creation and the stiffness of the term ‘human’ to fully embrace the glory of it, he wrestled with his desire to create and the inability to accept the fruits of this to his death bed.

“From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition; but how am I sunk!” he laments on his death bed to Robert Waldon, the ship’s captain.

Both Victor Frankenstein and Robert Waldon are not petty men: they share grandly expansive and metaphysical world views:

“… did you not call this a glorious expedition? and wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placed as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror, because at every new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited… For this it was glorious, for this was it an honorable undertaking…

…And now, behold, with the first imagination of danger you shrink away and are content to be handed down as men who had not strength enough to endure cold and peril.

Oh, be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes and firm as a rock. Return as heros who have fought and conquered, and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe.”

Thus, these men are not moored to the meat of their existence, but merely tethered to it. Their Being resides in more ephemeral geographies – like the eternal Atlantis –of fables that drive men to seek wider plains, desire deeper explanations and to learn of wider horizons.

However, in this Atlantis (which never really is there), the search itself becomes the act of its creation. Frankenstein’s creature was not a latent property to be “discovered”. It was willed into being by truth yarns spun together (like the alchemist Cornelius Agrippa) with agile zest and paranoia to create new plateaus to rest the imagination on.

 

 

*happiness is only real when shared. -

def ARCHIVE(lennardYear):

Los Angeles, 2010

title = 'The Whale'
description = 'Notes to Myself / A Thinking Machine'

eulogy = """

This is his diary.

\"He is currently an LA-based nomad.

He misses Berlin (where he worked for a summer) and is nostalgic about Singapore (his birth city).

After watching Hackers (aged 10), he wished he was in New York until he got there, where he realized to himself, "oh shit! maybe it was better if i'd left it in my imagination."

Finally, he gave up looking for There as a place. Home is now where-ever he is at that point in time.

What comes first? Truth or beauty. Either way, that gap between fiction and reality is where he plays. "Telling lies with the truth," he adds with a grin.

This is his document, a laboratory, a diary, a voice, a collage. Not about who he was or who he wants to be, but who he is, whatever that may mean or where-ever that may lead.\"

"""

summary = [title, description, eulogy]
print (summary)

print ("""

/             
 ___       ___ (___  ___      
|    |   )|   )|    |___ \   )
|__  |__/ |    |__   __/  \_/ 
                           /  

""")

return lennard

ARCHIVE (2009-2011)

//----------END CHAPTER-----------

Today Dan came by. He is well on with Life, arranging little games to keep himself busy.

Baking pizza, bread and making meals from the basics is a calming process. It slows and distracts the mind. However, am starting to realize that I need alternative inputs other than computational/textual. If not, the mind gets unbalanced and the personal temperament unpleasant.

//Book Thinking Machine, Frankenstein v1.0:

Frankenstein makes one question the definition of "monster". Is the monster so monstrous? The reader takes the role of the ship captain: at the end, torn between what he witnesses - the monster's wrestle to justify his life - and what he was taught by his visual and historical prejudice: the monster is a monster who must be killed.

His creator also goes through the same turmoil. But the monster is right when he says "you are my creator, but I am your master." Certain men of particular fortitude are drawn to such wild abandon to their disciplines that they lose themselves in it.