Resources for locating antique door-knob set screws:
Robinson’s Antiques. House of Antique Hardware. Smallparts.com.
Rugburn
Viv asked me to pull the rotten old carpet off the staircase to the basement today and I’m about a quarter of the way done, after about two hours. I’m finding it utterly dreadful, which is interesting. At one of the parties we attended over the weekend, some friends were volunteering to help with one another’s demolition jobs on each other’s houses, fairly rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect.
My father tried to teach me how to take pride in physical labor well performed, and I did learn how to really throw myself into a task. Yet for me the physical and emotional sensations are very much akin to the physical and emotional sensations I recall from the numerous involuntary physical attacks that were directed toward me as an adolescent by peers, of a sort. I dread the flow of adrenaline and feel only a seething resentment, mixed with regret and a kind of detached curiosity, as I feel my body fail in my demands upon it. Afterward, just as in my many beatings, I will rerun the tasks over and over in my mind in a kind of loathesome savor, dwelling with extreme detail on each way that I failed to perform an action that would have made the experience more successful.
The only way I ever have noted that I can overcome this sense of dread and alienation in physical activity is to fly into a rage, which of course leads to undesirable results and further compounds the negative reinforcement. I find it quite curious that until now I’ve never made the connection between my experiences of American violence and my own deep-seated hatred and fear of certain kinds of physical activity.
Attention Tom
SuprGlu “gathers your content from popular webservices and publishes them in one convenient place.”
iPatch
P-I: EyeBud can turn video iPod into big-screen TV for one.
Man, that picture is hilarious. Arrr. Don’t steal music – steal TV!
WMF WTF
Use the handy Mefi thread to locate the third-party patch for the exciting new WMF bug on Windows machines.
Hot lead
End of print, says Cringely. Interesting analysis, flawed in his argument that websites can’t carry as many ads as print publications.
elphless
Dammit! I just hosed a full gig of pics from the Elph, AGAIN! That included basically all of the pictures and movies from the move. Dammit! Now I’ll never see the old place again.
Still Life With Liquor Cabinet
Moorings
A comment appeared in my queue this morning from one Nouri, The Moor Next Door, an Algerian blogger living in the US. Nouri was commenting on my cryptically-titled 3108, an entry here on locating blog-world resources which included a longish stab at outlining some points of interest concerning my relationship with the country of Algeria.
(The title is a puzzlin’ reference to attempting cross-linguistic blogtrawling; 3 = B, 1 = l, 0=O, 8=g.)
Nouri’s blog is a current-events and commentary blog about Algeria, something I’ve longed for. Understanding and keeping track of events and politics in Algeria via the usual suspects in the US media is quite challenging, partly a result of the terrible civil war fought there in the early nineties.
I suppose American readers will in generally have been most exposed to Algeria via the works of the French author Albert Camus, who was born in Algeria and who set both of his best known works in the Algieria of the late colonial era. Camus also wrote short stories set in French North Africa, some of which when I last checked had never been translated into English. This seems to me an oversight.
As I read Camus, although the works are generalized to reflect the writer’s contemporary intellectual milieu of existentialist thought, the impetus behind the work appears to be colonial relations itself. The Guest, linked above, for example, turns on an interaction between a schoolteacher and an Arab who has been dropped off by a cop at a frontier school, instructing the teacher to take the Arab to a prison.
The story is recognizably a Western, and is easily imagined as a John Ford movie – John Wayne making a brief appearance
at the school to drop Jay Silverheels off into the custody of Jimmy Stewart. Throughout the story, Camus presents the encounter of the icons of civilization with the vastness of the landscape and the precolonial inhabitants as inherently absurd and without positive outcome.
This theme – the unexpected consequences of the encounter between Europe’s colonizing cultures, the precolonial people, and the resulting hybrid culture that emerged in the wake of the end of the colonial era – remains, unsurprisingly, a major area of personal and political investigation for those countries affected by it, as Nouri’s long post, On Historical Maturity, illustrates.
A few entries prior, there’s longish critical attack on Robert Fisk which examines uses, mis-uses, and perceptions of postcolonial theory, winkingly and appropriately entitled L’etranger, a direct reference to Camus. In this entry, Nouri makes an offhand reference to Frantz Fanon, a French Martiniquean who worked as a psychiatrist during the Algerian war of independence and published a seminal anticolonial work, The Wretched of the Earth, which was highly influential throughout the sixties in many countries dealing with the struggle to define a postcolonial future. The work may also have influenced the speeches and thought of Malcolm X, who near the end of his life began using the language of anti-colonial analysis to describe conditions he saw in the United States.
Immaterial
It seems likely that someon somewhere has recognized that I’d enjoy Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, but I always avoided them, understanding the deistic reference of the title to cast them as marketing artifacts along the lines of Left Behind.
This week’s amusing New Yorker profile of the author makes it clear I’ve misminded the meme. Should I ever read another book, I’ll keep these in mind.