metadata or mal d’archive

Fraught with the prospect of a digital dark age where our “content” has been either corralled in walled-gardens that can both facilitate communication or become a memory-hole at the whim of fortune, interest and competitive forces (reflect for a moment on all the effort spent cultivating a mySpace profile or application to any number of now defunct services) or are all but lost to rampantly changing forms of media storage (think what might be forever trapped in a spool of CDs that one does not even have the player for any more or in one’s old digital picture frame—like General Zod and the other criminals from Krypton) and presentation in incompatible software, the internet’s founders are launching an initiative to make the work of a few dedicated archivists much more distributed and less tied to any single agenda, no matter how altruistic or self-interested.
In part, like voluntarily over-sharing too much about what we’d prefer to be private and not construed with little detective-work, it is our own fault that so much of what we’ve created is subject to segregation, forgetting or censorship, and the impetus to return to a landscape that’s organic and a bit unkempt is strong for a lot of reasons.  Certainly there’s no way of knowing what sort of studious record-keeping (in any format and on any subject) might benefit future generations and as awash as we might be with the onslaught of information and different ways to leverage and nuance it, there is no need for something to pass to the ages by our own negligence. Who can say? The cookies and tokens of today might even have an important structural or descriptive component (and may even be the engines behind an internet that backs itself up) that we cannot not appreciate in this contemporary billboard jungle.

chirality or stage-directions

Though H is most charitable and patient and even anticipates my reflexes by giving my idiosyncratic directions their expected (correctly) and opposite responses, I was glad to learn that I am not quite alone in distinguishing my (or others’) right from left.

As Kottke ponders, as we begin to lose personal, native points of reference, I wonder if this incapacity might become something more endemic and more tolerated, like excusing a city-dweller for having not substituted equally personal landmarks and routines (for not seeing the rising or setting of the Sun and stars) for the cardinal directions. I wonder if having to face and flip one’s own reflection (as sometimes I feel that to be an impossible challenge) might be a skill-building activity for its own sake.  Divination from a mirror darkly is called scrying (though usually in the form of a crystal ball) but could possibly also broaden one’s cognitive frontiers or perhaps at least recognise one’s inward focus.  Despite or because of my orientation awkwardness (and maybe others becoming more comfortable with their own), I am noticing that it is more of a challenge to communicate it to others and do echo in wondering what it means when there no longer a dominant hand (of course these are not taken, like the side of the bed that is inalienably one’s own, away but our cues, like wrist-watches may be going out of style) or no clockwise orientation as an internal guide.

entrada

Though it might be safe to assume that the Aztec Empire of Mesoamerica was already doomed by the arrival of Europeans bringing Old World diseases with them without the ambitions of Conquistador Hernándo Cortés, it is hard to say what fortunes hinged on the ingenuity of one of expedition’s (entrada) artillery units, named Francisco Montoya.
While most of the slaughter and abject destruction was perpetrated by the Spanish with what would have been traditional weapons at the time (swords and arrows and missionaries that the natives knew and could repulse) and was indeed somewhat facilitated by client states of the Aztecs (a modern fiction to simplify a rather politically complex and strained alliance that referred to a mythological region called Aztlan somewhere in the north where the people had migrated from—sort of like metaphorically calling England Avalon), willing to throw off the yoke of Tenochtitlan, who’d just consolidated power only six decades before the arrival of Columbus, and sided with the Spanish.

Possibly too was an unfortunate series of coincidences and the way their calendar was constructed to stir superstition and resignation, which certainly could not compete with Spanish manifest destiny and prospecting for treasure. Although equipped with plenty of munitions, canons and muskets, the primitive gunpowder that had recently been communicated to western Europe from the Chinese was in short supply. The prepared mixture was unstable and unsuitable for sea-voyages, and though most of the constituent ingredients were available in situ, sulfur was a rare commodity. Our clever Francisco Montoya (prepare to die), determined not to have brought all these weapons for nothing, led a daring mission into the caldera of an active volcano, Popocatepeti (probably sacred to the Aztecs and a place of worship and sacrifice), to collect sulfur and produce enough gunpowder to compel the Aztecs with shock and awe to capitulate in less than two years (heady with the recent and parallel achievement of the Spanish crown called the Reconquista, recapturing lands on the Iberian peninsula that had been under Muslim control for seven centuries) after the expedition arrived in 1519.

post-modern prometheus or the year without a summer

The anecdote that without the catastrophic eruption of Mount Tambora was responsible for the birth of the Gothic genre, since—if not for the volcanic winter that spoiled their holiday weather, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin), her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley and some literati friends would have been able to enjoy the scenic shores of Lake Geneva and wouldn’t have had to resort to telling each other stories around the campfire (so to speak) and finding other indoors diversions.
The story behind the origins of what became Shelly’s famous Frankenstein is fascinating on its own, this summer of discontent marking two centuries since the 1816 delusory and haunted visit to Switzerland, but like the milieu of the Canterbury Tales at another time of crisis, does tend to overshadow the grave consequences of the release of so much ash into the atmosphere which—beyond poor weather and anemic sunshine, perpetrated a global famine, dread and the last one to affect the Western world on that scale. Although the Modern Prometheus is usually interpreted to be about the encroachment of technology and the creation escaping control of his creator (as a cautionary tale for artificial intelligence or genetic-modification) and there’s the feeling that the happy band were far too self-occupied, making the most of a rainy day, to concern themselves the plight of the hoards of weather-refugees coming into the cities after their crops failed. Though there’s a danger in transposing even the timeless to contemporary events, there’s much resonance to be found in the season of today, brilliantly investigated and considered further in this essay from Public Domain Review. Far from disdaining the suffering that was happening just beyond their guesthouse confines like the Lit Crit response to the debates on global-warming or migration politics, Shelley did notice this encroachment too and incorporated it into her novel and it could be read in that bleak light of the sun in that year with no summer, even if that monster was not of our own making.

armorial achievement or ladies companion

The College of Heralds, as Boing Boing astutely informs, has established protocols for the management of shields and devices for the union of same-sex couples, which would pass muster during a royal heraldic visitation. “A man who contracts a same-sex marriage may impale the arms of his husband with his own on a shield or banner but should bear his own crest rather than the crest of both parties…” No matter what one thinks about the landed-gentry and old-money or the relevance of such institutions, it was nice to learn that even such a conservative and exclusive custom can become receptive to change.

pastiche or ultraviolence

The subversively engaging Dangerous Minds has a nice appreciation for the 1969 Japanese counter-culture work of director Toshio Matsumoto called Funeral Parade of Roses (薔薇の葬列). The film, itself based on Sophocles’ Œdipus Rex, focuses on the misadventures of a cadre of transvestites in contemporary Tokyo, and was a major stylistic influence on Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange—thematically, no equivalence in delinquency—along with the short story Flowers for Algernon, which sort of makes the idea of inspiration material and footnoting all the more dissonant and it takes an artist to understand the echoes of homage.

media black-out or all the news that’s fit to print

While after having its servers compromised and fearful at the DNC that whatever muck has been raked (which ought not be such a bombshell, we suspect) might be released prematurely and spoil their impact, meanwhile the Republican National Committee has been presented a challenge by the third estate.
Although we have serious objections to the concept of denying dissenting voices a platform out of fear of causing trauma, the threat, pledge of journalistic abeyance strikes me as an effective way to take the wind out of certain sails. The time and resources formerly dedicated, thoughtlessly and without stint, to covering every stump speech would instead be pledged to uncovering the veracity of such claims that might only pass as the news ticker. Media organisations would also petition the party for the reinstatement of their credentials and access, revoked for having crossed the presumptive candidate. What do you think? Just apply the resolution equitably (when any candidate denies an audience to media outlets because it is not supportive of his or her platform) to preserve journalistic integrity and spare us all the awful spectacle. Is it biased or undermining to deny demagogues their expected and free publicity?

lavoiſier or eisenhower sez

I am overly fond of these sorts of anecdotes, and appreciate a fellow typographical aficionado sharing an intriguing enigma—after a stranger left this mysterious mcguffin on her doorstep, begging for authentication.
Apparently in the 1950s, the New York Times experienced a kerning dilemma on finding that the headline EISENHOWER SAYS was just a tick too big to fit in a single column, which certainly sounds deflating but probably far less frustrating that margins that try to outsmart the type-setter. In order to preserve the spacing of their copy, the newspaper turned to their foundry and commissioned, for the nonce, a super-skinny “S”—reminding me of the old-fashion Latin long minuscule s, that I think I first encountered in an older book about scientist Anton Lavoisier; I called him Lavoifier. To find out if this rumour could be substantiated, please check out the full investigation at The Atlantic.