the tweney review

David Weinberger writes: “I realized why I’m not as happy as I should be given the externalities of my life: I’m never done with anything. … Now everything is a goddamn thread.”

My reaction: I think people do need to finish things, maybe not all the time, but sometimes. And they need to be able to stop working from time to time, as well, even when things are unfinished, and go outside, play with the kids, climb a mountain, or just veg without being constantly plugged in. The pervasiveness of the Internet makes that harder and harder to do these days, and I think this might be at the root of the sadness that David alludes to here.

I watched “A Beautiful Mind” recently and was struck how much John Nash’s schizophrenia was like my online life: ethereal voices constantly impinging on my attention, demanding responses, distracting me from the work (and people) at hand. Only in my case it’s email messages, not hallucinations. And Nash’s office: the walls plastered with hundreds of pages torn from various magazines, random words and letters highlighted, lines linking one thing to another, the whole space a vast tangled map of mental connections made physical in paper and ink and string. Holy crap, I think now: That’s a weblog in physical form!

No wonder I so often feel out of touch, disembodied, even melancholy. Am I the only one who feels this way?

WSJ CareerJournal: Demand Explodes for Librarians With High-Tech Research Skills. There’s a newfound respect for librarians — due mainly to the information overload that’s afflicting many businesses worldwide.

UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering publishes an outstanding magazine highlighting new research. Called Lab Notes, it’s written and edited by David Pescovitz (a BoingBoing contributor among other things). Cool stuff!

I’ve been thinking for a couple weeks about a Derrida quote that somebody put into this AKMA’s blog awhile back: “Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: ‘here are our monsters’, without immediately turning the monsters into pets.” (here’s the link) One of the reasons I’ve thought so much about this is that I was reading Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternate History of Philosophy, by Susan Neiman. Neiman’s book traces the history of philosophy from Leibniz to Rawls, showing — quite convincingly, I think — that the struggle to understand, assimilate, or to bracket evil has been a central concern for modern philosophy, over and above such distinctions as epistemology vs. metaphysics or Analytic vs. Continental.
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“E-mail alone has some while ago turned us all into cyborgs in ways that are increasingly difficult to feel and name, now that the medium has completely assimilated us.” From Blogistan, a link to this amazing short story by Richard Powers about what might happen if someone used artificial intelligence and the Internet to create a storytelling machine. I didn’t know about Powers until I read this piece, and I was floored. It’s cool. Read it now; the thing will be yanked from the Salon site after two weeks.

A U.K. writer has been given a grant of 2,000 UK pounds “to use sheep to create random poems, which also utilise the deepest workings of the universe.”

The NYT has a piece that examines why poetry readings are so excruciating: It’s that ubiquitous poetry voice: “a sort of quivering, nasal incantation, in which the voice trails upward, uncertainly, at the end of a line … as if the poets were delivering dire prognostications or trying to awaken in the masses some sense of religious awe.” For some reason, British poets are less susceptible to this affectation than Americans.

Beliefnet is recycling an old but intriguing article by Gregg Easterbrook, in which he points out that Jesus reduced the number of commandments to six. The Six Commandments? Basically he took out all the God stuff. The remaining six are pretty non-specific in terms of religion:

You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness.
Honor your father and mother.
Also, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.