strange birds

In college one of my classes went to the professor’s house to watch a movie, in one of those enrichment exercises—the difference is that Baxter was good at these sorts of things. There was no “watch the movie, read the book, compare/contrast” or “play the video game set in the time period”. The extra materials were thoughtfully constructed to bring something new to the discussion, to open up new avenues of exploration in a sometimes boring subject—most often through overexposure.

One movie was on the list and we had to go to his house to watch it as he’d only been able to find it on laserdisc. It became an event, we went to watch “Kafka” and ate a three course dinner prepared by one of the other students who wanted to cook (I’m not sure why he was in college, instead of a kitchen, but c’est la vie).

The movie combines the fictional and biographical into a Calvino-esque romp. Kafka becomes the protagonist in the castle, both wanting to rebel and blend in. Needless to say I loved the experience: a good movie and good food, what more is needed?

The man has been in the news lately. Several books have dug up the dirt – pornography – in this case and suddenly the old is new again. Nevermind that anyone with a pulse has at one time been interested in sex, we had to pull a minor god off a pedestal. We forget so often that the great are people first.

Zadie Smith has more in the NYRB, including this tidbit, choice in its possibilities for authors:

The truth was that he wasted time! The writer’s equivalent of the dater’s revelation: He’s just not that into you. “Having the Institute and the conditions at his parents’ apartment to blame for the long fallow periods when he couldn’t write gave Kafka cover: it enabled him to preserve some of his self-esteem.”

It gives me hope to see the frailty in others—not their failures, but that they pushed by them, that they had problems and insecurities and succeeded nonetheless.

All it takes to overcome the convention bump in polling is to throw an unready candidate to the wolves (who then throws her own daughter before the pack )

Palin in the news (these are the ones that I read and still had sitting around in my history—there are hundreds more):

• A good overview
• slashed funding to teen mom’s
• One (literate) man’s view
• Venn diagrammed
• Republicans Rush In at The Washington Post
• Secessionist Party Claims Palin
• NYTimes on Vetting
• Mayor Palin: A Rough Record in Time
• Slate Magazine
• The Limits of Media Manipulation by Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic
• The Washing Post on Bristol Palin and politicians and parenting
• An Experience Trap on Politico.com
• Some of the Christian Right weighs in
• More intrigue on improper firings
• Palin on Obama earlier in the year at The New Yorker
• The inevitable result of nominating an unknown

I like Textpattern for the most part. It’s infinitely more suited to me than Wordpress, but it is still mostly a blogging system, which is fine, but not really what I want. I’m not a fan of the proprietary tags, it makes everything neater, but not easy to mentally parse out if I move away to something else.

Ideally, it would be flat files, not a database. Drop textfiles into a folder (Articles), drop images into another folder, and photos into a third. There could be an audio folder, sure. The tricky part is the script—I want to have something run automagically (like a CMS), instead of explicitly so that when I forget it still gets updated. The Articles would be parsed for textile or markdown (specified in the header) and structured around the CSS and they would appear (symlinks? redirects?) to be organized by year/month/day/title but would in reality all live in one big pile. There would be a comments folder under articles, but no commenting system. Email only—thanks be to the trolls—and those that added to the conversation could be copy/pasted into the text file with the same title as the article to magically appear at the bottom. Images would be for articles use.

Photos would be placed up in an order specified by a text file, if it didn’t exist they’d go up chronologically. Photos would not require titles or to called “Untitled”. There would be a gallery page, created automatically of thumbnails (named the same as the photos and created automatically if not provided).

Problems I still have with this mental model: I want a feed, but the few feeds I have from flat file systems (2) don’t seem to have the capability to not rebuild the entire feed on an update. That’s not nice.

I like the Tumblr idea – the curated internet, or more likely, “like what I like!” – but see no way to do this easily: quick links to photos, art, quotations, conversations, blurbs, video, audio, etc.

Is this dumb, to want so specifically and in opposition to what exists? I don’t think so (warning: I’m biased in my favor). I want to be able to pull out what I’ve written years down the line and throw it into a different textile or markdown parser and be on my merry way. No database backups or failures, just the text and the internet (and the video, audio, images…).