class User; has_many :issues # hehe

It's usually difficult to focus on the tiny passions, but it seems that I have prematurely achieved a life of contentedness and abundant leisure and that I'll be able to hold onto it for some time. I have always been a computer enthusiast and probably should have succumbed to that current earlier in life, but, well, you know, causality and serendipity and all of that other bad spec fic shit; now I have my girls and a happiness that I wasn't even seeking. I also have this job where I sit in front of a pair of computer screens for hours on end and write in a language that I learned last summer (recently, more in a language that I learned last month) and I fucking love it. I get paid to play Lego for a few hours every day, it's just that the blocks are significantly more complex and completely intangible. It provides such an intense level of focus that it is almost meditative at times. I have immersed myself in it so much that it is actually somewhat difficult to type in this text area; I continually find myself wanting to go kk up a couple lines or hhhh back to the previous word to fix something or jj escape to command mode. Above all, however, the most useful tool in my budding career is the environment that I work in. I went a bit hardcore and chose to learn how to use an industrial strength window manager called XMonad, which is configured directly in Haskell source and recompiled (this, in itself is a challenge as Haskell is a somewhat obscure functional programming language, and as such is non-linear in nature and difficult to learn - even now, I don't know it very well). It has become my most cherished tiny passion. My xmonad.hs configuration file has become something like a bonzai tree to me over the last few years. Rare is the day that I don't tweak something. Some days, I will take the day off to wade through it while perusing the API docs, trimming here, refactoring there. In it, there are subtleties of code that I genuinely find beautiful even before the consideration of what functionality they provide.

This single line, for example:

doTrans i = ask >>= \w -> liftX (setOpacity w i) >> idHook

The elegant solution to a long-standing niggling problem that this line of code represents is powerful enough to actually carry emotional weight for me. This one line allows the window manager to set the opacity of a window based on whatever window property flag that I want. It makes windows transparent. Not the most powerful example from a pragmatic standpoint, but to automatically set the opacity of windows as they are created without the need of an external utility is unheard of (XMonad is a tiling window manager, so without transparency, there is no concept of 'wallpaper' because you would never be able to see it and even programmers need pleasing aesthetics). There are many other solutions and I toiled away trying to get them all to work with moderate success, but the issue remained effectively unresolved for quite some time before I worked out this solution.

Another common task in the configuration file of every single XMonad user is window attribute matching. The built-in boolean comparison operators are, logically, equal to (=?) and not equal to (=!). Exact match is inflexible, so I wrote these:

q ~? x = fmap (x `isInfixOf`) q     -- includes?
q !? x = fmap (not . isInfixOf x) q -- excludes?
q ^? x = fmap (x `isPrefixOf`) q    -- has head?
q ?$ x = fmap (x `isSuffixOf`) q    -- has tail?

Native partial matching! It was a small revolution, but a powerful one. There are so many simple little efficiencies that I've worked in over time, and I am quietly proud of every single one of them. The file as a whole is something of a sacred treasure as it defines an environment that I have nurtured and improved for years. There are dated copies of it strewn throughout my various backup drives and file systems. There are obsolete versions of it that I dig through and pore over periodically to regain a bit functionality that I gave up in some underlying system changeover at some point. I don't get many opportunities to express the level of satisfaction that I get from working with code as I still refuse to have interactions with entities that I don't have a meatspace connection to, but I have the feeling that you guys will get it to some degree simply because you know what I was before I became enthralled with programming. Though, now, having written that out, I'm not sure what insights into my current affairs that would really afford you. Whatever. This is what I'm into now. Taye diggs.

I thought this might be helpful to visualize some of what the code does.

The title is an actual line from my client's code. I can't help but giggle every time I see it, though not because of the joke itself, but because of the image of the other guy on the project sitting at his computer giggling at it enough to have added the comment.

What has it got in its pocketses?

My advisor's Question: What do you see your thesis as doing?

I had an idea going into this thesis of providing some kind of ecological epiphany through a study of the labor of 'developed' commercial agriculturalists and their attendant societies/cultures/environments and, if I got lucky, to pull a fast one on old home town and old alma mater at once: lighting matches in the crawlspace where the tails of all the objects lead to things in dusty obscurity I vowed I'd bring back an image of the beast to the village. I lit out with with a determined curiosity, a shield covered in Said's writings on the crucial impact of positionality and my righteous library of ethnoecology texts into the maw of my matrilineal community and almost immediately realized some quantitative mistakes I'd made when estimating the weight of the project. 

While some of the interactions I would eventually have benefitted from my historical familial connectedness to the place, I was unable to secure any kind of sustained (cymbal!) agricultural work. My attempts to gain entry into the exciting field of commercial livestock production were complete failures. The farmers I spoke with were on autopilot, watching their crops roast in one of the driest summers on record, and readying their fleets to reap it. I found the working world and the workspace were more or less secreted, highly regimented spaces for interactions. Cultural anthropology in most cases elicits a group of responses similar to those I receive from New Yorkers when I say I'm from Iowa: "Ohio?"; "Idaho?": "Oh, you like diggin' up bones huh?"; "Wow! Hey, you ever read Jared Diamond? What tribe do you study?". Thus, I found myself more or less afloat. Lots of first dates and brief run-ins with people I knew growing up, but no protracted conversations, no admission. And I couldn't push it without alienating . No study, no researcher that isn't probing to cure some malady, or subtly vivisecting their subject would ever ask to just hang out and shoot the shit, let alone offer to help out with things. Where's the cool design in that? Where's the aloof magic? What is it you're trying to get from me? I could see these questions hanging over many interactions as they fizzled out in a haze of pleasantries and entreaties to greet my family members. 

My historical research of exploring the territory through records, writings, museum collections and genealogical materials proved excessively fruitful, and in the absence of prolonged success with formally sought or arranged meetings, I endeavored toward the second part of Geertz's characterization of fieldwork and just began hanging out, trying to catch my needle in a groove. The bars, the street, the organized festivals of the summer and all the doors opening out from these events became my milieu and suddenly sparks began to fly. In these spaces I met with consumption, the risky, sloppy, dark drunken communions, the slipstream of sacred stories and the not infrequent sovereign guffaw. Through its waste, the place suddenly related to me, identifying me as one of its confused dispossessed, returned somehow but not apparently making or productively rebinding to kin, not sublimating my raw energy into daily responsibility. 

For the thesis I want to give a general economy of Winnebago County that looks at the creation/production of nature (labour) and the destruction of its surpluses. I intend to do this primarily by telling stories that explore the surreal, shocking, humorous moments I encountered talking to people there last summer. I want to work from a point in your transgression piece where you characterize Modernity as the transgression of the sacred, Bataille's zone of radical negation. In this transgressed sacred terrain the old dichotomy of high (conscious? intellectual?) and low (ecstatic? corporeal?) splits the already corporeal sacred, giving an absurd moral hierarchy to the division of labor and the forces it organizes, disorganizes, naturalizes and denatures. The ethnography of 'development' exceeds the etymology of the term as it reveals but also conceals and must contain its opposite. This vibration manifests in the historical record (documents, landscape, stories), which silently guards the fragments of an unabridged, not for TV version of the 20th Century pioneers and Indians story, flattening and straightening it into an origami vector of natural-history, as well as logics of country and city, rural and urban as they bubble and burst from erection to impotence, as well in the slippery practical and theoretical distinctions between animals and machines. 

Beyond these more traditional things, the elephant in the corner of the room with anthropocentric little anthropology and its schizophrenically-culled, socio-culturally conservative frankenstein assembled eclectically from the academic temple of the conscious sacred in the name of humanity is the electronic digital computer and its growing cybergothic world. Ubiquitous computing orchids while we wasp, to recycle a popular natural trope, accelerating, enlivening and enveloping by the moment. For instance, deepening corporeal alienation by compressing social encounters into sequences of electrical impulses shot around the world at light speed for communion via baroque assemblages of oriental mountain ranges and puffed hydrocarbons. 

Sustainable development amounts to the project of converting these machines for animation (energetically and algorithmically) under general economy (fauna?,flora?, only harder, faster, arguably already intelligent - stones that walk like men). An anthropologically derived shot at ecology then would have to be a radical negation of the inter-eating biomass and its reterritorialization, something which no machine is yet able to provide. Cybernetic totalitarianism points to an emergent existence of vestigial immanence in a newly autonomous restricted ecology, not some kind of cushy 'co-evolution' implied in the recurrent romantic robotic leisure society visions of optimistic capitalists. 

Nick Land ends his collection of writings Fanged Noumena with the ominous challenge:

Level l, or world-space, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-conifgured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to Level 2!?

Several of my experiences speaking with farmers and farm workers made me shudder with the uncanniness of the scope at which this process of cybernetic penetration already seems quotidian in big agriculture, which was already impressively hulking before it became an integrated network. 

Skyfall and Fieldwork

I wrote this odd review last November with the intent to stick it up here. Now, here it is. The figure of the spy is a very peculiar one to imagine from the perspective of the anthropologist. The seamless mimic, versatile, adaptible, and charged with the exercise of public violence by the state. James Bond is back this fall and in a tale that responds to a recent tendency among film franchises to recast the sometimes vague and sometimes explicit and fundamental origins of the particular (super)hero-protagonist. In this film we see a somewhat sullen, aging Bond who, after being sacrificed by his mother, buried by the state, and then returning, Huck Finn-like, becomes nearly convinced of his own obsolescence in the face of the information revolution and its effects on the terrain of global threats vis a vis the UK. There is a corresponding shadow-bond villain (MI6 seems to have a hell of a time finding proper Bonds who don't explode under the tasks set for them, see Goldeneye), and some "Bond girls", but the meat of this movie, and the part that set my ears ringing is the argument over the necessity of Bond's very career, his role in the empire, the usefulness of what they term, again and again, fieldwork. Bond's body: old, experienced, knowledgeable, hardened, conditioned, does things in space and time that elude even the highest of technologies. No gadgets in this film. Just put ol' James in there with a gun and let him relate to the situation. Information technology and systems control alone can't get the results of a human, sure, we as anthropological fieldworkers can relate to such feelings, but what about the things James is actually doing? The film does a bit to suppose the psychological underpinnings that afford our nations these sorts of mercenaries. In Bond's case, early family tragedy and probable ptsd combined with an effective adoption by his older femle boss beget the kind of wanton devoton upon which empires rest their hopes. What does this film want me to think about its discussion and juxtaposition of the new and the old with respect to the strategies of the nation-state. What do characters like James Bond really mean for you and me and our imperial underpinnings? Is this some kind of pastiche wherein the contemporary world and its information hegemony bring on a desire a weird sort of nostalgia for less nebulous oppression of days gone by. Knives in the dark, viscerality, gore that runs hot and smooth before turning cold and sticky. Traumatized tools. This is what your government requires of you.