My ears aren’t used to a ‘bass’ anymore. A whole long year long I’ve been listening to music & barely been able to hear a good low bass sound. I’ve been listening to loads of mp3s through either little headphones or the tiny speakers of my powerbook. There’s no bass there.

I just connected my powerbook to ‘real’ speakers – Tannoy MX1’s – that have quite a heavy bass-sound. I do not believe my ears. I do not understand anymore what I am hearing. My ears have to adapt. The sound is so much richer, and it is so ‘low’…

It makes you wonder – again – what the iPod-craze is doing to our perception of sound and our perception of music.

(Not that I am a stereo-freak. Far from it. I think one’s ears do adapt, fill in, filter, imagine what is missing. Maybe when listening one always imagines what the music should sound like?)

The days pass by quiet. A bit like the weather: quiet and grey. I am waiting more than anything else. Waiting to move. First back to Amsterdam. Then start a new job. Then move on to a new appartment in Amsterdam. In the meantime I am writing. (F. is also finishing work – so I’m not much of a spoiler of Xmas-festivities).

I am writing in a strange way, working on the same article now since 2 weeks? It’s a round-up of my research at the Jan van Eyck; the story is the one I’ve been telling in the public lectures earlier this month.

The framework was already there (in my head, in the powerpoints that I used in the lectures). I basically wrote everything down and added all the necessary or nice quotes and references. I could only get it ‘out’ by not being totally involved with the sentences that I typed out – by simulating that I was not wholly present while writing. Simply too much material. maybe afraid to finish? And although I consciously threw out quite a few subjects (like a comparision of blogging and notebooks, of blogs and commonplace books; and the whole public - private issue), I still ended up with over 20.000 words.

That was 4 days ago.

So it feels almost as if I’m trying to write a thesis.

I’m used to write texts of 1000 - 2000 words. Sometimes, sometimes I may write 4000 words.

I spent the past days making a first edit. Not working too hard – a few hours a day. Cleaning up, deleting doublures (there are still a lots – I tend to state everything five times in the same text), shifting whole paragraphs. Again doing that while feeling not totally involved.

The first edit is done. It still is 20.000 words long.

And I am afraid it still is too much of a simple description of the history, present and possible future of blogging – zooming in on issues of authorship and software – mostly software. (Well, I know what Latour says about descriptions, but I’m not so sure that my description fits his criteria…)

But, well, I hope I now have all the ‘material’ – to get fully involved with the ’sentences’. I know I’ll be able to throw out at least 10.000 words.

Peet http://sneaker.nl/articles/2006/12/20/wil-je-ook-eens-een-keertje-minder/ tells me about this software: http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/writeroom – and hmm, although I’m quite often doing the apple-tab thing (swithing quickly between programs), I might like this.

Just text text text!

Alas, it’s only for 10.4 & I’m still using 10.3.9 – maybe this will make me upgrade (when I find the time — …)

Laatste ritje. Waarschijnlijk. 11 - 13.30. Vise en het dal van de Berwinne en van de Voer. Klassiek dus.Dikke mist, soms niet meer dan 25 meter zicht – dus ook nergens uitzicht. Kletsnatte weg. 5 graden. Misschien wel het beste weer om mee af te sluiten.

Kanne - kanaal - Vise - Lorette - Dalhem - Mortroux - Val Dieu - St. Jean de Sart - St. Pietersvoeren - St. Martensvoeren - Gravensvoeren - Moelingen - Lixhe - Lanaye - Kanne

Eennalaatste ritje. Denk ik. Mistig. 5 graden. 15.00 - 16.20. Raar om te bedenken dat ik niet zo snel meer op de Hauts de Froidmont zal komen. Ik ga het missen, volgend jaar.

Kanne - Eben - Emael - Halembaye - Froidmont - Houtain St. Simeon - Bassenge - Wonck - Eben - Kanne

Am here at the Jan van Eyck, writing. But it feels as if I have already left this place, as if the year is over. (Well, some days left en a few thousand words to write & edit).

2007 has started already. In the sense that 2007-activities have already started.

If this mood continues I think I will not go for any last goodbye-bike-rides. If this mood continues then, it will mean that I will not go for a bike-ride once in December.

To be honest, I can not imagine that will become true.

As I write this, I begin to feel the desire to go for a ride. (But it’s dark and it’s misty now).

I bought an ipod-nano — for all the train travelling I’ll have to do next year. I must say, it’s such a stylish & fashionable thing that I feel very tempted to cover it in ugly stickers.

“So”, the professor has gone on to explain, “if one acccepts the idea that maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again, we may say that these paramorphoscopes of Icelandic spar, which cannot exist in great numbers if at all, reveal the architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude.” (ATD p. 250).

“Wernfer, damn him, keen-witted but unheimlich, is obsessed with railway lines, history emerges from geography of course, but for him the primary geography of the planet is the rails, obeying their own necessity, interconnections, places chosen and bypassed, centers and radiations therefrom, grades possible and impossible, how linked by canals, crossed by tunnels and bridges either in place or someday to be, capital made material – and flows of power as well, expressed for example in massive troop movements, now and in futurity – he styles himself the prophet of Eisenbahntüchtigkei, or railworthiness, each and every accomodation to the matrix of meaningful points, each taken as a coefficient in the planet’s unwritten equation…” (ATD p. 242)

For more on this see for instance Matterarts The Invention of Communication…

“As if innocence were some sort of humorous disease , transmitted, in a stage farce, from one character to another, Lew soon found himself wondering if he had it, and if so who he’d caught it from. Not to mention how sick exactly it might be making him. The other way to ask the question being, who in this was playing him for a fish, and how deep was their game? If it was the T.W.I.T. itself using him for motives even more “occult” the they’d pretended to let him in on, then this was serious manure pile, and he’d best find a way out of it, soon as he could.” (ATD p. 223)

Hmmm, remember Slothrop, paranoia & anti-paranoia in GR…?

I bought my brother the dvd We Jam Econo as present; the story of the American punk-band The Minutemen – d. boon, mike watt & george hurley – plus three complete live sets: http://www.theminutemen.com/. I just came back from his house where we watched 2 of the live sets – I admit I already watched the documentary yesterday (and afterwards ran off to an Oorbeek-rehearsal – where the idea was to spend time with F.). Well, what shall I say… It’s fucking awesome? It is. And I get into such a good mood from watching & listening to the Minutemen.

Discussing it with my brother – how we both like this band, and why. I know them through him. He says he doesn’t really remember how he got into it then, around 1985, 1986 – how friends of his who were into punk and the Dead Kennedy’s didn’t ‘get’ the Minutemen. That he probably would not have liked it himself had he not gotten into listening to jazz (Coltrane, Ayler, Cecil Taylor) through me.

The Minutemen are ‘real’ punk – in the sense that punk is about doing it yourself, making your own thing, creating something which is real and you, not copying anything – so also not copying other punk bands. Discovering. And not wanting to be like somebody else. And it always sounds that such is the way the music of the Minutemen was made: this is us and we play bass, drums and guitar – and each of us plays in their own style and it magically comes together. This is how you play together.

& I love their songs – they are so bare-bones and ’simple’. You hear what the building blocks are and how they click. It is simple, but well, complex in the interlocking and succession of simple elements - mike watt’s baselines, geoff hurley’s crazy drumming (not at all how a punk drummer ’should’ drum), boon’s piercing & funky guitarbits.

& it is such a joy to see them perform live on a dvd & see d. boon jumping on stage. (Needless to say, I have never seen them live – yes, later on I say mike watt a few times with george hurley and I guess Eliott Sharpe, and also with dos – but never the Minutemen).

In the States the Minutemen seem to be sort of legendary by now, it seems. I have the feeling they’re not so big in Europe. Allright even 2 other Oorbeek-members knew the Minutemen (Maarten because he knows them all, Serge because of the Raymond Pettibon-connection), but generally you see people staring at you with a face like “who’re you talking about? – the Minutemen?”

mike watt btw is here: http://www.hootpage.com/.

A typewritten letter by Thomas Pynchon, scanned, at the British Telegraph, concerning some plagiarism-allegations against Ian McEwan:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/12/05/nwriter06big.gif.

Today is a historic day for the Netherlands –– no not because the timetables of all the trains have changed (first time since 1970 they say). Since today the Dutch public television does not broadcast an analogue signal.

I guess nobody has noticed.

I mean, who has a television with an old-fashioned antenna? Do they actually still produce tevees with antenna’s in the West?

Well, I have such a tevee. About 10 years old now. And I was very happy with it this year. In Kanne I can receive ARD, La Deux, België 1, Canvas on antenna, I even get a scrambled pay-channel (!) — and well, I could receive Nederland 1, 2 and 3 till yesterday.

I wonder what will happen with those frequencies. Are they free to use? Could you set-up an illegal station… no public channel that can be bothered? Well, in the Netherlands pirate television has not been around since the early eighties. (And well, who has a tevee with an antenna? You could start a pirate channel, but no-one will be watching).

Progression of technology leaves many unused possibilities behind. There’s only snow now…

Natuurlijk het is prachtig weer, vandaag & gisteren ook. Ik heb geen enkele zin om te fietsen. Het seizoen is voorbij. Ik herinner me alle tochtjes & wegen.

Here’s a wonderful description of one reader (& Pynchonwiki-member) and his reading set-up, with laptop + paper notebook: http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle/blog/?p=47.

I am reading ATD at stretches of about 10 pages & then make notes in a simple text-editor, plus go through some googling for references.

“Suppose it were happen to us, in the civilized world. If ‘another form of life’ decided to use humans for similar purposes, and being out on a mission of comparable desperation, as its own resources dwindled, we human beasts would likewise simply be slaughtered one by one, and those still alive obliged to, in some sense, eat their flesh.”
(…)
“Sir, that is disgusting.”
“Not literally then … but we do use another, often mortally, with the same disablement of feeling, of conscience … each of us knowing that at some point it will be our own turn. Nowhere to run but into a hostile and lifeless waste.”
“You refer to present world conditions under capitalism and the Trusts.”
“There appears to be little difference. How else could we have come to it?”
“Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well, what’s the next step — human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood — a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful he is.”

Ah well, hit 5, pynchonwiki, ATD. Whereas there really seem to be ‘quaternionists’ in the history of mathematics.

See for instance here: “A prominent quaternionist, P. G. Tait, wrote, “Even Prof. Willard Gibbs must be ranked as one of the retarders of Quaternion progress…” After quoting this remark, M. J Crowe continues, “Gibbs did retard quaternion progress for his … Elements of Vector Analysis marks the beginning of modern vector analysis.” (A History of Vector Analysis (2nd edition, p. 150)) Crowe considers Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) an independent and nearly simultaneous creator of the modern system.” http://members.aol.com/jeff570/v.html.

How many Pynchonites are visiting these same pages… one wonders….

Or, just at Amazon: “Ever since the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton introduced quaternions in the nineteenth century–a feat he celebrated by carving the founding equations into a stone bridge–mathematicians and engineers have been fascinated by these mathematical objects. Today, they are used in applications as various as describing the geometry of spacetime, guiding the Space Shuttle, and developing computer applications in virtual reality.”

Ah, so that’s what Hamiltonian faith (p.132) refers to…

And it’s all already in the Pynchon-wiki.

“Another Quest for another damned Magic Crystal. Horsefeathers, I say. Wish I’d known before I signed on. Say, you aren’t one of these sentient Rocksters, are you?”

Mineral consciousness figured even back in that day as a source of jocularity – had they known what was waiting in that category … waiting to move against them, grins would have frozen and chuckles turned to dry-throated coughing.

About every search I ‘throw’ into Google since yesterday, will yield as its 7th or 8th result something with “plays an important role in Against the Day”… sure – I was searching for Icelandic Spar because I’m reading ATD… but still.

Should we imagine that ‘the internet’ reads ATD too?

Uh, well, anyhow, wikipedians read Pynchon — that much is sure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcite.)

“But if you look at the history, modern chemistry only starts coming in to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets going. Strange eh? What do you make of that?” Webb nodded agreeably. ” Maybe capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic anymore.” An emphasis whose contempt was not meant to escape Merle’s attention. “Why bother, had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people’s sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes.” (ATD p.79)