Defining the Canon of Literature, Part I

In Eduardo's excellent second piece in the series On Porn: A Catastrophic Pastoral Failure, he touches on a separate, but touchy issue in the defense of the content in Arabian Nights. Works such as that one, which contain content that would be condemned as pornographic in pop fiction, are often defended on the basis of being great literature. The problem here is simple: what is great literature?

Let's consider the logic. The works of William Shakespeare are great literature because they exhibit the characteristics of the great dramas and poetry of literature. What are the characteristics of great dramas and poetry of literature? Characteristics, in the Elizabethan times, best portrayed by William Shakespeare. The logic, in other words, is cyclical. Many have argued because of this that literature is really just that thing which we choose to call literature.

I tend to dislike schools of thought that suggest that important definitions are merely arbitrary designs of the elite or general populous. The Intertextualist-Structuralist critics of literature are quite reverent in their view of literature, but nonetheless insist that for literature to be meaningful, one must be indoctrinated into literary thought. I cannot, they say, point to X, Y and Z and say this is why literature is literature. The Intertextualists in this regard remind me of the liberal theologians that came in force in the nineteenth century: they do not deny the usefulness of the terms, in fact, they appreciate them a great deal, but they destroy any inherent meaning that allows for the long term ability to support interest in the object they describe. In the case of religion, this problem came to light in the early to mid twentieth century when Karl Barth and other neo-orthodox theologians — whom we might call moderates — called for a return to orthodox foundations even while retaining the academic tools of the liberals.

The message is clear: if the foundation is arbitrary, people will rebel into either total rejection or a refreshed orthodoxy. There is no reason to go to church if the primary purpose of the rituals is to be a good person. I can be a morally good atheist, one might say quite rightly. Likewise, there is no reason to teach Shakespeare instead of some romance novelist's work if the primary reason we study Shakespeare is because he has been awarded the title of “literature” by the academic elite to perpetuate their existence. As the Historical and Formalist schools of literary theory gave way to Reader Response, Intertextualism, Post Structuralism and New Historicism, people have rightly increasingly found arguments for the study of the literary canon indefensible and promptly rejected the canon. A side effect of this change is to place a work such as Arabian Nights on the level of the trade paperback romance novel at the supermarket, and hence eliminate a roughly objective aesthetic justification of the one over the other.

Why read Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Marlowe, Johnson, Milton, Blake, Dickens or Hardy when Dan Brown or Tom Clancy appeals to our “modern tastes”? Is it possible to define and defend the literary canon? Would literature by any other name be indistinguishable from pop fiction?

These are important questions. Questions I hope to address.

Late Night Haiku XIV

XXXVIII. Time. When did it pass?
The winged chariot flew by
When I looked away.

XXXIX. Wind fluttered the leaves,
A friendly voice heard near too,
Fade as distant now.

XXXX. Summer's energy
Burns fast in the waning days,
Do the crickets know?

SAFARI 3 Progress

I've never taken SAFARI 2 out of “beta,” but what I'm working on now is sophisticated enough and different enough that I've decided if I ever release the SAFARI codebase, it will be released as SAFARI 3 (well, probably under a different name since Apple took my name and it makes it confusing saying I'm using Safari to look at SAFARI).

SAFARI 2 was essentially a port of SAFARI 1 to MySQL, with additions to make it a blogging tool. SAFARI 3 moves from there into new territory that I believe is not currently being covered by content management systems. My big initiative is metadata — each post will not belong to just one category, it will belong to tons of categories and an unlimited number of other, user definable classifiers. You can find any post by any of the metadata objects owned by that post.

By necessity, I've now introduced a new feature that I think is also innovative. For lack of something better, I'll call it Word2SAFARI. W2S allows you to upload a Word document and have it output into your new SAFARI post for further editing or posting. I've tested using both wvware and the heir of its technology, AbiWord, as the backend to process the documents. Right now, the W2S codebase runs a server side copy of AbiWord to do the processing, which seems to work beautifully. Bold, italics, highlighting and various other Word formatting bits seem to be preserved. Also, and most importantly for my present purposes, it fully supports Unicode.

If I get time and it proves worthwhile, maybe I'll add more uploading features, such as photo uploading or PDF2SAFARI.

AAPL and the "Butler Curse"

My dad has always joked about the “Butler Curse,” a curse that dooms any stock that a Butler invests in to sinking share prices or something worse. He came to believe this after having the two or three forays he made into the stock market plummet quickly after he took ownership of the shares.

At times, I almost think there was something to it. As you may recall, I purchased a small number of shares of AAPL (that's Apple, if you don't keep up on your stockspeak) right before Jobs' keynote at MacWorld in January. The stock went up about ten dollars beyond what I bought it at ($72 a share, I believe it was), but then began a steady decline that continued until about two or three weeks ago. The shares sank when the new Intel Macs came out ahead of schedule. They sank when critics lauded the new Intel Macs. They sank when more Intel Macs came out. They sank when Apple outperformed the rest of the industry. They sank and sank, bottoming out at about $50.

I planned to buy more before WWDC '06, but it started going up just before I did so, and I almost did not go through with the plan to buy my pre-WWDC shares. I decided to go ahead and buy some at $69.50 yesterday and then sell it when it appeared to top out after the keynote — I'm thinking we'll see it hit between $85 and $90 after the keynote.

That sounded really good when I ordered the shares right before the market close yesterday. I logged on this morning to find something had happened last night: Apple announced it would have to restate its earnings back to 2002 due to accounting irregularities with stock options. Fortunately, my order did not go through until this morning, when after-market trading had already forced the stock's opening price down to $67. Unfortunately, it was already about a dollar lower than that and sinking by the time I looked.

I almost decided to cut my losses and sell. I actually setup a trigger to sell if it hit $64. The Butler Curse had struck AAPL shares not once, but twice — in six months! I was a believer, I really could destroy companies by buying their stock. Sure, I own a bit of a few funds, but the only standard stock I own falls every time I buy it. (This could actually be a thing I could make money with, I suppose, but killing companies isn't exactly my type of business.)

Fortunately, the stock closed up about a dollar from where I bought it, but I'm still not so sure. Beware if I buy into any company you own equity in or work for.

Greek Posting

I'm working on a web site for a client that requires posting in Greek. When this did not work, at first, I blamed it on (my) SAFARI, however it has turned out to be a problem originating in the way Microsoft Word exports Greek and compounded by how Apple Safari sends Greek characters via forms.

Switching to OpenOffice/NeoOffice and Firefox solved the problem. Good 'ol FOSS for you, huh?

I'm Gonna Surf Like Its 1997

For the first time since 1997, I typed in a username and password that belonged to me and heard “Welcome. You've Got Mail.” Yes, I am once again a member of AOL. If you haven't heard, much of AOL is now free, including an aol.com e-mail address and access to it either via the web or the classic AOL software. Will I use it? I doubt I'll use it that much — I have not used my AOL AIMMail account much — but it was just very amusing to see the old service again.

I didn't start out at AOL. Conversely, my start online was Prodigy in February 1993. My address was dpbx52b — something I can still remember off the top of my head without any trouble, for some reason — and later dpbx52b@prodigy.com. I use to love to play around with the Mobil Travel Guide and Ziff Net download service. All of this stuff seemed so cutting edge thirteen years ago. There were a few nifty games, including one where you moved around a maze. You'd see one drawing that looked sort of 3D. Click, then wait. Then another screen. Well, I'm getting off track.

In 1994 or so, my family did try both AOL and CompuServe. This was the golden age of the online service. CompuServe was intriguing just because it was archiac — we first signed on using a MS-DOS based terminal program known as COMit and were greeted by the famous “CIS” prompt. Later, a copy of WinCIM (Windows CompuServe Information Manager) arrived, but it did little to bring the oldest online service up to the fancy standards of AOL or Prodigy.

AOL offered downloads (the best part of AOL to me at the time, since Ziff Net downloads on Prodigy cost a buck or two a piece), forums and some other neat stuff, but Prodigy's EGA color palate on fully graphical pages was more inviting looking than any other option until the Web gained HTML 3.0 or so, I'd say. Prodigy got even more exciting in 1994 when they added real photos to their news section, photos you could watch load one line at a time (it seemed very slow at 2400 bps and was still tedious at 14.4 kbps). Prodigy also introduced its Prodigy Web Browser (pweb.exe) that year and I believe it was sometime late in 1994 that I first surfed on the web, at the time mostly interested in video game sites, like Sega of America. Prodigy offered unlimited service for $14.95 a month, while AOL and CompuServe metered their service at that time.

CompuServe was canceled within a month or so of the end of the free trial, AOL survived a bit longer, but not much. I never used it that much, so I can't recollect my screen name.

In 1995, I was caught up in the excitement about Windows 95 and, after installing Windows 95 on its launch day, we signed up for the new MSN service. It offered charter members some kind of cheap deal — maybe it was $4 or $5 a month — but only offered five hours of service. We suspended our Prodigy account, although I quickly noticed what was missing: the Internet. This was before the infamous direction change at Microsoft that set it on a course to build internet apps. MSN had internet access in certain regions, depending on what MSN's contracted connectivity provider in the area offered, but St. Louis was not one of them. For a number of months, I fell off the Internet. We never reactivated our Prodigy account, as Prodigy had redesigned its service under the designation “the new prodigy” with the hopes of making it seem more Internet savvy, but had, in reality, destroyed the quaint feeling of the Prodigy Classic service. The newer classic service was stark and was also quite a bit slower. MSN won the day for a bit.

But, MSN was still a metered plan and had some problems, so we signed up for AOL again in August of 1996 or so when AOL sent out a win-back promotional flyer. This time, we switched to AOL. My screen name was “twnm.” The service worked fairly well, really, and we kept it for about a year. The advantage to AOL was that, as the hub of the online world, you could find almost everything on it — or so it seemed. The final blow with AOL was that its unmetered plan was $19.95 a month, and MCI was offering Internet access for $14.95. The Internet was seeming more and more useful without the need for an online service, so we moved on.

With the switch to MCI, the curtain came down on my time as a holder of an account with a traditional online service provider… until today. Now, I've got mail again. How interesting.

Late Night Haiku XIII

XXXV. Peaches so very fresh,
Burst with flavor when eaten.
The summer flavor!

XXXVI. Silence emanates
Where a lively voice once talked,
Something fades away.

XXXVII. Birds float, water glistens,
A tree rustles in the heat,
Unrelenting. Warm.

A SAFARI Glitch

With the way I have SAFARI setup, I have asisaid as a testbed, and then all of the other SAFARI enabled sites feed off of one codebase to which I push out updates. I did such a push a few days ago to fix the disabled comments bug that was affecting Ed's blog. Silly as I am, I didn't check afterwards to make sure everything was still OK on my church's site, which also uses SAFARI. As it turned out, I killed off most of the site because of a small bug that hasn't been a problem on the other sites.

Keeping the code centralized is good for saving time doing updates, but has its disadvantages…

Long, Tedious Meme

GRUB-OLOGY

•_ What is your salad dressing of choice?_
Typically, Thousand Island.

• What is your favorite fast food restaurant?
White Castle.

• What is your favorite sit down restaurant?
Lewis and Clark's in downtown St. Charles.

• On average, what size tip do you leave at a restaurant?
Average is probably 15%, although I “default” to 20%. If the service is good, 20%; mostly good, 15%; questionable, 10%; bad, 0%.

• What food could you eat every day for two weeks and not get sick of?
The beautiful thing known as a potato.

• Name three foods you detest above all others.
Tuna, Herring, Raw meats of any kind.

• What is your favorite dish to order in a Chinese restaurant?
Broccoli chicken fried rice.

• What are your pizza toppings of choice?
Either the deluxe/supreme or pepperoni and onion (depending on the type and place).

• What do you like to put on your toast?
Homemade jellies, preserves, apple butter, etc.

• What is your favorite type of gum?
I don't chew gum.

BI-OLOGY
• What do you consider to be your best physical attribute?
I have no idea.

• Are you right handed or left handed?
Right handed. I wish I was bi-dexterous like my grandfather was.

• Do you like your smile?
No.

• Have you ever had anything removed from your body?
Do splinters count?

• Would you like to?
No, I don't think that sounds like much fun.

• Which of your five senses do you think is keenest?
Sight.

• When was the last time you had a cavity?
To the best of my knowledge, never.

• What is the heaviest item you lift regularly?
Computer components — monitors, mostly.

• Have you ever been knocked unconscious?
No.

MISC-OLOGY
• If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
No, thank you very much.

• If you could change your first name, what would you change it to?
I'm not sure, but something “interesting” while not being “crazy.”

• How do you express your artistic side?
Poetry, photography and web design.

• What color do you think you look best in?
This isn't something I've ever really thought about. Yellow?

• How long do you think you could last in a medium security prison?
Not very long.

• Have you ever swallowed a non-food item by mistake?
Paper stuck to food, perhaps. Seeds, pits, etc., yes, I use to do so quite often.

• If we weren’t bound by society’s conventions, do you have a relative you would make a pass at?
I certainly hope not.

• How often do you go to church?
Most every Sunday. More often if you count going there for meetings and other “work”-type things.

• Have you ever saved someone’s life?
I don't believe so.

• Has someone ever saved yours?
Ditto.

TQ: Privacy and National Security

This week's TQ from Mark is on privacy. Feel free to respond below.

1.To what extent do you believe our govt is eavesdropping on you?

I think they probably intercept some, though not all, of my electronic correspondence. I doubt any of it has been looked at by a live person, however.

2.Do you think the govt has gone too far in the name of national security?

Yes. Though I have not experienced any problems due to PATRIOT Act issues, I would assert it provides far too much freedom for the government. Wiretaps should be used only when shown to be necessary before a judge and detentions should be impossible without pressing charges.

3.Have you taken any steps to protect your privacy?

In general, I try to keep my data secure, but not out of concern that the Feds will come looking for my information. I just don't want script kiddies breaking in. I don't encrypt e-mail or anything like that.

4.Comment on this picture.

I think it relays what many think less privacy will accomplish. Realistically, I don't have a lot of faith that our national security reforms are actually going to work to improve security. Especially with the amount of illegal immigration — if that many people can sneak into the country, how are we going to stop a few terrorists?

5.3.Will personal privacy ever be restored, or will things continue to decay?

As technology advances, it will become increasingly easy to create a police state. While I'm not entirely pessimistic about the future, I do expect that we will have less privacy in the future than the past.

Note: The questions on this page written by Mark are governed by the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.5 license. I believe my responses are allowed under fair use and therefore are not licensed under the Creative Commons license (I don't want people messing with adapting my personal opinions, thank you very much).