YES WE CAN - I BELIEVE - DO YOU?

Resilience - Poetry and A New Language Game

Why resilience? I define myself using a term established by Richard Rorty - “liberal ironist -the name for the “sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his own most central beliefs and desires –someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time.

So my anthem is resilience - the sustaining of life’s daring. From this date forward I will be contributing more and more material along this theme. If you find any material that you think should be included, send it to oldude59@happinessaddiction.info

clipped from www.blockislandtimes.com Poetry project begins with inquiry into resilience and the human spirit “There is a small world of people interested in human rights and writing,” says Marjory Wentworth, Poet Laureate of South Carolina. Wentworth and three other poets from that small world, Carolyn Forche, Taha Muhammed Ali, and Peter Cole, will be here, in our island world, this weekend at the first session of the 2008 Block Island Poetry Workshop, “Poetry, Resilience, and the Human Spirit.” “They are looking for a way to process their emotions. They are afraid, confused and angry,” Wentworth said. “When people get that sick they have little control. They’re told what to do. “ “It was a great way to process the information,” she explained. “There is a redemptive quality in creating a poem about these things.” This weekend, Wentworth and Forche will team up to do a workshop together. “We’ll teach reading between the lines. We’ll write poems from newspaper clippings.”

Barack - Damn!

If you listen, you will learn!

Drag and Drop

“We are starting to imagine a drag and drop world where we simply push and pull the content we want into the technical platforms and the locations we want to consume them. I envision a simple cluster of icons on my desktop that lets me drag my video and audio content onto emblems for car, TV, stereo, iPod, iPhone, etc. This is what I want; you tech dweebs figure out how to do it.” Steve Smith

Nice idea, but what I want from - “drag and drop” - starts a little before having it implement at the device level. For me it starts with the design question – function or form - which comes first. When I look at my blank Zude page – I have to imagine what I want people to do when they arrive, then what it looks getting it done. I take it a little deeper in the sense that try to encourage “active reading”, which means that I’m placing more of a burden on the reader than to simply to act as audience or spectator for a static meaning that I the author have defined. Designing on Zude has to accommodate a special kind of openness that takes advantage of the gaps and play between the elements. So it has to be intuitive, if not outright fun.

It has be fast, not only foolproof but stupid-resistant, and certainly faster than writing code with a keyboard even through it does have to permit you to write code if necessary – which Zude does. But making things “drag and drop” easy on the surface requires a sophisticated programming backend to make it work – that’s the magic – making it stupid-resistant.

Zude takes the first definitive steps into bringing that type of interface to the Internet – be sure that more will follow (the true testament its wonder), allowing you to drag and drop images, text, widgets, YouTube embeds codes, and even whole web sites on to the blank canvass.

That may not be enough to make you switch exclusively from, say Facebook or LinkedIn to Zude, but that’s not really the point. Zude is not a social networking crowd, but it does let you bring the crowd into see the total you, which those other sites don’t or more truly can’t. It’s intriguing enough to make you consider drawing your Facebook, LinkedIn, or other contacts into Zude and making your brand accessible to them in a whole new way. Your way!! So the form you choose can not be ordained by preset page templates, which all the other sites force on you, Zude’s drag and drop interface lets you, the user, decide what your page (actually pages) should look like and more importantly what it says about you for a public to read.

One of the common functions of a web page on a social network is to share your favorite links with others, most of the time people arriving on your page have no idea which of those links actually inform what you do or think. They just seat there, colored lines that whisk your viewer off to some place of marginal non contextual status.

In Zude, you just drag a website URL from one browser window and drop it right onto your Zude page. Whenever Zude detects an incoming web link, it prompts you to choose the form of the link, namely: A standard text link containing the URL, a standard button labeled with the URL, or an embedded web site which places the browser window right onto the page. Embedding can be very useful for frequently used if the subject states something foundational that makes clear something firmly attached to your way so seeing the world.

Of course an embedded site is not very space efficient, which is why you have the option of instead creating a button or a text link that opens that web resource – like a canvass you have to respect the borders of the frame. Like all Zude objects, these links are fully customizable, so you can change the text and color to suit your wishes.

Working with images in Zude

You can drag and drop images from other websites, making it easier than ever to decorate your own web page. Looking for a modern dancer? Just do a search in Google Images and drag the results from the browser window onto your Zude page. Want to set an image as wallpaper instead? Just hold down the [Ctrl] key while you drag and drop. Zude takes care of the rest.

Zude’s DropZone technology even allows you to drag local images from your hard drive onto your Zude page (one at a time – I’d like to see that changed to multiple uploads), though not all browsers fully support this yet. Once on your Zude page, images can be resized (this is another one of points you might like to do before bringing it to your page – photo retouching or other editing tricks need to be done before you get to Zude), or decorated with header/footer captions, or assigned actions that respond to clicks, double clicks, mouse over, etc. There are many different ways to make an image your own… even when it isn’t (I suggest Gimp 2).

Working with multimedia in Zude

At this point you can probably guess that you decorate your Zude pages with your favorite videos just by dragging and dropping them onto the page. (You’d be right, too.) Just do a search on YouTube of your favorite bands or comedian and then drag and drop the URL as a link onto the page. Whenever you click on that link, Zude will launch the video – No more searching! Zude has its own Video and Music Players – but I have not figured out yet how to utilize them to the same extent as using other players For those who like their information up to the minute, Zude also supports RSS feeds that you can just drag onto your page to keep you aware of the latest news, sports, weather, or the stock market.

So What?

Although Zude is a technology product in itself, that almost gets lost in the intuitiveness of its “drag and drop” interface. Instead it comes across as a facilitator or canvass for other technologies… something that allows you to put many different elements on the same page in a precise way. Back to my original concern of Form or Function Zude lets you enjoy them without having to be mired in the dualist dilemma. You can, like I am use Zude in an iterative fashion of bring multiple web sites into test them out. It lets us hunt and gather from the web. The fact that it lets us do this with the simplicity of moving a mouse is icing on the cake. And those who could care less about drag and drop will find that Zude responds equally well to “copy and paste”.

Step Two – The Art of Me in Zude

It’s more than a notion – building your brand in a virtual world. If I was building it for Corporation – I’d arrange a retreat where I would have an expensive facilitator conduct brain storming exercises to tease out some of the important concepts needed be expressed. Then, I would turn the project over to a project manager and a team of designers, writers and programmers that would be charged with developing a draft by a specific date – you get the idea.

Not so, this is much more personal. Not only do I not have the resources to engage in such a process, in some ways this is my fun that I want – need to master – because it’s me I want lay out on the screen. I still have the audience of one in mind – that stranger – that has no idea what I’m about, but gets drawn by some search engine or one off comment of a friend or through reading one of the post written about Zude.

If you read any of the reviews of Zude and there have been several: Terri Wells of SEOCHAT, David Berlind of ZDNET plus several others all tell about Zude’s team at 5g and the technology. Interesting stuff – revolutionary – gets thrown around many times in its discussion. If you want to know that kind of stuff, the guy that knows is Matt Wulkan – Director of Product Marketing. I’ve been real fortunate because when I asked a question – new people even more impressive than the last person I spoke with shows up. But I’ll spend more time focusing on the Zude team at another time

Today it’s about one of the Art Themes: Deconstruction. It’s the most difficult to explain.

“Deconstruction is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word ‘analysis’ itself, which etymologically means “to undo” — a virtual synonym for “to de-construct.” … If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyzes the specificity of a text’s critical difference from itself.”

Each image (6) was chosen to express a facet of a self analysis. There’s the multi colored Cow like those that littered Chicago’s Loop; the Male Afro Mask with brackets and other hardware and scraps taped to picture; a faceless torso with its gut split open and his face black out with a message stating “business as usual” where the face should be; a book cover with two long haired scholars – its title is “Stupidity”; there is a large multi colored scene that reminds me of a construction site; and lastly there is a abstract that looks something like a start burst.

Then there are two other elements: the video of Jacques Derrida – the French philosopher that has used the term Deconstruction throughout his work thus far; and forum titled Happiness Addiction. These are all the pieces that are in place. I will also had several others – music most of electric acid type – the Tied Tickled Trio; The Cinematic Orchestra or others. Then there will be a series of rotating essays – post that confront different subjects: politics – “How Black does Obama need be”, The future of being “Grey” – don’t worry they are intended for a audience that like post modern lit – Crit kind of stuff.

The point of deconstruction is that there is no point – it’s lost while being overdetermined.