VirusHead

I give up. I’ve been totally inundated by requests from my Facebook friends to post this meme. I’ve done “random things about me” posts before, but as Darrell points out, they were posted too long ago now to use as an avoidance mechanism. So, here are 25 new ones:

1. I am fascinated by faces. The mindful, authentic, observant face-to-face encounter might be the essential ingredient in most relationships – and certainly the test of most ethics and “values.” The very definition of pathology for me is someone who can look you in the eye, see your soul, and then still hurt or kill you.
2. I’m not adjusting to getting older very well. When I look at my face in the mirror, it doesn’t look like me and I feel a bit alienated and depressed. But at the same time, I love to see the changes in the faces of people I love. This last year, it was an amazing experience to go to my high school reunion and to see the faces of people that I’ve known since I was a child. The recognition-within-difference really touched me very deeply.
3. I do miss some aspects of other times and places in my life, but overall there is more kindness and caring and love and meaning in my life now than ever before. Sometimes that kind of stuns me.
4. Sometimes the only thing that will motivate me to attack my list of things to do is the prospect of being rewarded with some time alone in which I’m not required to do anything in particular. I’m a fierce guardian of that dreamtime – no obligation, rich imagination. My thoughts travel on their own -and mix up and ferment and rearrange and become resonant and meaningful. Not only is this ultimately the source of every major insight I’ve ever had, but without it, I wouldn’t be me to myself. My secret world is the heart of who I am.
5. I love to socialize, but it totally exhausts me. This is partially because I tend to overcompensate in various ways for my introversion. Later, I usually feel that I’ve not listened enough to others. I curse this recurring and almost irresistible urge to try to be amusing and likable and clever. It takes a lot of energy, I’m not very good at it, and I know that I should just zip it a lot more often than I’m able to do.
6. I’m still looking for my ideal pair of shoes – the shoes that don’t hurt my feet, that look gorgeous but have a heel of less than an inch, that are strapped or tied over my incredibly high arch and don’t let my tiny heel slip out, but that are wide enough at the front not to smoosh my toes or put pressure at the widest part. These mythical shoes would be perfect for any occasion and any outfit. I could wear them with jeans or a cocktail dress. Let me know if you find them. I suspect they have to be black.
7. I can’t let go of my books. I have too many, but I can’t let go of them. Even the Karl Barth.
8. My spiritual beliefs and practices are at once so eclectic and yet oddly inflexible that I doubt I’ll ever be a member of a religious community. I have the strangest things on my alter.
9. I’m almost absurdly grateful when I feel like someone I like “gets” me.
10. I miss the kind of cheerful feminism represented by such songs as Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman” and the tv theme song for Wonder Woman. Although I love the angry music and the whiny music, too, I wonder what happened to that soaring sense of confidence.
11. My energy level is never very predictable. I never know how productive I’m going to be. I work in very efficient spurts, but then I’m overwhelmingly fatigued. This can be measured in hours or in days. When I feel exhausted, I tend to become a bit reclusive. I still think of the couple of weeks that I had to be on corticosteroids (for systemic poison ivy) with a lot of fondness, because it gave me just enough of that little extra adrenaline boost to let me feel like I imagine many people do most of the time.
12. I like to take a walkabout from time to time. I love to travel alone. I used to disappear into the woods for a week, but that’s neither possible nor even really desirable anymore.
13. It’s kind of predicable – and I don’t blame anyone for rolling their eyes – but our son Ben really is the most beautiful sweet smart amazing kid ever. I hope he continues on his own path – just the way he is already doing.
14. The greater percentage of what I write is still never read by anyone but me.
15. I would prefer to die in a manner and a moment of my own choosing. Skydiving would be the ideal, and although I don’t have to ride down on a missile like in Dr. Strangelove, I can understand the appeal.
16. I love the moon, and I love to sing to the moon and to the night sky, especially if the songs are actually about the moon and sky and stars. Some favorites: Sister Moon, Sting; Fingernail Moon, Annie Lennox; Sisters of the Moon, Fleetwood Mac; Goodnight Moon, Shivaree; Stars, The Weepies; Galaxy Song, Monty Python; In the Deep, Bird York; Small Blue Thing, Suzanne Vega – and for some reason, Strawberry Fields.
17. I’ve finally come to terms with the reality that I’m never going to be a Jungian analyst, a comparative mythologist, a well-known poet, a best-selling novelist, or an accomplished singer. I doubt I’ll ever play the piano like Tori Amos.
18. I love paranormal romance novels – especially those involving vampires or fae. John (the hubby) is amused by this and often teases me about my “porn collection.”
19. I don’t often wear perfume, but when I do it’s usually either a vanilla-musky Must de Cartier or a combination of lavender, mandarin, lemongrass, and bergamot. One drop of either is enough to alter my experience of the world for hours. I hope other people like it too, but that’s not really as important.
20. I have twice had the opportunity – and twice refused – to swim in the Mediterranean.
21. I deal with melancholy much better than I deal with anger. You can try to make me depressed if you must, but don’t piss me off. I’m not easily angered at all, but hell hath no fury like a Heidi-grr.
22. The thing that most infuriates me is the sense of powerlessness I feel when I want to somehow make everything all better for someone who is suffering. I can be very empathetic, but at a certain point I feel like a minor prophet waving my fist at the sky. That’s when I most need a little alone time to breathe and reorient myself.
23. When I was younger, I used to be petrified – really petrified – that the people I love would be killed. I had nightmares about my brothers (most of all my brothers) and other relatives, and my son and husband, and some of my dearest friends, and even a couple of my teachers. The worst part of the dream was always that they might have been saved if only I had done one little thing differently. After my Dad died, these nightmares went away. I don’t know why that happened, but I’m grateful.
24. I do often dream about my Dad. He’s different in my dreams than he was in reality, but it still helps – or maybe that’s why it helps.
25. I don’t know whether or not I can still pet a fuzzy honeybee until it goes to sleep in the palm of my hand. I haven’t seen one of those bees in years. I miss the lilacs too.

And here are the old ones:

• 8 Random Facts about VirusHead – December 2007
• VirusHead Random 8 – June 2007
• 5 Weird Things about Me – July 2006
• Meme Me Me – November 2005

I have been seriously remiss in my intellectual (and wifely) support! I haven’t even urged you to buy, read, and comment on hubby’s book – The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI (Bradford Books, MIT Press)!

Preview The Allure of Machinic Life at Google Books.

I’m a little annoyed about the title, since I preferred “The Lure of Machinic Life” to “The Allure of Machinic Life.” However, the absolutely wonderful bit on me me me in the acknowledgments almost makes up for it. The book cover is extra-special, too, because it features a suggestive artwork by our friend Joseph Nechvatal.

The book is a philosophically-minded constructive analysis that answers Heidegger’s critique of technology in subtle and completely unexpected ways. It builds on the understandings of such thinkers as Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Kittler, but it’s also a very original tour through areas of research that haven’t been connected or critiqued from this kind of perspective. It’s worth the read if only for the interpretive history of research on (and ideas about) artificial life.

I’m biased, but I’m also a pretty good critical reader – and this book is fantastic. I think it’s been mislabeled by the marketing people, so I’m afraid that it won’t be read – and that would really be a shame.

Review
“John Johnston is to be applauded for his engaging and eminently readable assessment of the new, interdisciplinary sciences aimed at designing and building complex, life-like, intelligent machines. Cybernetics, information theory, chaos theory, artificial life, autopoiesis, connectionism, embodied autonomous agents—it’s all here!”
—Mark Bedau, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Reed College, and Editor-in-Chief, Artificial Life

In The Allure of Machinic Life, John Johnston examines new forms of nascent life that emerge through technical interactions within human-constructed environments—”machinic life”—in the sciences of cybernetics, artificial life, and artificial intelligence. With the development of such research initiatives as the evolution of digital organisms, computer immune systems, artificial protocells, evolutionary robotics, and swarm systems, Johnston argues, machinic life has achieved a complexity and autonomy worthy of study in its own right.

Drawing on the publications of scientists as well as a range of work in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory, but always with the primary focus on the “objects at hand”—the machines, programs, and processes that constitute machinic life—Johnston shows how they come about, how they operate, and how they are already changing. This understanding is a necessary first step, he further argues, that must precede speculation about the meaning and cultural implications of these new forms of life.

Developing the concept of the “computational assemblage” (a machine and its associated discourse) as a framework to identify both resemblances and differences in form and function, Johnston offers a conceptual history of each of the three sciences. He considers the new theory of machines proposed by cybernetics from several perspectives, including Lacanian psychoanalysis and “machinic philosophy.” He examines the history of the new science of artificial life and its relation to theories of evolution, emergence, and complex adaptive systems (as illustrated by a series of experiments carried out on various software platforms). He describes the history of artificial intelligence as a series of unfolding conceptual conflicts—decodings and recodings—leading to a “new AI” that is strongly influenced by artificial life. Finally, in examining the role played by neuroscience in several contemporary research initiatives, he shows how further success in the building of intelligent machines will most likely result from progress in our understanding of how the human brain actually works.

Language is not only a virus (grin) but also an essential bit of the block of the discourse network that co-evolves with technological change and human action to give rise to the computational assemblage; or, machinic life is always already within you (and without you) but here are some of the details.

Now – go forth and buy many copies, and tell all thine friends (and thine enemies as well) to read and discuss.

Try these too!

• Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation
• Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays by Friedrich A. Kittler (Critical Voices) – (introduction, edited and translated)
• Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s the Recognitions and Postmodern Theory (Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction)
• Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961-84 – (translated)
• In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) – Jean Baudrillard – (translated)
• On The Line (Foreign Agents) – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – (translated)

Binkee at I Love/Hate America has tagged me with a photo meme.

So, this was interesting. The sixth photo in the sixth folder is actually a photograph of my husband John and his first wife Paula. Click for the full-sized photo.

This was probably somewhere in the time frame of 1979-81. I’ve always liked this photo. It’s a good one of both of them.

Rules of the game:

1) Go to your Picture Folder or wherever you store your photos in your PC.
2) Go to the 6th folder and pick the 6th picture.
3) Post this on your blog and the story that goes with that picture.
4) Tag 5 bloggers by leaving a comment on their blogs and telling them about the tag.

Three out of four ain’t bad – I encourage anyone to participate, but no pressure.

I didn’t think I was either a Jackie or a Marilyn. Hmmm… an Ingrid? Not sure.

Your result for Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz…

You Are an Ingrid!

Take Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz at HelloQuizzy

Joy to you this Christmas Day – everyone, everywhere!