by Risa Dickens.

Part 1.
Editing Openness: Lessons from Open Source.

I’m really glad Christian drew the issue of edited openness into the comments about space and scale which followed his recent post from Yellowknife.
Personally, I think a lot about how public spaces can become healthy ecosystems, instead of slipping towards inequality or control. I am half of the team that’s spent the past month building Indyish, and some of every day for the past two years building Open. And I am the one who most often edits our Openness.

Building Open is an idea that bumps up against every one else’s ideas about what Openness is or should be. Building this site and evolving it has challenged my own thinking-through of the processes developed in the open source community (the subject of my MA thesis, still in draft form). And that was sort of the original intention.

Often, questions ethical and practical that I’ve encountered here have sent me back to open source, looking for suggestions.

Open source development has played out in as many different ways as there are different, successful open source companies. For Open Journal I have been following the templates created by Open Source leaders like Linus Torvalds- the genius coder and “benevolent dictator for life” behind Linux, the kernel of the central open source operating system. (Linux sits at the heart of most open source-enabled innovations, including the Apache servers that run most of the Internet and the small computers that coordinate the self assembly of the floating blimps in Julien’s arty robotics.)

The collaborative process that built Linux is layered and complex now, but it still boils down to this:

Anyone is welcome to submit bits that they think will work. Linus Torvalds, recognized for having built the entire first draft of the kernel on his own, and for having made a beautiful and smart thing, has final say on what goes in and what doesn’t, and what needs fixing for it to work.

Decisions are resolved pragmatically- does this work well, logically, efficiently, does it work well over time, does it scale, does it allow for and enable growth..?

If a contributor fundamentally disagrees with the decisions being made by Torvalds, they are welcome to attempt to fork the code. “Forking” is to take all the openly available material from the Linux code (which is all the Linux code) and build it in whatever new direction you like, and see if you can get people to work on it with you. Forking is an essential function in the ecosystem that is Open Source. And it’s something we’re open to as well, because our interest is always in building and being part of healthy ecosystems.

The importance of the right to fork makes sense when you think about the open source system on an extra-large scale. (And thanks again the Christian, for drawing our attention to differences in scale.)

Thinking about open source requires a kind of sliding scale- one that can see the individual creative spark alongside the enormity of the network.

Open source is bigger than any one project, (and many projects, like operating systems, are massive in size); it’s bigger than giant networks of projects like Sourceforge; bigger than the legal and business realms of open source and things like Creative Commons; bigger than it’s subtle role in enormous battles like the ones playing out in the music and motion picture industries. Open source is big, and so this question about scale is huge because it points to how hard it’s going to be to build things that will survive the size of the open source network. Not to mention how hard it can be to know which directions will prove right in the long run.

Will a choice continue to seem smart as it gets applied to increasingly various scenarios, in all kinds of chaotic and tugging contexts? Will a system stay quick and light across the infinite variations of software and hardware?

Will an idea that seems brilliant to me in my bubble of books continue to be meaningful when it’s read against knowledge from other disciplines? Or will I then hear in it what I couldn’t before: the repetition of super-sized buzz words, beneath which I have hidden my secret confusion.

Sometimes I think people do this: bury big haunting questions in fascinating twists of words.
Sometimes I think this is the result of individuals or groups believing they should build an operating-system-sized theory on their own.
Challenging this misconception is, in part, the idea behind OpenJournal.

Part 2:
Our Working Philosophy.

As I wrote in the copy for Indyish, I’m interested in editors. I think everyone needs an editor- every idea needs to get shaken up by other perspectives and also needs to get reworked a few times by its original fashioner. Good, complex things don’t get built by one person in one try. As Torvalds pointed out, it generally takes one set of eyes to see the spark of a new idea, or to correctly identify the crux of a problem that needs solving, and another set of eyes to solve it. An organized but open network is necessary to connect the eyes and minds that together can solve problems. People, I think, flip back and forth between both sides of this job all the time, but wherever they are on that road they still need those other perspectives to bounce off of.

I want Open to provide the time and space for theories to be considered, tempered, and reworked. And I want the people behind Open to get to play whatever useful role we can in that process. And if at any time someone would like to fork the theory we’re working on, or would like to post an unedited version of their writing on their own website, or would like the entire history of the edits we’ve made together to be published alongside their final version, then Open would be super into that.

Part 3:
Why Edit?

Because we are trying to bring out the best in each other’s theory and writing.

Open is not just a blog- it’s not a group diary where anything goes. If there were no spaces like that- if it were impossible to get access to your own space for publishing on the web- then we would have felt the need to provide that. But Blogger, Myspace, and the Mac version of blogging tools – not to mention free and open source systems like Wordpress- answer that need bountifully.

So instead, at Open, we’re building theory collaboratively. And a project that big needs a project manager. And that’s been me.

Part 4.
The Flaw in Systems.

I stand by my edits and by the careful and continuously evolving thought that’s gone into Open so far. And in general, people seem to find the fact that an editor will look at their work to be quite reassuring- it allows them to take chances. And we love that. But it means that there’s always more editing to be done. And so it seems there’s a flaw in the system. And it’s a flaw linux encountered eventually as well.

Linus Torvalds is fricken smart but he isn’t perfect. (nobody is, hence the title of my thesis: “no one knows everything.”) At one point in the now-nearly-mythic linux history, Torvalds made some mistakes and got tired and defensive.

But actually, maybe this wasn’t a flaw. Maybe it was just the rumblings of a system getting bigger and approaching a phase transition. And maybe we’ve reached this kind of a stage with Open as well.

My next door neighbor’s dogs, little rabbit sized things, are always barking. Footsteps in the hallway or quiet talking, any hardly perceptible sound can set off the yapping. But I don’t mind the barking so much as the man bellowing “QUIET!” every time they do. Despite their size, they’re fully grown and I would guess they’re past the ability to absorb that kind of mild behavioral training. If I drop a fork in my kitchen, the dogs will bark, but the man snapping at his dogs is more unpleasant to hear. The strange old man’s bite is much worse than their dogs’ barks; in the end, dim sounds set off the man.

Joanna Newsom’s relatively recent song “Bridges and Balloons” recognizes this nicely.

The sight of bridges and balloons
makes calm canaries irritable;
they caw and claw all afternoon:
“Catenaries and dirigibles
brace and buoy the living-room –
a loom of metal, warp – woof – wimble.”
And a thimbles worth of milky moon
can touch hearts larger than a thimble.

Needless to say, when you’re on a boat, you tend to notice things that populate your field of vision, that break up the monotony. Especially bridges, to say nothing of balloons. So it’s not only or primarily the canaries who caw and claw at the sight of bridges and balloons. The mariners are just as excited: the song squeaks and chirps as much as the birds do. And of course, that is precisely what this verse is — the human way of telling the same story.

Here’s a more agitated version of the same thing. The dogs are irritated by the sounds of trains, planes, and automobiles, but it’s really the human — and his/her “birdie brain”:

I hate the steam train that whistles woozy my bird brain,
That sends my spaniel insane…

I hate the livery cars that have my bird brain seeing stars,
That drive my Doberman to drink in bars.

It’s fairly common to often turn to others to mark a moment: it’s helpful to round up a bunch of impressed surrogates to emphasize your accomplishment, for instance. One might think of Keats’s famous sonnet —

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

But it’s especially true of animals, who often perform this job of certifying what we sense in the first place. Dog-whistles and ghosts: surely some things set off the animal and not us. But more often than not, we call on animals and pets to confirm what we already know.

To end, here’s a short poem from the opposite perspective: James Tate’s “The Promotion”

We’re still taking people on, but there’s one less poetry-literary-theorist spot left to be filled.
It turns out Yohei and I bumped around the old grey buildings of McGill together for a few years, back when both of us were wide-eyed and busy undergraduates. We were even in classes together, although Yohei remembers this better then I. I have a whole fuzzy realm full of McGill faces in my brain, and Yohei’s glasses and serious gaze are certainly in there, but for the most part, those large McGill classes are a blur. In crowds I seem to see the few people I already know in technicolour. Other potentially interesting faces are quite dim.
Yohei’s face would have, in all likelihood, stayed dim if I hadn’t been out here in public with Open, and if he hadn’t been out looking around to find us, or if he hadn’t been awesome enough to jump in when we threw up our call for contributing editors. There are strange old links being remade all the time.
But don’t worry, I didn’t choose to welcome him on board just because we share an alma mater- you can’t trust someone just because they’ve haunted the same halls. No, what won me over was the small collection of thoughts and observations about the whole feeling of homesickness that he sent me along with his introduction/application. Especially fun was finding out that we had both stumbled on the strangeness of the French verb “Missing” and stopped to write something down about it.

“Homesick”
by Yohei, originally published on The Red Line Review.

Cliche or thoughtless counterintuitive logic seems to intrude on an otherwise pretty Kings of Convenience song, “Homesick.” At first blush, there is something off about the song’s sense of causality. :

Homesick,
‘cuz I no longer know
where home is.

It hardly needs pointing out that one’s homesickness is contingent on a strong notion of home, on knowing where home is.

One needs a home first,
toward which longing can be directed,
to be sick for.

Homesickness, as we might imagine it, thus matches particularly well with the French verb
manquer
and the syntactical reorganization the verb requires,
for both emphasize the central source from which homesickness originates and pulls.
The object or site of remembrance takes priority over the subject: Tu
me manques.

The state of homesickness is often suggestive of

spatial remove,

in contrast to a related
kind of
anxious
remembering,
the act of nostalgia which implies a

temporal distance.

In addition to their common reliance on the enduring nature of memory, however, nostalgia was originally synonymous with homesickness: “acute longing for familiar surroundings, especially regarded as a medical condition; homesickness.” Such a definition allows, then, we can assume, that homesickness, like nostalgia, most likely involves some degree of idealization. One remembers familiarity, perhaps at the expense of home as it really is:

when away at summer camp for the first time, one hardly remembers Dad’s austerity or Mom’s temper; rather,
one extrapolates from frozen, quotidian happy moments —
what Virginia Woolf called moments of non-being– a
more or less
complete picture of home.

Homesickness and nostalgia also leave open
the possibility that one’s pang for a sense of familiarity
need not be for home at all,
but simply familiarity itself, imagined (deja vu)
or real.

One can be nowhere near home as long as the surroundings effect intimacy.
And in fact, one can feel familiarity not only from the truly familiar,
but from the comfort provided by one’s mistaken sense
of forgotten familiarity:
thinking that someplace was once familiar and now forgotten
when in fact it is — and has always been — entirely foreign:

“I would define nostalgia as an affection or desire, not for what one remembers, but for what one feels one has forgotten….Nostalgia in this sense is… well-known in a number of contexts. In a relatively bald form, for instance, it is often used by advertisers. (The television campaign that urged viewers to ‘Come
back to Jamaica’ was clearly not aimed at native Jamaicans, nor even at those who had ever visited.) In a more complex form the implication of forgotten knowledge is typical not only of Virgil but of what we call “the classics” in general.”

Erik Gray, Nostalgia, the Classics, and the Intimations Ode: Wordsworth’s
Forgotten Education (Philological Quarterly: Spring 2001.Vol. 80.2)

A false forgotten familiarity — that is to say, complete unfamiliarity —
merges into familiarity in homesickness and nostalgia;
we might be reminded of Freud’s discussion of the uncanny.
Unheimlich, in literal translation denotes the opposite of heimlich;
unheimlich is “unhomely,” frightening, and novel,
heimlich: “homely.”
Yet, as Freud comments, the uncanny absorbs both contradictory definitions:
the uncanny is “the notion of the hidden and the dangerous” (unheimlich)
but precisely so only because it is
also familiar.

“German usage allows the familiar (das Heimliche, the’ homely’) to switch to its opposite, the uncanny (das Unheimliche, the ‘unhomely’) for this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed.”

The Uncanny, trans.
David McLintock.

Homesickness, like nostalgia, then, might actually require not knowing where home is.
Familiarity and unfamiliarity — and home or some specter of it — are closely related.
Homesickness does not need to focus its desire on home
so much as something, perhaps home, that is felt to be missed:
either because it has simply become strange
and unfamiliar or because it seems
forgotten,
even if it was never experienced or remembered in the first place.

to read my ideas about ‘manquer’, you’ll have to read this piece, originally published in the Duck and Herring Summer Pocket Field Guide, called “Language Lesson 1″

I recently re-listened to Elliott Smith’s earlier, demo version of his song “Speed Trials.” Though the demo is poorly recorded, it has some noteworthy lyric moments that are, I think, more interesting than the later version’s.

Placing the original, demo lyrics in the margins in bold, the chrous of finished version of “Speed Trials” (as it appears on Either/Or) is,

It’s just a brief smile [crossing your face,] got stuck on your face,
running speed trials [still standing in place.] all over the place.

To the ear, it seems as if the earlier lyrics have been improved. “Crossing your face” is softer than the harsher and germanic “ got stuck on your face.” Yet, there is a subtle indeterminacy in the original line that isn’t preserved in the song’s final form. “It’s just a brief smile got stuck on your face,” immediately branches into two possibilities that are, wonderfully, left open. Is it “It’s just a brief smile, [that] got stuck on your face,” or “It’s just a brief smile, [I] got stuck on your face”? Both potential lines flicker in the empty space between “smile” and “got”. Even better, while the images are alternating (one a frozen smile, the other that first moment of attraction), they are at the same time forging — from that flickering — a combined image: an unstable, moving one that is both the stuck smile and getting stuck on it.

I prefer the earlier chorus then, but there is something rewarding in juxtaposing the two versions. As editors of manuscripts or theorists of textuality or bibliography remind us, texts are unstable, but examining that instability uncovers what would be lost in any single version. It’s a banal premise now, reflected in how common the practice is: Wordsworth’s Prelude comes in an edition including the 1799, 1805, and 1850 forms. Norton Anthologies of poetry reproduce (in appendices) canonical poems in various versions, with crossings-out and revision marks intact.

Thus, only from seeing both versions of “Speed Trials,” does it become clear that the smile is — to complicate matters — from the start, somewhat fragile and always on the verge of tumbling downward into its less joyous version, a frown. In version 2, the brief smile negates itself with “crossing,” a cross look. Just as it’s counterintuitive to think that a smile can cross (or dampen) a face, version 1 similarly undermines the smile in it’s own way, by grabbing its brevity and fleetingness by the collar to make it stick around — turning it into a forced smile (the kind one pastes on in job inteviews). Still, none of this to simply say that smiling is unhappy. Smith sings in another song,

“You see me smiling you think it’s a frown / turned upside down,” (“St. Ides Heaven”)

and there as here, the point seems to be that smiling is all the more valuable precisely because it can become a cross look in the short time it takes cross the face, or its honest spontaneity can get stuck into an insincere, meaningless smile — that smiling can turn upside down in an instant or else be virtually the same thing.

The whole song is below and there is more to unconvered.

————————————————
Speed Trials

He’s pleased to meet you underneath the horse,
in the cathedral with the glass stained black,
singing sweet high notes that echo back,
to destroy their master.

May be a long time till you get the call-up,
but it’s sure as fate and hard as your luck.
No one’ll know where you are.

It’s just a brief smile [crossing your face,] got stuck on your face,
running speed trials [still standing in place.] all over the place.

When the socket’s not a shock enough,
[you little child what makes] you think you’re tough, You’re a child because
[when all the people you think you're above,] You can’t remember what you were thinking of.
[they all know what's the matter.] Don’t ask what’s the matter.
[You're such] a pinball yeah you know it’s true. ‘Cuz he’s
[there's always something you come back running to,] He’s gonna keep on running back to you,
to follow the path of no resistance.

It’s just a brief smile crossing your face,
running speed trials standing in place.

It’s just a brief smile crossing your face,
running speed trials all over the place

So true: At its best, partial knowledge is the starting point from which more large scale patterns are initially hypothesized. It elicts curiosity and mobilizes interpretive effort.
–
John Ruskin as a child, before the aesthetic, geographical, and architectural theories that come later, grew up in a cold house- David Copperfield cold. Well, that’s how I imagine it. Patterns and rugs, once again…
Anyhow:

“Nor did I painfully wish, what I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in a toy-shops. I had a bunch of keys to play with, as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew older, I had a cart, and a ball; and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. …[I] could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my carpet: — examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in opposite houses… But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed-covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were my chief resources, and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate, that when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet.” John Ruskin, Praeterita
–
Ruskin’s childhood patterns are idealistically complete, so total in fact that flaws — as in Northcote’s carpet — stand out as abnormalities.
–
Two weeks ago, New Yorkers were told that city and national officials had credible information that a bombing would occur somewhere in the subway system in the next few days. A specific time and place was supposedly known but not announced: we, of course, had to go to work as usual.
–
Partial knowledge is the way to cause fear in mice in behavioral experiments (through electric shocks on an unpreventable, random, and irregular schedule) yet it is also the same way to run a city: terror and counterterrorism both rely on the same strategy.
–
The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense news briefing, Feb. 12, 2002
From The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld

Negative Capability: Unread Cultural Commons and Small Talk

you can read the other things we’ve had to say about the cultural commons here, if you like.

To complicate Cultural Commons further, there is the concept of reverse vicariousness. Half of the ‘commoners’ haven’t done their homework:

“Nonreaders can positively register at social gatherings that they “know of” the book without actually having seen or read it first hand. We might call this phenomenon reverse vicariousness, because we normally think of immediate viewing or reading as vicarious experiences for face-to-face interaction. But, in this case, a viewer or reader uses face-to-face interaction to experience the viewer or reader role vicariously;”

Kathleen Carley and David Kaufer, “Communication at a Distance”
Cited in Clifford Siskin’s The Work of Writing

It’s increasingly difficult to ignore the pervasiveness of reverse vicariousness.

I heard an NPR interview with the author of The Art of Small Talk. The book needs no introduction, really: it’s exactly what it sounds like, a self-help book for exactly these kinds of social or office gatherings. For instance, how to avoid being “held hostage” in conversations when one could be productively [grimace] networking.

Half knowledge, negative capability: able small talkers capitalize on it, synecdochal logic ready for deployment, to rush in and fill in the void. One half of a rug may be obscured underneath a couch, but you must assume that you know what the hidden pattern is. Bill Clinton, a master chitchatter, I’ve read, has on hand a humorous and engaging anecdote on almost any topic. A good small talker, I gather, relishes in this reciprocal state of half knowledge — and the real artistry comes in brushing up against but never crossing the boundary into any substantive knowledge of the other or betraying your ignorance of or distate for a topic.