Frequent flyer summer continues today with a quick dash to Louisiana to see my pal Marcus.  I decided at the last minute to drag the Powerbook with me, but given that I’m down to an average of about—and I wish I were exaggerating the situation—40 minutes of battery life when I’m not plugged in, and given that I’m not spotting any outlets anywhere near me (I’ll go on the hunt shortly), I’m not sure how much in the way of insight I’ll be able to produce here.

Then again, this last week has been pretty insight-free.  Brain is a bit scrambled, and its shell is extremely tired.  I’ve been powering down the Dennis Lehane this week, but not writing much of anything at all.  All my batteries could use a little recharging, I suspect.

I’ll be back in DC on Thursday, but hope to send electrifying reports from BR between now and then.

[UPDATE:  If you needed confirmation of the scrambled-brain:  Got to my gate, found an outlet, plugged in, realized I have no boarding passes.  Had boarding passes before.  Not in either carry-on.  Went back to cash register of place I bought a diet Coke half an hour ago.  And voilà:  boarding passes.  All’s well that ends well, I guess.]

This has been a quiet week, hereabouts, in no small part because I spent the first four days of it taking the first of the classes I hope to take this summer.  By the end of an intensive day sitting six inches away from an aged, flickering CRT, I had precious little desire to spend any further time online.  I did, however, spend Wednesday night virtually online, in an actual meetup with a substantive percentage of the cast and crew of the wordherders.  I’d met several of the ‘herders before, at various conferences, and it was great to catch up with them, as well as getting to put faces with names and f2f personalities with online ones for the other folks present.

The bulk of the week, though, was spent in class—two days of Photoshop, and two days of Flash.  And I know I’m not supposed to say this.  It’s seriously uncool among the geeky set.  But I cannot refrain:  I love Flash.

Here I’ll begin with the caveats:  not for what’s been done with it.  But for what could be done with it.  Most of the instances (a little Flash-class humor here (okay, a very little)) of Flash on the web are simply annoying.  But that was true of most early HTML, too, which served to prove the rule that simply because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.  But Flash opens a pretty remarkable set of possibilities for the fluid movement of text and images, and makes such movement remarkably easy.

If I’m going to be honest, though, the thing that’s best about learning Flash is its instant-gratification capabilities.  Again, when I was first learning HTML, it was much the same:  Think, “I wonder what would happen if I did this”; open and edit source; reload page; see result.  In a world in which publishing had previously taken weeks, at minimum, to see results, this was breathtaking—I make a change, and the world (or at least the page) is changed.  The changes, admittedly, were small.  But they seemed to mean something.

Flash does the same, in a dramatic fashion.  I think, “I want this to move over there.” I tell the program so.  It does.  Trust me, I know that that’s how computers work.  But there’s something endlessly entertaining about that to me.

Perhaps it’s just the change from the amorphousness of writing scholarship, in which the ideas never behave quite the way that I intend them to, in which there is no explicit syntax that will produce expected results.  But I’m quite in love at the moment, unacceptable (and possibly fleeting) though my object may be.

At Steve’s urging, I picked up Dennis Lehane’s first novel for my trip to DC, and am happy now to second that recommendation.  This first of the Patrick Kenzie/Angela Gennaro novels introduces many of the tropes that resurface in his work to follow—a decaying Boston, fraught race relations, and the lingering trauma of childhood abuse.  His detectives flirt with the cliche of the good-person-living-in-bad-world, and yet demonstrate a kind of complexity that makes them worth following for their own sakes, not simply for the intricate plots they find themselves wrapped up in.

My only complaint about this first novel, having read the last of the five Kenzie/Gennaro novels first, is that I wanted more Bubba Rugowski.  There’s something about his complete over-the-topness that I find really wonderful…

I admit this morning I’m pretty astonished.  Season 2 of Deadwood was astonishing throughout, but I just didn’t see the final episode coming together terribly well.  There were just so many subplots, and so many of them had become either maudlin or tangential, that I just couldn’t imagine how they’d manage to wrap anything like everything up in an hour.  But the episode was just breathtaking in the way that it managed to dance among the narratives.  The overlay of the wedding with the other various negotiations taking place in the camp was just genius.  And it just hadn’t occurred to me until last night how much I’d missed Gerald McRaney.  And while I said to myself at a certain moment in the episode, “Cy Tolliver’s on his way to being a dead man,” I just didn’t see the mode of conveyance coming.

And all I have to say now is thank god Six Feet Under is about to start again, because I’d be utterly bereft otherwise…

Purely FYI, IYI –

– These turn out to be cysts, as I’d expected.

– This one is growing back in nicely.

– This one turned out to be dead after all, but refused to depart on its own.  After a little clipper-intervention, it turned out that there was another one, already half-grown, underneath it.

– These start tomorrow morning, with an incursion into Photoshop.

– I’m currently here.  I ought to be meeting up with some of these folks later in the week.

– This now includes an August trip here.

Life, both on the whole and in the particulars, is good.

BT hits on something in the comments to a previous post that I want to bring up to top-level:

My point is that my own experience of knowing you through the blog (which vastly expands my grad-student-friend experience) is reflective of the persistence and (growing influence) of “the archived self” which seems to live and breathe on the Net in a way that continues to astonish me.

The bears a particular resonance for me because I’ve just this week started a new project, about which I won’t go into too much detail for fear of killing it, that I’m thinking of under the tentative title “The Archive.” And it’s precisely about this experience of encountering in the archive the traces of a person that one thought one knew, only to discover how much more to that person there is, how much can be learned from the archive, and how many small gaps and bits of unknowableness the archive reveals.

Again, I don’t want to give up too many details yet—the project has miles to go before it’ll see the light of day.  But here’s a question that you (collectively) might be able to help me answer.  If you were creating a fictional archive, of a fictional family, and needed fictional family photos to include in it, how would you go about producing them?  There are sites around such as this one that archive old photos submitted to them.  There’s also the flea-market route.  I don’t need many photos—the paucity of available information is part of the point—but they do need to be pretty consistent, and they need to not get me sued.

Asking such a question is not the best way, I realize, of thinking through the ideas that BT raises—but I hope that the project will do so, and that’s of course where my brain is right now.

Here’s something I wouldn’t quite have expected to see:  the Chronicle of Higher Education actively making fun of an institution of… well, higher education.  (Subscription required, alas; I’ll try to post an open link as soon as one exists.)

Not to say they didn’t totally deserve it.  But I bet public relations officers the academy over are now rethinking the Chron’s place on their automatic mailing list…

Should I be concerned that somebody with the IP address of a midwestern regional airlines found my site by googling “Pan Am 759”?  (Here’s the resulting page, if you’re interested.)

And while I’m on the subject, I know I brought it on myself, but the number of hits I’m now getting off of googles involving boobs is really alarming.  Also their diversity, and their sheer imaginativeness.  Seriously:  some of you might want to find somebody to talk to.

So the summer has now really and truly begun:  the freeway sprints are over, my students have graduated, my desk has been cleaned off, and I’ve split for the east coast.  Things have been quiet and lazy so far, which is much needed; the end of the semester—a period during which the faculty undergoes what I like to refer to as “death by reception”—was accompanied this year by a bit too much jollity and mirth, or at least a bit more than my hangover-prone self could take.

During one of those last bouts of jollity, an extended champagne infusement, my three pals and I somehow ended up on the subject of me.  (One of my favorite subjects, to be sure, but I’m still not quite clear how the topic came up.) One of these pals, someone I like quite intensely, admitted at a certain point to feeling like she knew me much better from my blog than any face-to-face interactions.  Needless to say, I found this a little disturbing:  I consider this woman to be a good friend, and yet I apparently tell the internet more than I tell her.

I’ve been pondering this for the last few days, trying to figure out, if I can, what it means.  I default—perhaps with emphasis on the “fault”—toward a kind of reserve in my engagement with the folks around me, driven in part by a sort of professionalization (something I wrote about a while back when thinking about the danger I feel in mixing the professional and the personal), but also due to a terror I have of being exposed.  Of being seen.  Really seen.

This arises, and it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to guess this, from some Bad Shit that happened to me as a kid, stuff I haven’t talked about here, and won’t, likely ever.  One of the effects of that Shit is a sense of safety in invisibility.  Which is not to say that I work to avoid drawing attention to myself—I’m a complete whore for attention, of certain kinds, at least.  But which is to say that the self that I’m drawing attention to is very rarely, in some deep sense, actually me.  Or at least it gives the appearance of not being me, of not being authentic and engaged.  The upside of such a detachment from the public persona that I wear in the world is that I can actually be in the world, in that persona, and still feel safe.  The downside is that people I care about don’t feel like they know me.

And, if I’m being honest, they’re right.  They can’t really know me, until they know the Shit.  Once they know, the persona makes sense.  But they can’t know unless I tell.  And the idea—much less the fact—of telling produces that terror of being exposed.

If that seems circular, it’s meant to.  If it seems cryptic, well, I mean that, too.

This all came up for me again today, while IMing with weez, who referred to the me on the blog as a three-dimensional character.  weez is one of my purely-internet pals (as opposed to the internet-first pals, or the internet-added pals), and it suddenly occurred to me that she might nonetheless have a better picture of who I am and what I think and feel than many of the folks with whom I deal every day.  Which just hammered the thing home for me:  I feel safer talking about certain parts of my life with the internet than I do with my colleagues, or with many of my friends.  It’s not that I have any illusion that this is some kind of private or anonymous communication—it’s the internet, for god’s sake, and I know my students are in and out of here all the time—but there’s something bearable for me in the distance it provides.  I write something, contemplate it, revise it, and publish it.  Sometime later, somebody reads it, and maybe they respond or maybe they don’t.  There’s an invisibility to the whole process that just isn’t there in face-to-face communications:  I can’t be seen while I’m writing, and I don’t have to watch for the look of horror on my listener’s face before they paper it over with a solicitous smile.

There’s perhaps something a bit perverse in being a morbidly shy exhibitionist.  But hey—at least I’ve found my medium.

This is a mighty busy weekend, under normal circumstances, but this weekend is decidedly not normal.  Theoretically, today is Class Day—departmental receptions for graduating seniors in the morning; big awards ceremony in the afternoon.  Tomorrow is graduation proper.  It’s usually a sprint from one event to the next.

This weekend, however, is also SSAW, so the sprint this year involves freeways.  I hosted the Media Studies reception this morning, literally dashed in one door and out the other at the English department reception, and then grabbed my computer and hopped in the car.  This afternoon and this evening will be here at USC, thinking about social software and its roles in the classroom and in research.  Back to Claremont tonight, and up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to sprint back to USC.  (This was not the best bit of planning ever; should have gotten a hotel room for the night.) Tomorrow morning is my panel, and then at noon, I’m back in the car, tearing toward Claremont, hoping to get there in time for graduation itself.

And then, collapsing, with margaritas.

More from SSAW shortly.