Through the Touch-Screen, and What I Found There

My new MacBook Pro came with a free iPod Touch with the academic discount. (Well, what amounts to the value of an 8GB model anyway–I had to fork out the difference to upgrade to 32GB.) The much touted unibody indeed looks sleek: the edges seem precariously razor-sharp, I get goosebumps when I run my fingers over them; the microphone and LED lights that indicate battery life are mere pinhole perforations, they’re almost invisible; the ON/OFF switch fits snug and flat in its hole, it looks like it was drawn there with a draftsman’s pencil. It looks as clean and keen as IM Pei’s National Gallery (East Wing) at Washington, DC.

Source: Ezra Stoller, The Architect’s Newspaper

This attention to design, perhaps more than its OS X operating system, is the main reason I lean towards Mac. I loved my old 12” Powerbook G4, and did not understand why Apple dropped the size, when, for a time, only 15” and 17” were offered. I did not want to lug a tray around, and almost considered getting the black MacBook. It was a good thing I hung on–the 13” MacBook Pro is exactly what I wanted: sleek, silver, and slim. For a short time, this body type and size was offered as a MacBook. Why Apple did that again boggled me; it only confused/diluted the Pro (Powerbook) brand, and would only alienate customers who bought it before it was upgraded to Pro.

Knock on wood that I don’t dent this unibody. I’m sure Apple would ask a pound of flesh for its repair. This is the problem I have with Apple: when you buy their products, you sign away your soul to the Corporation. They are fiercely proprietary and exclusive, exerting control over the product even after your purchase. I spent $400 to replace the optical drive on my G4 that can only be repaired with original parts in an Apple-certified shop. Customer service wanted me to spend “a bit more” to buy instead a new computer. (This was the time they phased out the 12” model.) No thanks. I didn’t like being bullied into buying. When I wanted to buy the iSight for the G4, they just so happen to have discontinued it to pave way for newer models with built-in camera. Customer service dismissed my complaint by saying that Apple “can’t keep on supporting older models”. My G4 was barely 2-years old at the time. There were no third-party Firewire cameras around, and the prices on used iSight cameras soared at eBay. Appealing to Apple is like talking to a brick wall, the Corporation is as veiled and draconian as a politburo, as self-contained and monolithic as the products they sell.

 

In The American West In The Dumpster

This is how these portraits were made. I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long that is secured to a wall, a building, sometimes the side of a trailer. I work in the shade because sunshine creates shadows, highlights accents on a surface that seem to tell you where to look. I want the source of light to be invisible so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things.

…

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or a fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

…

These disciplines, these strategies, this silent theater, attempt to achieve an illusion: that everything embodied in the photograph simply happened, that the person in the portrait was always there, was never told to stand there, was never encouraged to hide his hands, and in the end was not even in the presence of the photographer.

(Richard Avedon, Foreword, In the American West, New York, Harry N. Abrahams, 2005)

 

Break, Blow, Burn: Paglia Reads Plath

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face

(from Daddy by Sylvia Plath)

30 June 2009. Briefly back in Houston to take stock of stuff I had slowly been sending over in anticipation of finishing my degree and leaving Gainesville at the end of Fall. I did not realize it will take a couple more terms to finally get everything done and find myself another job situation. Needless to say, it has been a long-drawn-out move. My stuff–especially my books–have become what I feared: a ball-and-chain. How liberating it was to have lost all my stuff in a fire five years ago. (Was it that long ago?)

I need to do some long delayed spring cleaning, and kick the habit of desperately hoarding books. Back home, it was rare to find even the likes of Tolkien, Rilke, and Neruda at National Bookstore while I was still in school. Here, there is no reason to hoard; books are a mouse-click away, or, if you live in Houston, they will be at Half-Price Books. My latest haul there: Amy Clampitt’s What The Light Was Like; Seamus Heaney’s Station Island; Goethe’s Faust, Part One (trans. Randall Jarrell); Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante; Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn.

I was surprised that when I was editing the stack of books I wished to bring to Illinois, I stayed away from my stock male poets like Edward Hirsch, Mark Strand, Mark Doty, and Adam Zagajewski, and went for Amy Clampitt (The Kingfisher, What the Light Was Like, Archaic Figure) and Gjertrud Schnackenberg (Supernatural Love)–women poets of dense, complex language. What does this forebode?

In Break, Blow, Burn, “America’s premier intellectual provocateur” Camille Paglia gives “close readings” of 43 poems from her experience as a classroom teacher. (These reviewers make it appear there is a dearth of intellectuals here in the US.) The voice of the text is thus off of a freshman English class–i.e., approachable by a general audience who seek help in appreciating the classics–but also brings to bear the author’s scholarly erudition. The book also appeals to the teacher of poetry, as a superb example of how to make the text come alive in a classroom of even the most indifferent non-literature/-humanities majors. Paglia uses the politically agnostic tools of New Criticism in her readings, but avoids their “genteel sentimentality” with generous helpings of Freud.

 

Air and Fire, Earth under Water

Priestly Medalists, from left: Paul Flory (1974), Linus Pauling (1984), and Gabor Somorjai (2008 )

Every other year, the American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting includes a Tribology Symposium under the Colloids and Interfaces division. This year, the meeting was held in New Orleans, and I was able to participate by presenting our research on the conformational origins of polymer brush lubrication. The Priestly Medal went to Gabor Somorjai for his contributions to surface science and catalysis. He essentially established the field here in the US, popularly being referred to as the “father of modern surface chemistry”. I keep a copy if his Chemistry in Two Dimensions: Surfaces (1981), based on his lectures at Cornell, handy on my office bookshelf. Our research group traces its lineage to his group at UC Berkeley, where my professor spent his postdoc years. We now employ the ultra-high vacuum (UHV) techniques of surface anayses and scanning probe microscopies (SPM) to study tribological phenomena. I was therefore excited to listen to his talk, and did not miss the chance to take a photo with him. It was a little bit odd being somewhat of a scientist’s groupie, but Somorjai–a huge bear of a Hungarian–was surprisingly warm and winsome. He then awkwardly excused himself for his autograph-signing appointment.

 

Oryang, Part 2

Reading the account of the execution of Andres Bonifacio filled me with sorrow and disgust. It reads like high tragedy; once the Supremo resolved to attend the Tejeros Convention, the ineluctable wheels of fate turned towards his death. You know something really, really bad was going to happen from the onset, as when Oedipus insists in finding out who the killer of Laius was, or when King Lear divides up his kingdom between his thee daughters. You know, from a postmortem view, they were going against better judgment, which the Greeks explain away with hubris, and, like the ineffectual Chorus, all you can do is witness in horror the grizzly turn of events.

I read several versions of the story, looking for someone to blame for the egregious injustice of Bonifacio’s death. There was no single person to point a finger at, even Emilio Aguinaldo, yet all of them were culpable; it seemed like the whole of Cavite ganged up on Bonifacio. First, there was Daniel Tirona. After Bonifacio was humiliated during the elections for positions in the revolutionary government by not winning the presidency, but instead “the rather insignificant post of the Director of the Interior”, Tirona, adding insult to injury, undermined his eligibility by questioning his academic and professional qualifications, even suggesting that there was a lawyer in Cavite better suited for the job. Bonifacio threw a fit, declared the elections a fraud, and stormed out of the room. He was the Supremo after all, founder of the Katipunan, the secret society that instigated the rebellion.

Then there was Col. Yntong (Agapito Monzon), probably the most unsavory character in this story, who arrested Bonifacio for sedition in Limbon, Cavite, under orders of Gen. Mariano Noriel. His party was received by Bonifacio as friends, who shared breakfast with them, and were sent away with goodwill and cigarettes. At a safe distance, they sealed off the area, and started shooting at the camp. The first to fall was Bonifacio’s brother, Ciriaco. Bonifacio came out in the open, and hugging the men he met, shouted: “Mga kapatid akoy walang guinagauang kaualang hiaan.” They fired again, just missing his shoulders, and hit the man behind him. “Mga kapatid tingnaniño na ang pinapatay niño ay iño ring kapua tagalog.” Another shot finally wounded him, and having fallen, they stabbed him in the throat. Were the orders to arrest him, or to take him dead, rather than alive? This would have conveniently removed a “troublesome” thorn, who has outlived his use as organizer of the Katipunan, and had demonstrated his lack of military skills to prosecute the rest of the revolution.