Ingmar Bergman

Those who have read my profile will observe that I have a twin sister. Let me set the record straight, then:

• Since we are of different genders, we are not identical. I've been asked that a lot, but the person who surprised me the most was an medical intern.
• We do not have some sort of psychic connection, despite my sister's comments to the contrary regarding awareness of pain, etc.
• We are not alike.

The last point is not a bad thing - it is simply a fact. I can't begin to cover the many ways in which we aren't alike. Today, however, I'll use another fact to illustrate this dissimilarity: my sister does not like Ingmar Bergman films. I seem to recall some episode during high school or early college when I picked up The Seventh Seal and somehow she ended up watching it. I think that choice led to a ban on what she called 'weird films' that I liked.

Today Ingmar Bergman died; he was 89. Meryn Rothstein's column in the NY Times quotes him as having said,

“I am very much aware of my own double self. The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work — he is in touch with the child. He is not rational, he is impulsive and extremely emotional.”

I don't think this is a weird statement; I think it is the admission of an artist. I often like concrete art because I can sense the thought behind it, and I enjoy allegorical or metaphorical art because of the connections that are drawn in the work, but my perception of an artist is still of one who is irrational - one who is able to tap into a subconscious or other state of being that allows something visceral to be expressed. On the other hand, perhaps I want artists to be mystical because I don't want to understand the process too well.

A Pilgrim is not a tourist

I'm reading Conrad Rudolph's Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela. While the book has a somewhat secular tone, I do think he makes some good observations (where good is generally defined as 'things that I somewhat agree with but haven't reconciled completely'.) Here's a snippet that I find interesting:

A pilgrim is a not a tourist. You have a deeper experience precisely because you are not an observer in the traditional sense of the word. Something changes. You are not exactly the same person you were before. The locals look to you as a special experience, authentic. Despite the distance, you are a participator, an authenticator, even more than the locals themselves. You are part of the cultural landscape, part of the original reason for being and the history of many of the towns through which you pass. This is the pilgrimage route, and it is a deeply ingrained part of the identity of the towns and people along it. Yours is the experience of a fully reconciled alienation: the pilgrim at once the complete insider, the total outsider. This is why the pilgrimage is not a tour, not a vacation, not at all a trip from point A to point B, but a journey that its both an an experience and a metaphor rather than an event. This is why the pilgrimage must be done on foot, never on a bicycle; why you must stay in refugios, not in hotels, and why the journey should be long and hard. And this is why you then experience a place and culture in a way vastly different than as a traditional visitor or even as a local.

When reading 'pilgrim' literature, I often find it useful to re-read passages substituting 'Christian' for 'pilgrim', if only to see whether my opinion of the passage changes.

Desktop, Sweet Desktop

One of the great disadvantages of my most recent stint in grad school is that I had to switch my main home desktop machine over to Windows XP in order to run some of the tools that I used as part of my NSF fellowship work. So I made some backups of my existing system, bought a copy of XP (these guys tend to have pretty good pricing and you actually get what you pay for), and installed. Sigh.

I will say this: of all of the MS environments I've used, I like Windows XP Pro the most. My use of MS produced or influenced OSes includes

• Xenix on the main processor of the Intel Scientific Hypercube.
• Not bad, really.
  
• MS-DOS in various versions
• Adequate, I suppose, but I prefered CP/M (Xerox 820 model II), and even Apple's DOS on my ][e
  
• OS/2
• starting with 1.1 I think. I do recall that the TCP/IP stack up to around 1.3 was abysmal and crashed the entire machine.
• Windows 3.1
• Surely you're joking. I had used a Lisa and a NeXT Cube years before this.
  
• Windows 95
• Really. It's a joke, right? I mean, sure, it looks better, but ....
• Windows NT
• At this point I actually took notice of MS' OSes. Here was something that had legs. Legs with thick ankles, but legs.
  

XP was functional. I sorta knew where somethings were in XP. The truth of the matter is, though, that I had been running Linux (or GNU Linux, as some would prefer) for many years before that. So last weekend I bought a new hard drive, dug out my backups, downloaded a copy of Ubuntu, and re-took my desktop from the capitalistic forces that would seek to destroy... erm, nevermind. I re-established a desktop that I enjoy and can be productive on. Or at least that's the hope. I'm still remembering things, some in my fingers and some in my head.

Famous for the back of his head

Maybe one day that will be my epitaph, when Sybil MacBeth is famous for her book and potential participants view her website and see the photo of past workshop.