Remora

Lately my friend Don has been driving me mildly crazy by praising some articles I've written. Why would this drive me crazy? Because the more he praises them, the more I seem to hear him saying, I stink as a writer, but these articles he likes are an exception. Probably paranoia on my part, but Don likes to refer to the habit I have of multifariously referring -- which the implication here, folks, is that I cultivate an arcane set of names and facts that nobody knows. And why don't they know them? because, really, they are unimportant.

Now, I'm a belles lettres type of guy, I admit. And I like to think my writing is in communication with the great works of the past. It is what Breton meant by vases communicants, right? Oh oh, I'm doing it again, aren't I? Maybe I just don't get out enough. Anyway, I was raised in late eighties academe, where intertextuality was groovy, and that stuck with me. Actually, I like to think that I write the way Joseph Cornell did his boxes -- out of his intense loneliness, out of the garbageheap of Western culture, he produced these odd little worlds of pingponging signifiers. In any case, Don has emphasized that he liked my article on terrorism in the Statesman because it was very clear. He emphasized clear. The usual Gathman murkiness, thick as squid ink, was absent.

Talking about esoteric references -- there is a big storm around the Net about the W3C, the governing body (somehow) for the www, changing its rules on standards. I've read several articles on this topic, and have not the faintest idea what they are talking about. That doesn't mean have no opinion; of course I have an opinion. Ignorance has never stopped me from sticking my nose in other people's business. The issue is, apparently, that the big guns like Microsoft are after the W3C to allow the standards to subserve patent law. What that means, concretely, I can't imagine. But I know that if Microsoft is for it, and it means extending our rotten intellectual property laws in another domain, IT MUST BE A BAD IDEA.