Michigan Circuit

We're safely home--and overfilled with takeout--after our loop through lower Michigan.  Sunday we drove from Syracuse to Port Huron (across foggy Ontario) then north through Flint, Saginaw, Bay City and Midland, and west to Mt. Pleasant.  There we stopped in with D.'s family for two nights, caught up with a couple of old friends, played a few hands of euchre, watched Herbie: Fully Loaded with nieces and nephews, etc. Tuesday we drove to Muskegon for an afternoon with friends. We left again in the evening, passing through Grand Rapids and Lansing as we headed for my brother's place in the Detroit burbs. Three days there: three hours riding around with him to drop off parts at Sterling Stamping, three times more sweets than I should've eaten, three games of Clue (Simpsons Edition...won one, Marge in the Kwik-E-Mart with the poisoned donut). Unfortunately, D.'s got a case of the winter yuck. But we had such good travels today (besides the hour-long line at the border station north of Niagara) that I have a blister on my thumb. That's a first. Anyway, 1,200 miles. Five days. And home.

Perdido Street Station

I recently finished China Mieville's second novel, Perdido Street Station (on a generous recommendation from CGB).  Difficult as it was to put it down, I read it in several delightful interludes over many weeks, just chipping away at it between the reading I was doing for coursework. And I've never identified as a genre-fan of science fiction or fantasy, but all of that's changed now (it's in crisis).

In and around the complex sci-fi/fantasy cityscape of New Crobuzon, Isaac Dan der Gimnebulin, a self-described "dilettante" scientist working on a crisis engine, dodges close-call after close-call after he accepts a project commissioned by a nomadic Garuda (bird-person) named Yagharek.  Yag lost his wings as recompense for a crime we only learn about at the end of the novel; he walks many miles to the city where he recruits Isaac's assistance in restoring him to flight.  Isaac accepts the difficult assignment.  He immerses himself in research on flight, and in doing so, circulates a call for winged things to observe (develop a heliotype, model, etc.).  Several roguish figures want in on the money.  They bombard his lab with winged specimens.

And this is just the start.  Perdido Street Station is unrelenting with its startlingly fast pace, vividly developed figures and terrain, and wild, shocking twists.  I don't want to give too much of it away; I suspect that if you read this entry and you haven't yet read Perdido Street Station, you'll be tempted to run out and pick it up.  Mieville's fiction, here overflowing with eccentricity and imagination, is so irresistibly, punishingly smart, the pages threaten to drink your mind like the antagonist slake-moths.  A taste:

     The construct jerked.
     Deep in the construct's intelligence engine circulated the peculiar solipsistic loop of data that constituted the virus, born where a minute flywheel had skittered momentarily.  As the steam coursed through the brainpan with increasing speed and power, the virus's useless set of queries went round and round in an autistic circuit, opening and shutting the same valves, switching the same switches in the same order.
     But this time the virus was nurtured.  Fed. (210)

There's so much more here that I'm afraid I can't really do it justice: Weaver, a plane-traveling spider-figure who wields razor-honed scissors; an army of remades who follow the orders of their pieced-together crime boss, Motley; a vodyani watercrafter, Lin, who dates Isaac; a Construct Council self-foraged from a heap of rubbish; and a bad-ass team of slake-moths who play havoc on the psychosphere of New Crobuzon. Oy.  I heartily recommend it.

What Would Carmelo Do?

Wear your blended religiofanaticism openly with one of these devotional sports jerseys from Christian Throwback Jersey--"a proud sponsor of Jesus Christ" (via). With one of these, you too can give deeper significance to pointing a proverbial #1 digit skyward on behalf of your favorite sports team, add psalming the ball to your repertoire of hoops skills, and find forgiveness for taking The Referee's name in vain.  If I had to pick, I'd go for the Denver Nuggets "Genesis" mix with Carmelo Anthony's number. Of note: the Lakersesque "Luke" is matched with Kobe Bryant's No. 8.  Wow.  Wonder what Luke Walton thinks about that.  And what, no New Jersey Devils remakes among the hockey tops?

Sopa de Mezclada

Picked up this one during my days in Xalapa, Veracruzana in '00. 

Cut two onions, three potatoes (onions and potatoes: fist-sized) and 10-14 large carrots into big chunks.  Drop them in a pot with water just below the top of the vegetables.  The onions will reduce into liquid while boiling, so the space they take up is temporary.  Salt the water; I don't know, a teaspoon or two.  Cover and boil for thirty or forty minutes until everything is soft.  The smaller you cut everything, the faster this part will go, but I don't have any patience for working the vegetables when I know they're going to end up blended.

When the vegetables have softened (if in doubt, remove a carrot, check it), cut the ends off of a single green chile (alternative: a jalapeno) and drop it in the boiling mix.  Cover the pot again and give it another 7-10 minutes.  Basically, this just softens the pepper.  You could go to all the trouble of preparing the chile in other, more complicated ways, but basically I want it to soften so I can remove it to cool, slice it lengthwise, pull out the seeds, and have it ready to join up smoothly with everything else in the blender (that's next).

When the vegetables are soft, you should transfer them to a holding bowl or alt. pot for blending.  I transfer them so I can easily empty the blended soup into the original pot.  Next, use a ladle to fill the blender between 2/3 and 3/4 with the boiled vegetables and the hot liquid they cooked in. Then I add 2% milk to fill the blender just a bit more; somewhere close to 7/8 full.  Then blend.  I'd say it works best when you have enough liquid to incorporate the vegetables.  You want them to be smooth (unless you prefer chunks in the soup; if that's the case, best of luck).  Blend and blend.  And then pour the blend-pitcher into the original pot.  Repeat.  Be sure to work in the green chile.  It adds the kick. 

Eventually you'll have a steamy concoction of more or less creamy vegetable soup, carrot soup in this example.  Next I  add about three or four teaspoons of dry chicken or vegetable bullion, then let it simmer for another thirty minutes.  Sure, extra pepper and salt are fine additions, too.  And if you decide to sub out the carrots and use squash instead, consider adding ginger (for a nice cream of gingery squash soup).  Actually, you can replace the carrots with just about anything--zucchini, asparagus, etc.  And, if you're into richer dairy (as in something creamier), leave out the potatoes and use a heavier cream.  I'm not so fond of the dairy products, so I include the potatoes for thickening and use a bit of milk. 

That's all.  I know it's not the kind of recipe circulated by cooking-types inclined to strict measures.  But it's relatively light, uncomplicated and just spicy enough to ward off the common cold or offset a drafty window with some lasting warmth (yes, and also gentle on grad student budgets).  Enjoy it with some quick-nuked quesadillas (tortillas, cheese(s) of choice, etc.) or something more elaborate if you're planning a fancier meal.  Also keep a lime on hand in case anyone finds the soup too spicy.  A squeeze of fresh lime juice will cut the spice-heat by a bit.

If you're unimpressed, here's last December's solstice recipe.

Wayfaring

I signed up for a free Wayfaring account yesterday after I ran across it in this list of Web 2.0 apps (via).  Having monkeyed with it for a few minutes (btw, there's a greasemonkey script for it in Firefox...encouraging sign), I'd say Wayfaring appears to be easy to use and especially friendly for those who don't want to bother with the code required for Google Maps EZ.  Wayfaring incorporates waypoints (markers), notes, and routes (paths). Code is readily available for sharing maps (like this one) to a blog.  And it's simple to designate maps for private/public access and for individual/group changes.

Moviegoing

Unmatched by any four-week stretch ever (ever!) before, I've been heading to the movie theaters over and over in recent weeks.  At the unprecedented and steady pace of one per weekend, I have taken in four picture shows in as many weeks: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; Rent; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; and Walk the Line.

If you've got $8.50 to spare and an impulse to take in a show, I'll stand by recommendations in this order:

1.  Walk the Line.  Sure, this story of Johnny Cash and June Carter leaves out big hunks of their lives--several of Cash's songs, for example, are absent, and the film glosses right over monumental events, such as their co-starring in an (just one?) episode of Little House on the Prairie in 1976.  Despite these inevitable gaps, I felt moved by this movie and comparably unaffected by the other movies.  Why?  Because I like some of Cash's music (reminds me of my country childhood, when 94 Country was the only station detected by the radios in the house, and Cash meant they couldn't play Barbara Mandrell, Eddie Rabbit, and the Oak Ridge Boys forever).  Because the movie does a decent job of presenting tensions Cash struggled against.  Because there was a lady sitting directly in front of me with a single Santa Claus face stitched onto the back of her festive sweater.  And so on.  Downright moved, I swear. Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon. Go on.

Tied for no. 2.  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. These are a toss-up, a coin flip.  Go see one, the other or both if you're into the fantastic, amazing digital effects, and the magical realms of Hogwarts and Narnia.  What Harry Potter lacks in acting/performance, particularly of the young stars, it makes up for in striking underwater and in-air scenes.  H.P. competes in a series of challenges against older students; each portrayed scenario is really amazing (okay, actually the first two were better than the third, I'd say).  And, when we left the theater, Ph. reported that the book was much better, much more elaborate.  The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe works with better children-actors, I'd say, and the effects are almost on par with Harry Potter.  TLTWTW features believable centaurs, for example; toward the end, the battles were wonder-ful (boulder-dropping hawks, etc.), albeit predictable.  I came away from both of these movies with a similar feeling--with lasting impressions of the effects and an indifference toward the performances and the choices involved in adapting the novels for the screen.

3. Rent.  How to put this?  Well, five minutes into this three-hour musical, a moviegoer and her friends slid into the seats immediately next to us.  Then she started to sing.  With the movie.  While crinkling the wax paper holding a greasy pretzel.  Gnaw on the pretzel; sing a few lines. She sang (as if into D.'s ear) until we changed seats.  So that's how the movie opened.  After that, more singing.  And then: singsingsinging (right...it's a musical...but can anything be said without singing?).  Mixed in, there was a small thread of plot development.  In other words, I got it that the renter-artists were clinging desperately to their livelihoods, torn between the inevitability of workaday futures and the unrestrained pursuit of their arts. I struggled, however, to get into the odd bounce-back of the dancer who one minute was near death and the next minute was fully rejuvenated and belting out a duet.  It wouldn't be fair to dwell on the negatives, though.  I got caught up in the heavily referential scene/song about bohemia (La Vie Boheme), and I confess to being caught up in the crossovers between the documentary filmmaker (in the movie) and the use of film clips that appeared to be from sometime earlier, perhaps from Jonathan Larson's stuff in the early-mid 90's. Was this actual footage or imposter clips brought in to create the appearance of earlier footage? I couldn't land a clear answer to this question in my two lazy Google searches.

Wordwatcher

Earlier in the fall our program hosted Tim Diggles, coordinator of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Presses in Staffordshire, for a colloquium on working class writing/publishing.  I didn't get around to posting any notes after Diggles visited, and although I have a few lines about a range of things he talked about penciled into a composition notebook, I want to zero in on the thing Diggles mentioned that has been on my mind periodically ever since: wordwatching.

The wordwatcher, Diggles explained, is a common parliamentary role; in meetings of all sorts, one person is assigned the wordwatcher's role--to interrupt the casual flow of conversation with stasis questions (scroll down), primarily questions of definition: what do you mean by...? The wordwatcher (C. suggested Dictionarian) attends to terminological slippage, calls out for (folk) etymology, re-collects fanned-out usages, and does so with a potentially calm remove--a cool distance from the more heated interchanges (no, I'm not saying neutral position, and this doesn't always have to be the case...the wordwatcher could be more implicated, even po'ed, for example).  The point isn't to domesticate the meaning (or broadly officialize/standardize) as much as to make explicit tacit and unexplored nuances and differences, admit them to the discussion.

The wordwatcher's role interests me, even appeals to me as I think about teaching.  Why not designate wordwatchers as a way to emphasize contested or complex terms (with ties, of course, to stasis theory)?  This could work across several levels--from grad seminars to the FY course.  And I'm almost certain it's being done somewhere, perhaps under another name, but motivated by a similar set of interests.  I've also been thinking about how a wiki (i.e. the ww must be quick) would support wordwatching, especially in a course like WRT302: Digital Writing--the next course I'll be teaching at SU, coming in fall '06.  Wordwatching might be a good way to bring in the shared, ongoing formation of wiki content, talking about how they work, and so on, while also sharing the demands of keeping stasis questions fresh, continually a part of the conversation, etc.

Addressing Addresses Addressed

Below the fold you'll find a map-like project I've been working on for a little while today.  It's a spread of the CCCC addresses since Lloyd-Jones in 1977 with pop-ups including the details about each chair's address (notice: Roen's upcoming collection).  If the corresponding text of the talk has been run through parsing and posting at CCC Online, you'll find a link to it from the map. 

Why this?  Why now?  For one thing I wanted to get back in and tinker around with Google Maps EZ.  I used it when it first came about, but there have been a few changes, including an expanded range of options for coloring and labeling the markers. The markers work with single characters; I've color-specified the placemarkers by decade, then used a number to show the year of the convention and talk. It leaves something to be desired, but it's good enough for now. Ultimately, I'd like to see two-digit markers; probably ought to look into how to do that myself.  On the other hand, I probably should finish up grading. And on the other other hand, I probably ought to turn off Judge Mathis and stop playing Sudoku.

To add just a bit more rationale for this/now, I'm taking a course in geography in the spring called Seminar in Cartography: Web Mapping and Cybercartography. I don't have much formal training in geography; the course welcomes students from across the disciplines, and it will be the only course outside of CCR that I'll take during this program of study.  I don't have all the details about the GEO course yet, but we'll be looking at a book called Mapping Hacks and hacking and writing a few maps of our own. And because, at my geekiest, I'm keen on mapping disciplinarity (among other stuff, imaginaries, etc., as well...might even argue that disciplinarity is an imaginary, and that it's too vast and complex to know totally, so we map away). Yeah, well, that's why this/now. I'd say more, but I have to walk over to a chiropractic appt. (neck's still killing me), then catch up with D. for a ride to Ph.'s game.

CCCC Chair's Addresses Since 1977 (the first year of the ceremonial opening address)

Wondering Now

I just turned in my final project for the fall semester--a look at Social Network Analysis adapted as methodology for rhet/comp.  Hard-line SNA researchers often turn to mathematical sociology (half-seriously, I liken it to discourse analysis, peopled), heavy with formulas as probabilities for activity/system/org-phenomena, structural equivalence, and so on.  Basically, I wanted to sort the more general areas of network studies from SNA, tie in a few definitional pieces and key concepts, stake out the methodological layers of a few SNA-oriented future projects, get grounded.  Been a good project for that.  And yes, some relief in its completion.  Before the weekend, I have some grading to pace through; alongside that, leisure reading, a light read-ahead for the spring, and maybe a few days in Michigan at the end of the month if Ph. doesn't have hoops practice.

I didn't realize this would turn into another update (updates heaped upon updates lately).  But it does bring me to something I noticed on a science workbook laying open on D.'s workspace earlier.  She's plotting out the finer points of a science lesson for tomorrow.  The book, it has sets of questions to go with each of the labs.  Usual stuff.  Except the final question for every unit: What are you wondering now?

What are you wondering now?  Ought to end all semesters (projects, blog entries, etc.) that way.

Ignoreland

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry, ewm.  I've been occupied in the busiest of ways.  And we're starting to get those concerned (but cautious) glances, the look: "hey fella, you know your blog looks abandoned?" Somebody find a stick. But it's okay.  All in central NY is absolatesemesterly fine and dandy. Forecast: regular-ish blogging on regular-ish subjects again very soon.

The Making of...

Coming back to a passage from Manovich that winked at me when I read it last week:

A visible sign of this shift is the new role that computer-generated special effects have come to play in the Hollywood industry in the 1990s.  Many blockbusters have been driven by special effects; feeding on their popularity, Hollywood has even created a minigenre of "The Making of...," videos and books that reveal how special effects are created. (300)

I wouldn't yet self-define as a methodologist, but because I'm currently finishing up my program's methodology course, I have been thinking quite a bit about how things get done, how scholarship gets made, what methodologists want, and where the methodical (as more typically associated with a researcher's trail) blurs with writing.  Furthermore, in light of the recent interchanges on WPA-l, I'm thinking about the limitations of any published monograph to reveal the subtleties of the research and writing that went into it.  Yet a conventional model for knowing method~ologies is through inference.  Read something likely to have been researched and, from the text, extrapolate.  Another model: specific procedural explanations or how-tos (the way to ethnographize, the way to discourse analyze).  So what else can we do with method~ology beyond the domesticated regimen (albeit a stabilizing and study-able force) of this is how you do x?  What can we do with method~ology beyond the reverse-ordered and confounding in-through-the-exit of method read back through the monograph?  Maybe a collection of "the making of" essays that looks back on the production of the project, attends to the special effects, and so on. (Something close to North's The Making of... or Kirsch and Sullivan's edited collection, only more like what we get with film and told by the one(s) who did the work). 

Or maybe not.  Hooked me when I first thought about it to pitch something like what Manovich talks about only taken to comp scholarship. 

Tryangle

Perfect for end of semester regenerative digression: Tryangle (via).

See also the blue, green and orange flavors (are there more?).  And there's a Flickr pool, too.

Manovich - The Language of New Media (2001)

Notes on Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media (2001). In the prologue, Manovich gives us what he calls a Vertov Dataset--full-passage selections from elsewhere in the book matched up with frames from Vertov.   It's a distinctive and memorable way to open onto the project--self-sampling and re-associating, which emphasizes (paradoxically?) the relational and modular qualities of new media objects, the intertwined historical-theoretical trajectories of cinema and computing that now constitute new media, the logics of selection, association and assemblage driving new media, and the evolving lexicon of new media, from database, loops and micronarratives to transcoding, [var]-montage and the tele-.  It's all in the Vertov Dataset, then explained more fully elsewhere. 

Manovich's method depends on "digital materialism": extrapolating from new media objects the generalizable principles (characteristics, properties, qualities, albeit with a false neatness acknowledged here and there by M.): numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability (a truism?) and transcoding (27-48).  In introducing the project, Manovich says he wants to observe the bottom-up organization of new media while also relating the layers of historical and theoretical precedents.  Still, new media--especially in light of transcoding or the code-layering of computing and culture--must make room for those objects unmarked by historical precedent--the innovations.  This is somewhat less deterministic-seeming than remediation; new media's programmability (numerical representation, the anxiety-producing shift from constant to variable) can dissociate the new from older forms. The "new" celebrate/mourn the obsolescence of the older forms; they also tend to flow solubly in streams of digital information (the same ductwork that heightens the body as medial). And yet, Manovich folds the cinematic-computing complexities of new media back into the history of cinema (this, one of Hansen's critiques of Manovich).  At the end of the first chapter, Manovich explains his rationale for avoiding "digital" and "interactivity" in LNM.  Briefly, he refutes "digital" because it is commonly mistaken to suggest perfectible data (no loss, degradation, noise) and "interactivity" because it is meaningless to restate "the most basic fact about computers" (55).

Something to be said for Manovich's writing: super-organized.  His chapters and sub-heads make LNM easy to navigate; the chapters are tightly partitioned and he involves just enough repetition to assist each section's coherence with the aims of the broader project.  No need to trumpet on about the structure, but I want to observe the book's structuring as one factor contributing to its landmark status and the promise of future returns to these ideas. Following chapter one, which concerns "the properties of computer data" (117), the middle chapters, 2-5 present four more aspects of new media: c. 2, "The Interface" on human-computer interface; c. 3, "The Operations," on application software; c. 4, "The Illusions," on computers as illusion-makers and new media "at the level of appearance" (178);  and c. 5, "The Forms," on modularity and interactivity or database, narratology and navigation.  To each chapter, a few sentences.

2. Human-computer interface, a key concept for Manovich and a primary concern in Hansen's critique of LNM, "describes the ways in which the user interacts with a computer" (69).  The trouble, for Hansen, is that the user is ambiguous; LNM tips toward disembodied, non-affective notions of mind and cognition.  Nonetheless, Manovich develops an insightful (basic, useful) trajectory of three interfaces: cinema, print and general purpose HCI (71).  These, Manovich writes, are the "three main reservoirs of metaphors and strategies for organizing information which feed cultural interfaces" (72), and it follows--unsurprisingly--that they contend and co-operate with one another. The cinematic is most aggressively transformed into a computer-based cultural interface in computer games involving dynamic points of view (83-84).  Manovich ends by touting the presence of the screen, and he regards the screen as completely separate from the body, perhaps even as something that imprisons, constrains or immobilizes the body (114-115).  This is considerably different from Hansen's emphasis on affect; Manovich does little to acknowledge integrative-affective HCI.

3. Next, software development has followed a trajectory defined by abstraction and automation [I'm not sure whether this characterization holds up with open source projects and some of the stackable apps developed since 2001].  Here Manovich explains three varieties of operations that are akin to transcoding (121): selection, compositing and teleaction.  Selection is, just as it seems, choice among options.  "New media objects are rarely created from scratch; usually they are assembled from ready-made parts" (124).  Selection names the re-made/ready-made logics of practicing new media; authorship becomes a technology of selection. Examples of selection range from effects plugins to customizable gaming (level editors, build your own team) to web-in-a-box CMS and build-a-site control panels.  Other theoretical and historical origins of selection trace to photomontage (125) and signal modification or filtering (132).  In selection, variability replaces a more physical-material notion of malleability; the cultural figure illustrative of selection in new media: the DJ (134-35).  The second term, compositing, involves a rhetoric of arrangement: assembling.  The flatten image function in Photoshop is an example, according to Manovich [better examples?].  Seamlessness comes in on compositing, too: "Digital compositing exemplifies a more general operation of computer culture--assembling together a number of elements to create a single seamless object" (139).  The possibility of seamlessness sustains the designer's wish for convincing virtual reality.  Contrast and edge is replaced by a desire for aesthetics of "smoothness and continuity" (142).  [Within montage, though, seamlessness and edge contrast are at odds.] "The examples of 'methods of montage' include metric montage, which uses absolute short lengths to establish a 'beat,' and rhythmic montage, which is based on a pattern of movements within the shots" (157). In the final section of this chapter, on teleaction, Manovich plays with the prefix tele- and notions of distance.  He calls telepresence more radical than VR or visual simulation because "you take your body with you" (qtd. Laurel, 165). Teleaction in new media complicates Benjamin's arguments about aura and remove or distance (171).  This also relates to a problem I want to return to, one restated by Virilio:  "He [Virilio] mourns the destruction of distance, geographic grandeur, the vastness of natural space, the vastness of guaranteed time delay between events and our reactions, giving us time for critical reflection necessary to arrive at a correct decision" (173).  I also want to come back to Bettman's Archive: a stockpile of various media (130) and Potemkin's facades for Catherine the Great (146, 148).

4. The illusions chapter covers the problem of new media and appearances.  Beginning with VR's "quest for a perfect simulation of reality" (178), Manovich accounts for the evolution of 2D and 3D graphics, conceptions of the real in cinema and computing, and broader pursuits of mimesis.  Pursuits of realism diverge along two lines for Manovich: cinema and computer animation.  In this chapter, Manovich also articulates what I take to be a controversial claim about the problem in the mix of photorealism and the digital: "Synthetic photos are more real than traditional photographs.  The synthetic are 'too real'" (199).  Realistic representative media are pushed by the entertainment industry (re-recoloring of B&W films) (192-193) and also by initiatives to perfect simulation. Interactivity and navigability shift the encounter from viewer to user.  Manovich briefly mentions that the (re)combination of real and illusory objects necessitates "different mental sets--different kinds of cognitive activity" (210). Now a possible illusion, the represented real is no longer secure (if it ever was).

5. New media make use of indexing and database logics that are distinctive from traditional forms of documentation. Manovich suggests that "information access and psychological engagement with an imaginary world" influence the invention of new media objects (216).  Furthermore, although they run together, often mix-mashing into conglomerations (234), database and narrative can be understood as distinctive trajectories in new media.  Whereas narrative logics (syntagmatic) are primary to database logics (paradigmatic)  before the information age, new media reverse their relationship and pit database logics at the fore.  Consequently, "montage is the default visual language of a composite organization of an image" (229).  The second half of this chapter takes up navigation--the spatial journeys (245) and diagesis (246) involved with narrative action and exploration. Manovich draws on the figures of Gibson's data cowboy (250) and Charles Baudelaire's flaneur (268) to account for the variety of axes we select when moving at/through the space-medium of new media. The connections to de Certau (245), Virilio (278) and Auge (279) ring with other stuff I've heard/read/thought through lately, too.  There are several promising returns in this chapter.

6.  Following a restatement of the intersection of cinema and computing--its ~junction, new media--and a list of arguments from the book so far (287), the final chapter, "What Is Cinema?", reconfirms the blend of illusionistic and real brought together in computer images and new media objects. For all that the cinematic real did to displace animation in the mid-20th century, new media has (con)fused them, thereby relegating animation to "a subgenre of painting" (295) and cinema to "one particular case of animation" (302).  Hansen's critique takes issue with Manovich's historical assertions here; these arguments sound more like Bolter and Grusin in Remediation than some of the more nuanced spots in LNM.  In the concluding section, Manovich asks, "Can the loop be a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age?" (317).  I found this section on loops and micronarrative to be especially striking, especially for its potential to incorporate narrative and database logics rather than treating them as incompatible.

LNM presents a whole lot more than this, but this is all I have to blog about it for now. 

Terms: new media objects (14), cinematograph or "writing movement" (24), digitization (28), lossy compression (54), viewing regime (96), dioptric arts (104), photomontage (125), "tissue of quotations" (127), "authorship as selection" (130), "digital compositing" (136), montage (158), tele- (161), phatic function (206), metarealism (208), diagesis (246), kybernetikos (251), haptic/optic (253), space-medium (255), flaneur (268), loop (315), "database narrative" (319), micronarratives (322)