[digital:meditation]

Spending quite some time on it, I eventually finished reading Danielewskis “House Of Leaves”, a book surely to get hold of one as soon as you dive deeper into it. Overally, I have to say that this has been one of the most intense literature trips I’ve been on ever since reading Paul Austers “Book Of Illusions” but nonetheless the House is another kind of beast in many respects. In some way, Danielewski in his first novel successfully challenges our perception of reality in virtually every possible way:

• Mixing fiction and non-fiction writing, a purely made-up novel packed up in a fake-scientific essay on “The Navidson Record”, a reality-horror movie completely fictional yet described in an outstanding accurate and detailed way.
• Merging at the very least three different narrative threads (the story of “The Navidson Record” itself, the writings of Zampano on it, plus the thoughts and stories of Johnny Truant collected in liner notes along the “real”(?) story of the book makes you, finally, end up with a book you will be capable of reading at least three times in a completely different order, depending on whether, how or not to make your way through the different stories. Somehow you virtually can get lost along the way as, except for the conception putting it all together, there’s not that much in common between the three of these stories…
• The core essay surrounding “The Navidson Record”, as well, is armed to the teeth with footnotes referring to a vast load of books, articles and essays, some of them really existing, some of them made up as well as the story itself. Merging realities again, and proving that Danielewski seems to have spent an outstanding amount of time researching virtually everything ranging from physics (what size of room do you need to have an audible echo?), history (implications and ideas of the Minotaur legend and labyrinths in history itself) to the ethical effects of photography and media (considering “Delial” as well as emphasizing the role of “polished” and “raw” video footage and their perception as “real” in days of imaging technology available to virtually everyone) or aspects embracing philosophy, remembering dealing with the uncanny in ‘the House‘ as well as referring to the works of Martin Heidegger. Challenging to the mind, definitely.
• Overally, “uncanny” indeed is what describes a lot of aspects of this book rather well, describing vast extends of dark, absolutely empty space, extending to boundaries unreachable even to the protagonists of “The Navidson Record”, eventually almost destroying them while trying to get to the core of the labyrinth starting at the living room wall of the house on Ash Tree Lane. Not sure though whether it is uncanny because of its very size and darkness or because of it being completely absurd and beyond any rational comprehension.
• Completely letting aside the story as such, the typography used throughout the book challenges everything you might have seen so far in a printed book… Not that it makes reading really easier, at least it definitely does emphasize the mood of the book in many respects…

So, after ending the “main” part of the book, just having the appendixes (mainly the Truant letters) left to read, I am listening to the perfect soundtrack to this (“Hallways To Always” by Ulver, which at the very least in its title references the “House Of Leaves”…), pondering the implications of space and how “The Navidson Record” deals with it – vast, empty spaces, scary and frightening, “unheimlich” because of feeling not just “empty” like an empty room but “empty” like space not showing any signs of ever being claimed, being inhabited, being filled with life by anyone. Perhaps a good ending point – overcoming the uncomfortable feeling emanated by large, empty, unknown spaces by simply “filling them with life”, with laughter and art and inspiration and anything that make them comfortable, tangible, … human? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll do after reading “House” for a second time… or a third… or … you know. By the way: No I don’t think the world would need “The Navidson Record” as a “real” movie, there’s hardly a way getting next to the “inner-eye movie” created by reading this book, anyway… ;)

Just as of recently, I have been playing around with Java Mail, a library I overally enjoy working with, except for one thing perhaps: Somehow I miss a consistent data structure backing it to allow for traversing an e-mail structure in a clean way…

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Some progress, at last. Quite some of my (spare?) time the last couple of weeks I spent pondering a smart way of getting an existing Spring/webapp environment consisting of several modules migrated to make more use of the Java EE 5 features, namely provided by the glassfish application server which has been in productive use in our environment for quite a while now. But while migrating webapps from tomcat to glassfish has proven to be pretty straightforward in our case (asides a few minor caveats it was just as difficult as deploying the .war file using asadmin and seeing the application start up on the new system… ;) ), the idea to make our “backend” application (so far Spring-Remoting packed into a web application context) a well-behaving EJB3 module turned out to be a little more complex than just that. But doable, to say now, after all…

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Oh well… being so busy writing about this and that (and, most of the time it seems, nothing) these days, I almost forgot something maybe really worth mentioning: A while ago, Australian death metal band Locura has chosen one of my older works still hosted on Flickr to be used as inner-sleeve artwork on their debut album “Draconian Measures” (which I am just partly posting here, for the “full” print feel free to get the album… ;) ):

Feels good to see ones name printed to the back cover of a CD sold “on the other side of the planet”; even though I haven’t yet heard the whole album and/or read some of the lyrics, the music to be found on their myspace.com site at the very least sounds promising. Thanks folks, ‘ts been a pleasure working with you. :P

Well, haven’t been writing about music in ages; not that the last weeks were lacking good releases, but… oh well, maybe I was just lazy. ;) However a while ago some kind soul on last.fm told me to have an eye / ear on the “On The Parallel Front” album, an online sampler obviously created by x-line net label, collecting tracks solely created by Russian electronics / industrial / ebm acts. And, overally, I have to say this was quite a good recommendation, as most of the tracks are exceptionally strong. Personal favorites of mine, on there: ‘Survivalism’ by Church Of Machinery, a strong, straightforward electro/ebm track reminding me of Tamtrum somehow (asides the fact that I really enjoy the name of this project…), The Pulsar’s ‘Point Of No Return’ and ‘Trinity’ by D.J. GOLUBb. If you’re into darker electronic noises, be sure to check it out, get the tracks (and possibly some others of the x-line releases, and give’em a shot, it’s surely worth the time. Only bad thing, so far: Next to nothing is known about most of the projects and bands involved in this records, no websites, no mail addresses, no nothing. If anyone knows more, feel free to drop me a line…

With a release being scheduled for October 2008 according to the official roadmap, now the first milestone (M1) of oncoming NetBeans 6.5 IDE is available for download, use and testing. Some time earlier someone seems to got caught by the idea of making NetBeans the “only IDE you will ever need”, and, just following this paradigm, NetBeans 6.5 is likely to see quite an extended support for a lot of things not Java SE and EE, maybe most notably the new PHP tooling. Looking at the state of the code (as I am usually working with nightly day to day), I have to say that once again the improvements most important to me are some new features in the Maven2 support, some of them outlined in Milos’ blog, who has once again done a great job working on this module. Well, maybe I’m gonna give the new Groovy support a try as well, but, no matter whether “only IDE you need” or not, NetBeans continues to be the state-of-the-art tool if you have maven2 in your toolbox as well. Good show so far, folks!

By the way as a minor modification, there also is a new splash screen to be found with this release – not an essential feature, but a nice thing after all…:

Erstaunlich, aber wahr: Noch ist das Dresdner Elbtal Weltkulturerbe, wenngleich auch nur noch bis 2009, denn gerettet werden kann der Titel wohl nur durch einen Stopp der derzeit doch rasch voranschreitenden Bauarbeiten, wovon eingedenk der “Fakten-schaffen!” – Mentalität der einschlägigen Protagonisten selbst vor der potentiellen Aussicht, Dresden, Sachsen und Deutschland in die Geschichte des Welterbe-Programmes als zweite Stätte einzugehen, der ein derartiger Titel im Nachhinein wieder aberkannt wurde, wohl eher nicht auszugehen ist. Schließlich kann uns ja nichts anderes als nur genau diese Brücke genau dort in unseren Verkehrsproblemen helfen… Was eigentlich nur zu zitieren bleibt, ist die Reaktion der sächsischen Wissenschaftsministerin Eva Maria Stange:

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Die Entscheidung der UNESCO, dem Elbtal einen letzten Aufschub zu gewähren, sei die „letzte Chance für das Dresdner Lehrstück politischer Kompromisslosigkeit“, sagte Stange am Freitag laut einer Mitteilung ihres Ministeriums.
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Dem ist nichts hinzuzufügen, insbesondere im Hinblick auf die Kompromißlosigkeit…

“Lustiger” Lesestoff via futurezone: “EU-Pläne bedrohen das freie Internet”:

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Bürgerrechtler schlagen Alarm: In einer konzertierten Aktion wollen internationale Medienkonzerne und ihnen nahestehende Abgeordnete noch im Laufe dieses Sommers dafür sorgen, dass das Internet in der EU gefiltert werden kann. Der Hebel dazu wird im Telekompaket angesetzt, mit dem der Kommunikationsmarkt in der EU neu geregelt werden soll.
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Insgesamt liest sich die Liste der Ansinnen wie eine Horror-Show, die vermutlich auch ein Ministerium für Staatssicherheit nicht besser hinbekommen hätte (dem zu solchen Schritten wohl nur die technischen Möglichkeiten fehlten): “legale” Rootkits (als Schadsoftware, die gegen “illegitime” Aktivitäten des Nutzers vorgehen soll), permanentes Internet-Monitoring gegen “unerlaubten” Traffic, Trennung von Nutzern, die gegen “Rechte” verstoßen, vom Netz, Verantwortlichkeit der Provider für die Inhalte, die über ihre Netze übertragen werden, … . Das Frustrierende an der Sache: Politiker, die vermutlich durchaus in ihrem früheren Leben für freiheitlich-demokratische Grundrechte eingetreten sein mögen, lassen sich (ob aus totalem Unverständnis für die Technologien und Werkzeuge der Gegenwart – siehe unseren internet-ausdruckenden Innenminister, oder nur aus völlig blindem Gehorsam gegenüber den Größen der Medien-Industrie, das sei dahingestellt) ohne nennenswerten Widerstand als willige Werkzeuge dazu gebrauchen, die technischen Möglichkeiten unserer Tage langsam, aber sicher in eine überwachte Welt par excellence umzuwandeln. Wohl dem nächstem Diktator, dem diese Strukturen dann vollständig und fertig zur Verfügung stehen, nur weil einige eingeschränkte Horizonte dies nicht im Vorfeld zu verhindern bereit gewesen sind…

Nachtrag: Einen interessanten Artikel hierzu gibt’s auch bei welt.de, mit einem treffenden Vergleich:

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Nachdem Gutenberg den Buchdruck erfunden hatte änderte sich so einiges. Informationen waren plötzlich freier verfügbar und damit für mehr Menschen zugänglich. Zumindest die, die lesen konnten. Einige Staatsführer und die Kirche sahen das gar nicht gerne und versuchten den Informationsfluss zu kappen, in dem sie den Druck von einer Lizenz abhängig machten. Dem Internet steht offenbar etwas ähnliches bevor.
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Und, (erwartungsgemäß?) und erfreulicherweise gibt es auch eine europaweite Aktion zum Thema mit der Hoffnung, die fragwürdigen Inhalte des “Telecom-Paketes” noch auf der letzten Meile entschärft zu bekommen. Hoffen wir das Beste…