Lou Dobbs – money reporter for CNN – gave a talk at the Open Text Conference I’m at that was entertaining enough. (Yup, me and Dobbs, fellow keynoters.) I didn’t mind the general Republicanism of it. I didn’t even mind his greeed-is-good-ism; I like money, too, and I wish everyone had more of it, particularly poor people. But I do think it’s a problem when a national journalist says matter of factly that we were told at the time that we were going in to Iraq in order to bring democracy to the region. As I recall, we were told we were invading Iraq because Hussein posed an imminent danger what with his weapons of mass destruction and all. Dobbs should leave the revisionism to the politicians.

I mean, what does Dobbs think he is, a blogger?

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Chris Lydon wants us all to write The Blogging of the President.

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Music for America makes the connection between music and politics.

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Through Friday morning I’ll be at Open Text’s annual user meeting, this time in Orlando. I’m giving a very brief talk tonight — 15 mins on why messy, tangly relationships always are and have to be at the bottom of even the most tightly managed business — and then am going to be a “roving reporter,” doing a keynote on the last day that reports on what I’ve seen and heard and possibly smelled.

I’m going to be keeping a blog for the conference. Unfortunately, due to yet another disk crash — this time on my laptop — I’ve lost the conference blog’s url. I’ll post it later.

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From the mailing list of Beijing’s only Jewish synagogue, Kehillat Beijing

In this month’s issue of That’s Beijing there is an interesting article about a Bejing interpretation and staging of The Diary of Anne Frank. It is playing 1-16 November in a local theatre.We are considering a community trip, tentatively for Wednesday, Nov. 12th. If you are interested in reserving a ticket and joining with members of the community to see it together, please send an email with your contact details to ….

About a Girl
Ji Pei finds inspiration in The Diary of Anne Frank

Gerald Mak Ji Pei stumbled upon a Chinese translation of the play based on The Diary of Anne Frank while she rifled through the library of the Central Academy of Drama. “I was moved by Anne’s positive attitude in the face of a horrible event,” says Ji, a second year graduate student at the Academy. “It was very appropriate because I found the script during the SARS period.”

Though it may be preposterous to compare SARS to the Holocaust, Ji feels that Chinese people can still relate to the message conveyed in the story. “Chinese people associate the Holocaust with war and with both the fragility and the strength of life,” Ji explains. In China, the Holocaust hasn’t been characterised as the single most horrific atrocity in history the way it has been in the West. China certainly has had many atrocities befall her people during her history, and of course, WWII has different associations here. “We did a lot of research, but there may be some things that we can´t understand about the Jews,” Ji admits. “Our actors are young and it was difficult for us to understand the characters.”

Though Anne Frank’s story has a long history rooted in the plight of the Jews in Europe, it would be short sighted to miss the universality of her story of hope over adversity and the senselessness of a vibrant life cut short. In the past, people have downplayed the Jewishness of Frank’s writing when adapting it to a play. For example, Lillian Hellman, who produced the Pulitzer Prize winning version of the play, changed Anne’s words, “Perhaps through Jewish suffering the world will learn good,” to “Jews were not the only ones who suffered from the Nazis.” These were attempts to make the story more palatable to a public not ready to accept or comprehend the Jewish experience but the changes offended many who rightfully believed that the Jews suffered more than anyone else at the hands of the Nazis.

So, how does this lack of understanding of Jewish culture and history affect this new production? China is certainly no stranger to atrocities and, of course, during WWII, China suffered brutally herself at the hands of the occupying Japanese forces. Perhaps, then, a lack of understanding of Jews may not be as limiting as it was in the US in the 1950s. Hopefully, the Chinese audience won’t leave the theatre distracted by their lack of understanding of Jewish culture, but will instead realise that no nation and no culture is unfamiliar with suffering and senseless brutality. Nor is any human being unfamiliar with the insecurities, aspirations and hopes of youth. The tragedy of those very things being extinguished should translate in any language.

The Diary of Anne Frank will run Nov 1-16 at the Beijing North Theatre (6404 8021, 6406 0175)

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Steve’s making connections so gently that before you know it you’ve gone from the blatancy of Fox to the filagree of memory.

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Sen. John Edwards is blogging at Lessig‘s place. His normal campaign blog is here. The stuff Edwards wrote for the Lessig blog is a pretty stiff, but, hell, Dean’s Lessig-blogging was highly starched. No one is born knowing how to blog, and not everyone can – or should – learn.

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Halley is wondering if maybe online relationships are worse than mere shadows of real world ones. Maybe online we paint a false but convincing picture of who we think we are or who we’d like to be. (Halley puts it a lot better than this.)

I guess I’d agree, except that I think the same is true of the full spectrum of human relationships.

We aren’t simple objects defined in their apartness. We are our relationships. We present ourselves and comport ourselves with a sense of how we look to others. We are social selves and Rorty describes it well, but not as well as Shakespeare, Flaubert or Roth. (In fact, Rorty writes that it’s progress that novels are where we now work out moral issues.)

We write ourselves into existence online, but we dress and primp and inflect and gesture ourselves into existence in the real world.

IMO, there is no real self that’s a core behind the public views we present. There’s only relationship. Online selves are just one more type of relationship, with their own truth, deception and play.

Euan Semple points to an article about software under development that will automate the process of making your email sound like it comes from someone with a personality.

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Earl Mardle reflects on metadata and the value of vagueness, commenting on Jay Fienberg‘s commentary on my article. He puts well the way in which metadata is linguistic and thus ambiguous.

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On Nov. 18 at 7pm, you’re invited to a party at our house in north Brookline to write letters to undecided voters in Iowa telling them why you’re supporting Howard Dean. There is something peculiarly thrilling about writing these letters. If you’re interested in coming to our little party, let me know.

No, I am not inviting people who want to write letters to the same folks explaining why they’re not supporting Howard Dean. So now we know where the limit of my liberalism is.

If you want to host your own party, click here. Parties are being organized for the 18th and 22nd of every month until the first primaries. Parties on the 18th write to Iowans; those on the 22nd write to New Hampsherinis (New Hampsters?).

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