For years I have been trying various work-arounds, add-ons, macros, and scripts to make it eaiser to get information about books and journal articles. For books I find myself constantly switching between my library’s catalog, Amazon, Google Books. For journals I am constantly moving between Google Scholar, various Big Content sites (JSTOR etc.), and my university’s clunky interface for getting me past content firewalls. Nothing has worked really well and I’ve resigned myself flipping through multiple tabs in a browser and — horror of horrors — taking my hand off the keyboard and on the mouse, sapping precious milliseconds from my research routine.

Launchbar as a ’search template’ function that makes it incredibly easy to to create custom searches of websites: you basically just copy the URL of a successful search, look around for the string you originally searched for in there, and replace it with an asterisk. To invoke the search you just do command-space bar (what used to be the Spotlight shortcut) and type the name of the search template you want to use and hit return. Then you type your search string, hit return again, and a new browser tab is open with the result.

The genius of launchbar is that it trains itself to guess what search template you are going to use. It only takes a search or two for it to learn that ‘g’ means ‘google’, ‘gb’ means ‘google books’, and so forth. This means that with just a few keystrokes, in any application, you can check out a book, the author’s departmental homepage, or pretty much anything else. No more tabbing between windows or clicking on search windows to get the cursor in a place where you can type your query in.

It speeds up searches by, like, orders of magnitude. For anything.

Apparently it can do lots of other things — like the coveted ‘send as an attachment to an email the PDF file I’m looking at now to someone in my addressbook’. If you are really into controlling your entire computer through a single command line then this is the app for you. But if you are just a normal person who wants to do normal things like locate and save Anna Tsing’s entire scholarly output — fliers for guest lectures on her campus and all — in under ten minutes then you will quickly find that this application is like crack and you will turn into one of the junkie guys in The Wire.

Serious.

Maybe it is because I have just moved into a new house and have been putting together a lot of furniture purchased from Target, but this parshah read to me like instructions: Step 25: Fasten end of cords to frames which have been attached to ephod. Step 26: Attach 2 gold rings to ends of inner edge of breastpiece, facing ephod. Step 27: Attach 2 remaining gold rings two bottom of breastpiece. Run blue cord through breastpiece, securing breastpiece to ephod. They say that being Jewish is doing Jewish, and no place is this more true than in this parshah tetsaveh.

In the section of this parshah on priestly garments which we didn’t hear this morning, god instructs the priests to wear a crown which says ‘holy to the lord’ on. I imagine this to be a bit like wearing a tshirt that says “property of the dallas cowboys” or, perhaps, “use by 6/5/2010″. I mean they labeled the high priest. I guess I understand why. I mean after all in the desert this was all new to people — they had a lot to learn. There was probably someone with sticky notes writing ’sorry — you can’t eat this anymore’ on all the newly-tref items in camp.

Speaking to Christian creationists who read the bible ‘literally’ Rabbi Johnathan Sacks pointed out that it takes god only 70 verses to create the entire universe, but 700 to create the ark. Which, then, is the more important topic? I like this parshah because it reminds us of the materiality and embodied nature of Judaism. A few weeks ago in church I sang a chant with the following lyrics: “be mindful lord of we who bear/the burden of the flesh we wear.” The burden of the flesh we wear: this image of pure souls trapped in prisons of corrupt flesh couldn’t be further from the world-affirming, world-embracing instruction book that is the torah. This is the religion where, when I asked my rabbi for advice before heading off to graduate school, he said “try to live at least a mile away from campus. That way you can walk to school and that will be your exercise”. Its the religion where, when Woody Allen asks his father if he’s no worried about the after life his father replies “when I die I’ll be unconscious. Why should I worry now for something I’ll be unconscious for later?” In a world for people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” this is the religion which produced Rabbi Sacks, who insists — and this is one of my favorite lines from him — “ritual is for the soul what exercise is for the body”.

In fact, if I had to sum up the fundamental message of Rabbinic Judaism it would be: “come for the temple, stay for the halakhah”. In these post-temple times some might be tempted to look askance at parshyot about sacrifices and semen and blood and breastpieces and wonder why they are relevant. They are relevant because Judaism is, temple or no, a religion that recognizes the fact that we are bodies, living in this world: that it matters what we eat and how we eat it, who we sleep with and when, that eating meat entails spilling blood, that the mind is part of the body, not its opposite. It recognizes that the world is a confusing place, full of difficult decisions to be made with imperfect knowledge in uncertain conditions. Luckily, as this parshat demonstrates, Judaism teaches us that the best thing about this often-confusing world is that instructions are included. Shabbat shalom.

For AKMA, on the zither

How long must I wait oh lord, how long?
how long must I endure the attacks of my enemy?
My enemy hides in a dark place
from a secret place he plots against me
But there is no escape from the lord
the maker of light
Whose light shines everywhere
even the back of my book case

As I enter my office I see them scurrying in fear
hiding beneath the xeroxes
The spines of my books are chewed oh lord
the cover of my copy of Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande
And I’m talking about a cloth first edition of the full version here

Strike them in your wrath oh lord,
smite them wherever they hide
Smear them as they attempt to wriggle under stacks of ungraded tests
smash those who dwell between the pages
Spare not the juveniles oh lord
the ones who will breed further
The large ones will be destroyed
and the small as well, no matter how hard they are to catch

The wrath of the lord makes the cedars of Lebanon bend
the anger of the lord causes the stacks to shake
It makes the reserve desk skip like a young calf
And the book-ends quiver and tang

But you shall not be angry at your servant lord
you will bless your servants who tend the dust jackets as you command
Fear of the lord is the end of silverfish
And we shall dwell in the house of the righteous forever

Selah!

I will be honest with you: I do not know very much about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s music. There is a good reason for this: about thirteen years ago (!) one of the guys I work with hooked me up with the album “The Last Prophet” from Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records label, and this is the only album I’ve ever really listened to by him. In fact, I have not yet gotten to the second track of the album. For the last thirteen years I have been listening to the same track of the same album, over and over, and I still feel that I have not reached the bottom of it.

It’s not counterpoint or a Bach fugue and it doesn’t feature a full orchestra so I suppose at some level the music is not all that ‘complex’, but the tracks is seventeen minutes long and, let’s face it, it combines the best parts of the late Coltrane with Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria, which is not something everyone can say. We get the theme immediately, and variations are pyrotechnic, they climax, and then the piece winds down. There is a lot to say about Khan’s incredible vocal technique — as there is about the guy in the ensemble with the slightly higher voice — but it’s the mixture of intelligence and ecstasy in equal intensity (something that rarely happens) that I find so amazing. And that is just the individual singers. The ensemble work is equally insanely powerful. It’s ecstasy without simplicity, complexity without intellectualism: a genuine, overwhelming craftsmanship of the soul.

Now, In opposition to the ubiquitous refrain today that people are ’spiritual but not religious’ I often insist that I am ‘religious but not spiritual’, and I firmly resist the idea that the Christian music I sing is acultural (if it was you wouldn’t have to be a liturgy junky to get it). Still, I have to admit that this music has a power to it that is undeniable. Is it the piety of the performers or something deeper? I’m not sure — like I said, the only thing I’ve heard is the first track — but there is no doubt in my mind that if these were ‘boy meet girl’ or ‘baby I want you’ lyrics the piece would never have the obvious power it has for both performers and listeners.

I’ve taken a quick look around — most online music stores will sell you the whole album for ten bucks but not the first track. If you have 10 bucks and 15 years of your life free, I’d really urge you to pick the album up. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

I use Things as a GTDish type device — to capture everything I need to do so I don’t worry about it and can focus on work. I also use it to schedule all events and deadlines. I can’t be bothered with ‘projects’ since I do a better job keeping track of those in my head than making lists in Things. I also don’t use it for contexts, except the library — I throw all the LOC #s for things I need to get out of library in there, print them up, and mark them off.

The biggest thing I’ve found Things useful for are repeating projects: everyday I wake up to find Things has added three tasks to my to-do list: “Read for :30″ “Write for :30″ and “Transcribe for :30″. If I do all three of these things — on top of my teaching and other responsibilities — then I allow myself to browse the web for all the books I’ll never have time to read.

In terms of note-taking programs for Mac, I tried: Yojimbo, Together, Scrivener, Notae2, Mori, Notebook, Evernote and a few more whose names escape me at the moment. What I was looking for was: price (they’re all about US$30-40), decent way to export data (for when I code fieldnotes or the sofware stops being developed), robus support and developer community (aka track record), ability to clip webpages (important for WoW research), get data in via the finder (pretty much all of these now have a button or drawer you can drag documents or highlighted text to to create new documents), and the ability to categorize entries by ‘tag’ or ’smart folders’ (apparently increasingly called ’saved searches’ these days). I was particularly interested in finding a program that would let me keep multiple databases open, each of which had its own separate category structure — that way my WoW Research categories do not get mixed up with my PNG research categories.

Pretty much all of these products can do this in more or less the same way — and they are all much better than what I started using 2 years ago. I went with DevonThink despite the fact that it has tons of features I will probably never use because of the ability to open and close multiple databases, tag/group with ease, and because I might grow into its features as I need it more. 2.0 is much easier to use than the earlier versions I attempted unsuccessfuly to love earlier.

Speaking of software I use regularly, but which I forgot to mention in my last post: Dropbox. It’s finally managed to hit the sweet spot of online storage and version control. Let’s all give it a big round of applause folks.

As for dissertation-writing books, I must say that I am taken by Demystifing Dissertation Writing by Peggy Boyle Single. Like most people I got to know the book through her columns in Inside Higher Ed (and really if you’ve read them you already know 70% of what is in the book). Despite the fruity cover and kinda-lame name her ‘Single System’ there is a lot to like in the book: a clear outline of how to write, a small but useful bibliograpy, and just the right amount of depth. The book sort of orients you to what successful method is like but does not micro-manage you. One of her main points — the writers block comes from not enough ‘prewriting’ — really resonated with me.

Also, I like the book because the process it describes is familiar to me from doing fieldwork: take a living, buzzing world, simplify it by putting it on paper, reduce it down more and more to just a few quotes, and then start building up in a new, parsed form. This complex -> simple -> complex dynamic is more or less what I teach in my field methods class and I think it really works. That said I have not actually inflicted the volume on anyone but me yet, so I can’t really say I have experience using it in teaching.

One more quick shout-out — Single’s publisher, Stylus, actually turns out a lot of good books on teaching. I’d be interested in exploring them more, but requesting review copies is burdensome and requires giving up WAY to much personal information, etc. Yo Stylus: make it easier for me to publicize your books.

On category of things that did not make the cut with me, there are two that did not make the cut with me: first, academic socialbookmarking services like CiteULike or Zotero. Let’s face it: the problem these days is not discovering new things to read. Zotero and CiteULike are great programs for some people. But for me, who already as a long to-read list, cares about easy storage of PDFs and metadata, it is just far far better to spend the money on Sente.

Second, PDF management systems like Yep or various finder-enhancements that let you tag files etc: I think Alex Payne summed it up best when he said: “If you want to store data of differing types within a lightweight organization system, I encourage you to check out THE FILESYSTEM”. For academic books and articles I have a special program. For everything else, I have the finder. There is one exception: I wish there was a decent program for filing away syllabi as I download those things like a mother. Right now my half-solution is to store them in DevonThink. Ditto wih CVs.

In sum, one key to my recent optimization has been getting clear on what specifically I need programs to do, and then chosing one (1) program to do it. I resist programs that do more than one thing, and I resist the urge to do more than one thing with one program. Of course some things fall through the cracks this way — I no longer have long lists of books that I might someday read before I die. But that is the point: the stuff that I am not actually doing for a good reason does not fit in the system, and so I do not do it, which leaves me more time and focus to do the things that I need to do for a reason. Which is, of course, the goal.

First, I’ve rejiggered, reevaluated, and rethought the set up of my outboard brain. After testing a bunch of different combinations of note taking programs, PDF managers, and bibliographic software I’ve found that yes, the same combination of programs that everyone uses are in fact the best things to use: Sente for bibliography, Things for task management, Delicious for bookmarking, and DevonThink for notes. I tried Evernote, but I don’t have a Mobile Device and frankly, I fear the Cloud and want my data somewhere where I can lose or compromise it myself. Also it’s actually not that powerful in terms of bintiliions of ways to organize folders etc. Now if I can just take the 800 fieldnotes out of my OLD note taking program I’ll be really set…

Second, better scheduling. After years of sorta-using GTD I have finally shoved every bit of anxiety-provoking task into Things and my life really is much better. Also, I recently had a student come to me asking how I took notes or managed reading books for the purposes of writing articles, what my process was when it came to writing, etc. and I found that I basically had nothing to tell them — a mixture of intuition and a reliance on the power of enthusiasm to muscle my way through this process meant that I ultimately had little to pass on to anyone who wasn’t me. It also meant, I realized on reflection, that I was still relying on grad school strategies to do professorial work — and I mean here not only training students but also my own research and writing. And lets face it, how many of us really want our dissertation and first fieldwork to be the zenith of our research prowess?

So, having done some serious work on research methods over the summer I’ve spent the past semester doing a lot of work on handling ethnographic materials and writing them up. A lot of this, I’m not ashamed to admit, has involved trying out the various methods in the ‘how to write a dissertation’ books I have field-tested in course of learning how to be an adviser. Not surprisingly, a lot of them are really really good. In particular (I am ashamed to admit) I’ve started taking notes on readings in a structured and regular way for the first time. Like ever. This really beats surrounding yourself with dozens of opened, heavily underlined books and searching for quotes you remember in them.

Overall, it has been a good experience and all the rethinking is finally beginning to get amortized off in the form of actual productivity. Speaking of which… back to work!

Is there an anthropological basis for the emotion of love?
No. You can easily fall in love without having taken any classes in our department.

Does love serve a useful purpose or is it extraneous?
Falling in love is one of the most wonderful, life-affirming experiences that can happen to you, so if you think ‘having wonderful, life-affirming experiences’ counts as ‘useful’, then there you go. Additionally, when you fall out of love you feel absolutely terrible, a feeling which serves the useful purpose of giving blues musicians more to sing about than just racism and alcohol abuse.

Are certain societies or cultures more predisposed toward feelings of love?
Love is a Western concept, although obviously you don’t have to be Western to come to care deeply for another person. Still, I think your standard haole American has got to be particularly predisposed to fall in love. American culture imagines the entire world as if it were a business, worrying constantly about the ‘useful purpose’ of everything, and Americans are obsessed with sharing their feelings for others. As a result they carve out a very small niche in their lives — romantic love — in which ‘love’, ‘feeling’ and ‘caring’ are carefully separated from ‘economics’, ‘buying’, and ’selling’. Thus Americans believe prostitution to be wrong because it combines love and intimacy with spending lots of money. Which thus makes it completely and totally different from Valentine’s day.

What difference, if any, are there between the way people express love in Hawaii and New York?
People in New York are often much colder than we are when they fall in love.

If you are married/involved, how do you plan to spend your Valentine’s Day?
My wife and I are going to get totally baked and watch ‘300′ like seven times in a row. No just kidding. We are planning to do all the “Love Is In The Air” achievements in World of Warcraft together, though. We might even try to farm the Big Love Rocket that drops off of Apothecary Hummel.