As I said the other day, I’m reading.

Things need to get bet­ter here. Hell, they need to get bet­ter every­where, for almost everybody.

We need to build a thing. A thing I’ve been dis­cussing qui­etly, plan­ning, and for­mu­lat­ing for nearly six months now — at least dur­ing those gaps when life has been wind­ing up its punches and giv­ing me a chance to think.

And, in a strange jux­ta­po­si­tion, I’ve also been dili­gent in try­ing to clean out my Inbox. Got it emp­tied out com­pletely today, by the expe­di­ent of delet­ing lots of things I might have wanted to read some­day, and tuck­ing the rest off into a “Do Soon” box. But clean it is.

First new email to appear in my cleaned-​​out inbox, this gray Christ­mas Eve morn­ing? I will take it as an omen of deep import, some­where between a for­tune cookie and a con­fir­ma­tion of grow­ing conviction:

A new issue of Indus­trial and Cor­po­rate Change has been made available:

“Spe­cial Issue: Infor­ma­tion, Appro­pri­abil­ity and the Gen­er­a­tion of Inno­v­a­tive Knowl­edge” Decem­ber 2006; Vol. 15, No. 6

This par­tic­u­lar Con­tents Alert is, indeed, omi­nous. Omi­nous in the sense of being an omen, of being fraught; an echo of a pat­tern of ideas that have been play­ing off one another in my soul for more than that six months. The time I spent and the sci­en­tific lifestyle (good and bad) I expe­ri­enced at the Santa Fe Insti­tute; my jokey-​​but-​​half-​​serious Erdös Num­ber Auc­tion; the moti­va­tion for my recent Return to the Acad­emy after too long spent in Real Life; the future of intel­lec­tual prop­erty, com­merce, and pub­lish­ing; the echo-​​chambered frus­tra­tion ema­nat­ing from four hun­dred foiled aca­d­e­mic blog­gers; the ques­tion of who gets to play at sci­ence, at engi­neer­ing, at his­tory, at inven­tion and inno­va­tion and schol­ar­ship; the grow­ing (and threat­en­ing) expense of — and under­bud­get­ing for — basic and applied research; the innu­mer­able smart peo­ple I’ve met through 30 years, forced to climb over one another’s bod­ies to make their way towards an uncer­tain tenure-​​track posi­tion, or forced to give up on the entirety of the aca­d­e­mic mode of life because it’s so “incom­pat­i­ble” with Real Life; the increas­ing and pow­er­ful suc­cess of col­lab­o­ra­tive work; the mis­un­der­stood eco­nom­ics of intel­lec­tual prop­erty, and con­stric­tions pre-​​emptive secrecy and patens can place on col­lab­o­ra­tion and inno­va­tion. The immi­nent end of Amer­i­can sci­ence and engi­neer­ing. The ruth­less pres­sure of time, that leaves for­ever untouched the count­less note­books full of good ideas that every smart reearcher accu­mu­lates. The strug­gle, above all else, that ideas face in com­ing to light.
What a load of stuff. How does a lit­tle eso­teric jour­nal issue spark a flood?

Who can say what notions will form the key­stone, the hub of a new net­work? It’s all about the exap­ta­tion, baby.

And so, while the world winds up again, I hope to explain it all. Time to move from wait­ing, to read­ing, to doing. Time to revive a sen­ti­ment I’ve let slum­ber for too long:

Let’s change the world, and see what happens.

The charm­ing book by Charles Brooks: bought and scanned by me, proof­read by unnum­bered souls, and com­posed and edited by Bar­bara. It’s in the top 100 books down­loaded from Project Guten­berg in the last 7 days, as of this writing.

When the Vir­gin Mary in the local nativ­ity scene tips over in the wind, one can see a mys­te­ri­ous bril­liant glow ema­nat­ing from some­where down there under her dress. If you think about it, all the other fig­ures have a bit of glow as well, and pos­si­bly from a related cause. It may well be that there are reli­gious implications.

…for more than a week. Sat, and read, often in what seems like dusk­light, and immo­bile: books, blogs, email, old fam­ily mem­o­ra­bilia. Stacks of papers set aside “to do”, dusted with three months’ fluff. I have re-​​sorted the piles and replaced them where they sat.

Tried to catch up on those impor­tant things that have passed us by these last seven or eight weeks. No less to avoid the things that have since loomed large. But there comes a day when you’re exhausted by count­ing things lost, and stand in the shadow of the new insis­tent ones that have arrived. Time then to move on from reading.

One’s ten­dency when a chunk of life falls away is to approach the future as some­thing that must be orga­nized and planned. In this way we can post­pone par­tic­i­pat­ing for some time, pick­ing just the right step to take back into the present, and then real­iz­ing that it isn’t that present any more. Some folks refer to this as “heal­ing”. I don’t know.

My wife’s mother died more than a week ago. I have read all I can stand about iatro­genic mor­tal­ity, “insti­tu­tional dam­age”, “defen­sive med­i­cine”, and the like.

But I find I’m no bet­ter able to plan what to do.

Some­thing, though. Just walk­ing the dog might do. Something.