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[ by Charles Cameron — a double instance of form signalling significant (!) content ]
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Here are two self-referential quotes from Barbara Ehrenreich‘s Guardian post today, In America, only the rich can afford to write about poverty — the first being the title of her piece, the second a sentence from it:

As I have noted before, whenever you see a property of form such as the ouroboros or serpent biting its tail, pay attention: something of significance may well be going on. Further, if a pattern such as this crops up in writing, painting, cinema, etc, it’s a likely indicator of an artist who values the medium as well as the message.

And that goes double when the same pattern is displayed twice.

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Oh, and once you’ve read Ehrenreich’s piece, please feel free to pay me to write about the things I am both passionate and informed about..

[ by Charles Cameron — an enclave within an enclave within an enclave within a state no more! ]
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You know my obsession with form — and that one form of particular interest to me is the world within a world, the play within a play, or that potentially infinite regression of dolls we know as Matroshka?

Dahala Khagrabari, the Washington Post informs us, was “a part of India, surrounded by a Bangladeshi enclave, which was surrounded by an Indian enclave, which was surrounded by Bangladesh”.

No more, it’s not.

India and Bangladesh have swapped out various enclaves, 160 of ’em in all, and Dahala Khagrabari is no longer “the only third-order enclave in the world – an enclave surrounded by an enclave surrounded by an enclave surrounded by another state.”

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But all is not lost, nor won. At least for fictioneers, there still remain the Groaning Hinges of the World of which RA Lafferty informed us:

Eginhard wrote that the Hinges of the World are, the one of them in the Carnic Alps north of the Isarko and quite near High Glockner, and the other one in the Wangeroog in the Frisian islands off the Weser mouth and under the water of this shelf; and that these hinges are made of iron. It is the Germanies, the whole great country between these hinges that turns over, he wrote, after either a long generation or a short generation. The only indication of the turning over is a groaning of the World Hinges too brief to terrify. That which rises out of the Earth has the same appearance in mountains and rivers and towns and people as the land that it replaces.

We all know how dire the result can be when that happens.

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Back to the enclaves — there’s a games angle there too. Again via the Washington Post:

Old stories say that the enclaves were the end result of a chess game between the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and the Faujdar of Rangpur many centuries ago, or the result of a drunk British colonial spilling ink on a map, both apocryphal stories but a good indication of how arbitrary the borders seemed.

Chess, a game of skill. Spilled ink, a game of chance. Is that what this post is? A game of virtual spilled ink?

[ by Charles Cameron — in which a couple hundred people mimic our society at large ]
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There were reports of some people shouting “white power!” while others were shouting “black power!” at rival protests outside the South Carolina State House today — but that just means that opposing views were expressed. The report that really caught my attention was this one, from The Hill:

The media outlet’s coverage documented protesters from both rallies shouting obscenities, racial slurs and slogans at one another.

It’s not so much the simple symmetry of opposing slogans that troubles me, it’s the symmetry of obscenities and racial slurs that’s so depressing.

[ by Charles Cameron — these people seem headed for Darwin prizes ]
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You know I am always on the lookout for form — pattern, geometry, whatever you want to call it — in the news. Here, if the Daily Mail is to be believed, is a classic case:

There’s that saying, form follows function. I’m not sure how universal a truth that is, but it is certainly a useful design heuristic, and what we appear to have here is an instance of the failure of function followed by an aberrant form: lack of knowledge leading to self-destruction. More succinctly: form also follows dysfunction.

In fact, it’s an OODA loop gone awry, with lack of Observation followed by Orientation, Decision and Action. Unless these poor people awaken from their delusion first, the Islamic State is unlikely to give them any further iterative chances to re-Observe and Orient.

I don’t much like the Darwin Prizes — there’s a bit of a gloating aura to them, although they’re also amusing in a way that sneaks around the inherent sadness and meanness.

Poor kids.

[ by Charles Cameron — a wager on the impact of form in media ]
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It’s a moment in the unfurling of an event: the moment when our war correspondents, photographers, whoever, manage to bring style to their reporting, not simply fact.

Take a look at the symmetries here — the photographer wasn’t just able to get a shot, but to get what we might call a shot with form — an artist’s shot:

Photo credit: Hosam Katan / Reuters

From The Atlantic, The Boy Named Jihad: From the Ashes of the Arab Spring to the Battlefields of Syria

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Great artists, how can I say this, bring this quality with them. It’s in their eyes for vision, their ears for language. Gregory Johnsen is one of those..

My wager would be that images and or texts infused with this quality go deeper, communicate more memorably, than texts or images that lack it. FWIW.