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Tuesday, November 14, 2006
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Mumpsiumus talks about teaching Nabokov in New Hampshire:
Inevitably, there were students who were convinced Nabokov was insane or a drug addict or both. This accusation comes up all the time when we read anyone who is not among the hardest of hardcore realists, because imagination is something that has come to be associated only with the stimulus of drugs or madness. That someone could think up a story like Invitation to a Beheading -- where a man is imprisoned for "gnostic turpitude" in a fortress of porous walls and fake windows and rules against improper dreams -- without being addicted to hallucinogens or lacking a couple of screws is at best inconceivable to many people, if not threatening. The people who issue these accusations would never think of such a story or such imagery themselves, and therefore they can't imagine how anyone else could, unless there was something wrong with their brains. I am sad to see this way of thinking in my students, because it means they are suspicious of one of the fundamental techniques of art, but at least in the classroom I am able to challenge and undermine those beliefs; the effect of such suspicion on the world at large is depressing to contemplate.
Very depressing. Art is strange, great art is very strange. If it were ordinary, what would make it art? A very good little piece about a very very good novel.
9:25:45 PM 
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I'm a big fan of MySQL's Full-text Search capabilities. It's not perfect, of course, but it's very easy to use, integrates well into the the rest of the database, and is pretty fast. We've been working to extend it, so that search results are affected not just by the full-text algorithm, but by other activities on the site, and it works pretty well. Today, while trying to figure out, once and for all, just how the weights for various items were caluclated, I came across this fascinating page, which I hadn't seen before. It describes, exactlly, how weights are calculated. Also of interest is this page, which details the "stuff left out of the manual," and is very good reading, too. Finally, Peter Zaitsev has a nice little presentation here, comparing MySQL's full-text search with some other approaches to solving the problem in MySQL.
12:23:29 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Steve Michel.
Last update: 12/1/2006; 4:02:36 PM.
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