"difficult to get carbide"

[Alan Sondheim]

"difficult to get carbide"


difficult to get carbide, calcium carbonate, necessary for the two miner's
lamps; the bottom chamber is filled with the same, water drips from the
upper, acetylene is produced which escapes from a nozzle, burning, a lime
residue is formed. but the lamps are outmoded, and apparently one needs a
permit for the substance, which is part and parcel of West Virginia
history; i want to illuminate bodies with the same, technical apparatus,
works; i want to see the reflective glow of heat on skin from fair
distance to fair distance.

the program is to eval an expression in x over a text, filtering out the
hits after taking the int. strings are needed in arrays, input and output
files, and the two programmers working with me, undergraduates, have been
three days at it, the room is cool, thermostat fixed so we're back at a
homeostatic temperature independent of the external world.

the project is to provide tools for working between code and the real,
thinking of any entity as filterable; one might eventually move from
[a < filter > b] to [<a filter b>] to [filter(b)]; in other words the
ontology moves from objects (a,b) to process/object(b) - which reflects on
states replaced by operators, entities replaced by processes etc., shades
of Whitehead here.

everyone born in WV that we've talked to has worked in the mines or has
relatives who have done so. one of the people we've met spent years
preparing lamps for his father and grandfather; i'm hopeful he'll be able
to help get it working again. he mentioned a place that still sells
carbide.

http://www.clc.wvu.edu/sondheim/files/family.mov and
http://www.asondheim.org/crimescene.mov

worth watching

_