I am pleased to announce you can now instantly buy online original unpublished articles, essays and papers I have written from the Boles Books website and the range of work available for purchase is wide and deep.
You’ll enjoy poking around Boles Books and perhaps you’ll find something interesting to read. Here are some of the titles available:
My personality type is INTJ or “Rational-Mastermind” according to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter — one of many tests and examinations I have taken over the years to determine my INTJ status.
There are less than 1% of others in the world with the INTJ personality type.
That means I am often misunderstood or negatively judged by those who are frustrated by their inability to bend me to their unreasonable orders.
No matter where I am or what I am doing I am always alone but never lonely.
It was a great relief to discover my “Rational-Mastermind” diagnosis because it brings years of experience into a new and satisfying light.
The Peter Brooks ideal of an “Urban Semiotic” can be found in his fine essay The Text of the City (from Oppositions, 1977) where he defines “urban semiotic” as:
…a way of discovering, elaborating, the codes which would allow the indifferentiated surfaces of modern urban existence to reveal their systematic meaning….
This site was named Urban Semiotic over the more familiar “Urban Semiotics” plural because the singular “Semiotic” — unlike its plural cousin — is an adjective first and a noun second and I’m never bringing any of this up again!
David W. Boles’ Urban Semiotic is where Blood and Bone Render Meaning in the City Core.
One of the harbingers of how fruitful the continued marriage of technology and research can better serve the future is found in the status of the New York Public Library’s position on electronically borrowing books. One can head off to the NYPL eBooks online library and actually check out books by downloading them to your home computer.
These downloaded books are “time bombed” to expire at the end of three weeks so instead of taking the book back to the library you just let the book expire on your hard drive. There are certainly sticky copyright issues that must continue to be dealt with in the internet “borrow but don’t return” lending scheme for libraries; but for those who understand eBooks are good for authors and publishers and libraries the concern over digital rights borrowing can be resolved in the greater favor of the consumer.
Publishers will rent individual licenses for their books that will expire the same way a parking space expires after you purchase its limited use for a quarter. eBooks, for libraries everywhere, means they can finally sustain a relationship with their patrons beyond the walls of their libraries.
In the February 1, 2005 edition of Law Enforcement Technology, writer Liz Martinez investigates Gangs in Indian Country and offers the following insight:
Native Americans have some of the highest poverty and addiction rates in the United States and a rapidly increasing population, along with some of the highest rates of infant mortality and lowest educational levels. Because the reservations are in remote areas, the opportunities for jobs and industry are virtually non-existent.
Coupled with the fact that many young people have lost touch with or never known their native languages, customs or religious traditions and are exposed to the relentless commercialism of mainstream America–yet are without the wherewithal to achieve most of the commercial ideals–and the white-hot anger erupting among American Indian youth and manifesting itself in an explosion of gang involvement should surprise no one.
Gangs create bonds of belonging for those who feel outcast, lost and disconnected.
Helping to find ways to retie the disconnected to the positive moral core of society must become a paramount human mission reaching from suburban corral to urban core to rustic reservation.
Another example of “Pretentious City Pretend Art” is Claes Oldenburg’s Torn Notebook currently found marring the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Claes Oldenburg created some magnificent and provocative pieces of art over his career but Torn Notebook is not one of them. I have felt that way from the moment the monstrosity was first described in the local Lincoln newspaper many years ago.
Here’s why: The good people of Nebraska have an identity crises.
The unveiling of the ugly “draperies gates” in New York City’s Central Park was the epitome of what I call “Pretentious City Pretend Art.”
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