The workings of the mind...

I had an interesting time with the "deconstruction" topic for the second week of LJ Idol, mostly because a casual definition of the topic, say from Wikipedia, involves some interesting twists and bends:

Deconstruction is an approach, introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the supposed contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is founded - showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible

This seems like a lot of intellectual finger-painting to me, since if the vehicle of language is intrinsically riddled with contradictions and internal oppositions, then "rigorous pursuit" of any such meaning would itself be devoid of meaning, as its expression would, of necessity, be text-based and capable of being similarly deconstructed.

Worse, there arises the potential to make any text mean anything one wants to, whereupon it would seem that the only viable defense against being "deconstructed" in turn is to be in a position of authority to denounce, suppress, or ridicule any such attempt. Basically, deconstruction appears to grant a license for ipse dixit, in spades.

Alas, the business of life did not afford me adequate time to explore any such avenues for the topic, and so I fell back on describing an event that happened a long time ago under the rubric of "deconstruction," and pursued that track.

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One thing that I think I've mentioned before, but bears repeating, if only to give some serious thought to the subject as I tap out these words, is the importance of brainstorming approaches to the topic and to not let the first thing that pops into your head consume you (unless it springs fully formed, like Venus from the sea). That's because you may end up trying like the dickens to make the idea fit, culminating in a result that's not as good as it could be.

This week's topic is a case in point. The topic "it's a trap!" automatically has me thinking of chess, which I've written about before in previous seasons. However, not of any specific incident (which might qualify for the "fully formed" exception noted above), but in general.

And this is not good, because now I will have to struggle past this almost reflexively erected barrier (how does one not think of an elephant?), with the attendant risk of finding out there's nothing really usable out past the wire.
</freewheel>

* * *What does not help—from the perspective of LJ Idol (but very much so from the perspective of a future payday)—is the arrival of a 25-page job whose source word count is in the 4,000–5,000 range, consisting of a bunch of low-resolution scans packaged in a PDF file. Past experience suggests that asking for a better copy is a waste of time, but as hope springs eternal, I've asked for one anyway. In the worst case, the translation will be liberally peppered with "[illegible]" in places where the pixels sort of run together.

The challenge with this document is the deadline: the end client wants it Friday.

Cheers...

Winding down...

I put the PDF through FineReader and mirabile dictu, it did a much better job than I expected, with only a relative handful of misidentifications in font of normal size. Text shown in small font is pretty much illegible, so there's no sweat there.

A 2200-target-word emergency came in before lunch, which didn't eat up so much time as it did energy. Fortunately, there are a lot of graphs and equations in the back of the PDF that came in today, so the actual source word count turned out to be less than 4,000 and of that number, I've actually got about 3,000 words left to do tomorrow, which ought not be a problem unless another emergency job lands in my inbox.

Generally speaking, however, it's time to wind down.

Cheers...