About the Name
"Arabissmo is a Peruvian word meaning the unbridled desire to rise - it applies to people who have felt out of it, not beyond the melting pot, but behind it. And they're trying to do not what I was brought up to do, that is, work hard, keep your mouth shut, and join the mainstream. These people are not going to keep their mouths shut; they may work hard, but they want to maintain their identity, not become part of some pabulum-like dream of whatever it was that we were all dreaming about in America."
- Warren Bennis in conversation with William Dowling in Dowling, William (ed.) (1971) Effective Management and the Behavioral Sciences: Conversations from Organizational Dynamics. (p.275) AMACOM: New York
Uh, the name has nothing to do with Arabs or with Arabists but probably has all to do with belissimo or bessamo mucho or Carmen stomping her heels and swishing her skirt or Zorba the Greek going Oompha! (or was that a more recent movie with Greeks in them too?) or King David dancing up the hill near naked which means that this foreign word came swaying, sweating, stomping, and smooching at me at a time when my imagination was failing me in ordinary English.
Believe you me. I set out thinking of this website with this grandiose scheme of meta-ing digital information. I thought I had such an original mind that it surprised me that every domain name having "meta" in it (metadata, metainfo, metanarrative, metaverse, metamphetamine) has already been registered or is owned by somebody, someorg, or somecorp. I persisted to find the right name by concocting such cutesies as I3.com for Information, Individuality, and the Internet (I3.com exists for I-cubed) and pdl.com for Personal Digital Libraries (pdl.com exists for Protein Design Labs, pdl.org is for a casino on the Net). I thought of just going for plain "glendaclaborne.com" but, uhm, well, what can I say about myself after, say, three months?
That bit about the American Dream in Bennis' definition...I don't identify myself necessarily in contradiction to whatever American Dream there is to dream. I could take an outsider's view of it but I also am very much aware that I benefit from every material manifestation of it. It would be nothing but a cheap shot to define an identity in contradiction to the American Dream. I think that the beauty of the so-called American Dream is that it gives us so much freedom to dream and so much resources to make our dreams a reality.
So said, let us all rise and dance.