These are things I’ve forgotten, abandoned, or saved up. It’s uncomfortable to publish them, many of them being rather lousy, but they weren’t doing any good as it was. Comments are of course welcome. As you’ll see, there are a lot of silent lacunae, redundant passages, and bad parts, but I think that here and there are some good bits. It might make more sense to consider these not as drafts, but as extended notes to myself.
Some formating may not work. Tsk tsk.
You’ll notice several recurring themes. I am accepting proposals for the Charlie Drinking Game.
This page shows them all together; click on a filename to see a piece alone.
1.0.0: Original release. Almost perfected.
1.0.1: Added images. Certainly looks a little more lively.
1.0.2: Added some text. Seems to keep all those pictures from bonking into each other.
1.0.3: Looked "html" up in dictionary. Didn't have definition. Dad doesn't know either.
1.0.4: Learned that <i> makes italics. Quickly italicized entire text.
1.1.0: Major organizational changes. Added 6.8 "MB" worth of "jpegs" of me with family, me at Christmas, me at the beach, me with brother, me with girlfriend (with hidden dirty pix!), me with computer, me with pets, me in pool, me watching TV, me at Camp, me with cousins, me with minor celebrities, me with chicken pox, etc, to splash "page".
1.1.1: Changed fonts.
1.1.2: Changed fonts. Inverted background image (640*480 high-quality jpeg of Yosemite) to look better with trendy hot-red text.
1.1.3: Changed fonts.
1.1.4: Changed size.
1.1.5: Changed fonts.
1.1.6: Some fine-tuning. Now accepts browsers other than AOL 3. Removed a total of 87 non-beaking spaces that crept in here and there.
1.1.7: Nearly perfect. Stomped some bugs that caused text to display upside down and backwards.
1.1.8: Discovered that </i> makes it stop being italic. Quickly de-italicized most of text.
1.1.9: More fine-tuning. Updated all references to "this century." Fixed some typos,
2.0.0: Huge changes! Entire site structure overhauled. Most links on main page now work.
2.1.0: Discovered "tables" by accident. Handy, though hard to get rid of. Formatting much improved.
2.1.1: Redid site in iMac colors. Groovy, baby! Tangerine looks wonderful on lime!
2.1.2: Squashed bugs causing redone site to load only in MSIE on a G3 through an EarthLink ISP. Sent snitty letter to Steve Jobs.
2.1.3: Undid iMac theme. Apple and eMachines both threatened to sue, plus dentist says it's bad for the teeth. Bummer.
2.2.0: Opened site in text editor. Cleaned up a little over 137k of empty tags etc from welcome page. Considered switching from WYSIWYG to text html editing.
2.2.1: Added my name at the top in really big letters.
2.2.2: Made every appearance of my name huge, italic, and bold.
2.3.0: Found definition of html: sounds like I was using it all along. Minor changes. Added another 100k of self-portraits.
2.3.1: Whoops! Fixed bug that let text load before all the pictures had finished.
2.3.2: Looking for ways to liven site up. Discovered <blink>: very handy and original!
2.3.3: Site still looks bland. Trying desperately to remember how I got the text to go upside-down and backwards.
2.3.4: My birthday! Yay! Great new scans of my presents, the packages they came in, party hats, my slice of cake, etc.
3.0.0: Lots of new features! Sprinkled each page with quotes from two or three dozen favorite songs. It even chooses randomly whether the title of the page will be a quote from Tori Amos, Dar Williams, Ani DiFranco, or Abba! Added clever fake "hit counter" that shows a random number in the thousands. . . very funny! Got a free "Made with Macintosh" animated gif that shows a larger-than-life 3D Apple wearing army boots stomping on Bill Gates, who is choking on his own vomit, to an mp3 of "Reprehensible" by tmbg. Sure to attract lots of converts.
3.0.1: Got inspired and added an entire screenful of "doctored" Bill Gates photos to top of main page. I edited them in KidPix so he has broken glasses, fangs, horns, etc; very persuasive.
3.0.2: Fixed mroe typos.
3.0.3: Added big, friendly, scanned 144*144 icons for back, home, and so on: home is my house, reload is a shotgun shell, back is my back, etc.
3.0.4: Pet goldfish dies.
4.0.0: Mourning ends. This version named "Thomas" in honor of my late pet. Changed background image to night sky.
4.0.1: Back from vacation. Changed text from black to white.
4.0.2: Intirdused speling riforms for English, starting rite here!!!!!!! Desided to start a litle at a time and go slowly. sentences are sometimes capitilized, sometimes not..................double letters sometmies respected, sometimes not. i think ppl will start catching on when they see how wierd thier writing looks compered to mine!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Keeps thingz from geting to bland and sameoldsameold!!!!!?!?!!!?!?!
4.0.3: Decided to hell with reforms, made entire text capitals; much more eye-catching. Extremely striking, but it looks like I'm the first one to think of it. Note: if you're reading this, and I know you are, don't copy my idea! I mean it! ©™™™™™™©©©©©©©©©©©©©©™™™™©©©©™©©©! It's hereby copyrighted™, by me, today, ten minutes ago! If you do, I'll hunt you down and sue you!
4.1.0: Came back and made some changes after taking a week off for health. Had upset stomach, bloodshot eyes, and headaches like you wouldn't believe. No longer using all caps.
4.1.1: Text now divided into paragraphs.
4.1.2: New site colors: pineapple-flesh yellow, juicy-cherry red, cola brown.
4.2.0: Came back after short break. Had to get keyboad cleaned: that's the last time I use live models for my site colors. Switched to KleenGreen(TM) and BriteWite(TM) colors from colors4u.com ~ going to see if I can get away without paying the shareware fees on them!
4.2.1: Made entire shareware collection downloadable as one binhex file-thingy. Discovered </blink>.
5.0.0: Splash page is now a download of Autobahn by Kraftwerk. Very cool.
5.0.1: Discovered that other computers might use different fonts to display my text! Everything is now "gif"s -- one per letter.
5.0.2: People might think I'm egotistical, I mean to have a site and all, so I'm putting an apology at the bottom of each page. Also I'm carefully trying to force myself to not capitalize "I", I mean "i".
I’m setting me up an 8.5*11 template in InDesign®. This may make me quite literally the only person on earth to use exclusively use vim and InDesign® for personal correspondence.
It doesn’t look so great from the inside, but I sure like the idea of a society where anyone can sue anyone for anything. It discourages some more reasonable ways of settlement and costs too much for regular folks, but it’s better than not having a way of people holding each other to the law. We should have more torts, though. (We’d need to to have a properly literal interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.) More and more I’m thinking of cities as essentially barbaric and small towns as civilization.
I’m telling you — vim is real cool, but the whole modes idea is goofy. It might not be that hard to turn it all (or all the stuff I use) into mod-key combos, though I guess most would have to take args. I’d be cooler with ctrl-w n a m e enter than escape w space n a m e enter, for a start. Modelessness is one of my favorite Macintoshisms, right up with good menus and vicious standards.
Where do those fools get off, writing MacIntosh
and MAC
? A MacIntosh is a Scots or an apple; MAC was an old computing project with no particular relation to the Mac. And Apple Macintosh
: these days Apple is the only outfit making Macs (sniffle ... I miss you, StarMax and PowerComputing), and even when they weren’t, people called the clones Apple Macs too. Why? To distinguish them from the fruit MacIntosh? I mean, get real. I can stand people calling Macs Apples
, and saying Macintosh
where I would say the Macintosh
(I’m still not sure of that one), and so on, but surely you’d have to be trying to keep calling ’em MACs. You’d have to keep noticing and being annoyed that most people didn’t do it that way, but never actually look it up. I mean, sheesh.
More diatribe? Comin’ right up!
I was reading PC Magazine today (carefully following biohazard procedure), and happened upon some columns by one Dvorak who considers his middle initial more important than .25 square inches of blank paper. Man is he not right. It’s not even the issues so much as the attitude: stand aside, pleblians, for I am on Imperial business. Stand aside, I say, or I shall smite you! Ohh, you got it coming! I fully intend to smite you in such a way that the remains of your corporeal entity are to be so scattered that they do not even in any way resemble their former co-configuration! I carry News of the PC, and nothing can stop me! Not even you hippy-dippy fools with your so-called
I mean, it doesn't even make sense. He implies that he’s making Important and Well-Reasoned Points of Brilliant Insight, but I saw just a lot of not-particularly-original undocumented conclusions. I think he’s what I’m afraid of becoming.Linux
and Macintosh
, for I am close personal friends with Bill Gates, and I understand The Way of the World and the Will of the Consumer better than you pathetic middle-class non-MBAs! Yes, I have just smitten you mightily not with a blow but with rational, reasoned argument, such as transcendently intelligent and rational beings such as myself use on pitiable self-deluded navel-gazers such as your worthless self. Stand aside, I say!
Verbal computer interfaces won’t work until we have Turing-complete software. English is not a command language, and its bandwidth is itty-bitty; the only advantage over keyboards and mice is pleasant familiarity to the user. We use it, with its famous problems, (a) out of habit and (b) because its sidebands and subtexts can carry orders of magnitude more information than anything else we do besides painting, love, and music. This is great for us, but computers are no good at any sort of idiomatic human-to-anything-but-computer interaction yet and they don’t need to be until they get there naturally. For now, their faces, simulated workspaces, and language all seem strained and presumptuous; the solution is to not see this as a problem. Until computers can handle crazy stuff like poetry, there’s no point in trying to use such a poetry-optimized medium with them. Quantum computers — well, that would change everything; any ignoramus could replace the most hairy, shambling code of today with a long but comfortable set of musings (not even instructions) in plain English. Imagine getting in the habit of thinking aloud to your computer, metaphors and all, as it continually runs your babbling to see if it would be the sort of thing you’d like to see on the screen. It would be about halfway between a net portal circa 2001 and an exceedingly well-educated butler circa 1920. But that’s the equivalent of asking for a computer you can chat with comfortably about anything at all, which is Turing-victorious. (Plus some, ’cause users will expect their computer to act like a really good computer as well as a customizable person.)
I played with Speech Recognition (another of the many astounding, ten-years-early Apple tricks that no one remembers) when it was practically new, and it got me pretty well convinced that speech has a place: I actually got sort of used to being in another room and yelling Volume seven. What's the date? Volume one.
and so on. It ran at 117 MHz without anything seizing up (more than otherwise — System 7.6.1 and all that), played well with others, and was actually well-thought-out: take a list of files from the Speakable Items folder, convert it to phonemes through text-to-speech (another Apple coolness), and launch files whose phonemes sorta match the sound-in. (Everything was a file: very Unix.) It was remarkably accurate even on slow boxes and bad mikes, reduced the national debt, prevented hair-loss, et cetera; in short, it was an excellent implementation of a good idea. But no one cared. You can barely find it mentioned anymore. If its relatives have a future, it’s only in cars and sunglasses, where speech is the best medium short of gaze and telepathy. English is a good backup, but the things we call computers use mice and keyboards. There’s no point in trying to force speech-recognition on them; we should be molding our computers to our ideas.
A bald man with loose white robes and a gold watch just walked south by the window. Zack has his hand around Marina’s shaven head, and Roya is asleep just in front of them under a sleeping bag that pretends to be the color of her hair. Nick went grudgingly off to bed, and Mitchell is reading the things on the walls.
I’ve been afraid lately of recording. I must have been too much for it. Records are useful, but they are not the thing, and to do something only to record it is probably dishonest. Right now I’m annoying Zack, at least, with the noise of typing, and I’m not talking to Mitchell: should I be ignoring them to talk about them? I thought earlier today that I should write a eulogy-for-elegy of Grace, but then that I should instead talk to her. If you like something, buy it, don’t sell it.
Nick and I have been too quiet for Roya & Marina. When we don’t say anything for longer than about ten seconds (it seems to depend on the time of day), they pick out of nowhere conversations about people I’ve never met, and do not get bored. It seems almost as though everything is only a reminder of some other thing. Clearly I’m missing something, but it looks as though the immediate, ephemeral, material world is for them a foreshadowing or prologue; a set-up and background for social drama; an atmospheric condition; something to be remembered and rehashed in some other place and time. They seem to get satisfaction out of every person and thing far thing distant: x-ray emotions.
Even as I respect their plans and memories, I’m proud of my lack of them. By and large, I feel uncomfortable with photos of moments and live bulletins; I’d rather hear the memories of someone who was concentrating on being there. It’s hard for me to imagine people staying sane around a camera — it makes everyone a performer. If you’re playing with a camera, great, but if you’re doing something fun and someone says say cheese
, I fear that the ruined beauty of the moment is proportional to the beauty of the developed photo.
I’ve argued before that ideas don’t die in dissection, and I’ve gone on many camera-walks — but social constucts do die in dissection, and plants don’t get self-conscious in front of a lens. Consciousness of the self is not something I’d like to cure people of, either. When we laugh with each other, we’re fooling ourselves that we aren’t gobs of atoms forming desires, but the reductionism of film and prose won't record the feeling of being in our selves, only the atoms. Really great photography, art, will sometimes do what prose does in poetry and mention the self in the photons, but — well, I think my problem is that I just don’t identify enough with people in books and photos.
Chuck-computer-fixing-December
4 December 2001
An eighty-year-old chemist who just married his teenage sweetheart called at two. He asked if I could fix his scanner under Windows 98, and I said I’d try. I hadn’t ridden that road since I helped a poet with a printer. It rips flat and straight for a mile, then stalls and flutters along the south slope of a long point, heading west toward Canada. The salal and ferns and cedars and muddy patches and skating turns and gray sky ganged up and smothered me into a euphoric calm: this is what my home-land looks like in December. Foggy bays through skeletal cypresses, groves of ivy-bound firs and barky alder clans, asthetically foreign gardens in clearings on hillsides facing the road, long gray waves breaking on the lee beach, and mudspatters up the jacket-back: nothing else. I left my bike by a blackberry forest and walked through rotten mushrooms in a soggy orchard facing jay-blue whitecaps and seagulls in the rain. The house faced the sunset over hazy islands over loud surf over a wide tan field. They had been trying to import Adobe PhotoDeluxe scans into WordPad for their Christmas card; I set them up with jpegs and FrontPage. It took two strikes of the birdcalls-on-the-hour clock to explain it all, but they got it. I wouldn’t take money, so they sent me off with a gallon of apple-juice in a warped thirdhand plastic jug.
My brother just got Warcraft III. I played I, II, and StarCraft, and this a straight extrapolation. It seems to have ripped a few pages out of Myth’s book, too: the Humans have dwarfs and dwarven mortars with gung-ho Scottish accents. The rendering per se is nice (very smooth, with only a few jpeg artifacts) but the view control is abysmal — the camera won’t rotate, so you’re stuck at 45°. The engine could handle it, because the models are already 360°, and you can even zoom in and out on a curved pseudo-track, but I guess they just forgot spin. The excellent camera controls put a huge kick in Myth, which was so not-suckyI say was so not-sucky
— well, with eight megs of video ram, Soulblighter is still cutting-edge. WWII is the best mod. partly because of that wonderful freedom — to lay mines to the inch, to follow winding paths, and especially to pull a formation toward you, over every knoll and ditch, watching the lines of sight from the enemy’s perspective. But WarCraft, for all its sophistication of gameplay and plot, is stuck hiding units behind a quarter of all cliffs.
Then again, the plot kinda sucks. In the original game, you played the Humans and fought the Orcs, right? Well, gasp in amazement when you hear that things have progressed to the point where, in the third game, not only do you play both species,Okay, so you can play the Undead and the Elves too. but (O bitter irony!) the Orc protagonist is more sympathetic than the Human protagonist! Talk about irony — wow! It seems reasonable to suppose that the dialog was done by someone hired for Lucrative Realtime 3D Engine Developer Position (some writing required)
. We get lots of deathbed expositions and trumped-up arguments,I’m sick of mutiny as a plot device. It’s too convenient. and it’s all read by robots. Plus, the subs are written advertizer-style. With no commas. Just periods for every pause. I like short sentences. Even if I don’t use them all the time. But sometimes they are just wrong. Some pauses are far better represented by commas. Not periods. Except when they’re extremely emphatic. Which is why advertisers like them. And game designers too. It makes things more urgent. But reading it is like listening to a slow stutter, a sort of stuttering of ideas, where nothing comes out whole and nothing connects to anything else.
When I think about it, I try to keep my sentences under sixteen beats, and to organize them neatly into cause and effect, or neat parallels, if they get longer.
When I think about it,Tetrameter too, I guess. Long tetrameter is a reasonable denominator for me, because it seems to be the length of my phrases. On second thought, hexameter with cesuras. Bah. Counting beats is beside them point; what I meant is that I try without trying to write phrases against other phrases, and sometimes I pay attention to their patterns. I’m always ready to pop a one-phrase sentence for special effect, but I’m just as eager to use my trademark two-minute dive-bomb formula. Uh. Which, having identified for the first time, I will recipe:
I try to keep my sentences
under sixteen beats,
and to organize them neatly
into cause and effect,
or neat parallels,
if they get longer.
and, not commas). The adjectives are recalling and developing, and even re-interpreting, the nouns; this should be the first use for all of them. If you’ve occasionally used secondary names for some nouns, go ahead here too.
becomes.
Word! But back to complaining about WarCraft. I guess they should have worried more about naturalism. Orcs and Elves are one thing, but people just don’t say things like my first thought was to awaken you
— or, if they do, it sounds more old-fashioned than it sounds mythical. The whole business of trying to evoke history seems weird. They seem to mean to associate the game with Beowulf and so forth, and thus to imply that it’s exciting and, uh, good enough to repeat for a thousand years. If I were trying to give legitimacy to something that sucked, I’d call it revolutionary instead of associating it with — well, here’s the thing, see: the Human protagonist is named Arthas, and he gets a magic sword, and his mentor is names Uther. But wait! Uther is not his father, and he gets the sword by betraying his friends, and then he goes crazy. Huh? Some of that Round-Table stuff was pretty dark, but none of it was at all like that. If they’re going to — jeez — I mean, would it have killed them to call Arthas (say) Malcolm, and Uther (something like) Ethelred? Would it have hurt sales?
Furthermore, why to the Elves refer to nature
? In my experience, people who would have occasion to use the word don’t, any more than people in Manhattan are constantly referring to city
. I will do it for the good of the city
is no more absurd than s/city/nature/. If you live in nature, you don’t think about nature; you think about where you live. In everyday speech, people don’t talk about kinds of things, they talk about things. If Bungie can’t make a forest seem interesting without resorting to banal generalities, they got problems.
This sense of personal integrity in punks and mods — in a BBC broadcast, C. S. Lewis said:
People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says
If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing. I don’t think that is the best way of looking at it. I’d much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal lonliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to one state or the other.
Now, notwithstanding the various arguments against that as Christian theology, as an agnostic I feel reasonable twisting his words to imply that
A walk in Lake City, 17 April 02, with Zack and Marina (with flashbacks to a walk on Waldron Island, late October 01, with Arianna & Carrie).
Like Nirvana only bad, 70 decibels plus Bass Boost, and burnt cheese in the air. Right along 35th, and uphill. On the dark side of the street is a spray of white flowers — no, a leafy branch singled in a beam out of a hole in the face of the streetlamp.
(A mile from home, an owl coasts just over us. We stand silent and still for too long to measure in the middle of the ridged dirt road watching the bird sitting just above us. The owls call to each other over miles of forest like mad sad dogs.)
Coming down the hill in the middle of the road, I feel I’m getting sick. A plane flies through the clouds over us, a gray lambda flashing along, ripping out or roaring through its predicted groove. It’s banking toward Seatac, and as it turns it dips in and out of visibility. Zack points it out.
(At the tip of Sandy Point, after passing through numinous warm breezes and past big rocks, we stop. The moon is full or near-full but often hidden. There is an abandoned driftwood fort flying a skull and crossbones against the orange-gray sky, and two acres of tule and seagrass make subliminal scratchings. Clouds with faces like old men roll over islands with bodies like old women. The ocean is black and imperceptibly glittering with phosphorescent plankton, parallel to the aurora borealis somewhere behind the clouds.)
I’m worried that this will all be lost. City steets will one day have white lights, not orange. The tongues of warm air we felt rolling off the forest will be irrelevant. The entropy will dissimilate us all. Wideband radiation will be everywhere. We must look for another green world.
The big fear of *n?x old-timers seems to be the symbolic interface. They see icons and mascots as mittens keeping us from direct manipulation of concepts. Right they are, but hypocritical, because symbols are what it’s all about. Words — letters — are symbols like a life-saver for save
, though better and more flexible ones. Fewer buttons and more hypertext-like links. Symbols are only good when they are either abstract (a, b, c) or really analogues, when you can do to them easily what it’s hard to do with the real thing.
Last Christmas Dad gave me The Three-Cornered World, by Natsume Soseki, and I’m halfway through it.
Our narrator is an artist in Meiji Japan. He is a Victorian sort of host to you in his head: meta-introverted: there’s a perspective, but he tries not to come on too heavy. He wants to get outside himself and into the world, so you have a nice combination of cockpit and overhead views.
I think the attitude (translation disclaimer goes here) is delicate but appropriate.
I wish I had the time to put the book in context. There is presumably an interesting mythological or traditional significance to butterflies, for instance. Here and there are sort of stereotypically oriental litanies of divinity:
If pressed for an explanation, I would say that my soul was moving with the spring. Imagine all the colours, breezes, elements and voices of spring solidified, ground to powder and blended together to form an elixir of life, which had then been dissolved in dew gathered from the slopes of Olympus, and evaporated in the sun of fairyland. I felt now as though the vapour rising from just such a precious liquid had seeped through the pores of my skin and, without my being conscious of it, saturated my soul.
I think I speak for me when I say what the hell?
Dew? Fairyland? Vapour? If he’s making fun, I’d at least like to know how. If he isn’t – well, how did this metaphor get hired? In his place, I’d be proud to say just that the day seemed to be soaking in. There’s literature afoot, and I don’t know where to look: Soseki’s winking, and I’m shrugging.
Even if I can’t follow the discursions, or even work out where we are other than by comparing the thickness of the pages read to the pages to be read, it’s very very good. The fairyland shenanigan quoted above comes just after a first-rate landscape, and works around to an elegant little riff on abstract art. (He decided that you can take the subject out of a portrait and leave the portrait: that art
means evocation more than representation. – Quite rightly, I think, and at least fifty years ahead of most people.)
I’ve got the Canturbury Tales in translation (perilation?) here, and for the moment I’d rather read them. Soseki was great this morning, over miso soup and in natural light, but right now I can only handle the Pogues and Unix.
a+story+as+sharp+as+a+knife.html
I got A Story as Sharp as a Knife, by Robert Bringhurst, from the library, and you should too, because it’s $50.00.
Today I read Wendell Barry and Bruce Chatwin with interludes of Ezra Pound. Barry and Chatwin fall into close harmony, and Pound is off on bass. My abstractions tell me but don’t understand that everything is about itself, and that self is about other, and that stillness is a pattern of motion. The water in a wave barely moves from side to side; the huge structures of everything flex only in some dimensions.
What is stillness? Death. (And yet.) Satisfaction everywhere would fade to boredom but could not be perturbed. (And yet.) Backlash keeps us alive; the sociopolitical boundaries of Europe are probably incapable of equilibrium, but that keeps them from disappearing into mush. (And yet.) Borders sound depressing, though: see it as not divisions but connections; not rims but spokes. (And yet.) Everything talks to everything else, and the talking wears paths.
whilst swinging the corpse of a black cat round your head at the stroke midnight in a graveyard. with a browser and some fonts. with software you don't have. with Internet(R) Explorer[TM]. with a great big stick. with full comprehension of the effects of your actions. with an attitude of heathly skepticism. in light of the recent developments concerning the issues. if you like this kind of stuff. thru rose-tinted glasses. under the influence of caffeine. outside business hours. over packet radio. without excess emotional baggage. under optimal viewing conditions. with a very weak telescope. with a very weak microscope. without thinking about it too hard. as an allegory. as a sort of metaphor. as a desperate cry for help. by people who like me. without passing judgement. with NCSA Mosaic on an Amiga. as a hexdump. as html. over a cool can of Slurm(R). with an eye to the future. with an ear to the ground. with your nose to the grindstone. without preconceived notions of truth and beauty. with tongue firmly in cheek. Your cheek, you pervert. with cynicism and malice. with liberty and justice for all. with secret hope. without a cause. with nothing to lose. without visible means of support. with cheerful nonchalance as an example to others. as a suggestion, not an order. with alarm. thru hypercool mirror shades. with your back straight and eyes level with the top of the monitor. with your credit card number ready. while in your Happy Place. with a slight accent. through the eyes of a small child. through a polarized transparent medium. by imagining how it should look. by asking me for a screenshot. without paying a whole lot of attention. in the dead of winter, when the sky is like a blank slate, diffusing gray nothingness over the broken and ghostly earth. while driving. in the hope of stealing my ideas. with a standards-compliant browser on a minority operating system. with a sense of irony. without really caring. on a sunny tropical beach. with some fonts you've never heard of. with your disbelief suspended -- forcibly, if necessary. as yet another of those things that just happen. as yet another example of rampant yellow journalism, lamentable moral decay, and sloppy diction. without hope or expectation of reprieve. with despair. with alarm. with no idea of its sociopolitical significance. on a reduced instruction-set chip. in awe and wonder. while swaying rhythmically. with an air of passive acceptance. thru kitschy 3-D glasses. in a certain field in rural Austria while under the effects of whatever gets you through the day. with your eyes closed and your mouth open. with your own browser settings. with distaste and distain. with an alarming degree of interest. with absolute and unassailable belief. by the extremely gullible. in the quiet faith that it all means something. as Braile. on a thinking-machine.
I wonder how it is that such annoying and poppish music works so well. I suspect I’ll never find a satisfactory answer by asking the question out loud; that the only way to get it is to do it. Woah — five two-letter words in a row. (Oh my, no — if to do it in it is as to be of it or on it, go to it!) I guess pop is defined as what works most immediately, and the annoyingness is annoyance at its working so well.
Watching smoke rise from a thing of incense. The raw unknowable mathematicality of it is stifling. Getting too involved in this stuff — walkin’ around finding koan-like extremities of perception — is the intellectual equivalent of smoking everything in the medicine chest trying to get high: it works really well, but it can be a bit of a downer if you’re not careful. The smoke-structures are, in their specifics, quite unlike anything else we see, but they show the same subtext of being, the same liquid metaform of motion, the same — aww heck — tao as everything else everywhere.
People seem so taken with simple self-referentiality. What’s too great about the second hearing of avoid clichés like the plague
? Contrariwise to that particular curmudgeonliness, I’m pretty cool with clichés, or at least set phrases; just like disgusting ad hoc words filling a need — automobile, radar, RAM — cliches (enough with the accent already) should be given a chance. After all, they’re just words with spaces built in, and a lot of words are phrases with the spaces taken out — see previous list. The words for just about everything under the heading of New Technology are pretty gross. For one, technology: it’s nearly synonymous with technique, and no one goes around twaddling about high-technique equipment or whatever. Input and output are, when you look at them for themselves, pitiable mutilations; sadly, they’re short and extremely useful — though, when you think about it, not really: you can talk about stdin (standard-in) and so on. Parameters or arguments to a function are also pretty gross. It’s depressingly hard to think of excellent replacements for most of these words, but they’re so arbitrary and puffed up that just about anything in the dictionary could nose them out.
Okay, let’s take random-access memory
. First, there’s nothing nondeterministic about it. To distinguish itself from read-only memory, why not call it writable? Of course, that’s a pretty weird word too; let’s go with nothing — since the other kind is called read-only (and no one cares about it), it’s not a loss. You cannot access something, you can only have access to it — it’s a noun, not a verb. This sounds clumsier, but luckily there are a lot of situations like this one, where it means nothing anyway. (See? Already we’re down from three words to one.) A computer’s live memory (the stuff that isn’t on the disk) is not particularly like anything else called memory more than, say, a landscape is a memory to a deer walking over it. It’s more of a medium or a world or a state than a repository of experiences in ditto. What is and isn’t memory is a diverting metaphysical question, but whatever the answer, it’s sure that however much like memory RAM is, it’s not as much like it as disk space is. Things that get stored all together, cross-referenced and nonvolatile, are memories indeed, unlike the ultra-short-term patterns (derived from memories, to be sure) that pop up in the fast, hashed-up self-stuff used to do work. So we should stop calling RAM memory. Try state — but core, mind, reach (in reach
sounds cutsie but works well), and store all work. Anyhow, random access memory should be called state. Oh, sure, tell me all about how you can’t imagine saying I’m gonna order another 128 megs of state
or how much you love acronyms that spell something irrelevant; go ahead, ruin my little project.
A path is the route to a file, in other words, its name and the names of all its containers in order. On Unix systems (including Mac OS X), paths start with /
; on older Macs, with anything; under Windows, with something like C:\
. For instance, as I write, this file’s path on its server is .
A URI (sometimes called a URL) is a path that includes the name of a server, as though it were just another directory. Thus URIs work as web addresses, because your browser can tell what server to connect to, and the server can tell what file to send back.
Here’s a color-coded imaginary URI:
http://www.example.com/plants/cacti/sajuaro.html
There are a few things to worry about in this system. What about capitalization and spaces between words? Do we need or want the suffix? [closure, baby]
I think the biggest mistake anyone ever made with paths was introducing file extensions. There are several ways to tell whether something in an HTML file:
.htmlat the end of its path
An attributed filesystem relies on the co-operation, or at least lack of suck, of its users. The filesystem shouldn’t be expected to have . A file’s creator, last modifier, or direct user-agent (e.g., Change File Type inspector)
The ability to hide file extensions is a relief, but not a solution. Supposing two files identical in every way except file extension are on the desktop, how am I to tell them apart? If by their icons, suppose the thing responsible for setting icons doesn’t recognize either extension, or that one has no extension at all. Okay, I guess it could hide only known extensions. But surely it will not hide them from the C library’s fopen() function, and therefore third-party tools will have either to rewrite or to see a world different from the user’s. (In other words, how do I tell a text-only program which of two visibly different but apparently identically-named files I want?)
So just hiding extensions is kind but not wise. The power of the idea of paths – a simple and useful abstraction from the physical filesystem – is more important than avoiding a minor eyesore. I think it can be both elegant and pretty, though: all we need is more metadata. As it is, files are associated with more than a path: modern systems keep track of their kind (file proper, link, directory, etc.) creation and modification times, and owner and permissions. The old Mac also stored two four-byte fields which defined the file’s type and parent application; this was how icons were assigned, and so forth.It worked really well, and the only thing I’d change would be to make the field larger and thus less arbitrary. Some of the four-character codes were pretty bizarre: I recall R*ch
for BBEdit, MOSS
for Navigator (probably a reference to the Mozilla, which was an early mascot), and Eric
for some system files.
Anyhow, a new system could use the Mime types or just about anything else, and we’d all be happy. You could even have an optional or graphical-only translation layer, so appending .html
would changed the filetype metadata (and, perhaps, revert to the old name – heh heh).
That
Reed’s library uses the Library of Congress system: books are shelved under a one- or two-letter general prefix, then by a three-digit number, with edition and date and so forth as a tiebreaker. For example, I have here E99.H2B74 1999 (as in most North American books, it’s given on the copyright page). Maybe this isn't as elegant as the absolutely one-dimensional Dewey system, but I think it’s denser, more conductive to sanity, and, given practice, as clear.
The library here where my grandmother lives, anyway, uses the Dewey system. Hm
, I think, stepping inside and shooting my ample cuffs, Herewith I shall find and peruse Edward Tufte’s outstanding trilogy on practical graphic design, viz. Envisioning Information, , and of course .
And indeed, the computer finds each book – Envisioning Information at 001.4226, in the misc reference
section, at 302.23, under media studies
, and at 760, as printing and graphic design
.
Huh? These books were written by one author in one decade, and if you’ve seen one of them, you can’t see either of the others without wanting to shelve them together. Each has on its back something like if you liked this book, please try its two companion volumes, ...
– really, because the first two have been reprinted since the last came out [double-check]. I guess I had some kind of tacit supposition that competant librarians, and programs acting as their agents, had a new book subfunction that asks where the author’s previous books went. Sheesh. I’ll look for the encyclopedia under machinery for Abacus–Anywhere, botany for Amaranth–Axon, and paleontology for Aztec–Boycott.
Henceforth, this will be known as the Tufte lemma of—
The proportion of a library’s interesting books shelved between Dewey 000.0000 and 003.0000 approaches 1/3.
If you've ever upgraded a Lombard or Pismo Apple G3 PowerBook, you know how to pop the keyboard off -- cool, huh? Wanna try popping the individual keys off?
I do not recommend doing any of this. In fact, I recommend against it; consider it a gedankenexperiment or an autopsy for a dead computer. You may irreperably damage your hardware and void your warranty. This is merely a description of my experience. [Much later and wiser note: in fact, you can really break an aluminum PowerBook if you try this.]
The keyboard is a circuit-board on an aluminum bed. The board is kept cozy by a layer of tough black plastic and a latex dust-attractor. You can pop a key off by lifting carefully on the top corners with your fingernails, and you can see how each
Each key covers a latex nipple which protects the pressure-sensor and works as a conical-flex spring. Above each nipple on either side are sockets with tiny east-west holes, into which fit the pins on the sides of the tips of a U-shaped white plastic thingy. The U hugs a similar O-shaped thingy, which can pivot inside it and tucks into to the base at the bottom. Since they're joined fairly loosely, they can lift up like a car-jack. Their loose ends (U at the bottom, O at the top) click into sockets in the bottom of the key:
____
x| / \ |x U connects to base
|x| |x| U connects to O
| \_xx_/ | O connects to base
\________/
You can pop white plastic scissor-hinges out by squeezing the top and pulling towards you.
The spacebar is trickier. It has two O-U scissors, but only one nipple; it's held even by a stiff wire running along the top and tucking in at the bottom. Be sure to tuck the wire in when you replace it (I didn't, and bruised an important flange). My spacebar leans almost imperceptibly to the right because the left scissor squishes against the lump where the black sheet folds under -- probably also because I tend to hit the spacebar with my right thumb. This could be fixed (or cancelled out, anyway) by twisting the wire counterclockwise, but it won't be worth it for another quarter-million strokes or until the black layer's glue starts to give.
Charlie Hears from his Anima
This is a dream I had in the early morning of 6 May 2002. I’m leaving it as I first typed it, save linguistic mistakes. There’s at least one continuity hole, I think it made the clearest memory of any dream I can remember. It was very vivid (and colorful), and very plain in its ideas. I think that dreams, and especially this one, are likely to have deeper meaning, but I’m not doing any interpreting for you.
I was in a big bright city full of campers or whatnot — I think it was a little before Camp. It was certainly summer, and people were happy. The streets were big and there was lots to see and everyone walked. There were restaurants and gardens and museums and toy shops and everything along the road. It was great; it was like downtown Santa Barbara on a good day.
I came to a place, a store or something, a little off the road. There was a nook in the wall with no floor and some sheets of paper stapled to it. They were poetry, and I liked them, so I read them. I liked them very, very much. Off to one side was the poet, or maybe just a photo of the poet: a post-starvation Somali woman, barely clothed in something boring, writing complacently on a wall. I stared for a while, and later, when I was talking to one of the curators or caretakers of this display, some people burst in and began to rip her poetry up. If I’d been reading it instead of talking about it, I would have been able to keep them from ripping it. There was a big ugly sneering woman and a couple little neurotic men, and I couldn’t seem to stop them. Eventually I fought or argued them off, or made them go get legal reinforcements, and took a fire-pole down into the nook.
On the floor were the ripped-up papers, and I began to hand them back up to the curators and the other visitors, who didn’t trust me at first. When I bumped into the wall, I saw that it was covered with tiny writing, and when I looked behind me, I saw that the writing covered the walls of a whole story of the building down here. One or two of the other people came down too — loud bright woman poets and meek subtle woman poets and loud jock men poets and me — and I read. It was poetry that I’d been waiting to read for years. It talked about beauty beautifully, and about pain clearly, and it even complained about corporate America well. It was smart and erotic and it covered every wall down here in one piece. The rest of the place was a bookstore of some sort, so for vague property reasons
the poet hadn’t been allowed to touch the bookcases or certain parts of the floor, but the whole room was colorful and elevated by her muted pastel under-coloring and her poetry. There was a loft at one end where I climbed up and saw but could not read the end of this poem: her handwriting, in Magic-Marker capitals, said SMART ROOM
with arrows at the white space left over at the end of the poem. I thought about that for a while, and felt how odd it is to see someone’s handwriting in Magic Marker after seeing hundreds of square feet of it tiny.
As I was thinking, the indignant people came back. Before they had said that the poetry was obscene and that they needed this space for their private notices, but now they just hated us. We spread out and argued and accepted them and ran away, but I made a mistake: I punched a row of books so that it hit their leader, the sneering woman. She fell down and panicked, and I sprinted for the next nook up. The person ahead of me was one of the jocks, but he had been reading the poetry with interest. When we saw that the only way up was a fire-pole, we laughed while running and he said Good, a challenge!
and started shinnying up it. I took the stairs and helped him at the top, and we took off running. I went back the way I came, and made another mistake: I heard someone calling behind me, but when I couldn’t see who it was in the distance, I left them behind. I ran until I was exhausted, and I saw a store with the same blue-and-white awning as the house that had the poetry, and realized that now those people would be after me for a very long time, not after that poetry or any poetry, but after me (I must not have actually seen the poet, the Somali woman, she must have had to disappear, the others would have broken her bones), and that the only thing I had to do now was write poems on walls.
moon over my shoulder
water over my head
soap clouds drift down
the forest is feathered:
a forest of birds live in it
opening the window
to keep air coming up
dead binoculars
handful of lenses
In The Difference Engine, Wm Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s steampunk adventure, the Communards attempt a coup in pseudo-Victorian London.
In Repo Man, a sort of punk-era Cool Hand Luke, a televangelist enjoins us to fight Communism abroad, and liberal humanism at home!
I’ve been reading The God That Failed, a book of essays by prominent ex-Communists. It was published in 1950, and smells of cheap paper and Joe McCarthy, but the writers are excellent. Now I want to go read all Arthur Koester and Richard Wright. Stephen Spender says:
It is obvious that there were elements of mysticism in this faith. Indeed, I think that this is an attraction of Communism to the intellectual. To believe in political action and economic forces which will release the new energies in the world is a release of energy in oneself. One ceases to be inhibited by pity for the victims of revolution. Indeed one can regard pity as a projection of one’s own revolutionary wish to evade the issue of revolution. One can retain one’s faith in the ultimate goals of humanity and at the same time ignore the people in prison camps, the tens of thousands of slave workers. Do these exist? Whether or not they do, it is bourgeois propaganda to maintain so.
Ta-da, the first broad and honest account I’ve had of the issue. People like to say looks good on paper, fails in practice
, et cetera, but Spender actually explained how reasonable people could suck up to Lenin and Stalin. I gather from this, and from Louis Fisher’s account here, that Communism was attractive partly for its contradictions, for the one-time alertness it took as a central denial.
Like certain of the elder religions, Communism establishes itself as the outermost frame of reference. Everything in it must be either revolutionary or bourgeois, so there are no neutral judgments – and so everything’s exciting and full of potential. You have only to accept the idea of point sources of good and evil. I think it’s cool just because it starts so abstracted and clean and ends up justifying anything you can call revolutionary. Ah—ah—hatchoonationalsecurity! Oh my! Excuse me!
Most of the essays in the book are not particularly anti-Communist, but anti-totalitarian and anti-delusion, and they’re framed in this wonderful experienced idealism. I respect the mass of mid-century intellectuals, who absorbed terrible things and just got more lucid. My grandmother points out that one of the reasons Communism survived was that it either killed or bought its artists and scientists; it didn’t let them be seen angry. Hitler may have understood some propaganda, but he didn’t seem to notice that he’d first abused and then exiled the people who could complain most loudly and credibly. The Reich didn’t realize that there were international mass media (novelists, even), but the young USSR played them like mad.
I guess I’ve just seen so much of other people’s angst left over from the Cold War that an account from the inside, and of its relatively twee beginnings, is surprising. Never having seen them, I’m sick of hearing about the bitterly noble cold warriors staving off Communism-or-Imperialism. But if these decent-seeming fellas were in the thick of it, writin’ poems ’n’ fightin’ Nazis, I’ll read about it.
Ides of October 2001
My cabin is heated by an ambitious little Lopi stove. This winter my family has been especially lazy about wood, so I run the stove only every third day or so, but as hot as I can. The night before a run, the whole building is cooled off, and I sit typing in the highest room with stiff fingers and stinging toes. The air is moist, and when a window is open for oxygen, a draft blows against my face. But when I'm on the computer, I keep my headphones on and I don't feel cold at all.
People who don't stay up all night now and again are missing out. So are people who stay up all night habitually. All-nighters, if you pay attention, tell you a lot about humanity and nature; there are things I know I could not have learned from anything but bashing syntaxen as the sun came up. The night is violently still. The abstract momentum of human activity -- the number of people in downtown, the steadiness of highway traffic, the continuity of shop business -- folds away in the dark. Walking down an empty urban sidewalk is weird. Humanity has a meta-motion that looks so stable but fades so quickly at night that you think you still hear it. I never learned to speak well. Clear speech, in any sense, doesn't seem worth pursuing. Maybe I'm too vain to put effort into ephemeral things, but now and then I happily let a poem or some such rot in the woods or float off on the tide. I think it might be a wish that social interaction could be more quantified; that ... darn, lost it. I love my stove. It's built around an x axis -- most heat-stoves are around the y. The firebox fits stacked pieces end-to-front, which works wonderfully. I get déjà vu rarely but strongly. I've had two references to today: I found their ends while sucking air out of jars and while scrolling along XMMS's play-list. It's very much like a memory in reverse, but I'm still not conceding that it's supernatural. I'm totally hip to the subconscious-and-unconscious-being-extremely-smart jive, though: my brain's a quirky character, and I'm sure it does all kinds of things without my prior knowledge and informed consent. I remember future-remembering some things I did today, but it seems reasonably likely that I just made up a whole suite of meta-memories.20 October 2001
Robert Bringhurst consistently uses a, b and c instead of a, b, and c, and Bill Watterson often does. I’m about three more examples from switching. I asked some people on IRC a month or two ago, and they seemed mostly against it, but didn’t comment when I used it. Darn IRC doesn’t let you watch people creepily. Well.
I started Sterling’s Holy Fire (ISBN 0-553-09958-2) last evening and finished at dinner. It’s a passing good book, tho’ sorta flat. I didn’t check the copyright, but I suspect it’s one of his first or something. [No.] The plot is good and the ideas valid, but nothing really caught me off emotional or intellectual guard; maybe it’s just that he set the fads and I’ve been inoculated by his wannabes, but I don’t read much cyberpunk. I never felt like sitting still and concentrating on this or any similar book; there’s too much image. Maybe I’m just spoiled on Stephenson, but I’d like to think Sterling has equal virtue in some other way. At least it was free: a friend of the family was taking all her dead mom’s books to the post office freebox, dropped in for tea, and left without them. They’re mostly old and deservedly obscure, but here and there is a schweetly set Bible or a Saul Bellow (whom I’ve never read, but not for long).I guess my problem with cyberpunk is that I think it’s doomed to embarrassing falsehood because you can’t really tell the future. I mean, yeah, you can quote a dozen sci-fi authors who were talkin’ rockets and robots in the thirties, but none of them ever got a solid grip on what life in 2001 feels like, and that’s what cyberpunk seems to be trying for. My ideal for cyberpunk is to mange both technology and culture, and the one of the other. Perhaps it is impossible, or just unrealistically difficult, to manage hard science and a compelling story if you aren’r Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, or David Brin. I can’t hold Sterling, Gibson, et al. to the ignorance of the thirties, but neither can they touch the future — they’re not smarter by virtue of living today. In fact, making eighty-year predictions is harder now than then, what with the well-known exponential growth of history and all. (Of course, that’s a prediction in itself.) (Some sarcasm.) The twenties’ predictions showed Art Deco moon bases and womens’ space-suits with cloche helmets; the sixties’ predictions had puzzle-piece chairs and food colors everywhere — and, needless to say, neither had women doing anything useful or Black people doing anything at all.
(Food colors: Asher Sandburg-Lewis has cogently pointed out that every color popular in the late sixties and early seventies was directly derived from food, mostly fruit. Avocado, peach, orange, raspberry, oatmeal (popular for buildings), mint, chocolate, and so on, with absolutely no exceptions.)
— The idea that, once we’ve discovered enough races to be worth writing a novel about, we’ll turn out to be the most human of them, is pretty fair. After all, they’re likely to be decidedly strange, and even if one of ’em were to have more of our qualities than we do, we’ll still be the most human by having the qualities in the right amounts. The question is: what qualities? Sci-fi authors consistently make humans the plucky, well-rounded, unexceptional but unpredictable race. Look at Asimov, Niven, Star Trek, Pratchett, Robert Asprin, Herbert, and any number of others: their spectrums of races are almost interchangeable. There’s a warlike race, a cute race, a glum race, a smart race, an old wise race, a bear-like race, a(n inter)stellar race of pure energy, a trickster/trader race, and so on and on. Most authors are original enough to mix and match the stock aliens a little, but they always make humans exactly the same in relation to them: the underdog, the disadvantaged but noble species with not a lot of resources or book-learnin’ but plenty of spirit and gumption. We baffle the overly-intelligent, we beat the warlike, we outwile the wily, and so on, not by strength but by quirky earthling logic and sudden intuition. Well, what the hell? How did we get any idea of what’s earthling and what’s not without comparing ourselves to anyone? How can we expect to be more or less anything than anyone without having any idea what they’re like? I mean, get real. What we’re looking at — this gritty humanoid pride, this unpredictable earthling cleverness — is pure projection. Any portrayal of humans vs. x is coming from nowhere but the author’s head. As such, it’s interesting as human psychology, but surely we should worry if something so contrived feels right as a portrayal of ourselves in circumstances we can’t imagine. Like action-movie characters having huge biceps and breasts, it’s best to notice and think about.
— The idea that, to maintain an air of futurosity, it helps to write with a hypercool disregard for not-strictly-necessary grammatical tags. The building was big, gray, uncaring.
Another slept, tired.
This only seems futuristic because it’s modern, and it’s been modern for a really long time, so quit it. If you think it makes your prose cleaner and more icily sparse, you may be right, but you’re also stupid. Hemingway — who was cool, don’t get me wrong — with his transcendence of inessential grammar, was reacting or experimenting against the Victorians, who liked to use as much grammar as possible. Now, you may like Hemingway because he was clean and clear and studly (which Asimov and clones seemed to like), and you may think the Victorians are old hat, and you may be right. But Hemingway, despite being lucid and fast, was quite the converse of both computers and the shiny gritty bitterness (like bad coffee) that cyberpunk seems to like so much. Semicolons are extremely well-adapted to cyberpunk’s modes of thought; they’re not <wuss> tags. The Victorian feel for language is what cyberpunk needs: an expressive, structured, big-idea/tiny-detail meta-patterning. Yes, it needs new vocabulary and new forms (maybe an infusion of Nipponese), but it’s a far better base than Hemingway or anything like him. Dig The Difference Engine, by Sterling and Gibson. (Stephenson, in The Diamond Age, sums up why other Victorian ideas port well to technocracy.)
Some people figure everything is full of spirits. The more I think about it, the more I think they just happen to carry the metaphor for something we all do. If you always bump your elbow on a particular innocent-looking doorframe, you could take the animist perspective and satisfy the spirit of the doorway. If you’re more practical, you could measure the doorway and its approaches,compare it with others, and figure out what to change. If you’re a dancer, actor, or athlete, you might go though it slowly and carefully to find the motions that make you collide. If you’re into introspecive psychology, you could take the chance to examine your attitudes toward entries and what this particular doorway suggests to you that you have to confront. If you dig feng-shui, you’ll map out the ley-lines and so forth leading to this discharge of disharmonious energies. Et cetera.
When something bothers you, you have a way of looking at it carefully. The more quickly you use your way (ways, really) instead of just swearing at the doorframe each time, the healthier you’ll be. It’s not just things that annoy you — it applies to anything that catches your attention. Everyone is always under a hot avalanche of sensation and perception and memory, and to understand and react to it, they let a few microcode handlers deflect the mass of it. The more engaged you are, the lower your thresholds are and the more information filters through to your self and the more sophisticated your world-models become. The less you operate on mental reflexes and the broader and more precise your deliberate habits are, and the better you are at learning new ones and switching between them, the better off you are.
My favorite way of dealing with doorframes and so on is by writing. To me it seems like the Best Way because it’s the most general, but of course everyone will defend another way as they best by way of its helping people or being the truth or not being constrained by notions of Way. I like mine for being the Way of Ways, for being expression instead of action, or — well, see, writing is an action, especially as it takes an action to cause an action, but it’s an extreme case in either direction, because you can do it very much in secret and still derive personal benefit from it, or spread it and therefore its effects more widely and directly than anything else. It’s given to weakness and self-satifaction, but hey. All in all, I dig prose as a medium: I tend to face things like bruising doorframes and lovely evenings with it.
Hey, I didn’t use meta-medium
even once!
Never feel guilty for cluttering up the web.
The Internet is a network of millions of people letting anyone check out the stuff on their hard drives. It is not a failure for people to share things that don't interest you or a sin for you to share things that you don't think will interest anyone else.
Anything could be useful sometime; everything is useful somehow. Dictionaries don't leave out boring or redundant or embarassing words. The Internet is a live encyclopedia of culture: put everything on it.
Small things should be modular, spare, and definable. Medium-sized things should be elegant, complete, and structured. Big things should be multiplex, generalized, and flexible. These are basic concepts, following smoothly from the idea of size, but having seen this you can hardly complain that the Internet is full of junk. Sure it is! Everything big is! It's not an annoying side-effect, it's part of the natural wholesome goodness of big things. The Earth is full of junk, the genome is full of junk, the library is full of junk — they couldn't not be.
And even so, junk DNA isn't junk, it's scraps. Some of the stuff in our genome is self-replicating and thus almost a seperate species, not parasitic but symbiotic: un-called-for routines for forgotten diseases that haven't forgetten us. If we could comb, cut, and wash the genome to be only the information for the physical processes you're using right now, homo sapiens would be gone within one hundred years. Junk DNA is not junk, it's only unused.
Big hairy things with lots of redundancy can be the Right Thing. The English language is full of sillyness (spelling, irregular verbs, and gender), but look at our poetry. The human body is full of confused and silly things like appendixes and a single cavity for breathing, eating, and talking, but we've run 4-minute miles and colonized Antarctica. Any healthy ecosystem is horribly self-entangled and full of competition, but as a whole it's efficient and stable — and the Internet too is not a park for grooming but a jungle we can live in. So what if you don't like its proportions? People in programming and blacksmithing say that a great tool is one used for something its creator had never heard of; don't keep knowledge to yourself just because you don't know how to use it.
No personal site bothers me per se until it apologizes for being a vanity site. Talking about yourself is not vanity, it's introspection, and to be let in on another human's self-reflection is an honor. Always assume your readers are interested; if they weren't, they wouldn't be your readers. I visit your website to see who you are and what you do; you're insulting us both if you complain about what you write and I read. I'll decide for myself whether it's good and I like it. In your writing, you have no responsibility to me besides honesty. I'm not paying.
Maybe you do have one other responsibility -- to make things public in the first place. It's food for our culture. Writing is a way of taking live thought and freeze-drying it. We write to put our ideas and feelings outside us, far enough away to focus on. The value of text is that it is quantifiable, inflexible, and sterile; any life it has is in the reading and writing. We take our intangible things and throw them into the exformation, the culture, the media, the shared experience, the outside world, because that's where they belong. You can't clutch creativity to yourself.
Art is abiotic, but it changes and grows with us. Long after you've forgotten why you put something in words, someone will find in it something that you don't even understand, something prophetic or descriptive of something you never cared about. When we fling art into the Outside, it composts. This poem lands on that technical reference and inspires someone idly wading in the Culture -- and what is better than an inspired human? Not everything useless is trash, and most trash is recyclable somehow; imagine the fun you could have with your neighbors' garbage. Information is even better, because it moves at the speed of light and contains no bacteria. Throw your scraps away, but not in private.
Let it all go. Artists are media, not creators. You are not the things you create. Writing is letting fruit fall. Never be scared to write anything down: never be ashamed to ask, never be embarassed to tell: we can never lose knowledge, it only increases. Make a full backup of your consciousness onto the web. Write that dumb thing down, be smarter tomorrow, don't regret. Everything is in the past, everything; you will never catch up with your self in writing, only in being.
Because it’s always there and always subject to taste, typography attracts idiots and pedants. The few people who know enough to take a credible stand on the issues are usually selling something
First, do no harm. The writing has to be legible and complete. Unfortunately, you can’t just make everything as simple as possible; you have to reflect a complicated world. For a start, there are more than 26 letters: what Americans call special characters
are not optional. Peter Høeg, for instance, is a real person with a real name; calling him Peter Hoeg is as wrong as calling him Paul Høeg. You can embed any Unicode character in HTML in the form &#U;
where U is its number, or use a named entity like ø
for ø or É
for É. Every browser knows Unicode, and Unicode knows every character, so you may as well use the right one.
Clean code, comfortable editing,
Carrie had the Pimlico reprint of Week-End Wodehouse out, and I’ve been flipping through it again. With Nick B-W I’ve talked now and again of the way some musicians use astonishingly insipid lyrics that unfurl into entire poems only through acceptance of their hokeyness, and to Mom the other day I was muttering that certain scenes in Harry Harrison’s non-highbrow Stainless Steel Rat series have stayed asonishingly vivid after one or two reads many years ago. (They’re mostly in the earlier parts of the series, around the introduction of Agelina and the first time he saves the world — the Gray Men; the rainy beach, burning shuttle, and farmer’s skiff; the cave he builds on ancient modern Earth, &c.) In the introduction to Week-End, Hilaire Belloc said that P. G. Wodehouse was the best living writer of English out of sheer sure vividness. It’s convincing, but, like anything more than fifty years old, the reasoning and stated scope feels awkward. (Reading outdated genuises in the original is weird. It’s also odd that modern translations of works first translated n years ago tend to sound n years old. Trying to out-KJV the King James Version is both silly and doomed.)
In the order I think of them, here are the writers whose prose renderings of sensations and abstractions strike me as excellent:
What was I measuring? Prose is the magic between words and ideas. Getting it right takes at least two of instinct, experience, and intelligence; getting it as well as Wodehouse takes genius. Good prose gracefully reflects reality; great prose does such a job on your perception that its effect is indistinguishable from defining reality — magic. This is what people are dimly poking when they say that books are better than movies because they leave more to the imagnination: a great writer makes you think it’s happening to you; you see the action, make the arguments yourself, and remember it like life.
(Children, who are still getting used to language and reality, are more succeptible than hard-headed adults. Children are all stoned: intellectually they’re remarkably like, say, Einstein or Shakespeare on LSD, speed, and pot. (This is interesting to think about while around children or stoned people.) They have incredibly credulous and unimaginably imaginative minds that will do the detail work of any correctly presented story; the hard part for authors is correct presentation. We elders are similar in kind if not degree: everyone’s a little stoned all the time, poets and mathematicians and lovers more than others.)
Different people in different moods feel more comfortable with certain things implicit and others explicit; any overall level of detail is a compromise redeemed by the tuning of one detail against another that abstracts to good writing, painting, or music. There’s a place on the implicit/explicit spectrum for every kind of entertainment and art, from the most abstact music to the best-rendered virtual reality. They don’t cross-compete — economists would disagree, but the only artistically interesting squabbles are between two forms trying to live in the same niche on the detail scale.
Good prose is like walking: rhythmic, flexible, human travel, exposed and observant. It’s honest and sincere but not predictable, and it is incapable of boring. It’s the best way to see get to know a place, they say. It will use roads, tunnels and bridges if they’re there, but it can go where nothing conscious has been before, alone, quiet and moving.
This is all about taste. Prose is art; there’s something cuspy and analog about it — the theoretical finitude and reducibility of expression acknowledged but unapplied — and it’s not for forcing on other people. I have, on the other hand, absolutely no compunction about spraying my prose or metaprose all over. To my taste, a definition of good prose is self-support: it tends to stay in the content corner and not talk about itself except when trying to. Except as humour or last chocks against misunderstanding, these tick me off:
They break the spell and disturb the purity of the illusion. I don’t like saying so, though: usually people whining over broken illusions are scared of actual mysteries being dissolved instead of the protrusion of one context into another. (When actual alleged spells are broken, the properly flexible mind can see the spell or the reality as convenient, or even superimposed. A spell is an abstraction (in this subcontext, an unwilling or unknowing one), and we can’t live without abstractions, but to reveal them as such is not to destroy them. Geeks, who understand such things, create them willingly by, e.g., referring to computer code as having intentions. Willing suspension of disbelief applies to all writing, even the driest: we agree to run a model of the author’s train of thought to see if it works, provisionally granting statements that we would reject as the Truth. Another duty of prose (towards the form end) is to provide for smooth suspension, and things that use the reader’s concentration for anything other than model-train building — ignoring it is worth noting that
, correcting typos, or finding a footnote — are in the way of communication.
People feel like something is lost when impressive things are explained in terms of unimpressive things. We resist (rightly or wrongly) the ideas that our minds are nothing but cells and that cells are nothing but atoms, that aliens aren’t among us, and that eerie conincidences happen in accordance with the laws of physics. Everything that seems engaging and warm is made awkward by inopportune literal explanation: love as physiology is so weird an idea that we try our darnedest to forget it.
What is it that we want back when things are explained? Nothing: nothingness — mystery. Mystery lets there be something better than possible, and that’s fun to hope for. But every time you smash a mystery, you find three behind it; it’s not like science, philosophy, or art is going to run out of worries. (People have quite often called frontiers final. Cannonically, Alexander the Great cried that there was nothing left to loot; there are scientists now seriously supposing that we’re almost done.) By sloppy but reliable induction and extrapolation, it’s clear that every mystery belongs to the class of solvable mysteries. (All you religious folks can can bally well shut up — I didn’t say solvable by humans.)
I just finished Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson, and I think he may break my list up there. He has just about every desirable skill except that extreme solidity of prose. He certainly has a better grasp on art than Sterling, and he manages to explain some, which I respect. If only he could lay off the sex a little — even the literarily valid sex — ahhh well. His microwriting isn’t as good (can’t be as good?) as his paragraph-scale stuff, though, and — hrm.
We went to Minnie’s and listened to Nirvana and Procol Harum, and at three Mitchell and Nick and I walked to the park. It closes at dusk, but there’s no gate. The moon was full but we saw that there was almost no halo on it, so the sky wasn't orange but it was still light all night.
I lay on my back on the gravel near Mitchell. The sky was green and yellow around the edges (it was near dawn), and midnight blue in an egg-shaped patch at the zenith. I saw two satellites, and wondered what the undisturbed tribes think of them. The sky seemed like a dessert sky, and I fancied myself lying on sand, flat in all directions, listening to the silence until something warm nudged my hand.
What do we put between ourselves and what we say we’re talking about? Is there any kind of thing except the kind that gets in the way? In lambda calculus, even numbers are verbs; nothing has an inside. You think you’ve seen through all the symbols and got to the heart of it and you realize that thinking and seeing and symbols and hearts are thoughts and perceptions and symbols. So then do you study the trivial? I don’t know. I’ve been feeling an urge to break through it all, to get enlightenment, and yet I feel that there is no through and that wanting enlightenment is like fighting for peace. I suppose I’ve often enough fought for peace.
Howard Rheingold tells us that on-line community is community, and Cliff Stoll warns us that computers are not the only window to the world. My parents moved to a place where their interactions were physical and mental and emotional and immediate, and I wonder what I want of that.
Paradoxical is with Nick and me at the Blanchard-Wrights’. We drove — he drove — around in the evening, over the Tacoma Narrows bridge, with cathedral clouds and a little fog on the water.
Looking across a long bay at dusk to a forested shoulder with a radio tower at the highpoint and four or five mixed lights over on the water? I could have counted a dozen kinds of off-black, and all of them would have implied the whole hundred cubic miles. This land is generous to our human ambitions; it acquiesces to assumptions and reservations. From across a fjord, it’s a lot of green-gray; while driving through it, there is nothing but forest; three feet in, it’s heavy liquid textures flowing a little out of reach.
Imagine a city on a hillside, a half-terraced multi-story city leavened with green-gray trees, and in a large room with a downhill view over the city and to the water — a tall, bare room painted in flat olives and stucco blues — a really great orchid or something, maybe a bird of paradise, hanging just within reach, but you cannot touch it because you wouldn’t believe it while you did. There isn’t too much beauty, but there’s too much other beauty. Stop imagining and step onto the porch in the dawn. Are you sure you stopped?
We’re really quite stuck with it all, even the aloof and slippery bits: not even their patterns, but them. The world is completely perfect — let’s go get ice cream!
suggests some kind of dynamic perfection or perfection-in-silhouette, and traditionally we are to regard the trick not at coming unstuck but as sticking to the world instead of to our stickiness. And I just don’t know, but something in my æsthetic-emotional magnetism to those views over Salish Sea bays is enough to sit and watch by its own warmth.
| Words Some of this comes from playing with the GNU/Linux program "grep"; I used the linuxwords file that comes with Madrake 8.0 (cksum: 1182854002 409048 /usr/share/dict/words), though not exclusively. I've excluded plurals and some other close forms. Words that work as html colors:Words with seven consecutive consonants (counting y): |
