Arthur C. Clark, the great Golden Age SF writer and scientist, who predicted geo-sync communication satellites back in 1945, invented the concepts of cold fusion, space shuttles, supercomputers, notebook computers, the Y2K bug (and it's solution), video phones, mobile phones, the ion drive, and the near-orbit slingshot maneuver, has now predicted that one day everyone will have email! "Is it not strange," Shakespeare wrote, "that desire should so many years outlive performance."
I'm thinking about moving out of the country in order to get jobs with US companies. This article wants me to invest in the outsourcing trend. I think we should put tariffs on labor.
This dude wrote a Lacanian treatment of The Matrix, which was inevitable since you can apply Lacan to everything from Finnegans Wake on down to... I don't know... this.
What's with all the lousy web sites? I'm not talking about Sally's Vanity Site on geocities, I mean sites for big respectable companies, companies that make all kinds of cash, companies that expect me to give them money for the services they provide. I decided to try to pay my energy bill online this morning (PECO/Exelon) and was met by the most convoluted, incoherent, simply messy mess I could ever hope to avoid. I'd call it a monstrosity but it's main flaw was a near total lack of information. They couldn't even let me see my bill, but I was supposed to pay them through some service called "Speedpay" who were going to charge me a 2.8% "convenience fee". Gee thanks.
A-and then there's Verizon. I must categorically state that Verizon has a terrible web site. Either they hired some lousy programmers, tried to integrate too many vertical apps, or they're running on a lousy platform (and I happen to know they're a Microsoft shop). Most likely all of the above. Routinely I'll try to log in and get a 404. Or I'll change a password and the system won't recognize the new one (or the old one), and I either have to wait for some database replication (or -- *shiver* -- some batch process) to migrate my login, or call customer service in order to be told to wait, or open a new session and try try again. And there's pop-ups all over the place (I *hate* pop-ups -- don't designers know by now that people *hate* pop-ups, that pop-ups are now the associative equivalent of ads?), and I have to inform PopUpCop that Verizon is allowed to open browser windows for me (which I hate just on principle -- *I* control the windows around here, not some snotty web site). And for some reason they need to know my zip code before I can even log in. And they never remember the zip code, so I have to enter it every time. And I have a different login for my home phone, my long distance, and my wireless accounts, so I have to go through this three separate times in order to pay my phone bills.
Verizon needs to start over, and PECO/Exelon just needs to start (but such is the way I suppose with corporate welfare recipients).
Here's a warm human interest story.
I am somewhat ambivalent about the new $20 bills. Part of me likes to see some color and variation added (although this first attempt makes the bill look kind of stained more than anything, like a rivulet of coffee or worse cut across the middle), but then every other country's got colorful bills (usually with some wacko king or viking or something on it), and it was the persistently bland green of our bills that made them distinctive. Whether or not they'll stop counterfeiters is another matter -- I didn't realize counterfeit money was still a major problem (no matter how high I set the quality settings on my printer, the 20's still come out looking fake!).
I've been reading that the next generation of currency will be dumping paper and switching to plastic (which apparently New Zealand and Australia already has). How are fatcats going to light their cigars with *plastic* bills?
Season 3 of Six Feet Under is now over (after 13 episodes, which isn't enough), and it was better than the first few weeks led me to expect. [Spoilers follow...] The scene in the last episode with Nate driving -- drunk, battered, crazed, desperate, while his dead father and dead wife torment him from the passenger seats (so much like baggage) -- was an unforgettable minute of terrifying beauty (Peter Krause needs an Emmy or something for his portrayal of Nate's breakdown over the last few episodes), and his arrival at Brenda's doorstep both logical and somehow unexpected.
I also really liked the scene where Claire travels through the land of the dead (her Virgil her father in 60s summer dress) to meet her old boyfriend Gabe ("I didn't know you were dead!") and finally Lisa with Claire's own child ("Can you give me a ride? I have to go get an abortion") leading to a flash of personal epiphany for her that reminded me of Natasha's in War and Peace.
There had been rumors that the season would end with Nate awakening in the hospital to realize the entire season had been a dream (ala the infamous Bobby-wakes-up Dallas episode), and I was both relieved and disappointed when those proved untrue (relieved because it would have been hokey and would have left many dangling plot-threads, and disappointed because it would have fit this particular show in which dream and fantasy often confuse and collapse reality anyway).
But it's over now, and I must return to more-or-less ignoring television. It's curious how a show this good is able to make everything else on TV so impossible to watch.In retrospect I now realize that of all the music I listened to as a kid, the band that was trying to guide me in the right directions, to become the kind of person who I would now most likely respect, was Rush. Yes, Rush. When I listen to songs like Limelight, Freewill, and New World Man today (rarely, I'll admit), I regret not paying a little more attention to them, and a little less to the likes of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. (Although that song "Closer to the Heart" reeks of socialism if you ask me.)
Marriage contracts have become archaic, more often broken than not before the commitment of a life is fulfilled. In what other context does one sign an agreement for life? The law warders like it this way and so must balk before changing it, but can two people not agree to their own, separate short term contract? Or is this now governed by tax law too?
I've finally dumped Blogger. While I retain lots of appreciation and respect for their accomplishments, the system hasn't scaled so well (and who could have predicted the blog-boom, how so many losers with websites would dump their words into the exhibitionist ether -- or at least try it once), and it's been a pain in a lot of areas (mainly in losing archives). Somebody suggested this freeware app called Blog some time ago; it's a standalone desktop program, so there's no relying on somebody else's server (SES) and database, but it's therefore not accessible from everywhere (I can live with that -- I don't have anything to say that's so urgent). Seems pretty good so far.
I've moved the archives for this year into Blog (I suspect it uses an MS Access db, which should be fine), and merged the links for the rest into the archive table of contents. Fewer files is good. But the automatic archiving generates its table of contents within an html table (which I hate), and so far I haven't been able to tell it to stop. (The rest of this site uses div tags for structuring -- except maybe for the really old stuff.) Another thing is that I can't relocate the data files from Blog's install directory, which is annoying since I reinstall windows every other month or so and try to keep all my data on a separate partition. This means another migration task for reinstalls. The set of content tags is adequate, and includes a title (which to get from Blogger you had to upgrade to Pro), as well as the ability to categorize every post and produce a categorical index.Nobody was born here. I'm quite certain I was born here, but I'm the only one. Most of them arrive deliberately, each in various stages of psycho(socio)logical decay, dragging various quantities of baggage up second floor steps to their newly remodeled apartments, squealing up in consumer rated moving vans or popping from squads of SUVs and minivans with friends and family chosen to help drag the mattress and the armoire and the milk-crates stuffed two thirds books one third knickknacks, office supplies lifted from workplaces, electronics sundry, coffee mugs and sugar packets and half depleted rolls of lifesavers and sugar-free chewing gum. Others arrive by chance. You can pick them out by the dazed and haunted expressions on their faces, the manner in which they wander around searching for a way out, banging on the gates, tunneling under the walls, constructing hot-air balloons from bedsheets and beachtowels, toiling in physics laboratories to conduct teleportation experiments, but finding the path only leads back in. The girl was one of these. I believe she was the only one to ever leave alive.
Others manage to leave by dying -- we are not immortal here, trapped in some eternal bubble of Limbo. There have been ambulances on several occasions, dull and solemn under switched down lights parked along the main drive. It is unclear where they come from, the subject of much speculation among some of the more desperate neighbors. Regularly, one or two attempt to stow away in an ambulance, stealing aboard while the EMTs attend to their corpse, hiding beneath a stretcher or replacing the spare tire with themselves in the sunken wheel well. The EMTs never seem to notice, or if noticing don't care, and drive off with their hidden passengers toward whatever outside world they live in. But the fugitives always return, without exception wandering back in from the woods near the liquor store, and never able to recount what had befallen them out there, where they had been and what had compelled them to return, their memories wiped clean of the experience as if repressing some terrible trauma, or bearing the marks of government experiments in desert labs with white coated technicians and long needles dripping incandescent slime to bleached tile flooring.
More often they attempt to summon a taxi to come pick them up and drive them away. Nearly every day, neighbors stand waiting on the corners of the drive, packed bags at their side, wrapped in traveling clothes, anxious yet hopeful for a bright new life on the outside. But unlike the ambulances, the taxis never arrive. They may have been held at the gate by rough faced troopers with black uniforms and ferocious dogs tethered by thin and fragile looking leashes; they may have become lost in attempting to find us, their maps grown vague and incomplete, their resolve faltering; or they may have never intended to come, interested only in more lucrative trips to the airport or the opera houses of the distant glimmering city.
Attempts to scale the old stone walls have been considerably more successful, only rarely resulting in damaged limbs or bruises easily repairable by the local clinic. One can wander the perimeter and find any number of dangling ropes and leaning ladders left by energetic escapees. But again and without exception each attempt has failed, each fugitive returned, bewildered by their circulation and unable to remember what they'd seen or where they'd been on the outside. The only thing they are able to describe is the great woods, a labyrinth of vegetation seeming to crowd against the sky, and the peaceful chirping of birds somewhere high above them.
I too have seen these woods. And I have seen the ruins that remain in them, scattered about as if by some ancient destructive force, and left to molder and decay, testaments to other such compounds as ours that spent their time bottled up and waiting for something different to happen. I wonder how the girl got out.Speaking of Friday, today is Friday the 13th [Ed: that was yesterday, Joe -- do try to keep up]. Statistics show that although fewer people drive on this day (yes really), there are actually more hospital admissions due to accidents. According to the British Medical Journal, "Friday 13th is unlucky for some. The risk of hospital admission as a result of a transport accident may be increased by as much as 52 percent. Staying at home is recommended."
Speaking of the BMJ, There's something 1984 about this. Is it tragic and ironic that Superman Christopher Reeve should be in such a condition? Or is it the Muses exacting their symbolic revenge upon Hollywood for their great plastic hubris?
Speaking of great public hubris, just as I was bemoaning the loss of Six Feet Under from the data stream that enters my home, someone reminded me that another great HBO drama was just starting back up. The Wire, a Baltimore crime show that evolved more or less from Homicide: Life on the Street was my choice for best new television series last year. Based on the first episode, it's still just as good. Television, it would seem, is still worth watching after all.
Speaking of television, some UK channel is now airing all the Firefly episodes that were made (15), including the three that never aired in the US (I have one of them -- #115 -- and would like the other two please). This was a promising series, and it was wrong of Fox to cancel it so quickly (First Aired: September 2002; Last Aired: December 2002, always in a terrible time-slot). Guess they had to make room for The Masked and Secretly Pregnant Bachelorette with Herpes (But Don't Tell the Twelve Suitors Who Secretly Want to Sleep With Her Million Dollars) Part 2.
Speaking of secretly wanting to sleep with her, here's a new account of reading, teaching, discussing, and identifying with Nabokov's Lolita... in Iran!
Speaking of Nabokov, the Pynchon-L, that venerable mailing list of crackpots, loudmouths, misfits, and know-it-alls (who are all really smart by the way) is starting a group read of Nabokov's Pale Fire, one of the great (and most complex) books of the Twentieth Century. If you've ever tried and failed it on your own, this may be your chance; it's well worth the time and effort. Starts July 14 (tentatively). (And some of it will be hosted by yours truly -- under a different pseudonym of course.)
Wasn't that bloggarific?
On this day in 1778 General Sir Henry Clinton marched his 10,000 British troops out of Philadelphia in retreat to New York. It was exactly three years since the Continental Army's terrible defeat at Bunker Hill lost the city of Boston for the duration of the war, but now with a small fleet of Frenchmen on the way to blockade the Delaware, things were turning more favorable. General Washington was free to move his troops out of Valley Forge and into Philadelphia.
There was rain for the last two weeks, and now puddles pool by sidewalk sides where eager birds knead soggy ground for worms, my bleary eyed neighbors peer from their chambers like Noah's children on the fortieth morning, and plotting children play games of hopscotch with evil cats between lines drawn in mud (such things as youth are so fleeting). I've spent the time encased in the map room, piled to one shoulder with mass-produced acid-free volumes on geography, and to the other with sample maps I had hoped to imitate. These maps are carefully impressed onto aged parchment (the closest I could get was unbleached supermarket bags -- most sides logo-free) with worn-down jagged edges teetering on the near side of dust (several passes with the flame of a Zippo lighter), their india ink dried centuries ago and flaking from the arc of every curving line (ten layers of heavy ballpoint trimmed by a narrow gauge razor). The results were crude but in their way spectacular.
Having gotten the process down, I lack only the map itself; and now with the sun returned and the roof gardens grown lush from overindulgence, it is time to locate some intrepid surveyors willing to take on my specialized task. There are always those who would climb the awkward steps to the tapered roofs and rising gardens of our shared community; I have seen them often in their preparations, spooling guidelines and testing the integrity of carabiners, donning molded plastic helmets and lacing reinforced leather boots, comparing accounts of the latest conditions returned for royalties by the wild eyed scouts and their scribes. Whenever these bold lunatics set off, filled with bluster related by loud and anxious chattering, a hush of voided consternation will always fall to the apartments beneath them -- for it is then that the waiting cycles begin: the bars grow quieter, the fretful wives begin their daily march to the lookup towers, and the poets unquill to write of heroism and adventure and loss and despair. But some of them typically return and often deliver news or cargo of the most incredible variety: tales of the skyward natives in their gaudy garb and unfathomable customs, spices of such pungency as to make one sneeze, gold trinkets of inimitable craftsmanship, and accounts of harrowing encounters with beasts unimaginable to an earthly frame of experience. My hope is that among these explorers, some prospective Masons and Dixons might be found.
In order to reach the staging area of the climbers, one must pass first though the laundries along walls thick with flies and infestation, winding deeper downward though ever more aggressive assaults of irony, past series of dimly lit vestibules for catacombs and dungeons that attract their own excursions and their own kind of explorer (with whom I've had dealings in the past), and finally back up into the sunlight. Here the observation teams grind lenses from spinning stones -- tiny comets arcing out from their bicycle powered wheels -- to be affixed to a single cannon of a telescope, the observers arguing among themselves as observers will do over where to aim the device and how to fairly allocate its use. One faction seems to remain true to its original purpose by insisting the telescope be employed to attempt learning the fate or whereabouts of the climbing parties up somewhere on the towers; while another now dismisses that goal as frivolous, and urges they set out learning about stars and planets and stellar phenomena without delay; while still a third group -- this one sloppily dressed and generally more vulgar in their manner than the other two -- appears convinced that pointing the telescope upward is the wrong approach entirely, and that it should be used to study the earth, its soil and microorganisms, its geologic age, its myriad of mysterious catacombs and dungeons. One must spend a surprisingly long and patient march through the observers' jumble of equipment, charts, supplies, and paraphernalia, in order to pass finally to the climbers' staging area at the base of the great northern stair, where most upward assaults mark their point of departure.
It all sounds like a lot of effort at the moment, and the day is rapidly growing hot, so perhaps I shall remain here in the air-conditioning instead -- for the time being.I've had little time for weblogs lately. Rereading Pale Fire is a more ambitious task than reading it -- all the allusive marks left previously, the mental ellipses, must now be pursued and reconciled, the alien words defined, the leading edge of the spiral pursued to an understanding. Once again I am amazed by the level of complexity VN achieved in such a seemingly small book; it must be the longest short novel written. In college I read it twice through, and then mostly again during discussions; I think twice through plus a discussion read is about right for a single "reading", and particularly suitable for the approach I'm taking this time: I've decided to follow every cross-reference in the Commentary, thereby gaining a single reading non-linearly (or most of a reading anyway), then again along with the poem.
For this first reading, I've begun trying to think about the book in terms of threads (where a thread is a cascade of cross-references taking place before returning to an origin within a linear read), keeping track of how many there are, what they each include, what is finally *excluded*, and where any redundancy takes place (sort of like profiling a piece of software), marking each link with a "jmp pg" notation, and isolating the individual threads as I go -- much like tracing a call stack in a software program. Indeed, this process has many similarities to software programming, and I've been tending toward that sort of terminology.
So for example, the Foreword has one Commentary cross-reference (as well as several links into the poem), which sets off the first thread beyond the linear text (pg 15 of the Random House). This jumps to page 287 (Commentary to line 991). From within the 991 Commentary, another cross-reference goes to pg 82 (lines 47-48 Commentary) -- and this is a particularly useful section for getting to know the setting (I've now completed a preliminary map of the surroundings based mainly on this section), not to mention its end is fairly mind-blowing. There are two jumps from 47-48, the first to pg 246 (Commentary for ln 691), which thankfully doesn't have any of its own jumps, and later on pg 87, where a jump goes to pg 95 (ln 62 Commentary). Here a recursion takes place: on pg 96 there's a link back to 47-48 (perhaps significant because of Kinbote's behavior of obsessively returning to Shade's house and his surveillance of the poet). Lucky I'm not a CPU because I'd be trapped in an infinite loop now -- an interesting approach to Kinbote perhaps, trapped in a vicious circle.... Tantalizingly for the (self-aware) CPU, there on the next line is another jump (unreachable code!) -- this one again to the Commentary for line 691. Seems this is an important subroutine.... Finally I'm able to back out through the call stack to return to the Foreword, and I find I'm considerably further along in the book than I'd anticipated on the third page of the actual linear text.
Due to the content of that first thread, I am now convinced that following the cross-references is the correct approach. Several important themes are well established by the time the reader returns to the Foreword, as well as much of Kinbote's claimed backstory, and lots of detail on the setting. I intend to attempt recording all of these threads and possibly draw them up into some sort of diagram either soon or when I've completed a first reading. Damn, this is even more fun than I thought it would be....
All the kids are composing soundtracks now, the scores to themes they've heard a hundred times on popcorn aisles and vinyl couches, their heads swimming in a myriad of images broadcast through them toward listeners in the stars -- who want only to eat them.
I watched movies this weekend (because I've become really passive or something). These are those movies:
About Schmidt: Here, hold on, I'll save them the time and just SHOOT MYSELF! What a depressing movie. Why do people feel so compelled to make and then later watch depressing movies? Is that entertainment? Kathy Bates redeems it a bit (as usual -- she's probably the best female actor in Hollywood -- although I could have done without the nude scene thank you very much), as well as the rest of that uncomfortable family, but Jack Nicholson is just lifeless in this thing, like an extra from Night of the Living Dead or some French movie, like he was barely paying attention the entire time. This is what seems to fool Hollywood these days as "good acting". Likewise, heavy handed metaphors pass as "good writing", opening scenes with loud noises or ending scenes with protracted images is "good editing" or "good cinematography", and so on. What a terrific bore! Enough about Schmidt, I've got my own life to detest. 4 donkeys out of 10.
Adaptation: Great movie! By the same crowd that did _Being John Malkovich_ -- and I liked this one better -- this is a film about a screenplay writer creating the script of the movie itself as the movie progresses, balancing his own veracity against that of an autobiographical book (and its author) which the screenplay is intended to adapt, ultimately leaving the audience wondering who the author was, and whether any dimension of the fabula had any concrete relation to any other. A fine example of an involuted film, and the first good performance by Nicholas Cage since _Leaving Las Vegas_. 8 toothpicks out of 10.
Catch Me If You Can: Once more I'm confounded by the ever exasperating Leonardo Di Caprio. I truly dislike this guy but he keeps showing up in outstanding movies and not ruining them. How can this be? And as if that dilemma weren't enough, I have also to balance my distaste for Steven Spielberg with the practically indisputable fact that he remains a great filmmaker (when he's not shilling for Disney or pretending to understand Science Fiction that is). It's very frustrating! But this is a great movie, constantly engaging and interesting, and Tom Hanks as usual does a fantastic job in yet another different kind of role. He may be the most versatile actor in Hollywood these days. 8 Christmas trees out of 10.
I also watched Farscape. I'm taking the whole route presently, starting with episode 101 and ending with episode 422 (I've gotten to 113 so far), just because I am. And being of sound critical mind at the moment, I've been toying with the notion of a serious paper on the series, mainly because a title for one occurred just today: "Farscape: A collision of Ahabs". Actually the original title I thought of was "Farscape: A chorus of Ahabs", but that was just silly. Part of my focus will be on contemporary permutations of the classical quest motif (I know, it sounds like it snores but I'll take a dialogical approach, focusing mainly on when quests collide), and then, as the storytelling technique in the series matures (moving beyond the formulaic modes found especially in the earlier episodes), I'll move into a narratological discussion of the series' several innovations, and how they complement the preexisting character complexes. (Let's face it: the season spanning hour-long television series is the epic mode of our time (like it or not -- probably not), so why not pick a genuinely good example and do something with it? Or else, not. Maybe Six Feet Under would be a better choice...?)