Epecho

2004-05-04T18:58:00.000-04:00

I go, Hugo, we all go

Not being registered for Noreascon (since I have no frickin' clue how I'd afford it), I don't get to vote for the Hugos this year. But that doesn't mean I don't get to bitch about the nominations and winners.

I shouldn't sound off about the Best Novel nominees until I have the one that I haven't read under my belt (Blind Lake, for the record). Omissions first: where the heck is Quicksilver? (yeah, "it's not really SF", okay, fine, it still deserved to be on the list) Where's Alastair Reynolds' Redemption Ark? I don't see any grievous sins of commission this year. With Humans I have the same kvetch as I had about Hominids last year; it was fun, but ultimately just didn't seem like Hugo timber. Singularity Sky I liked, though it didn't quite live up to the Strossolatry I'd been hearing up until I picked it up. Perhaps I had unrealistic expectations, but it just wasn't mindblowing like I'd been led to expect; and the characters did spend a hell of a long time on that damn ship, which didn't advance the action.

2004-03-25T15:27:00.000-05:00

World's Tastiest Oxymoron Department

I'd quite forgotten that Long John Silver's promised America free giant shrimp if the Exploration rovers found conclusive evidence of water on Mars. Well, their standards of proof are reasonable enough to follow through, on May 10th. When I will probably not be anywhere in the United States. Still, I will look southward and contemplate our neighbours eating free crustaceans on account of Science, and this will please me no end.

2004-03-23T14:40:00.000-05:00

Winter journeys

".. if you have the desire for knowledge, and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say 'What is the use?' For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg."
-Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910-13, final paragraph

2004-03-22T14:10:00.000-05:00

Bag o' links

In lieu of anything creative.

"When one first arrives here, one may believe the Soup tastes like ass. That is not so, my child."
"...Spirit and Opportunity, my favorite Martian robots ever. I love those 400-pound, plutonium-heated smoopy-poopies. I want to invite them out for a really great dinner at an expensive restaurant and forget about all the bad things the government has ever done."
Yasser "After all, I am a Semite myself" Arafat gives The Passion of the Christ two thumbs up. Hanan Ashrawi equivocates.
"I don't know why anyone would ever steal a movie. Unless of course it's to avoid this commercial which we now play in front of every single movie you could possibly go to, telling you you're bad for stealing even though you just spent $11 to see some movie and instead you have to sit there and listen to me whine at you and accuse you of being a thief." RealVideo stream; thanks, BoingBoing!
"Very soon, one of your deadbeat buds is going to walk down the aisle herself. Maybe she’ll even wed someone in your circle. The guest list for their reception will be similar to yours, and all your friends, older and wiser now, will happily take their seats around the ballroom, testing the fire marshal’s occupancy limits. The drinks will be strong, the decorations bright, the bride beautiful, the bonfires ablaze. And just when the guests are at their most vulnerable – drunk and giddy and lined up in rows for the Electric Slide, you and your husband can kick in the door and go Grendel on their asses."
Big Dead Place, a site by disgruntled Antarcticans for (I suspect) other people considering becoming Antarcticans, offers an All-John-Carpenter's-"The Thing" Film Review Section

That is all.

2004-03-18T12:58:00.000-05:00

The design of everyday bling

I posted the link to OK/Cancel, an online comic strip about user interface design and designers, while they were in the midst of using one of our age's more painfully unfunny "comic" devices: recasting some mundane situation in hip-hop style and lingo -- or at least, what they imagine to be the lingo*. I don't have the knowledge to say they're wrong, but subcultural dialects are even more idiomatically unforgiving than ordinary ones. This is related, I think, to the mistaken belief that rapping is easy because it's not singing. Actually it seems difficult to me, because I've heard any number of people chant rhythmic verse in what they like to think is a bad-ass manner, with lots of arm waving, and yet they don't sound like Chuck D. (Just to emphasize that this isn't a racial distinction, they don't sound much like the Beastie Boys either.) Pausing between verses to make explosive vocal noises does not help. At all. I don't know what nuances of phrasing, rhythm, emphasis, and intonation these people are missing, but they clearly exist, and learning them takes a certain amount of either innate talent or skill, and being good at them doubtless takes both. Possibly if North American education still involved a lot of poetry recitation, we would realize this at an early age, just from noticing that some people made the same poem sound fascinating and others made it sound somnolent. (This would, however, require the setting of interesting poems to recite, not a notable feature of my own education.)

Long story short, if you went and looked at OK/Cancel when they were in the midst of all that, browse through the archives, because there are some funny and clever strips there.

Footnotes
[*] The perceptive reader will note that I've actually done this myself in the title of the posting. I plead somewhat guilty, but using a slang word out-of-context for the sake of punfulness seems like a lesser offence. I'll do community service, honest.

2004-03-14T10:15:00.000-05:00

Pentagon destroys all robots!

See the sad story here. As usual, I find myself at war 'tween "Robots! Robots are so cool! Robot endurance races in the desert even cooler!" and "Tsk tsk, military uses of computer science bad or at least depressing."

2004-02-24T18:17:00.000-05:00

A somewhat frivolous exercise in mechanism design

Ryan Bigge has a post (scroll down to February 20th, the direct link doesn't quite seem to work) savaging Kevin Smith for giving an expensive lecture. His anger is understandable, but not, I think, entirely justified; let me ramble for a little about why not.

Facts: the ticket price is $47.50. It's at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto; a quick Google tells me that the capacity there is about 2,600. I'll say right upfront that there's no way I'm paying $47.50 for an evening with Kevin Smith. Not a dis: I thought Dogma was plenty funny, and he's obviously a clever and funny guy. But his take on things is only of limited interest to me. Bigge says

Kevin Smith is very wealthy. If he were not rich, then I could perhaps-maybe understand the ridiculous fee, but what are you thinking man? Do you realize the extent to which you are alienating your fanbase by charging that kind of money?

Let's consider this situation, though. Kevin Smith is very wealthy because a lot of people go to see his movies. Not only that, he has a cult status; people who like his work tend to like it a lot. I'd actually hazard a guess that more than 2,600 people in the Greater Toronto Area would really, really like to go hear him speak, maybe even get a chance to ask questions. I'd guess a lot more than 2,600 people would really like that. Kevin Smith is a scarce resource.

Who gets a sliver of Kevin on the evening of March 12th? It's a social choice problem: we seek to maximize collective utility.

Now, if Kevin Smith were a necessity, like clean water or health-care, the fair options are limited to:

Devoting common resources to providing more Kevin; enough so that everybody who needs some gets some. This might degrade the quality some: perhaps it's in a bigger hall, he does several shorter lectures, he's hoarse, worn out, and in a crappy mood by the time he's finished giving as many lectures as needed to satisfy everyone.
If we can't, by hook or by crook, obtain enough Kevin to make everybody happy, then we need at least to satisfy a secondary criterion and make sure the decision is absolutely fair, and doesn't discriminate on grounds of, say, income. As with health-care (in Canada), waving a wad of bills doesn't get you ahead in the queue. Since -- unlike medicine -- there is no profession and academic discipline devoted to assessing the comparative needs of individuals for a lecture by Kevin Smith, allowing ticket-distributors to make judgement calls simply opens the door to corruption. First-come, first-serve it is.

Now, first-come first-serve (plus medical judgement calls, but let's not factor those in right now) works OK in health-care because there is basically total information; as soon as you become sick or injured, you are aware of the need for medical attention. Also, by claiming medical attention, you are using a certain amount of a resource for a certain length of time; once they're done with you, that resource is available for someone else. They've had to wait, but with reasonable triage this is just an inconvenience. Contrast this state of affairs with the lecture, and the two first-come, first-serve alternatives there:

Advance reservations starting at a set date: Fanboy X finds out a month in advance, is not a huge Kevin Smith fan but thinks it's a cool thing, and puts his name down for a ticket; Fanboy Y doesn't hear until 3 days ahead, and the tickets are gone. He is a huge fan, and is devastated. Those who find out earlier are preferred.
No advance reservation, doors open a certain amount of time in advance. Under these assumptions, we get a huge lineup, which rewards those with the spare time to devote to a lineup.

Neither of these "fairer" alternatives is very satisfying, is it? If Mr. Smith were a necessity, then we would have, collectively, to hold our noses and go with one of them as being still less repugnant than discriminating by income. But since he's not... well, a high but not insane ticket price doesn't sound so bad: low enough so that anybody who really wants to go can scrape it together, though certainly at some opportunity cost, and high enough to dissuade the casual "Yeah, I'm not too into him, but what the heck" ticket buyers. (Now, of course, this depends crucially on there not being too many bored rich kids for whom $47.50 is pocket change snarfing up the tickets. For them, I have no rational remedy, except maybe a good swift kick in the arse.)

2004-02-24T11:30:00.000-05:00

The spine of my country

I missed it, but apparently Margaret Wente took it on herself recently to savage Adrienne Clarkson (Canada's Governor-General, for my readers abroad) and her husband John Ralston Saul for spending public money in the course of their job of representing the country. The Master of Massey College delivered this magisterial rebuke today:

And what a joke are all those frigid little countries like Iceland that the Governor-General goes on and on about? What on earth do we have to learn from a speck on the map like Finland, stuck by the whims of history and geography right next door to a behemoth of a country that is constantly on the verge of overwhelming its economy and culture?

And why doesn't the Governor-General's husband just shut up? Who on earth wants to hear his ruminations on citizenship or Canada's ridiculous place in the world? In Ms. Wente's worldview, we are almost as stupid a little country as those other stupid little countries, with our very own stupid little vice-regal couple going on and on about our stupid vast and empty acres of northland, buzzing as it does with all those irritating and stupid little mosquitoes and stupid little writers...

As it happens, Molly Ivins, one of the best things about Texas, is interested in Saul's ruminations on citizenship. The article she cites isn't available online, I don't think, but the 2000 LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture text is well worth a read. Some bonehead in my neighbourhood has a bumper sticker with a silhouette of a rifle and the words "Our Rights Weren't Won With a Handshake"; here Saul recounts a truer story:

When the Chateau Clique and their allies came out into the streets of Montréal on the night on April 25th 1849 and burnt down the Parliament of Canada, the government responded with moderation. Everywhere else in the West, governments automatically responded to such situations with rifles and cannon. The Executive Council - the cabinet - met on the 27th in the midst of the ongoing disorder and ratified a report which would explain their policy. It stated that the proper mode of preserving order is by strengthening the Civil Authorities. And that the Council deprecate the employment of the Military to suppress such disturbances...

It was one of those perfectly existential moments. Here was a fragile half colony/half country, which already has two languages, as well as many ethnic groups and religions - without even taking into account the aboriginal role as a founding pillar of the society. In 19th century terms it was a powder keg. The government's response would cause this place either to slip down the European/American road towards impossible oppositions, outright violence and a centralized monolithic model. Or the ministers would have to discover another way.

Somehow, LaFontaine and Baldwin reached down into their own ethics and imaginations and decided upon an original and much criticized response. The Imperial government in London, for example, was furious that the streets had not been cleared with volleys of rifle fire. The great western historian W.L. Morton put it that the reformers had decided not to answer defiance with defiance, but to have moderate conduct shame arrogant violence.

2003-12-06T17:25:00.000-05:00

For sorrow and for shame

Northbard reminds me that I should do this, which I had forgotten on account of lying in my sick-bed all day.

Dec 6th, 1989.
Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal

Geneviève Bergeron
Hélène Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Maryse Laganière
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Michèle Richard
Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte
Barbara Klucznik Widajewicz

2003-12-04T13:13:00.000-05:00

Three in a tower

Today is (or rather, was) the Feast of St. Barbara. She did not exist, but if she had existed she would certainly have been confined to a tower with two windows, and insisted that a third needed to be added; and she would have not only specified this declaratively ("Look, I insist that nWindows == 3") but directed the workers in carrying it out. Thus, she is the patron saint of engineers, and by extension mathematicians; and by even more extension of gunners and other People Who Knock Holes In Things, and by even more extension of those in danger of sudden death, though picking a specific martyr for that seems a little exclusionary -- there was a lot of danger of sudden death for Nonconformists in those days. Anyway, since I am sort of a mathematician and sort of an engineer, this is a mildly celebratory day for me; and I feel entitled to indulge in wanton contrafactuals like the one that began this paragraph, since I am also something of a logician. It is, as following the first link will confirm, not an official feast anymore, but then I am not exactly an official anything myself these days; my excuses for parties are ecumenical, though leaning towards more familiar (to me) traditions.

I also wished to argue for extending Barbara's patronage to many-valued logic: if there was ever a clear message that two values are not enough to capture all truths, hers was it.

But out of the third lattice
Under low eaves like wings
Is a new corner of the sky
And the other side of things.
--G.K. Chesterton, "The Ballad of Saint Barbara"

2003-11-19T11:24:00.000-05:00

In passing

I just want to mention how much I hate the alleged "word" webinar. I don't have a philosophical objection to portmanteaus, but this one (composed of 'web' and 'seminar', if you haven't encountered the horror yet) just makes my hackles rise.

2003-11-18T22:25:00.000-05:00

Which parts are the Dunadan's?

I haven't even seen the extended edition of Fellowship, let alone of Towers, but as you can well imagine the madness has me well in its grip. There's a writeup on the TTT extended edition in Salon (view the ad to get a day pass, or, if you are not a cheap sod like myself, subscribe), in which Peter Jackson responds to the "not enough Ents" school of criticism:

Jackson says he wants to make a spinoff TV series set in Fangorn Forest. "Nothing happens ... or I could make Treebeard a kind of crime-fighting tree who solves mysteries in Fangorn. He just doesn't do it very quickly."

While I, like many fans, am a little perturbed by the planned editing-out of Christopher Lee's Saruman, largely because I like me some Christopher Lee, generally I'm in favour of cutting the Jackson/Boyens/Walsh writing team lots of slack. My personal view on adaptations is pretty loose, to say the least. I don't expect them to follow the text point-by-point. I'm probably geeky enough to watch a seven-hour-long Fellowship which included Every. Single. Incident, and all the songs in full, but I don't measure the quality of the screenplay by its proximity to that. To be honest, I think the task which I should, as a responsible reader/viewer, evaluate them on, is how well they take Tolkien's material - the fabric - and make something of their own out of it. I suppose there is, lurking there, some coefficient of elasticity -- if the thing deviates too much, it stops being an adaptation, exactly, and more a new thing partly inspired. But in general I don't even subscribe to the "well, as long as it's faithful to Tolkien's vision" cavil; I don't think conveying Tolkien's vision is their duty. It's to convey their vision, using Tolkien's materials without doing actual violence to the nature of those materials. This I think they have done well so far.

Here is an objection from the peanut gallery, explaining why Lord of the Rings (the movie) suXX0rs.

Oh, and I doubt there was really much suspense; but if you didn't feel like reading "Warm Beds are Good" start to finish, the answer to the question "Sam and Frodo: Gay? Or Victorian?" is, unsurprisingly, "Victorian".

2003-11-17T15:54:00.000-05:00

The newest profession

At one time -- in my own defence, let me say that it was as a student intern -- I wrote HTML (and the odd chunk of JavaScript or Perl, and even odder Java applet) for a living. That was not quite what I thought I would be doing when (large computer company) hired me, but there it is. The mantra "It beats flipping burgers" figured prominently in tedious and Dilbertesque moments, though I'm sure the aging mainframe developers in the next set of cubes over probably thought we should all be planting trees, or running test cases, or something much less fun, and that we -- by which, mostly, I mean myself -- should get our goddamn hair cut already.

(Pause to insert false teeth) Web programming was not taught in computer science departments in those days, so we had all kind of picked it up on the fly, mostly while avoiding the things we were supposed to be doing. Mostly we picked up HTML and JavaScript from cannibalizing other peoples', and from reference guides. I had a book on Photoshop, and the Camel Book on Perl, and I knew people had read the rightly-much-maligned Creating Killer Web Sites by self-acknowledged ruiner of the Web David Siegel. Siegel got his just comeuppance as reported here:

At one point, following Berlow's intense debate with Verdana creator Matthew Carter, Siegel piped in that he will have "a chapter about that in my next book - though it will probably be obsolete by the time it's printed." Berlow gave Siegel the long, cold stare: "No, it was obsolete when you wrote it." The stunned Siegel replied with a very Anthony Michael Hall-ish "harrrrsh!" The most profound insight came a little earlier, though, when Berlow responded to Siegel's initial plugs for his Amazon bestseller Creating Killer Web Sites; Berlow hissed that he is "writing a book called Killing the Creators of Web Sites.

I managed to avoid, by good advice from others and from my own basic sense of design, engaging too much in egregious design crimes like Front Page hover buttons, entrance tunnels, and vast swathes of text in graphic-only format. All the same, I devoutly wish I had had Philip Greenspun's mighty work How To Be A Web Whore Just Like Me (more sedately issued in print as Database-backed Web Sites) to hand in those days. The Acknowledgments are swiped from elsewhere -- Olin Shivers' Scheme Shell Reference Manual -- but deserve wider propagation:

Who should I thank? My so-called "colleagues," who laugh at me behind my back, all the while becoming famous on my work? My worthless graduate students, whose computer skills appear to be limited to downloading bitmaps off of netnews? My parents, who are still waiting for me to quit "fooling around with computers," go to med school, and become a radiologist? My department chairman, a manager who gives one new insight into and sympathy for disgruntled postal workers?

My God, no one could blame me---no one!---if I went off the edge and just lost it completely one day. I couldn't get through the day as it is without the Prozac and Jack Daniels I keep on the shelf, behind my Tops-20 JSYS manuals. I start getting the shakes real bad around 10am, right before my advisor meetings. A 10 oz. Jack 'n Zac helps me get through the meetings without one of my students winding up with his severed head in a bowling-ball bag. They look at me funny; they think I twitch a lot.

A little dated by the "bitmaps off of netnews" trope; we graduate students of the modern age principally waste our time posting to our blogs.

Um. Yeah. Gotta run!

2003-11-17T13:15:00.000-05:00

Today's weather in Hell

.. a chill Arctic wind, evidently

(Background: before moving out West and becoming a pot activist, Emery was known in my hometown as a bookstore owner and hard-core anarcho-capitalist libertarian who ran for the batshitinsane Freedom Party of Ontario and pushed Ayn Rand on anybody who looked susceptible. Just to make it clear that this is a sea-change of MacLeodian proportions.)

2003-11-15T19:21:00.000-05:00

Sam will kill him if he tries anything

Some might consider it a fruitless topic, but the essay Warm Beds are Good: Sex and Libido in Tolkien's Writing is rambling and fascinating. Slash writers may wish to skip directly to the chapter addressing the vital question "Sam and Frodo: Gay? Or Victorian?"

2003-11-14T14:52:00.000-05:00

I will not smell in your solemn assemblies

Separation of church and state exists de facto in Canada, the result of long struggles by people like Robert Baldwin, Egerton Ryerson, and Pierre Trudeau, and no thanks at all to aspiring theocrats like Bishop John Strachan, the Ayatollah of Muddy York. It doesn't, however, exist de jure: the Constitution (a document younger than me, I might add) speaks about "the supremacy of God"; Remembrance Day ceremonies at the U of T (though not, I discovered this year, at York) contain Anglican prayers, as did my M.Sc. convocation ceremony. We have state-funded Catholic schools. Up until I was about 12, the singing of the National Anthem was followed by the "Our Father", in public school. (Note: okay, maybe it was preceded. It's been awhile.)

All this is to say that I'm accustomed to public life which is essentially secular, but adorned with religious grace notes. However, the idea of "separation of church and state", whether as stipulated in the U.S. Constitution, or actually practiced by Americans, is not something that I entirely comprehend.

My comprehension is only decreased by this session of the Nevada State Legislature that I stumbled across, where the session opens with Pastor Dixie Jennings-Teats (Dear Reader, I do not make up these names) reciting a prayer by W.H. Auden, of all people. It's been kicking around for a good 40 years or so, and has undergone the folk process, but it's still recognizable. (Note: this is in fact how I found the page.) In the transcript, the prayer is preceded by the note "All present except Assemblyman Oceguera, who was excused". Was excused! Please, Mr. Speaker, my parents believe differently, can I leave the room?

It just struck me as, well, odd.

2003-11-11T06:56:00.000-05:00

Not selected by the committee

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,--
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
-Wilfrid Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth"

The hucksters haggle in the mart
The cars and carts go by;
Senates and schools go droning on;
For dead things cannot die.

A storm stooped on the place of tombs
With bolts to blast and rive;
But these be names of many men
The lightning found alive.

If usurers rule and rights decay
And visions view once more
Great Carthage like a golden shell
Gape hollow on the shore,

Still to the last of crumbling time
Upon this stone be read
How many men of England died
To prove they were not dead.
-G.K. Chesterton, "For a War Memorial (Suggested Inscription Probably Not Selected By the Committee)"

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You'd see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour.

'Poor young chap,' I'd say-'
I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap.'
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die - - in bed.
-Siegfried Sassoon, "Base Details"

2003-11-10T17:58:00.000-05:00

Bantustans of Beleriand?

In general, I'm deeply critical of the Tolkien-as-reactionary/imperalist/crypto-fascist line of argument, even when pursued by people I respect like Michael Moorcock and China Miéville. He is critical of technology, specifically of industrialization, and that critique can be abused terribly. I notice in Return of the King he gets around some of the problems by giving Gondor's Houses of Healing pretty advanced medical knowledge, even without Aragorn handy to do the athelas thing.

Okay, now that I get to that, I have to wonder about the practicality of the healing royal hands. At the time of the War of the Ring, Minas Tirith, and by extension all of Gondor, are said to be sparsely populated, but once the Fourth Age gets underway the population starts to climb, and so the proportion of the day that poor Aragorn spends just boiling athelas in water and rubbing it on sick and injured people is going to creep up too. I believe in single-payer health care, but single-provider is a bit much to ask even of a Ranger of the North.

That's a digression, though. What I wanted to recount was my eyebrows shooting up at this passage from The Silmarillion:

But after a time the Elf-kings, seeing that it was not good for Elves and Men to dwell mingled together without order, and that Men needed lords of their own kind, set regions apart where Men could live their own lives, and appointed chieftains to hold these lands freely.

There are reasons why this shouldn't creep me out as much as it does. For one, okay, Elves and Men are actually different species; and for mortals to live side-by-side with an immortal species doubtless breeds considerable resentment. For another, it's more or less known that the Elves are eventually all going to leave Middle Earth to humans. But, on the flip side, the Elves in Beleriand in the Silmarillion are classic colonialists: they have a place they belong -- the Blessed Realm -- and they aren't there, for pretty shady reasons. They give the Men a lot of self-justificatory wind about defending them from Morgoth, but they probably would have happily let Morgoth rule Middle Earth competely if he hadn't stolen the Silmarils.

This is all rather tongue-in-cheek, of course. Tolkien is certainly conservative in that he considers that power relationships are rendered just or unjust not by their nature, but by the attitudes and actions of those taking part in them. For my part, I think this has a good deal of truth in it, although it is one of those truths used to make a lot of Big Lies more credible.

2003-11-04T13:28:00.000-05:00

Tortured! By being dead!

Sars at Tomato Nation takes the plunge -- into a large mug: "I've decided to get married. To coffee. What? Seriously."

Naomi at Baraita gives simple trick-or-treating guidelines: "(10) For future reference, and especially for those of you dressed as witches, there is no One True Way to pronounce 'Samhain.' There is, however, a proper way to pronounce 'Hermione.'

Disclaimer: I am way out of any kind of pop-music loop. So I have no idea who the heck Vanessa Carlton is. All the same, her spiel for a forthcoming album slew me:

"There's nothing piano-recital-y about it. It's goth."

"Among the tracks completed are the likely first single, 'Private Radio', about insomnia; 'She Floats', about 'the kind of the euphoria that someone gets when they're tortured by being dead'; 'Morning Sting', about 'emotions being so raw in the morning'; and the only love song, 'San Francisco.'"

"I've been able to kind of just merge the Wicca and the Eighties chick," Carlton says.

It doesn't help me read those statements with any sobriety that thinking of 'the euphoria someone gets when they're tortured by being dead' also makes me think of Jerry Haleva as Saddam Hussein in one of the Hot Shots movies telling Charlie Sheen "And now I will kill you until you die from it!"

To finish off, I finally tracked down another online version of Lorrie Moore's "How to be a Writer, or Have You Earned This Cliché?". Not actually a how-to guide, though it has been linked to as one more than once:

First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/ missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age - say, 14. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at 15 you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables. Show it to your mom. She is tough and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She'll look briefly at your writing then back up at you with a face blank as a doughnut. She'll say: ''How about emptying the dishwasher?'' Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Accidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters.
...
In creative writing seminars over the next two years, everyone continues to smoke cigarettes and ask the same things: ''But does it work?'' ''Why should we care about this character?'' ''Have you earned this cliche?'' These seem like important questions.

2003-11-02T21:20:00.000-05:00

Tricksyness in the first degree

A lot of people seem to have books that they re-read as comfort food, and I suppose I do, too, but re-reading the books in that category always has a wistful edge to it, since it means I've worn off the freshness of reading it the first few times, which is sad. The Hobbit is one such book, and I re-read it this weekend, being in a bit of a mood.

I've always been a fast reader, and even when I was a child re-reading The Hobbit was an afternoon's work at most, but there's still the sense that "This used to be longer"; or that I used to get more totally drawn into it. So, while it's still a great pleasure to read, there's this (possibly imagined?) Peak Hobbit Experience that I'm straining for, which makes it a little bittersweet.

Still and all, there are always new things to be found. For instance, I found the botanical details jumping out me this time, which I had never really paid much attention to: such as when the party is descending into Rivendell, and the trees change from evergreen to deciduous; and the beeches appearing at the edge of Mirkwood.

I thought a lot, too, about the book as an artifact, rather than just the text. I have a late 1970s George Allen and Unwin paperback, black with a painting of Smaug on the hoard on the cover.in a frame. I can't remember where I got it: I think my aunt bought it for me when I was around 6 or 7. At the time, those editions were about what you got when you bought Tolkien, at least in Canada; not like nowadays, when every bookstore has a bewildering array of bindings and covers and the like.The cardstock of the cover is lighter than usual; much the same design as my much-treasured 25th Anniversary Lord of the Rings. Even if I got to choose the book design, the paper, the typeface, and the cover art, I can't imagine after all this time wanting it any different.

Heh. Must be love.

2003-10-31T10:59:00.000-05:00

Seen around campus

Posters bearing the slogan "More humus, less Hamas". It's not that I have any problems assenting to it: more fertile leaf mould rich in nutrients, less fundamentalist terrorism, sure, no problem. But, doesn't it still make you go "What the Hell?" Is it solely for the sake of alliteration and internal rhyme? Or, rather, that "rhyming-but-changing-vowels" thing that Wilfred Owen was into?

Occam's Razor suggests to me (now there's an image: "Billy the Razor says: Hey kids, don't needlessly multiply entities!") that what the creators of the sign really meant was not humus but hummus, which has the additional connection of coming from the same part of the world. Hey, Middle East, they want to say. More tasty food, less death. More tasty chickpea-and-tahini dip with lots and lots of garlic and black pepper. Oh yeah.

A university campus is a rich breeding-ground of loopy slogans, but this one definitely takes the baklava, at least for this year, by dint of sheer incongruity and head-scratching-inducing. Who knows what the Spartacist Youth League or the Objectivist Club will produce in the New Year?

2003-10-21T18:22:00.000-04:00

Black Deathski Vodka for Kimberly Stalin Robots: I wax yet more inconsequential

Further imperiling whatever reputation I may have (ha ha) as a Deep Thinker of some sort, all I have to present today is the results of using two Web toys.

Firstly, idly Googling for one of my favourite not-quite-words, "deathski". Though Google helpfully suggests "Did you mean death ski?", I don't; I mean 'deathski' as in 'brewski', only with death. Three results:

The Captain and His Buccaneer Oarkestra: "In 1980 the Captain released Urban Buccaneer, an arte-cassette that strode the fulcrum of Sir Henry Morgan & John Lydon, time-married as it is, or Errol Flint [sic] collaboratin' wid The Clash in an irksome injun arm-wrestle to the deathski."

Terug naar .:: Heerendispuut Lucifer ::. Igor from Russia writes: "Als die Paulski leest dit in litouwen, hij weet hij moet meenemen black-deathski vodka voor igor."

Sumner County, TN, Death Records: Kirby, Sarah.Alas, only an artifact of their URL generation scheme. Cause of death is the dull -- and mis-spelled -- 'phtsis'.

Secondly, running this page through The Eater of Meaning. Best results:

Cosma Shalizi becomes "Cosmopolitan Shameful".

Homestar Runner becomes "Homemade Runnymede". I'm keeping that one.

Bad Subjects becomes Badger Substitute (badger badger badger badger)

The Journal of Mundane Behaviour, the Jousting of Municipality Beheading

"So long, Johnny Cash" becomes "So lonelier, Johanson Casuals."

Kim Stanley Robinson, mentioned ad nauseam, gets several snappy aliases: Kimball Standpoint Robin, Kimono Statuesquely Robust, and, best of all, Kimberly Stalin Robots.

Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer - Homogeneousness by Robinsonville J. Sawfish.

"Mucilage morphisms". I don't even know what that was originally, and am not checking because it's too good as it is.
"Nonorthogonality culprit!"

2003-10-14T22:34:00.000-04:00

"On the Fourteenth of October / very early in the morning.."

On this day, Canadians who were teenagers in the 80s recall the day when the dislocated body of Elisabeth Dumoutier was found, in the oddly popular song by The Box. I don't know whether the song even describes an actual event; probably not. But it was odd and great: the story told in a singsong recitative, interspersed with bits of dialogue in French and a repetitive but catchy chorus, suddenly terminated with the bang of a gavel and the verdict "Non culpable! Par cause d'alienation mentale."

Fond memories. The Box were the first band I ever heard live, at the Western Fair in London. (The same place -- probably the same stage -- where Johnny Cash proposed to June Carter.)

Oh, and somehow I am immensely cheered by hearing Patrick Moore play the xylophone. That's an affectionate sendup, but as the bio notes, he really is quite a good xylophonist by all accounts. How great is that?

Sleeping now; have head cold, dentist in the early AM, bleah. Blatherings about Augustine forthcoming soon, I hope.

2003-09-29T15:54:00.000-04:00

Drafts

I haven't posted in a few weeks, because I had a big ramble about St. Augustine incubating. I hate that Blogger won't let you put that in a list of drafts while you post some new, inconsequential thing like this.

My last post was an obit, and I can't help noticing that people are dying, as my grandfather used to say, who never died before: Mattel Intellivision shill George Plimpton -- yes, I know, respected man of letters, intellectual, blah blah blah obituarycakes -- but to me he's still the guy who pushed Intellivision back in the golden age of home video games. But, my parents bought me a computer instead of a game box, which seemed pretty far-seeing until programming jobs started haemorrhaging to the Third World. Who else is dead? Some guy who was in Singin' in the Rain, which I've never seen, nor ever really wanted to, since that song was butchered brutally for me by the other kids in elementary school. (Unlike, say, "It's A Small World After All", I'm prepared to believe that "Singin' in the Rain" did have merit at some point.). Elia Kazan, famous ratfink; Leni Riefenstahl, without whom there would probably be no History Channel. It's raining famous dead dudes.

Reading: John McPhee's Coming into the Country, an impression of Alaska circa 1975. It covers a lot of the same issues as Encounters with the Archdruid: the balancing interests of wilderness preservation and development: 'development' including even making wilderness accessible by road. It puts me very much in mind of the Red vs. Green debates in the Mars trilogy, which may be one of the reasons that those arguments ring so true; they've actually been had in the recent history of colonizing the remote parts of the Earth. So it's like a substitute KSR fix, with the bonus of being factual. It also portrays the people who have gone to Alaska to find a frontier, to be away from the restraints of urban society, and don't exactly find what they're looking for. A lot of those profiles are getting put into my personal Americans Are So Weird file, a very large overstuffed box which has brought me no nearer, over the years, to a good explanation of why this should be so. Worries about a severe oil spill in Prince William Sound turned out to be prophetic; debates about moving the capital less so, since a quick look at the State of Alaska website assures me it is still Juneau.

The major effect, though, is to give me wistful thoughts of tramping about the Arctic, something I would doubtless be shockingly bad it even if I could afford it or had a reason to.

2003-09-12T10:46:00.000-04:00

There'll always be a Man in Black

Well we're doin' mighty fine I do suppose
In our streak of lightning cars and fancy clothes
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back
Up front there oughta be a man in black
...
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men
And I wear it for the thousands who have died
Believin' that the Lord was on their side...

So long, Johnny Cash.

2003-09-06T20:34:00.000-04:00

Me old China

A comment recently asked me why I like China Miéville and Kim Stanley Robinson to the extent that seeing them talk for an hour had me bouncing up and down in glee. So I thought I'd try to address that, starting off (arbitrarily) with China.

A couple of years ago I broke my arm in a cycling accident. This resulted in surgery, which resulted in me having -- once the plaster came off -- a row of about 15 staples running from just above my elbow to just below it. Big, surgical steel staples. I dearly regret never getting a picture taken; they were only in for about a week. They looked cool as Hell. My friend Catherine commented that they made me look like on of the Remade.

Which, of course, baffled me utterly. She explained that in China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, the Remade are humans who have undergone some magical/scientific surgery to modify their bodies, generally as punishment. I filed the book away on my To Read list, but it was then only available as a trade paperback, and I hate buying trades; they're expensive, and they don't fit in my jacket pocket.

A fast forward of a few months brings me to Copenhagen Airport, where a miscalculation has left me with nothing but half of a Robert Louis Stevenson omnibus to read before a two-hour layover and a nine-hour flight. I'm pretty sure that the remainder of The Black Arrow and all of Treasure Island, not a long book, will not last; and lo and behold, a bookstall with an English-language section beckons. And there is a mass-market paperback of Perdido Street Station, with a great oil-painted style cover. Out comes my Mastercard, and into the bag goes the book. I am saved, saved!

It turns out, of course, to be more than just a lifesaver; it's riveting. An urban fantasy, in a city -- not too far away from the nameless one of Mary Gentle's Rats and Gargoyles, another favourite -- inhabited by several species, with water-magic and commuter trains, labour unrest, and domestic robots. It has a scientist as hero. By turns it is horrific and surreal -- we meet moths that eat minds, the Ambassador from Hell, an outlaw hero with a mantis claw instead of a hand, and a flying man -- a garuda -- who has had his wings cut off for some crime that nobody who talks to him can even understand. And under all that, rather like Peake or Moorcock, there is a constant moral note, a sense of outrage at complicity in everyday injustices; and even the heroes find themselves complicit. They are not, in general, particularly heroic, either.

I have to admit that my reasoning for liking China's books so much is not that he's doing anything radically new. He's just doing things I like well. In some semblance of order:

It's good fantasy. He does that 'far horizons' thing well -- casually mentioning a name, and a half-sentence of description, such that you immediately sit up and go "Wow, that sounds cool! I really hope there's more about that place, or that person, or that thing." The creations brought wholly on-stage have that proper mythic feeling -- like they were always there in your mental basement, just needing China to shine some light on them.
It's good urban fantasy. Like many people of my age, I discovered urban fantasy by way of Charles de Lint. But much as I like Charles de Lint -- at least before he got all gloomy -- he doesn't have a feel for cities. To me the original manifesto for urban fantasy is G.K. Chesterton's much-neglected The Napoleon of Notting Hill. To Chesterton, cities are fantastical things in themselves: lamp-posts and subway trains are as strange and mysterious as trees and rivers in the wilderness. There's no need to have an irruption of the wilderness into the city, it is already wild -- no less wild because all its denizens are human, and all of its landscape built up over centuries of cycles of human activity and neglect. China has this feeling for cities. Peake had it, too: Gormenghast is basically a city. (Actually, I have a pet theory that Gormenghast is really flying through space on a generation starship heading for the Andromeda Galaxy, but never mind that.)
It's pretty decent science fiction: the world of Perdido and The Scar behaves according to natural laws, though they differ in fine details from ours. And, of course, nobody there quite knows what they are -- though Isaac dan der Grimnebulin is getting a clue -- and so there's lots of leeway to surprise them with. There is technology using common phenomena, like trains and robots: the artificial intelligence uses that old "Dial F for Frankenstein" idea that a certain level of interconnectedness is sufficient to yield sentience, but so does a lot of perfectly respectable SF, so I swallowed it even though I have big trouble with it in the real world. Also, Perdido has a Scientist As Hero, and a lefty scientist to boot. Which brings me to:
Despite all this, it's humanistic and democratic fantasy: hope doesn't rest with the Return of the Divine King, nor with (as in the odious David Eddings) pragmatic but wacky end-runs around their own stated ideals. Okay, brief pause: actually I hate this much more than just hoping for a King to fix everything. At least that kingship is some sort of understandable structure, amenable to checks and balances. But more and more, especially in the light of recent events, fantasy epics where the so-called "Good Guys" literally get away with murder, because, well, they're the right side and they really need to win make me want to toss the book down a large flight of stairs. I live in a basement, and have qualms about abusing library books, so generally this doesn't happen, but, you know, I've done it in my heart End pause.
He turns a great phrase. After his reading at Worldcon, he admitted to doing a lot of plot-wrangling to keep phrases he really liked in the books: like in the The Scar, he decided he absolutely had to use the phrase "Malarial Queendom". And frankly, I'm a major sucker for that sort of thing.

2003-08-21T22:32:00.000-04:00

Best. Panel. Ever.

I'm not sure any of you actually exist, but regular viewers of this space may have noticed in me a certain attachment to the writings of Mr. China Miéville of London, England and Mr. Kim Stanley Robinson of Davis, California. Well, the Worldcon programming features a brief break from a glut of Heinlein and Buffy panels to present "China Miéville and Kim Stanley Robinson In Conversation". In conversation! England's greatest leftie urban fantast and America's greatest leftie scribe of ecological/utopian SF shoot the shit on a Sunday morning, right here in New Torontobuzon! Wow. Who knows what they'll talk about, but they might as well call it "The Revolution Begins Here". At the end, simultaneous text messages to Ken Macleod and Ursula Le Guin will begin the bloodless transatlantic phase change.

And speaking of New Torontobuzon, the spattering outside my window indicates that my much-loved but exasperating city is receiving a much-needed shower of rain. I think I will go stand in it.

2003-08-07T13:46:00.000-04:00

Things that made me snort coffee recently

This entry on Baraita:

"Found that manuscript -- in section not actually my focus, but manuscript context important (or so grant application says) -- offers litany of usual Names of God cribbed from Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, French, and quite possibly nursery rhymes. Favorite name: "Ellamay." Am now visualizing God as ingenue from Beverly Hillbillies. Think this is no worse than visualizing God as old man in nightshirt; am quite certain God has better dress sense either way."
"In related news, cannot take "Jewry" seriously as collective noun."

I have to quibble slightly, though; I'm not sure 'Jewry' is exactly a collective noun, but rather was constructed as a direct analogy to 'Christendom', which did not exactly denote 'all Christians'; note that it is no longer used, even though there are still plenty of Christians to denote by it. Now that I come to write about it, I'm not sure I can really describe exactly what 'Christendom' used to denote, so I can't say what it (or 'Jewry') is if not a collective noun.

In the style of the Brunching Shuttlecocks, this quiz: "Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?". Except with pictures, instead of names, making it difficult. Spoiler and confession: the first image is of Bertrand Meyer, inventor of the Eiffel programming language, whom I immediately pegged as a serial killer even though I saw him give a keynote at ICSE in Portland not three months ago. In my own defence, I was sitting near the back and was not entirely riveted by the talk anyway. An office-mate identified Philip Wadler from the lineup, but Philip Wadler really looks like a programmer anyway, so I was already poised on the button.

Gary Coleman running for Governor of California. "Comedian Gallagher is also gathering signatures," comes the laconic remark about halfway through. Seriously though, it's funny because people of my generation remember Gary Coleman as a little kid saying "What choo talkin' about?", but then surely any number of the people who voted for Reagan had to remember him playing second-fiddle to a lovable chimpanzee, and that was over 20 years ago. Probably we're just jealous because Canadian candidates for high office are by and large bland nonentities.

2003-07-29T17:55:00.000-04:00

F---in' 'ell, I voted for the Hugos!

In thirteen-odd years of fandom, my first Worldcon, and hence my first time voting for the Hugos. One of my personal favourites, Karl Schroeder's Permanence, didn't make the list, but I slogged through and at least read all the Best Novel nominations -- having already been to see all of the best Long Form Dramatic Presentations.

My life is an open book. These are my rankings for Best Novel:

Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson. Not the life-changing, drop-you-on-your-ass greatness of the Mars trilogy, which I am currently re-reading and which continues to motivate me to do all sorts of fun things, like run and do thermodynamics problems in my spare time; but still a great, great slab of alternate history and history of science, and more Islamic feminism than pretty much any SF novel, ever. (Though it is implicit in Sarah Zettel's Fool's War.)

The Scar, China Miéville. More involving, more vivid, and better paced than the nonetheless superb Perdido Street Station; especially impressive when you consider Station had scruffily likeable protagonists, whereas Bellis Coldwine is a big pain in the ass. (Though, of course, Liveman Uther Doul rules.) Not only that, but despite being in the same world is about different things: loyalty and its uses and mis-uses, and the political ends of storytelling, to name just a couple of things China manages to think deeply about without stopping the action for a Message.

Bones of the Earth, Michael Swanwick. The last one I read, and though it didn't unseat Scar and Years from my Top Two, it squeaked in just underneath. Like Years, it is in part about science, and why people do it, which I am a sucker for; and it played in a clever way with genre conventions. "Travel in time to look at dinosaurs" is a classic motif, and he uses the conventions of the "paradox creation" subgenre of time travel, and of the "high-tech humans thrown on own devices in primitive setting" subgenre, and of the "mysterious technology on loan from aliens/other sentients with possibly ulterior motives" trope, to keep nondeterminism, and hence surprises, in the plot, without so much nodding-and-winking intertextuality that you stop believing in the narrative.

Hominids, Robert J. Sawyer. Local Boy Makes Good! This was a pretty solid book, although for its heft it felt as though not much happened and the characters, interesting as initial sketches, didn't develop very much. Still, fine journeyman work, and left me wanting to read the continuation, but, you know, not necessarily deserving a Hugo.

Kiln People, David Brin. Whose name makes me snicker, recalling how he got Coke thrown over him by Jo Walton. Anyway, that has nothing to do with this book, again a decent outing but not really striking me as Hugo material. If you want your mind stretched by the possibilities of copying personalities into other media, read Hofstadter and Dennett's The Mind's I; if you want a lot of in-jokes about clay and puns on the word 'ditto', mixed with forgettable attempts to seem Chandleresque (a pet peeve of mine in SF), then read Kiln People. A decent airplane read, but for a Hugo? This strikes me as just more "author got one before, so I'll nominate this" nomination.

And, just for full disclosure, I am Canadian. 8-)

So, Best (Long) Dramatic Presentation. Looking at this "exit poll", I'm pleased to see my Top Two in the general Top Two, though distressed by the poor showing of Bones and high ranking of Kiln. But I'm appalled by the overwhelming number of votes for The Two Towers, and the paltry number for Spirited Away. Now, I suspect a certain amount of this is people voting despite not having viewed every nominee. TTT got very wide release, and Spirited Away not so wide. But, Jesus Christ! Yes, we all waited for LOTR for years and years, and it is tremendously good and they got so many things right. Yay, Peter Jackson and Co. But really, Spirited Away is a jaw-dropping achievement, and features its own world-building as well. Not to mention that FOTR won last year, when it richly deserved to.

Ah, well. Fans will be fans. Now I just have to take care, after the awards ceremony, not to read Slashdot, where the posting of the final results will invariably lead to long, long threads about how the Hugos are "really" an award for hard science fiction, especially if China wins.

2003-07-22T11:33:00.000-04:00

The citizens retire from the walls

Fellow Serial Diner Colin Eatock covers -- with some bemusement -- the opening of a true Canadian compromise, Parry Sound's Charles W. Stockey Centre for the Performing Arts/Bobby Orr Hall of Fame. Walk in the door, turn one way for classical music, turn the other for hockey memorabilia.

Café Press continues to allow the masses to sell their own merch, with the predictable results -- tedium periodically interrupted by incredible surprises, like cream of wheat flavoured with Pop Rocks. Some highlights:

Everybody's favourite much-sequenced nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, has its own gift shop. Buy the beer stein! The bumper sticker! The thong! Oh my God, the thong. Bacillus subtilis so far doesn't have its own shop, though I was told some time back that "B. subtilis is closely related to anthrax, and what this means is, every single bacillus, in the United States, has a little dollar bill attached to it."
Buy your own OotP spoilers. With great restraint, they are offering neither the thong, the lunchbox, nor the wall clock.
Jacques de Molay is avenged at the Knights Templar shop. There's a special on the Knights Templar teddy bear in combat fatigues. I am sorely tempted. Aidez-moi, croisadeurs!
Wear the immortal words of Socrates here.

The Museum of Techno, so straight-faced you want to run to your collection of histories of electronic music just to double-check. At any rate, I do.

2003-07-12T17:53:00.000-04:00

The 'Glorious' Twelfth..

For I've given my heart to the land I was born
And forgiven the whole House of Orange
King Billy and the whole House of Orange.
-Stan Rogers

2003-07-11T17:43:00.000-04:00

Foxes in the henhouse, cows out in the corn..

Continuing the "eulogies and democracy" trend of the last post: Steve Earle has a moving tribute to Woody Guthrie up at AlterNet. Steve Earle gives me hope for the US all by himself, and even though he once dissed my home town in song, it was a fair rebuke. He finishes up with a bang:

Besides, as much as we need him right now, I wouldn't wish this post-9/11 world on Woody. He hated Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" more than any other song in the world. He believed that it was jingoistic and exclusive, so he wrote a song of his own. It goes:
This land is your land
This land is my land...

I remember singing that in school (with Canadianized geographical references - yay, the folk process), coached by greying hippie teachers who liked the vague populist sentiment of the first verse, but discreetly passed over the more radical later verses:

As I was walkin'
I saw a sign there
And that sign said No Trespassing
But on the other side
It didn't say nothing!
Now that side was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city
In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office
I see my people
And some are grumblin'
And some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

As usual, Steve leaves me nodding and saying "Yeah. What he said." So, no more off-the-cuff rambling; I'm going to walk down a street that once Emma Goldman walked, and hope for better things:

Only the brass-bands throbbing in the park foretell
Some future reign of happiness and peace
We learn to pity and rebel.
-W.H. Auden, "A Major Port"

2003-07-10T14:10:00.000-04:00

"Do only what only you can do"

Of all places, Salon has an appreciation of the late, much-missed Edsger W. Dijkstra. The author commits the venial sin of omitting the middle initial (for 'Wybe'), which Dijkstra was famously much attached to, and I'm not too sure about dubbing the collection of EWD manuscripts a proto-blog. If that's the case, then the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the Essais of Montaigne are also proto-blogs, and maybe the genre of "loosely connected pieces of short-to-medium length in temporal sequence" is pretty old and deserves its own name, separate from the particular technology we are using to enable it these days. However, the piece captures Dijkstra's uncompromising spirit of inquiry and problem-solving nicely, though it glosses over - de mortuis nil nisi bonum, perhaps - his equally-famous, erm, forcefulness in giving voice to that spirit.

I can still recall vividly when Dijkstra visited my department a few years ago. Here was the inventor of the stack and the semaphore, but he wanted to talk to us about calculational proofs. This was just fine with me and the other formalistas, but there was some restiveness -- people hoped for something zippier. An office-mate of mine fell asleep; he had been up until 4am or so making copies of his doctoral thesis. He had a stentorian snore that filled the lecture hall, and did so for a good twenty seconds before an elbow in the ribs. Dijkstra wound up in good time, and fielded questions. An early question was a familiar one - why do proofs that way, when "real" mathematicians don't? The questioner got hit with the butt end of the pistol: "I am not interested in the sensibilities of those who call themselves mathematicians." To Dijkstra, the mechanics of proof were as simple as the rules of high-school algebra, and could be taught in the same way, rather then being cloaked in the social and linguistic conventions of math papers, leaving important details to be reconstructed after much consulting of reference texts. I thought of this point some time ago, while reading Harold Innis' Empire and Communications (much more illuminating than anything of McLuhan's I've read); Innis cites Plutarch on math and politics:

.. Lycurgus is said to have banished the study of arithmetic from Sparta, as being democratic and popular in its effect, and to have introduced geometry, as being better suited to a sober oligarchy and constitutional monarchy. For arithmetic, by its employment of number, distributes things equally; geometry, by the employment of proportion, distributes things according to merit.

For arithmetic there I read algebra, the formal approach, and for geometry the reliance on intuition and innate gifts: and for my part I come down on the democratic and popular side of the fence, and Dijkstra did too. That climate he created was a major part of my education.

I recall, too, the news of Dijkstra's passing. I was at a summer school in formal methods, and Tony Hoare came up to the podium to announce that Dijkstra had died, and asked us all to stand for a minute of silence. There was a strong feeling of being among giants, one of whom had just fallen -- imagine a roomful of physicists hearing of Newton's death, or Einstein's. At the final dinner, J Strother Moore, who had been Dijkstra's department chair at the University of Texas at Austin, delivered a brief eulogy. Moore is a compact, wiry Southern gentleman, flawlessly courteous and decent, and he spoke similarly at the funeral a day or so later - text here. I had forgotten how he spoke as much about Dijkstra the democrat as Dijkstra the scientist:

He brought to faculty meetings only one agenda: How can we improve? How can we become better scientists? Better scholars? Better teachers? He stated his positions in the open and debated them. Then he cast his single vote and that was that. Never did he come to the chair's office and argue, behind the scenes, that because he was Edsger W. Dijkstra we should do things his way.

Though, in truth, many of the founders of Moore's Republic were not only democrats, but scientists also; so, as wiser heads than mine have noted, there are at least common values and mental tools to both tasks.

2003-07-07T20:26:00.000-04:00

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

Of late, I steeled myself to read Matt Ruff's latest outing, Set this House in Order: A Romance of Souls. Steeled, because I have loved his first novel Fool on the Hill for ages now, and I could tell that this one would be nothing like it. If you have not read Fool, it's a fun, fun book; a contemporary fantasy set at Cornell University, with sprites, evil rats, the wonderful Bohemians (including Ragnarok, the Minister for Defence, and Preacher, the Minister for Ministry), Tolkien House, a college for dogs, and lots more. It's a first novel, and has that first novel characteristic of containing everything in the author's head, including the kitchen sink, and there's probably a touch of wish fulfillment -- Ruff did go to Cornell, but his stay probably wasn't that cool. Having loved it for so long, I found myself unable to warm to, or even finish, his second book, Sewer, Gas, and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy: for one thing, there was a lot of talk about Ayn Rand in it, and even though he obviously was mocking at least the extremes of Rand's thought and the silliness of a lot of her followers, that's still too much Ayn Rand for me; and it dwelt in gruesome detail on the main character's smoking, and that always puts me off too. So it was expecting disappointment that I picked up Set this House in Order.

Another source of worry was that House is about people with multiple personalities, and that is just strewn with pitfalls: something that the recent wreckage of the film Identity made gruesomely clear. So, I was pleased to see that Ruff avoided most of these pitfalls, and, in the process, drew me completely into the story. It's been about a week, and I can't say that much of the book has lingered in my head -- I don't think it's quite as deep an exploration of identity and morality as I get the feeling it was meant to be - but it was definitely a compelling narrative.

2003-06-22T17:31:00.000-04:00

Meltdown!

My Betrothed and I are in Ottawa, visiting friends and (me, at least) going to a conference. I wish I had some interesting thoughts provoked by the trip or my day, but really I am just recovering from the sudden onrush of summer. I have great fondness for Ottawa, though, sleepy though it is sometimes; it's been there for me at difficult times. That's an odd thing to say about a city - probably inappropriate personification - but there it is. Cities have very distinct personalities to me. There's a topic! Perhaps more on why this is so when I am back home in my cool basement.

2003-06-13T14:19:00.000-04:00

The years and the miles

James Gleick's new book Isaac Newton is a crisp summary, with no equations, of that fascinating though not very likeable individual's life and work. Simply because Newton is not likeable does not mean he is not loveable, and Gleick clearly loves him, though he is scrupulous about not recounting events for which he has no access to many eyewitnesses, like those recorded in Chaos and Genius. In place of dramatic incidents like the confrontations in Chaos ("Sir, do you intend to offer numerics or a proof?"), he offers a striking perspective on the beginning of the modern world:

Information flowed faintly and perishably then, through the still small human species.

which is the sort of shift of perspective that Stephen Baxter gave me in Manifold: Time by blithely referring to the present day as "the afterglow of the Big Bang" - the Universe young still. Newton the scientist is well portrayed, but a judicious selection of his alchemical and theological writings makes it clear that Newton himself never felt he lived in a clockwork universe - as Keynes (quoted in the epilogue) puts it, he was the last of the magicians, not the first of the scientists. In his alchemical writings, he asserts:

Nothing can be changed from what is without putrefaction. All things are corruptible. All things are generable.

Proton decay would not have astonished him at all.

Frances Yates in The Art of Memory, and Paolo Rossi in Clavis universalis, trace the history of the idea of the universal language - Leibniz's universal characteristic - from Ramon Lull, through Giordano Bruno, to the natural philosophers of the 17th century - Descartes, Leibniz, Newton. For centuries it was pure mysticism, pure nonsense - the idea that all the intractable complexity of reality could be rendered into symbols, whose grammar would reflect the structure of the things they represent, and that new, unknown truths could be obtained by manipulating these symbols simply according to a body of formal rules - a calculus. As a computer scientist and logician, I find this thread of intellectual history close to the most compelling, and I do wish Gleick had traced it more. Newton and Leibniz produced the integral/differential calculus, which we learn in high school simply as "calculus": though since Boole's time, and especially since the time of Church, Turing and Tarski, calculi have blossomed riotously, a garden of forking derivations. Even the calculus of Newton and Leibniz was imperfectly formal, leaning on intuition and geometry - it would take the still-unsung efforts of Weierstrass, Cauchy to put a foundation under that castle.

Stephen Toulmin, in Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, looked at the drive for the universal language, which yielded up calculus and, centuries later with Boole, Frege, Russell, Godel, and their successors, the foundations of computer science, against the backdrop of the European Wars of Religion, and specifically the Thirty Years' War, which turned central Europe into a fair simulacrum of present-day Afghanistan, and for similar reasons. In the face of ideological warfare like that, he argued, there was hope that reason, honed to a sharp enough edge, could decide the truth of the matter without bloodshed. Sadly, a vain hope, by all appearances; if I thought that formal logic would ever stop a knife-fight, let alone a war, I'd be much less apologetic about explaining that I spend my days studying and using it.

I'm fond of the conceit, which appears in Mary Gentle's "What God Abandoned" and other works of fantasy, that the age of Descartes marked not a change in worldview, but a change in the world: that the last magicians and alchemists chose consciously to replace the chaos of a magical world with the predictability of a mechanistic one. There's a temptation to look at this conceit as a stand-in for real changes in our societies, but this is doubtless an oversimplification.

These cover the years and the miles
And talk one style's dialects from London to Omsk
...
Events move now in a smoother control
Than the swords of lords and the orisons of nuns
The poor have choice of purchase, the rich of rents
...
Sir, if you made verse you would doubt symbols
When the means are autonomous, they are deadly
When words slip from verse, they hurry to rape souls
When sensation slips from intellect, expect the tyrant.
-Charles Williams, "Bors to Elayne: On the King's Coins", from Taliessin through Logres

2003-06-10T18:41:00.000-04:00

Gathering dust

The last entry was just posted this afternoon, but since I started it a week and a half ago that is the date Blogger puts on it. That's a little ridiculous, guys.

More up to date entry: today's news yields this, a pleasant good thing about our city in contrast to SARS, West Nile, smog, and an idiot mayor.

"The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation."
-Pierre Elliott Trudeau

2003-05-30T17:15:00.000-04:00

Further questions to your answers

After the last post, it occurred to me that it's all about ontologies, and this is not a widely-used word outside certain circles. I tried to figure out how to reply to the question "What's an ontology?" - perhaps asked by my brother, who for me incarnates the Wily Attorney that Steven Weinberg imagined as the ideal audience for The First Three Minutes: not a domain expert but a good thinker, and widely-read. Weinberg imagined a Wily Old Attorney, but my brother has many years to go yet before that. To add to the challenge, he has a degree in philosophy and knows the standard meaning of 'ontology', which is a field of study and cannot be pluralized.

In brief: an ontology is a thing that helps you ask questions. There are ontologies that we all have: such as for people. Recall the last time you met somebody new, and how the questions went. How old are you? Where are you from? Do you have any brothers or sisters? And so on. Having an ontology for people makes a lot of initial interaction straightforward. Contrast this with situations where you don't have an ontology. I had this experience recently, when I phoned my fair city's Parks and Recreation department to inquire about permits for using a park. I did this with no ontology for permits: of what kind they can be, what privileges they grant and deny, what different states they can be in, and so on and so forth. Now, the person on the other end of the line was naturally in possession of this ontology, and as such was impatient with my attempts to figure out what question to ask. I've encountered this impatience before, and haven't yet thought of a good way to rebuke it: "Look, I don't have your ontology" won't fly. More than once, I've had roughly the following interaction:

Me: "Excuse me, I was wondering if you can do task x for me."
Service-type person: (with mild sarcasm) "I'll need your name first."

But then I'm an introvert, and it bothers me more to blithely fire off my request and get "No, sorry, I don't do that, you need Bill down at Counter Q" - because that means I got it wrong. So I ask first. I want the ontology first. Either approach is fine for human-to-human interaction, but for programs to programs, getting the ontology first is the only way to go.

It's probably a sign of the computer-geek in me that I prefer a list of available services. A long-held fantasy of mine is redesigning the Restaurant System. Restaurants are half-way there: they have a menu, and you pick what you want rather than entering into negotiations with the server or chef (modulo substitutions and order of arrival of appetizers and such things). I'd also like it better if more service options were foregrounded: that, say, you could say to the server "We need to leave by such-and-such a time, please adjust timing of food and the bill accordingly, and warn us if we try to order something time-consuming" or "You may notice I'm alone, which means that I won't be having any after-dinner conversation, so bringing my bill as soon as I say I'm not having coffee or dessert really ought to be a painfully obvious thing to do; also, please seat me somewhere quiet if humanly possible." Okay, yes, if you say these things to a server you will most likely get what you want, but I can't escape the feeling it's an imposition which interferes with the smooth operation of their system, and I think they should simply be part of the system: like in those rare but wonderful places which automatically split up bills per person in large groups, a sensible thing in this age when those of us not having expense accounts go Dutch as a rule. The Restaurant System embodies an outdated set of assumptions, being much harder to change than any individual.

From all this you may draw the unflattering conclusion that I prefer the service people I interact with to behave like automata, which is not at all the case. First of all, I am an old-school leftie of the William Morris variety, and think that in a better society we would all take the odd turn slinging food, cashing cheques, and so forth. Even if just the academy were arranged this way, I would be much more content. Second, I don't wish to lose my consciousness that while an automaton may be asked to do anything at all, a human has dignity and may not be. For instance, most restaurants allow you to add a tip if you pay by credit card, but some screw the server over by making them pay a processing fee. This, I refuse to view as Not My Problem, even though it takes places inside the black box of the Restaurant System. I have to ask, and leave a coin tip (if possible) if the management is an ass.

And formalization is a very double-edged sword, of course, and a rigorous definition of a server's job may well reduce it to something completely automatable: conveying menu choices to the kitchen, conveying food to tables, routing complaints to the appropriate authority. Again, as an introvert, I like the thought of such a restaurant -- pick menu option, have it whooshed to table, no energy-sucking interaction with a person. The consequences as a whole, though, may not be great. For one, a whole class of low-level jobs goes away, and such things have a purpose - not least of which is providing employment for artists and researchers in unlucrative fields which may be stressful, but at least starts and ends at a set time and leaves no problems to be taken home. We technologists fondly like to think that automating away something tedious frees people up to do something more interesting and worthy of humans, but late capitalism doesn't work like that. For another, some Third-Place-like social function served by restaurants, that is probably completely incomprehensible to an obsessive-compulsive and impatient get-in-eat-food-get-out diner like me but is nonetheless important to the ongoing working of civil society, might well be irreparably compromised.

Well, and so. The tradeoff between structure and flexibility never seems to have an equilibrium point: not in biology, not in any individual's mind, not in any civilization. Even in the design of a simple artifact it seems almost overwhelming.

"I am a commuting diagram."
-Daniel Jackson

2003-05-30T14:46:00.000-04:00

Google is ruined, and I ruined it

Glancing at my logs, I find somebody arrived here via the query string "matrix fanfic trinity". And following the link, I discover that, doubtless for one brief shining moment, I am the very first entry for that query.

If I were a better blogger, I'd have kept the link to the person who pointed out, of late, that blog hits are clogging up Google results because people are actually using hypertext as it was originally proposed: like a memex. However, the mis-hits to my page, I find, come largely because search strings span multiple entries. I ramble a lot and make a lot of allusions, but even at that it's mostly the spanning which is the culprit, as with matrix trinity fanfic: fanfic came from the entry about the Digby Mary Magdalene play. In short: multiple documents, one page; each entry really needs to be considered by Google as a document by itself.

Interestingly, if this hypothesis of mine is true, it inverts a minor annoyance which was more common in the early days of HTML: hierarchical structure gone wild!. That is, a structured document that has a separate page for each subsubsubsection, making it a pain to navigate and a chore to print - a perverse thing to do for, say, the manual for a piece of software, which it often was, but still. Use of latex2html was a common accessory in this crime.

It's possible, of course, to stick to a one entry per page template, a la Diaryland, but that makes me crazy to read. After being set back for years by David Siegel and company, the Web is finally catching on to the separation of structure from presentation; now it needs to be able to expose the structure to search engines, and such beasts, so they can be a little cleverer about indexing. I'm not sure whether this is one of the things Tim Berners-Lee means the Semantic Web to be for, but I'm hoping so. Bring on the ontologies!

2003-05-28T13:36:00.000-04:00

Quizzes Considered Harmful

Out of idleness, interest, and the desire not to let too much time stretch between updates, I have twice posted the results of quizzes, and twice the results of questionnaire memes in this space. Thus, there is a degree of hypocrisy to this mini-rant, which I will now artfully defuse by acknowledging up front so that it seems, you know, like even more testimony to my strength of character rather than underlining that I'm capable of being both inconsistent and unreasonably judgmental.

Actually, it's not so bad as all that. I am not here to diss quiz-taking, which seems just fine. No, it's the quiz design manifested on popular sites like Quizilla that bothers me. Yeah, I realize it's just for fun, but to me all the fun is leached away by the fact that almost every question makes it painfully obvious which answer contributes to which outcome. How snoozetacular. The proximate cause of this rant was the "Which Canadian Province Are You? quiz, an especially egregious example where the order of the answers to each question followed the provinces in order of traversal from east to west, and pandered largely to popular prejudices about them, where such exist. Non-Canadians will lack this information, but at the prospect of some netizen in Florida, Denmark or Oman spending even 5 minutes to find out which province of Confederation their personality most closely approximates, my mind not only boggled, but froze and needed to be rebooted. Anyway, to me this obviousness completely invalidates the results and removes the fun; ideally, you should get a series of seemingly irrelevant questions, and then get told that you are Manitoba (or whatever) and why.

I'm convinced that the Dante's Inferno test became so popular because the results were surprising; you didn't get asked a list of question with nine answers, each corresponding to a circle of Hell. And, of course, I realize that rather than just kvetching I should actually come up with my own damn quizzes if I don't like the ones out there, but, well, it's not my trade to make tables.

While I'm in this ranting frame of mind, there's been another question on my mind for close to twenty years now: why do the English call the common schoolyard game of tag "tig"? "Tag" makes perfect sense: you know, because when you're It you have to, well, tag someone to pass the Itness on to them, like some kind of masochistic token-ring network. But "tig"? This description uses it, appallingly, as a verb, with the simple past formation "tug". This site also features the charming games "Crown Jewels":

"You can use anything for jewels, a few balls..."

"Octopus", which falls into the general "Red Rover" category:

When the octopus shouts "octopus!", the other players must try to swim (run!) [Ed. Note: important explanation. Actual swimming would be impossible on dry land, not a growth experience for the kids] across the sea to the other beach. The octopus is allowed to move freely and tag as many players as they can.
Once tagged, they must stand frozen on the spot where they were tagged. They then become part of the octopus team, and can tag the other players running to the beaches...but unlike the main octopus, they are not allowed to run around, they must remain frozen to the spot, using only their arms to tag.

Hm, okay, that actually sounds reasonably fun; I remember being a not-very-fast kid, and getting to be on the Octopus Team (maybe as a sea-anemone) has to be better than just flopping on the grass in ignominy until the next damn game.

On the other hand, the same site also offers the unbelievable "Bean Game":

Run around the area making shapes of different beans. A caller gives instructions which the group must follow:
Green Bean: group must run.
String Bean: group stand tall.
Baked Bean: group crouch down. [Ed. Note: insert fart joke here.]
Broad Bean: group stretch as wide as they can.
Jumping Bean: group jump on the spot.

which to me sounds more like a Nitzer Ebb song than anything else, and not a lot of fun. There's also "Chicken Pie", but enough is enough already. Octopus!

2003-05-28T11:09:00.000-04:00

To no one's surprise..

.. I score "35.10848% - Major Geek" on the Geek Test. (Disappointingly, the next rank up is not Colonel Geek but Super Geek.)

2003-05-27T17:40:00.000-04:00

Harrowing the house of the dead

A trawl through the new releases at the nearby library produced two interesting-looking books from small Canadian presses. Now, ordinarily, I find the idea of independently-published Canadian books more appealing than the reality; but these are non-fiction, so they avoid the grim-slice-of-life quality of most fiction, and the "rivulet of uninspired verbiage meandering down a page" terror of modern Canadian poetry. And not only are they non-fiction, but they deal with things of interest to me, so I was won over easily.

The first: Agora Borealis: Engaging in Sustainable Architecture, by Vivian Manasc and Cheryl Mahaffy, published by Partners in Design, Edmonton, AB. (Note to PiD: please, find a more Google-friendly name; there are at least two dozen "Partners in Design" who come up first.) Since this is a book on design, I'm going to dwell a bit on the book as an object, and not just on the text. As befits the imprint - devoted to books on sustainable and green architecture and design - this is a handsome book; its unusual proportions, thicker than usual paper and floppy orange-and-khaki cover with interesting type all scream "I am a book on design!", and I'm a sucker for that, since I like to think that with more visual intuition I too could be a designer (of things other than software, at any rate). Since I borrowed it and didn't buy it, I didn't care about possible shelving issues, but they doubtless exist. The book shows evidence of constraints: the About the Authors is photocopied and glued into the back, and most of the pictures are black and white. Also, and I realize this is a small quibble, CO₂ was printed without the subscript, and that looks bad and uninformed. Most serious complaint: that Wired-esque thing that layout people really out to have outgrown by now, of interleaving two chunks of text in different fonts and colours. Ooh, I hate that. I know it's supposed to produce some kind of contrapuntal impression, and in principle that's a great idea, but unless most readers have much more parallel minds than I do, the end result is just reading one, then the other, and it takes much more time than if they were just set in columns alongside one another. There's also the more standard magazine convention of quotations in larger type interleaved with paragraphs, and I am none too keen on that either.

Anyway, on to the text. Obligatory disclaimer: the keen student of this weblog will probably already have guessed that I am not an architect, but I shall reassert that right now just to clear the ground. There are four case studies: all in northern Alberta. The architects responsible apparently also did a building in Whitehorse, which looks very cool but is unfortunately not described. The northernness is significant: the tradeoff between climate-control, energy efficiency, and natural light and air is a theme throughout. It's a commonplace that Canada is a nation built by technology - primarily communications and transportation - but if we are to have any real life in the North, not the toe-hold currently held, technologies for building like the ones in this book are vital. Not just to eke out an existence there, but to live large (though treading lightly). And if we can't live like humans even in the less hospitable regions of our own planet, how can we think about other ones? That's a general hope, not an especially patriotic one; though it wouldn't disappoint me to see, before I die, "From Canada By Space" written on some other world.

When I read about architecture, I'm always, with part of my mind, wondering what architects have to teach about making software. I was pleased to find that software is central to the projects described in this book: specifically, cheap energy modelling of buildings. It's that software - and, of course, the mathematical models behind it, which needed to be tuned and correlated with empirical observations, a story not told here - which, according to the authors, turned green building from trial-and-error craft that didn't necessarily repay the time and effort invested into an engineering discipline. There is something, too, about doing climate-control with minimal resources which is elegant as a clever algorithm is elegant: resources might be cheap enough that brute force works fine, but somehow a programmer has a responsibility to the discipline, if not to an employer, to use the elegant solution.

Turning to the other direction of learning, the other thing that most interested me was the architects' process of doing workshops with all the stakeholders - by which they mean not only the eventual users of the building, but also the subcontractors. Not only did they have initial consultations, but they kept asking clarifying questions: keeping the stakeholders as a primary source, rather than putting their requirements into a big document that drifts further and further from reality as design decisions which feed back into the requirements get made. It looked like they solicited input for as many of those decisions as they could. One project - turning a disused airport terminal into a high school - made it impossible to consult with many staff or students, who didn't really exist yet, and they confessed this lack caused problems later, though I would have welcomed concrete examples.

My main quibble came not with the process, but with the product. Sure, there was plenty of natural light and air - something lacking, I might add, in my current recently-built building, not that I recall an architect ever asking me how I felt about an office with low-hanging fluorescent lights and no windows - and that rules, but everything had that "Modern Building" look that I don't have the vocabulary to actually describe: very spare, clean lines, very abstracted. I accept that this is a style, and there's even some argument to be made that it fits with the starker Northern landscape. On the other hand: I like ornamentation. Going back to my building: it's nice enough, though could do better in the light/air departments, but I still look at the Gothic Revival college across the street and sigh wistfully, wishing we could evict its current inhabitants and take possesion of its stone staircases, quaint library, cloisters, and chapel. To expand this argument to be more about just "Me, me, me", our current civilization didn't spring from nothing at all, and I think that it's meet and right for buildings to reflect that; to show where they came from, not just where they are - to bear the traces of Greece and Rome, of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment. (Note: I don't apply this argument to the First Nations high school, since they would probably like their own vernacular architecture to be the dominant influence; although, of course, that was a conversion rather than a new building, so scope for such things was limited in any case). Besides, it has often been claimed that the pillars and arches of the Gothic cathedral were echoes of the forests of northern Europe; why not look to the forests of northern Turtle Island for similar inspiration?

From another quarter entirely, though, comes this proof that the spirit of Gothic is not dead in building. The cultural cauldron to the South is worth watching, too: ex America semper aliquid nova.

2003-05-26T13:15:00.000-04:00

Hell is full of mice

Preliminary biographical note: My Betrothed had a concert at Marcon in Columbus, OH, this weekend past, playing her fiddle. I am enormously proud of her and happy for her. I wish I could have been there, but I was bouncing up and down here all the same; she astonished and delighted all and sundry, as I was sure she would.

I myself, as happens all too frequently, consumed more than I produced this past weekend. On Friday, I took in half of a medieval play about the life of St. Mary Magdalene. Well.. sort of; it had elements that, literally, were not exactly canon: to start with, Mary begins by inheriting a castle from her father, Lord Magdalene. I'm picturing the same sort of dialogue about that that fanfic writers go through:

"No, wait. She didn't have a castle in the Gospels."
"It doesn't say she didn't have one."
"But it doesn't make sense! Why would she become a prostitute if she had a castle? Did they even have castles in Roman-occupied Judaea? I can't see the Romans putting up with Jews having their own castles in that situation."
"Well, in my version she has a castle."

Okay, fine. So Mary inherits the castle, and her brother Lazarus (I won't even go into the conflation of Mary Magdalene and Mary of Mary-and-Martha here) doesn't seem to be peeved at all; I'm fuzzy, again, on first-century Jewish (or indeed, medieval English) law in this area, but I have a sense that normally he would have stood to inherit. But maybe he doesn't want the responsibility of owning a damn castle, which probably involves a lot of paperwork and kissing Roman ass anyway, and probably at this point he was already struggling with the big C or tuberculosis or giardia or whatever eventually knocked him over and was just as happy to avoid the extra tsuris.

The production was outside, and people sat in the middle of a park, with the sets arranged all around them on carts; action moved from cart to cart. We flashed, at this point, about 75 degrees northward to Hell, where a very butch and bullwhip-cracking Satan plots to bring about Mary's downfall. Why this is so important to him is explained, but I didn't quite track it: some sort of treading-on-the-serpent's-head business about Mary being able to depopulate Hell if she isn't stopped. Satan zips around, a dog-headed Wrath and snake-headed Envy in tow, to the cart of The World, who delivers a great though totally non-action-advancing little speech about the seven planets and the metals they are associated with. Anyway, Satan and The World send a messenger (strangely, the same messenger we earlier saw carrying letters between the Emperor Tiberius, Herod, and Pilate; I don't know if this is in the text, or just scrimping on cast-members) to the King of Flesh, an effete wuss lounging in a flowery bower with Lady Lechery, Gluttony, and Sloth. Having assembled all seven deadly sins and a couple of random devils - who are apparently necessary because the deadly sins are not exactly goal-oriented and have a tendency to indulge in their namesakes rather than get about the arduous business of tempting mortals - our villains shoo them off to Mary's pad to bring about her downfall. Which they do: this downfall is symbolized by Mary dancing a branle with all of them, to the strains of a woefully-out-of-tune hurdy-gurdy.

At this point, enter Jesus. There's probably no harder role in the world than Jesus, so I tend to give kudos for any performance which does not induce actual cringing, but this was a decent enough stab as they go. A little reserved, but the text seems to be like that; he doesn't cry at Lazarus' death, which I think is sort of important, but, okay. What expression of sorrow there is manifests through Simon Peter laying a comforting arm over Jesus' shoulders, and that was a good touch. Anyway, Mary washes Jesus' feet, and he forgives her and drives out the seven deadly sins and assorted devils: by a happy coincidence, this also managed to shoo away a helicopter which had hovered nearby for about ten minutes, and came at exactly 6PM, so there were bells ringing. Nice timing. I don't know what was with the helicopter; perhaps medieval mystery plays are now considered a subversive activity. So, anyway, all of the sins and devils are driven out of Mary. Satan is some pissed, yo, and the action stops for some completely gratuitious kink as the deadly sins all have to take their turns getting whipped by the two devil heavies while Satan froths and cracks his bullwhip in the air. They all bitch and moan, except for Lechery who is actually kind of into it, which figures. Seriously, all this hot devil-on-allegorical-personification leather action consumes about 5 minutes, which provides added evidence that my ancestors could be mighty kinky; although the game of hot cockles, an utterly transparent excuse for people to spank each other, was probably enough testimony in itself.

So, back to Judaea, where Lazarus is now on the verge of popping his clogs. Jesus is too busy to show up, and Lazarus buys the farm. A procession of mourners in black hoods and chant-singing angels carries him to the tomb. Mary and Martha bawl Jesus out for not showing up, and, despite a gentle reminder that Lazarus is enjoying perpetual bliss compared to which playing second-fiddle to his Hell-depopulating sister (not to mention that Martha probably pushes him around like nobody's business) in a sandy, discontented Roman province governed by Pontius Pilate - who, far from being the slightly wimpy philosopher of the Gospels, was actually a crucifixion-happy psychopath - probably fails to thrill, Jesus has them roll aside the stone and calls out the mostly-naked Lazarus.

At this point there was an intermission, and it started to rain. Heavily. And so I missed the second half of the play, in which Mary goes to Marseilles to convert the pagan King and Queen to Christianity, in more not-exactly-canon action. At least Marseilles actually existed then. All in all, though, even truncated it was tremendous fun.

Hell is dark, Hell is deep
Hell is full of mice
-"Dives and Lazarus", English traditional, collected by Vaughan Williams

And so is my apartment, alas. Well, hardly full, but I'm a light sleeper and even the odd skitter wakes me up. Perhaps I should get an oatmeal-chest for them to bob about.

2003-05-21T16:03:00.000-04:00

Zion dub

You have probably already guessed that I am adding my own two, leaf-bedecked Canadian cents to the chorus of opinion on The Matrix Reloaded. Before I leap, all nonchalant and cassock-wearing, into that fray, some possibly relevant background. By which I mean, in the rhetoric of Blogopolis, things I want to talk about because they relate to how I react to the movie.

Neuromancer. Y'know, I could just stop there: you can fill in for yourself the Gahan Wilson-esque graphic of a huge, brushed-steel cube, like a NeXT with rabies, the single word "Neuromancer" etched into it, awed masses paying it reverence. You can scoff at the sequels, or at the near-future sequence that began with Virtual Light; you can snicker at Johnny Mnemonic: The Motion Picture -- though in fact I rather liked it: sure, they did Molly all wrong, but I loved Rollins as the righteous slum doctor with the ass-kicking Rollinsmobile, and the reliably talented Ice-T was a great Lo-Tek, and Keanu seemed really pretty decent about how they shamelessly stole basically all his scenes, except for the rant. ("I.. want.. room service!") You can probably spurn the Abel Ferrara adaptation of New Rose Hotel, but I can't, because I haven't seen it. Anyway, you can diss all that if you like, but there is no dissing Neuromancer: it was perfect as what it was, and remains so. That pure vision of downloading your soul into software was like a bolt of lightning: it would appear shortly afterwards in Tron as almost pure nightmare, but Gibson knew how seductive
it was, the horror of the messiness of the organic, the fear of pain and loss and death that drove it. Still and all, in the end the Flesh finds the weapons to defeat the Book: and not least among these weapons is righteous dub from the Rastafarian orbital colony Zion.

Flash forward a decade or so. One of the things that sold me on graduate school was spending a year (plus change) working for a Large Old Computer Company. One day at lunch one of my officemates, another student intern, mused that what our department really needed was a Rasta. I pointed out that LOCC was almost certainly Babylon. Still and all, Cabaret Voltaire had hymned a Digital Rasta, and having one kicking out Perl in the next cube would have ruled. Other colleagues had much more Gnostic desires. "Aren't you so sick of living in a body?," one asked me, out of the blue one day. "I can't wait until I can just download my brain into software." This was somebody who spent his weekends chasing girls, but I guess he would have preferred being spared the necessity. Rather than answer the question, I favoured him with some "Sailing to Byzantium":

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold, and gold enamelling..

But my own taste for the artifice of eternity was daily diminishing.

Shortly after that came The Matrix. That same year had seen the same obsessive mathiness surface in Darren Aronofsky's Pi, and the same Plato's-cave metaphysics in Cronenberg's Existenz, but The Matrix was so much more satisfying than either. It touched nerves through deft metaphor: Hackers and Sneakers had paid lip-service to the wizardly self-image of geeks, and countless action movies had given form to fantasies of defying gravity and physiology, but here the imagined world allowed a short-circuit directly from a programmer's agility and strength of mind to pure ass-kicking in the virtual dojo. The Matrix was a non-repeatable phenomenon, and that made following it up a tall order. Rumours of sequels began almost immediately, of course; I was told more than once that the sequel would be entitled Zion, after the free human city that we never get to see in the first movie. When the title The Matrix Reloaded was settled on, I felt a little disappointment; but I was repaid, because Zion is front and centre in it.

In Reloaded, in what for me (and Andrew O'Hehir, one of the few reviewers who seems to have seen the same movie I did) was the main touchstone of the whole movie, we see Zion celebrating, in a massive, thunderous rave, while Neo and Trinity consummate their love in private. It puts the whole first movie in clear perspective, and sets the stage for the second one: what exactly are they fighting for? What do they take so seriously? Oh, right - it's this. Cypher sells this vision out for imaginary steak in the Matrix, and seeing Zion play as it works, with passion and focus, you can only shake your head at the poor deluded fool. I bounced impatiently in my seat on both viewings, wanting to get up and dance in the aisles of the theatre. Rocky Horror is a tradition, whose very silliness and self-parody invites us to join in, but Reloaded, like the first movie, is all about choosing involvement over detachment. Reacting to it felt right; at least the rules of opening-night shows let me cheer the fights and the good lines, even if dancing would have been beyond the pale. At the end of this sequence, when Morpheus looks out into the main shaft of the city and murmurs "Goodnight, Zion" I had the overwhelming desire to yell back "Goodnight, Morpheus!" -- not just for the funny, but because the Wachowskis had just made me feel like Zion was my home, too. (And not only because my town could use a few sensible, dreadlocked councillors.)

Of course, after emerging blinking into the moonlight, I thought of all kinds of little problems with the movie. The expository dialogue is terrible. It's still not sufficiently justified that programs in the Matrix mostly play by slight bending of consensus-reality rules, instead of just using the marvels of random-access memory to delete irritating problems. The characterization is not bad, in a broad brush-stroke sort of way, but I didn't find myself caring about the characters quite as much as I should; and the potentially-interesting Captain Niobe was woefully sidelined. Those are all issues. The thing is, though, after running through all these objections - I found that I really didn't care. Pretension ahoy, but I can't think of any other way to really put words to my reaction: Reloaded engaged me as a work of art, and its storytelling was only one side of that, adequately compensated for, to my tastes, by all the others.

A bed to be made, and a bed to lie in
One hand on the darker side, and our sights set on Zion
The heart of a skeptic, and the mind of a child..

-Indigo Girls, "You and Me of the 10,000 Wars"

2003-05-13T17:22:00.000-04:00

Neologism alert!

I hate to be such an old fogey as to complain about verbing of nouns, but "to larvicide" (spotted in today's Toronto Star) really does strike me as peculiar. The real payoff in that story, though, comes several paragraphs in, when a sentence calmly begins "Liberal health critic Sandra Pupatello..."

Maybe I should have stayed in Portland, and discovered whether my travel health insurance would cover counselling in Klingon. Given the surreality of recent headlines in standard news outlets ("Dixie Chicks answer critics, pose nude"), I'm not surprised that over half of respondents to this poll, at last count, deemed The Onion the most reliable source of information.

2003-05-08T11:03:00.000-04:00

Nostalgia for the Carboniferous

Why it's been so long between posts. I am in Portland, Oregon, and it is wonderfully rich in ferns and mosses accessible by foot or public transit, but I have not brought a computer with a wireless card, so an Internet connection is a little hard to come by. Mostly I have been to busy conferencing to do much besides visiting Washington Park and seeing the local vegetation, running through Portland State University, and drooling in Powell's. More today, I hope.

Don Quixote de la Mack Daddy. As travel-reading I brought along Don Quixote. A couple of hundred pages in it yielded up the following astonishing bit of social policy:

"..the pimp's trade is no ordinary trade; it must be carried out by intelligent people and it is absolutely essential to any well-ordered society, and only the well-born should exercise it; and there should be an official inspector of pimps, as there is of other trades, and a maximum permitted number of them established and published, as is the case with stockbrokers... I should like to go on to give the reasons why it would be advisable to make a careful selection of those who do such a necessary job in society, but this is not the place."

-book 1, chapter 22, translation by John Rutherford

Much coffee. Though, as anticipated for the Pacific Northwest, Starbucks outlets abound -- though most of them seem to close at 8pm in time for the Rolling-Up of the Streets in Portland -- there is also a much more idiosyncratic and fun local chain called Coffee People. I first spotted them in the airport, with a stall promising "Great coffee, no backtalk" - really, this seemed like an odd way to distinguish themselves; I've never found Starbucks employees particularly insolent. (A great word which I will forever hear in the Dr. Evil voice - "I had the group liquidated. They were insolent.") The coffee is somewhere between Starbucks and Second Cup in quality (Tim Horton's partisans may disagree, but I've never really been sold on Tim's coffee), but printed on the cup is a delightfully absurd Bill of Rights:

People of Coffee, you have certain rights. Among these are the Rights to Spring, the Right to Peace, Freedom and Coffee - in that order.

You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to become an attorney. If you cannot become an attorney, someone will become one for you.

You have the right to wander, in your own way, the Garden of Hydraulics that is espresso.

You have the right to form your own opinions. You may even have the right to address the nation tonight during the dinner hour. Check local listings.

You have the right to expect freedom from backtalk. However, seen from outer space, much of the globe appears to be blue. Therefore, O Wanderer, speak softly to us. [Ed. Note: okay, this is mildly creepy for some reason.]

Coffee isn't always the answer. Certainly not. But it remains a beautiful question we are inclined to ask. [Ed. Note: strictly speaking, people, this is not a right.]

And on that note, off to the tub, and more exploring.

2003-05-01T19:34:00.000-04:00

Uncles Bill

"A 19-year-old draft dodger named William Gibson conducts CBC TV on a tour of the village, where Beatle-haired kids, drugs, and free love are rampant."

Yep, that William Gibson. I read William Gibson for many years before ever hearing his voice; I think it was on an episode of Prisoners of Gravity. I was surprised by how slow and Southern it was, lingering on "The sky was the colour of a television set tuned to a dead channel" like a reminiscence over lemonade. It reminded me almost instantly of that other great writing William from the Southern states - William Seward Burroughs - only younger and more energetic. Not that the energy was being used, but if Gibson had really had to get that sentence out in a hurry, he could've, though it might've dented his sangfroid. Listening to Burroughs in his last couple of decades, though, you felt that he'd had a pretty wild life and this was really about as fast as he wanted to talk, thanks very much, goodnight.

According to Greg Lazenby's guide to literary Toronto, Gibson lived right on my block at one point during his sojourn here. To some things, the only proper response is "Cool." That was one of them.

2003-04-30T15:11:00.000-04:00

Riguarda qual son io

...you wouldn't think there could be any real suspense about it except a mild speculation as to whether the next clutch of bad eggs is going to be served up poached, fried or scrambled.
-letter from Dorothy L. Sayers to Charles Williams, on Dante

I realize this is a further substitute for original thoughts, and blatant herd-following, but I read Dante not too long ago and couldn't really resist; besides, everybody is jumping off a cliff, so I may as well too.

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	High
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Low
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	High
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very Low
Level 7 (Violent)	Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Moderate
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Very Low

Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test

Black wind, come carry me far away!

..Lust
Was one of the great teachers; Pascal was a fool.
How Emilie had loved astronomy and bed..
...
He'd done his share of weeping for Jerusalem: As a rule,
It was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.
-W.H. Auden, "Voltaire at Ferney"

2003-04-28T19:40:00.000-04:00

"You Will Answer The Questions, Doctor"

That was a chapter title in a Doctor Who book; for the life of me I don't remember which one, but I bet Amy does. (Edit: apparently - thank you, my love! - it's Full Circle, with the Fourth Doctor, Adric, and Romana: a good reason to remember! Like most geek-boys watching Who, I wanted to be Adric, and to impress Romana.)

This meme comes courtesy of Bluejo, and insidiously plays on a weak spot of mine: each question must be answered with a quotation. (It occurs to me that 'memes' in the blogging sense are not really single memes, but some sort of virus: they come wrapped in a coating. But we are already overloading the word 'virus'.)

1. Who are you?

We are not that strength which in olden days
Moved heaven and Earth; that which we are, we are.
-Tennyson, "Ulysses"

2. What do you look like?

He was tall and he gangled.

When he sat in his deckchair gazing at the Pacific, not so much with any kind of wild surmise any longer as with a peaceful deep dejection, it was a little difficult to tell exactly where the deckchair ended and he began, and you would hesitate to put your hand on, say, his forearm in case the whole structure suddenly collapsed with a snap and took your thumb off.

But his smile when he turned it on you was quite remarkable. It seemed to be composed of all the worst things that life can do to you, but which, when he briefly reassembled them in that particular order on his face, made you suddenly feel, ``Oh. Well that's all right then.''

-Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

3. What's your secret?

(Unintentional meme trigger: "Secret secret.. I've got a secret..")

He that has been a servant
Knows more than priests and Kings;
But he that has been an ill servant,
He knows all earthly things.
-G.K. Chesterton, "The Ballad of the White Horse"

4. What do you want to be?

There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars, and now we dare not go a hundred miles from home. We keep a little knowledge, and do nothing with it. But once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life. We did man's work.
-Ursula Le Guin, City of Illusions

5. What can you do?

A man's true delight is to do the things he was made for. He was made to show goodwill to his kind, to rise above the promptings of the senses, to distinguish appearances from realities, and to pursue the study of universal Nature and her works.
-Marcus Aurelius

6. What can't you do?

And all the clocks in the City
Began to whirr and chime:
"O let not Time deceive you;
You cannot conquer Time."
-W.H. Auden, "As I Walked Out One Morning"

7. What is love?

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day
I would my true love did so chance
To see the pageant of my play
To call my true love to the dance.
-"Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day", traditional, English West Country

8. What is friendship?

One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need -- of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.
-Bertrand Russell, "A Free Man's Worship"

9. Are you strong?

We acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,
Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire..
-T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

10. What are you afraid of?

When I think of pain - of anxiety that gnaws like fire and loneliness that spreads out like a desert, and the heartbreaking routine of monotonous misery, or again of dull aches that blacken our whole landscape or sudden nauseating pains that knock a man's heart out at one blow . . . it "quite o'ercrows my spirit." If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it. But what is the good of telling you about my feelings? You know them already, they are the same as yours. Pain hurts. That is what the word means.
-C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

11. What would you do with a million dollars?

I'd give the ugly people all the money
I'd rewrite the Book of Love - I'd make it funny
-Laurie Anderson, "My Eyes"

12. What would you tell the one who loves you?

Love, let us live as we have lived, nor lose
The little names that were the first night's grace.
-Ausonius, 4th century AD

13. What do you want to do?

By difficult mental work, going on for years and surmounting enormous difficulties, we are step by step acquiring new logical truths. And with what are these truths to be concerned? With empty inscriptions and spatial ornaments? I am not a graphic artist or calligrapher, and I am not interested in ornaments and inscriptions.
-J. Lukasiewicz, "In Defense of Logic"

14. Where do you want to be?

"My home is not a place, it is a person, sir. People."
-Lord Aral Vorkosigan, in Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold (again, previously quoted in these pages, but it still holds)

15. What do you want?

Disturb our negligence and chill
Convict our pride of its offence
In all things, even penitence,
Instruct us in the civil art
Of making from the muddled heart
A desert and a City where
The thoughts that have to labour there
May find locality and peace
And pent-up feelings their release;
Send strength sufficient for our day
And point our knowledge on its way..
-W.H. Auden, "New Year Letter"
-or simply-
...the humility of Kepler or Newton, who studied the Universe, and knew they were not asked to run it.
-Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology

2003-04-26T17:15:00.000-04:00

Carrying that weight

"There's that word again: heavy. Why are things so heavy in the future?"

-Doc Brown in Back to the Future

And we continue the "'Tis Fifty Years Since" vein of the previous post. It is also fifty years since a somewhat less momentous event: the publication of Hal Clement's hard SF novel Mission of Gravity. Long out of print, Mission is now available as part of a handsome Tor omnibus entitled Heavy Planet, along with the sequel Star Light, some short stories, and the essay "Whirligig World" about the design of the planet Mesklin. It is not, sadly, followed by a note akin to the one that Poul Anderson once received after giving a world-building workshop: "Dear Mr. Anderson, That is not the way I do it. Yours sincerely, God." Also missing is a program Clement once wrote to calculate the shape of Mesklin, which turned out to disagree with that of the books.

Once upon a time I had everything Hal Clement had written, up to the forgettable The Nitrogen Fix, and at some point when I was purging my SF books I think I flushed most of it. Though I went off him at one point, I'm enjoying Heavy Planet - I finished Mission of Gravity and the short stories, and am now in the midst of Star Light. What exactly am I enjoying? It can't be character - all the characters are sketched in great, big brush strokes, and in Mission there are really only three - the Mesklinites Barlennan and Dondragmer, and the human Charles Lackland.

In the grand SF tradition, a big dollop of blatant exposition is probably needed at this point, for those who haven't read this stuff. Mesklin is a planet with 16 times Jupiter's mass, which spins at such an absurdly fast rate that it has the shape of a fried egg ("I wanted to call the book Pancake in the Sky, but Isaac Asimov threatened violence"), and an atmosphere the depth and pressure of Earth's, roughly, instead of being a gas giant. The other significant consequence of the fast rotation is great variation in perceived gravity, due to centrifugal force: from 700g at the poles, to 3g at the equator. (Intuition pump, following some back-of-the-envelope calculations: if you drop an object at 1g, Earth gravity, in one second it will fall 5m and acquire a speed of about 36 km/h. At 700g, it will fall 3.5 kilometres in a second and reach a velocity of about 7 km per second. ) On this planet, a species of exoskeleton-bearing centipedelike organisms, roughly two feet long and two inches in diameter, has evolved sentience and developed a roughly medieval level of technology. Though they mostly live close to the poles, a trader/explorer named Barlennan (like Marco Polo, driven equally by the love of profit and a fascination with the unknown) travels to the equator - the only part of the planet where humans can actually exist, and indeed there are some of us there, and contact is made. This is the back story: at the opening of Mission of Gravity, Barlennan is already well acquainted with the human visitor Lackland. A human probe has crash-landed on Mesklin near the pole, and since, for some incomprehensible reason, it was storing all its data on board instead of transmitting it, the humans ask Barlennan to pretty please take his ship and crew and some cameras and visually scan the instrument readings for them. (For some reason, it seems to frequently become important in SF to abuse a high-bandwidth video link for conveying low-bandwidth information: just off the top of my head, this happens in Sterling's "Green Days in Brunei" and Bujold's The Vor Game. At least in The Vor Game it's being used as a covert channel, which is more defensible.) And off they go.

Neither humans nor Mesklinites really seem to have a culture at all; no religion, no myths, no customs, no taboos. The Mesklinites have a well-developed rational fear of heights (which they define as anything above about an inch - see above for acceleration at 700g) and having things above them (same), but like the human fear of darkness and large predators that's not really culture. There's no sexuality at all; there might be more information in Star Light, but from all you can tell the Mesklinites are all male. It's a very boyish fictional universe, and in a lot of ways that makes it soothing to re-read, for me: humans and aliens interact in a very relaxed meta-culture based on trade, science, and a general respect for the well-being of other sentients. Probably, when I was a teenager failing miserably at understanding the not-very-rational culture of my schoolmates, I found this very reassuring.

So, really, this is science fiction that is actually about science. And since the protagonist is a trader, it is, to a great extent, about applied science, and about the relationship between theoretical understanding and embedded knowledge. The humans have vastly superior theoretical knowledge of physics and chemistry; but time and again it is much less useful than it ought to be, because of their lack of intuition about conditions on Mesklin - and Barlennan picks up on this very quickly. The human advisors lack the embedded experience he and his crew have, but their science is able to supplement Mesklinite informal knowledge. This process of synthesis of being-in-the-world and abstract understanding is, basically, the narrative engine of Mission of Gravity, and the various incidents and setbacks just give it a form. Well, it's a fine boy's adventure story in hundreds of gravities, also.

Barlennan's character is not convincingly alien, really, but the fine balance between wanting to know things for profit and wanting to know them for the sake of interest is a familiar one that I've seen in many a technologist. When he admits to the humans that he could be tempted to give up trading for the sake of learning, I wanted to jump up from my chair and shout "Yeah!"; but when he (or, more usually, Dondragmer) turns a bit of abstract human science into something useful in the world, that makes me smile too.

Small outstanding problem: what does the name 'Mesklin' mean, really? The two things it calls to mind by association are salad greens and a psychoactive drug, and I'm not sure either of those is quite right. Actually, maybe they are closer than they might seem: I find Heavy Planet a nourishing read, even if it doesn't hold up as a novel of character at all ("Salad isn't food! Meat and potatoes are food!"), and as a travelogue to an imaginary alien landscape, where terrestrial assumptions are all wrong, there is much to be said for it too.

2003-04-25T13:41:00.000-04:00

Four amino acids and the truth

"Genius need not always wear an Einstein's saintlike mien."

-James Gleick, Chaos

Google reminds me that today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Crick and Watson's Nature paper on the structure of DNA. The one in which Rosalind Franklin's name is not, so far as memory serves, even mentioned, when by many reasonable standards her contribution was sufficient to warrant a place as co-author.

Watson's memoir The Double Helix was urged on me by my mother, and I enjoyed it; though I took a dislike to Watson himself early on, enough so that I can't recall even registering the abuse he heaps on Franklin. A quick re-flip through the book brings up plenty, which doesn't really seem to be counterbalanced by his sheepish confession in the afterword of a later edition that she deserved more credit. I'm not even sure my mother noticed it; principally she identified with Francis Crick, and always regretted learning that you could be clumsy in the lab and still be a good scientist too late to do anything about it. After all, in the book there's just Watson's opinion, and given his continued loopiness on the subject of eugenics there's every reason not to entertain an opinion of James Watson's very long unless it's actually about biochemistry; the systematic sidelining which Franklin suffered, institutionally as well as from spiteful individuals like Watson, does not appear at all. Again, I am working from memory here, but I would be surprised if Watson saw fit to mention that Franklin was barred from the lunchroom at King's College on grounds of sex.

But then, my mother has also often claimed that you can accomplish anything at all, as long as you don't care who gets the credit; and every evidence is that Rosalind Franklin would have agreed. Still, justice should be done; and general knowledge about Franklin's contribution seems to be diffusing. I've even managed to work in a bland reference to "Crick, Watson and Franklin" while giving a talk, which I was absurdly happy about. Current accounts, I've noticed, tend to work in a cautious note about how she could be a difficult person, so not everything can be explained by sexism; and that's doubtless the case, but of course we have no idea what would have happened had she been extended the tolerance usually due to male scientists with difficult personalities (who exist by the trainload). It's quite clear that both Watson and Crick showed up late and out of breath when they were handing out the social graces, come to that.

For instance: recently David Gelernter cracked me up in this review by referring to James Watson as "His Eminence". Actually, the fragment bears repeating:

...the cheerleaders are not a pretty sight. Someone asks His Eminence James Watson, co-unraveler of DNA, whether "enhancement" isn't a lot like eugenics, the weeding out of genetically inferior human stock. "It's not much fun being around dumb people," Watson answers. Michael West, the first cloner of human embryos, explains why the US Congress is unfit to oversee such affairs: Who wants "insurance salesmen from who knows where," he asks, "pontificating on such important issues?" So much for democracy.

which in turn reminded me of Bart Kosko's pungent dictum from Fuzzy Thinking:

I'd rather be governed by the first five hundred names in the phonebook than by the combined faculties of Stanford and MIT.

which I have to agree with; though, in fact, I'm a strong believer in governance by the unwilling, and this is something that scientists (indeed, all academics) are deeply familiar with - when my department appointed a new chair recently, the general reaction was a desire to send him condolences, rather than congratulations.

2003-04-23T16:17:00.000-04:00

Evil..

The very existence of a Charlie's Angels sequel - at least, one which doesn't entirely consist of Lucy Liu dominating computer geeks, fully one-half of the frog's-hair-slender justification for the first movie's existence (the other being Crispin Glover's badassery) - goes some way towards diminishing faith in the cosmic order. A look at some of the details of the IMDB entry does not restore this any:

Some tertiary characters: "Pussycat Doll", "Hispanic Doorman", "Mongolian Fighter #4", "Irish Henchman #4"

I forgot "Demented Mongol". This is bad enough in itself, but in this role is Daxing Zhang, fight co-ordinator of note, and the Tough Warder from The Last Emperor - I'm guessing, the one who keeps wringing more confessional out of John Lone, only to eventually wind up publicly humiliated as a capitalist running-dog in the Cultural Revolution. That was a great role - the committed Party man who can be harsh but still has a vision of a better future, not realizing how his leaders have betrayed it. As the "Demented Mongol", however, we can only hope for something slightly less embarrassing than an extra from The Shadow. Yeah, the Alec Baldwin Shadow.

(and a half) Having said that, didn't John Lone already play a demented Mongol in the Alec Baldwin Shadow? "Join me.. orr diiie." Zhang can probably still preserve more pride than either him, or fellow Last Emperor alumnus Peter O'Toole. Bad O'Toole roles are legion, but the one that sticks out most for me was as the monk in a remake of Kim nobody saw, with the least convincing bald wig I've seen in my life. But I was trying to stick to dissing the Charlie's Angels sequel..

The presence of the Olsen Twins, as themselves

Resurrection of Crispin Glover's bad-guy: on the face of it a good sign, this doubtless means he'll be phoning it in, big time

The presence of Shia LaBeouf, star of Holes. Okay, I'm being needlessly nasty, because for all I know he's actually quite talented. But the Holes trailer was irritating as hell, and secondly, dude: your first name is a sect of Islam, and your last is the French for beef, misspelled. Parents of the world, please: not every word can be made into a name!

Please, will Luke Wilson just go away forever?

Not mentioned in the entry, but the unconvincing and unsexy pleather from the first movie will doubtless return

2003-04-23T15:58:00.000-04:00

A musty affair

Today is St. George's Day. To the oft-asked question "Where is St. George?": St. George Street is a few flights of stairs from where I'm sitting. Despite the rather nice dragon motif in signs for the subway station, though, it was not named directly for St. George, but for a French émigré businessman who took the name St. George in honour of his adopted country. It's disappointing, but on the other hand Christie Street really is named for Mr. Christie, he of the good cookies.

The legend of St. George is also a reminder of the strands connecting us with ancient Mesopotamia. It's not, cannot be, absolutely certain that there is an unbroken connection between the myth of Marduk's fight with Tiamat (referenced last week in these pages) and the myth of St. George and the dragon. If the connection is real, then there is a commonality of inheritance; if not, then there is a commonality of dreams and fears. Though I admit a preference for the human St. George over four-eyed, four-eared flame-shoots-from-my-mouth-when-I-speak ol' Marduk, who after defeating Tiamat turns to his fellow gods and says "Well, that wore me out. Why don't we create humans to do all the hard work, while we lounge around on the Couch of the Gods hitting 'Smite' and 'Flood' on the Remote of the Gods every so often to keep things from getting tedious?" I'm reluctant to mine historical texts for evidence of ethical progress, but at least we get to kill our own dragons now. The downside being that we no longer have any good reason to build a ziggurat, and I kinda like them; I'm envious of the Mexicans, who have those Aztec step pyramids that Frida Kahlo and Trotsky climbed up in Frida.

"They choke the air and bleed us, these noble men who lead us / So leave the factory, leave the forge, and dance to the new St. George." -Richard Thompson

"St. George he was for England, and when he killed the dragon / He drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon." -G.K. Chesterton

"Where is St. George? / Oh, where is he, O? He's out in his longboat, all on the salt sea-O." -Padstow May Song, Cornwall

2003-04-22T14:27:00.000-04:00

"I stood outside the Albert Hall, and wept and wrote upon the wall:"

"Work like you were living in The Early Days of a Better Nation", Ken MacLeod's recently-minted weblog.

I notice that the 2003 Hugo Award nominees have been announced. Ken was up last year for The Sky Road, but even though Dark Light was a probable candidate for this year it didn't make the cut. Damn. However, China Miéville's The Scar and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt did make the Best Novel list, and they were two of my favourites; I think the only top-5 novel of mine missing is Karl Schroeder's Permanence, which in its own quiet, soft-spoken way was as subversive of established SF tropes as MacLeod's work. The sympathetic culture of Permanence, the Cycler Compact, is a set of solar systems linked by slower-than-light starships in a framework dependent on mutual aid: systems that defect are 'punished' by receiving less in turn from the others, and having fewer cyclers willing to visit them. One mainstay of the Compact is the meta-religion Permanence, one of whose many functions is seeking the numinous in alien landscapes. And they have a great citizenship ceremony. It's my sense that the culture of Permanence and the Cycler Compact is as much influenced by Schroeder's Mennonite background (and by not-yet-dead Red Toryism) as by game theory or anarcho-socialism; though those, clearly, play a role as well.

There's interesting political ideas in The Years of Rice and Salt, as well: as in Dark Light, interestingly, the culture of the Six Nations provides a source of inspiration. In Dark Light it yielded ideas for an indigenous culture, but in Years of Rice and Salt the Hodenosaunee themselves, being situated much further away from the Chinese colonizers of North America than from European colonizers in our timeline, are able to mount a much more formidable resistance, and enter the 21st century as a second-rank world power, and a general Force For Good. Presumably in the intervening time they got over that nasty prisoner-torturing business which was made so much of in my education, particularly at Catholic school. A few years ago I was working my way through the books of Thomas B. Costain, a historical novelist and popular historian who was popular in this country in the early part of the century, but no longer seems to be read at all except by specialists. The People of the Longhouse are plenty scary in his The White and the Gold, a history of the French regime in Canada ("the spiders of the Finger Lakes" is a typical description), but he juxtaposes a vivid description of the deaths of the Jesuit martyrs with one of the slow, gory execution of Ravaillac, the assassin of King Henri IV of France. It was a perspective I hadn't expected to find; Costain pulled a similar trick on me in The Black Rose, a historical amble from post-Conquest England via the Near East and the Silk Road to China. The protagonist loads up on Chinese high-tech to bring back to the west, for fun and profit, and it all sinks; when he returns to Europe, the sight of knights riding to the Crusade, formerly stirring, just depresses him: he sees it for the bloody waste of lives and resources it is. Mind you, this is less surprising, on a little thought: as in Walter Scott, we get the voice of the bourgeois triumphant, smirking at the counterproductiveness of the old order. Maybe, though, all that Chinese cargo would have destroyed what was good about the medieval European social order, as well as the folly: not that we didn't do it all by ourselves with great thoroughness.

Ahh, there's a big "we", isn't there? There's much talk about communication between cultures, but of course this concept has a scent of the statistical to it: communication actually happens between individuals. As an anglo, I have the privilege of mostly not speaking for my culture: any opinions I express are considered to be my own, and not those of my employer, Consolidated White Folks Ltd. There are times when I would like to speak for some group I am identifiable with - generally English Canadians, descendants of Irish Catholics, or products of the culture of Latin Christendom. On the flip side, though, I've seen how people's faces fall when somebody asks them "As a [member of group], what do you think about [issue]?" enough so that I only ever do this, with lots of qualifiers, if curiosity utterly overwhelms me. The ulterior motive underlying some of this kind of questioning was nicely subjected to bright light in this article recently.

Anyway, back to the Hugos. I've been thinking of late that one of the nice things about speculative fiction is that it provides a way to do relatively safe thought experiments about cultures: safe, as in free from the pitfalls of attempting to speak for a culture that's actually lived. In The Scar, some of the major strands are the idea of loyalty to a place in spite of the flaws of its institutions, and how such loyalty can be used and abused; the question of how desirable a just society is if you aren't allowed to leave; the place of myths and tales in the making of power structures. This is all done through invented cultures, and even though in the city of New Crobuzon there's more than a small hint of Miéville's native London, it's clearly not just a disguise. In The Years of Rice and Salt, all the cultures are real ones - principally China, Islam, and the Hodenosaunee, though others play a role too - but they are altered by the complete devastation of Europe in a much-more-virulent Black Death.

I'm happy, as well, to note that Miyazaki's Spirited Away is nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation, though I don't hold out high hopes for it to win. There is not much by way of politics or sociology in Spirited Away, but its dream logic seems to thread together elements drawn from different folkloric and literary traditions with complete seamlessness, and I'm sure there's something very important about that too.

I'm hugging the kid to my side and looking at the cheerful, chatting faces, and thinking Just you wait, you bankers! Just you wait!
Our day will come, again.

-Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division, closing lines

2003-04-21T18:24:00.000-04:00

Mighty windmills

This weekend I attempted to see the new Christopher Guest and Co. outing, A Mighty Wind, twice, only succeeding on the second attempt. The first time I ended up sitting in the lavishly appointed - yet somehow still uncomfortable - Varsity VIP room watching Lost in La Mancha instead.

This is the documentary of Terry Gilliam's ill-fated attempt to film Don Quixote. Well, not quite: what he's trying to film is in fact The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a postmodern take on the story in which Johnny Depp, as a modern-day adman, travels back in time and becomes Sancho Panza. A very svelte Sancho Panza - you'd think even the Quixote would notice that his right-hand man Lefty had dropped a few stone. The movie doesn't exist, and I haven't see the full screenplay or storyboards, so I ought to withhold judgement, but actually this to me sounded like a terrible idea.

However, it did yield the hilarious scene where Depp, as adman/Panza, holds a live fish in his hands and cusses it out: "You fuckin' wanna fuck with me? Huh? Fucker." Meanwhile, the crew desperately tries to get Rosinante to amble forward and push him into the pond, to no avail; the investors look on, and to their eternal credit none of them seemed to have hunted, despairing looks on their faces.

The movie hits the Gilliam-as-Quixote note in many places, though maybe the Gilliam-as-own-worst-enemy could have been brought out more: for instance, the scene near the beginning where he smilingly tells the crew "Please tell me if you can't do anything, so I can keep from making a fool of myself" rings false even then, and when he later snarls at an assistant "Why didn't you tell me we were fucked?", it's perfectly clear why they didn't tell him: because he would have bitten their heads off. Much is made of what an unmitigated disaster Baron Munchausen was, though actually I liked it enough to see it twice. I probably won't see it again, because it demonstrates how much Sarah Polley has aged since then: by now, I doubt I could even stand the contrast between Joe's So Mean To Josephine and the present day. Oh well. On the other hand, John Neville doubtless still looks exactly the same, but ever since Regeneration he gives me the creeps, through no fault of his own. (Okay, really, it's through the fault of him being a very good actor, but not good enough that a new role can make me forget how scary-ass he was in Regeneration.)

Sunday night I did manage to see A Mighty Wind, and this was a much more rewarding experience. The two poles of the cast are Bob Balaban as Jonathan Steinbloom, the obsessive-compulsive (all the reviews say anal-retentive, but I know OCD when I see it) son of Moses Asch-like folk impresario Irving Steinbloom, whose death kicks off the action, and Eugene Levy as Mitch Cohen, former half of singing duo Mitch & Mickey, and now borderline schizophrenic. Actually, you sense that Mitch has always been that way, except that he lost the ability to channel it productively. In one of the film's many funny-sad moments, Catherine O'Hara's Mickey reads out the first poem Mitch wrote to her, while in the hospital with his jaw wired shut: I can't reproduce it, but it is a short lyric about yearning for a vision of misty loveliness. Levy leans forward and says: "I really just wanted a glass of water." It's a laugh, and it sounds like ordinary stage banter, but actually you sense that he is dead serious: we've heard him talk that way about mundane things several times during the movie, in a halting, monotonous stutter. It underlines in a flash of lightning so much of why and how their relationship was so dysfunctional, and really how messed up they were to start with. Mitch & Mickey are an amalgam of any number of real-life folk couples: Ian and Sylvia Tyson are usually cited, but the disconnect between Mitch's obsessions and Mickey's painfully needy definition of herself in terms of him brings Richard and Linda Thompson to mind, and the slow, painful unravelling their relationship, as recalled by themselves and onlookers, recalls that of Bob Dylan's relationship with Joan Baez as shown in Don't Look Back l. (Now that was a documentary that didn't make nice to its principal subject: I don't think I've ever forgiven Dylan for that scene where he carefully, systematically humiliates an eager young fan.)

The spotlight is entirely on the more commercial end of the folk music revival. The three guys who played Spinal Tap (Guest, McKean, and Shearer) incarnate the most authentic of the acts, the Kingston Trio-esque Folksmen, but despite their mutterings about what sellouts the squeaky-clean Main Street Singers are and were, the Folksmen are pretty pop. None of their numbers are traditional, there's no hint that, a la Pete Seeger or Alan Lomax, they ever actually collected songs; no hint, basically, that the music we're hearing was part of an attempt to draw from a long, unbroken tradition. It may have been a ham-handed attempt, putting the music to political ends that didn't fit well, robbing it of much of its power and originality by forcing it into standard 19th-century harmonizations and strict rhythm with no room for improvisation, and marginalizing the mostly-poor, mostly-Appalachian, mostly-not-very-telegenic population who had actually maintained the tradition in the first place, but the attempt was real. Ebert complained that the left-wing politics of the original folk revival had been effaced; that's a valid complaint, but to my mind it's the disappearance of that connection to a continuous tradition which is more serious. But if that had been shown, we would have had a different take on things: rather than the Spinal Tap-like spectacle of slightly sad but likeable obsessives trying to excel in something which is inherently lightweight, and basically succeeding, we would have seen sad but likeable obsessives trying to excel in something that they weren't, for the most part, capable of understanding at all, and that would have probably either tipped the balance of funny/sad overwhelmingly to sad, or alternatively tipped the balance of gentle/mocking humour very much to mocking, and in either case the tone would have been different and noticeably darker. But there would have been some idea of the good and the beautiful which I thought was sort of missing, because I'm sort of old-fashioned like that.

That criticism of the setting aside, though, I actually think this is a great movie. Eugene Levy is very, very good: though clearly mentally ill, and only barely able to handle tasks like travelling by bus and showing up for a concert on time, we never feel sorry for him: he also shows a formidable intelligence and musical and verbal talent. Nobody actually says "What a noble mind is here o'erthrown", but you sense that the Mitch Cohen we would have seen before his delicate balance was lost would have overwhelmed everybody else on screen even more than he does now.

Oh, yeah, and it is funny. Good moments: one of the New Main Street Singers explaining how her former life as a porn star led to folk music: "I learned to play the ukulele for a role in Not-so-Tiny Tim." Bob Balaban, getting twitchier and twitchier as the show approaches, criticizing everything in the theatre, from the flower arrangement: "These branches are at eye level, someone could poke their eye out; and elderly people could trip on these vines" to the set: "Can you have a real three-dimensional object next to a flat one painted to look three-dimensional? Does that work? Why isn't the back painted?" while Michael Hitchcock, as the bowtied theatre manager gets shirtier and shirtier: "Yes, those are the lights. That thing above them is the ceiling." Finally, Hitchcock loses it and just bops Balaban on the top of his bald head, not hard but resoundingly. I'm certain it was unscripted (I don't know how much improv was involved; supposedly a lot, but presumably there was a skeletal script and a lot of re-takes), and it was the perfect way to end that scene.

And everyone else under the sun has levelled this criticism, and it's valid enough that I'll add my chorus: not enough Parker Posey! If I was Christopher Guest, and I had a Parker Posey, I'd Parker in the morning, Parker in the evening, y'all know the rest. It's hard to give everyone in an ensemble cast time to shine, but if Fred Willard got all that time to do his rubber face and hyena laugh, Parker Posey should've had plenty more opportunities to deliver the funny.

Final word: I have some issues, but, really, this has been one of the most memorable movies I've seen this year. I woke up the next morning still thinking about the characters, who were really given lives of their own. It's not just funny, but actually a comedy.

Life Imitating Art Postscript: on my way home to the subway, a mighty wind did indeed blow up along Bloor Street, whipping dust into my eyes. And, cycling along the waterfront the next day, I got a good look at the new power-generating windmill at Exhibition Place. It is too high to tilt at, probably fortunately, but though minimal and white it is actually quite striking to look at, and when you are up close it makes a very low, pleasant hum.

2003-04-14T12:24:00.000-04:00

An immortality, rather than a life

From Long story, short pier:

So that when our children, and our children’s children, and their children besides, ask, “Who destroyed the treasures of the Fertile Crescent? Who let the golden harp of Sumer slip through his fingers? The cuneiform tablets and the copper shoes? Who pledged to do his best not to war on the earliest history of humanity, and failed to keep his pledge? Who destroyed the history and the heritage of the people he tried to save, thus fueling the very hate from which he hoped to save them?” we can smile sorrowfully at them and say, “Donald Rumsfeld,” and then, demurely, spit, to rinse the foul taste of his name from our mouths.

From Milton's "Areopagitica":

...we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life.

Marduk to Tiamat, from the Enuma Elish, c. 1200 BC:

Mother of all, why did you have to mother war?

From the Lament for Uruk:

Oh, Sumer! Alas -- your spirit! Alas -- your structure! Alas -- your people! The word of An, having been assigned its place, has destroyed the sacred precinct.

2003-04-07T15:38:00.000-04:00

The problem

"Unfortunately, the machine was not designed from a formal specification and is liable to fail permanently, issuing aargh once."

Source: this LOTOS tutorial from Stirling University.

2003-04-02T18:32:00.000-05:00

Loose ends

Loose end number one. Several weeks ago J. Tan. talked me into going to hear the Creaking Tree String Quartet at the Rivoli, and they were blindingly good. I was pretty happy I gambled on the admission plus CD combo, definitely.

The four pieces are fiddle, mandolin, upright bass, and steel-string acoustic guitar. All are equally gifted: with exquisite tone, melodic, and fast, when they wanted to be. Since I play guitar (fingerstyle) myself, I had my head in my hands whenever the guitarist took a solo, or even had an especially nifty accompanying bit while someone else played melody. Several weeks ago I was talking about how much of a part the perception of craft plays in at least my reception of music, and here was a great illustration.

It's hard to sort out the mix between improvisation and composition. My suspicion is that composition predominates on the macro-scale, since what I heard on the CD matched what I heard at the show pretty closely; the improvisation is in small touches like tempo, dynamics, ornamentation. Since that's mostly where I think it belongs, that made me relatively happy; although listeners coming from a jazz angle - and the band does have a strong jazz influence - might prefer things more free-form and unpredictable.

Since jazz and blues leave me, mostly, cold, I was pleased by how much the jazzier pieces grabbed me; although my preference was still for those with closer ties to old-time, bluegrass, Celtic, and chamber music. If anything marred the experience at all, it was the rudeness of the audience, talking during subtle and beautiful music as though it were a Bad English cover band. Come on, people!

Loose end number two. I was sent an absolutely gorgeous stamp from Israel: an illustration of the Church of the Visitation in Ein Kerem, which Googling assures me is now a suburb of Jerusalem attempting to retain some rustic charm while hosting a medical centre the size of Battlestar Galactica and looming housing developments. The illustration show the church spire in the foreground, with the eye looking upward, several autumnal trees, and a green sky. Artistic license, or sign of Armageddon? Probably the former: Har Megiddo is miles away. (Note to my readers: if there is any subtle political subtext to that link which I missed on a quick glance, my link is not intended to endorse that; it was just the first expository link I found.)

Further Googling brought me to the Israel Philatelic Federation, who get points for having the oddest collection of navbar icons I've seen in awhile: the shouting head for "Societies and Groups" is especially nice, as well as the bulging sack of money for dealers. The Hebrew version has a slightly different set of icons:
the moneybags and head are gone, but there's a writing hand and a question mark. Since the filenames are in English, I can tell that they link to a lexicon and a FAQ, respectively. I'm not at all sure what they mean by a lexicon, but the page is blank.

Oh, and the Visitation means Mary's visit to her cousin (to be interpreted loosely) Elizabeth after being told she would be bearing the son of God. (That was the Annunciation.) Elizabeth greeted Mary with the words "Blessed art thou amongst women", and Mary responded with the Magnificat. Okay, there were probably some less-deathless preliminaries, along the lines of "Oh God, my back is killing me", "Mine too", since Elizabeth was pregnant with the future John the Baptist at the time. Anyway, the Church is allegedly located on the site of Elizabeth's house, but that is doubtless a little farfetched.

Did I just manage to milk several more paragraphs out of a stamp than out of a great concert? I did, didn't I? Oh well. The stamp came attached to an IBM Haifa envelope, containing a flyer inviting me to a conference which I probably won't submit anything to or go to.

2003-04-02T13:08:00.000-05:00

One rational voice..

The mathematician and geometer H.S.M. Coxeter has passed away. Though I have been at his university for four years, I never knew him: but I heard him speak twice, and saw him from time to time at public lectures, up until the last year or so looking spry and fascinated by everything. Last year, he was carried up the stairs of the Fields Institute in a stretcher, but he still looked fascinated by everything. He visited Bertrand Russell in prison to learn mathematics as a boy, and called George Boole's daughters his aunts. I lack, sadly, the geometric intuition to really follow his work, even the Introduction to Geometry - he did not proceed slowly and formally, but in leaps and bounds, using whatever paths seemed most interesting - but I have it on my shelf and enjoy dipping into it. I'll never be the sort of mathematical mind that Coxeter was, but just a few lines from his pen or a few spoken words could always make me want to, by giving a sense of what it must be like. Lux perpetua luceat ei.

..but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air

-Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare"

2003-03-18T16:39:00.000-05:00

The bean and the cod

So, here I am on the free soil of Old Massachusetts, and it is spring, and my talk went well. Some observations, completely lacking in synthesis:

To be someone in Boston, it seems like you need to moonlight; one job just isn't enough. The archetype here is of course Samuel Adams, Brewer and Patriot; but a quick trawl of public statues has also produced a Sailor and Historian and a Preacher of the Word of God and Lover of His Fellow Men. Mind you, Sumner has several statues, including a very chilled sitting-down one in Douglas MacArthur Square in Cambridge, none of them bearing a job description at all.

A local fast-food chain, the Boston Chowda Co., serves Paul Revere Chili. Only after ordering and eating it did it occur to me to hope that it didn't result in any midnight rides to the bathroom. Okay, I'm sure I'm far from the first person to make that joke, but hey, I'm from out of town.

Okay, back to public statuary. The representative ones are standard enough, but the more symbolic ones verge on the strange. For instance, there's a corner of Boston Common with three statues representing "Religion", "Industry", and "Learning", all of them men kneeling astride some emblematic object. "Religion" is kneeling on a very spiky five-pointed star, looking exquisitely uncomfortable. "Industry" is kneeling astride a dodecahedron, of all things, and up close you can see that he's riveting the frame of it together, but from far away it just looks like he's doing it. A voice within says, dude, he's getting all hot and heavy with a Platonic solid. It's not right. "Science" kneels astride the Earth, and would also look like it was slipping it to the globe, except that he is consulting a book in his hand with a puzzled look -- what is it, Raping the Earth for Dummies?

Building numbers on Park Street start at zero. Yay!

There are not one but two Irish Famine memorials, one in Boston proper and the other in Cambridge. The one in Cambridge works better, I think: a single oblong block with figures atop it, and just the dates and the legend "Never again shall a people starve in the midst of a world of plenty", where the Boston memorial has several blocks of figures scattered about a small square, and about a half-dozen of the little memorial plaques. Doubtless the Boston one is more informative if you had never heard of the Great Hunger, but the Cambridge memorial is more powerful, and more general. Cambridge Common also has a Civil War memorial not dissimilar to Boston Common's, but it boasts a statue of Lincoln standing under the canopy looking rather smug at having arranged to stay out of the rain. Guess being Commander-in-Chief has its perks.

Writing about the Famine memorials reminds me of watching the History Bites segment about the Great Hunger, which a friend co-wrote, and realizing as I watched that, as far as I was concerned, it was still Too Soon for wackiness.

2003-03-14T13:33:00.000-05:00

"The thing I can't figure out is what exactly you're trying to say with this."

You have to imagine the above being said with a prompting gesture that involves lowering the entire head while moving the hands in circles, as Supervisor A (yes, I have two, whom I'll unimaginatively call A and B, tempting though 'Natasha' and 'Boris' might be - only A is Russian) does after reading early drafts of my papers. My usual writing style involves pouring everything remotely relevant into a text file and then trying to put it into some sort of order, and for a change you, my Loyal Readers, are to be subject to this.

Gemma (see blogroll for link) was treating everyone to golden nuggets of James McIntyre, the Canadian Cheese Poet ("Who hath prophetic vision sees / In future times a Ten Ton Cheese") at the Serial Diners (see blogroll). Some Googling to find the text for myself resulted in my discovery of a monument to the Mammoth Cheese. This site is worth, if merely for the laconic "Back to Big Things in Ontario" link at the bottom.

Before I actually linked to the Diners here, I was going to refer to them as the Dining Philosophers, thus allowing indulgence in two vices: giving cute aliases to your friends in your blog, and theoretical computer science in-jokes. However, I have the link so I may as well call them by their right name, and besides, the name is already taken. Curses.

Alright, enough tomfoolery, back to giant cheese. Via no less august a source than the Library of Congress, I discover that Thomas Jefferson was once presented with a mammoth cheese, by some Baptists (note: insert Life of Brian joke here), though at 4 feet in diameter and 17 inches in height it is considerably overshadowed by the Mammoth Cheese from Perth, Ontario. Much as I would like to crow over this, the difference is more one between 1802 and 1892 than between Canada and the US; McIntyre envisions ever bigger and better cheeses with Late Victorian sun-never-sets-on-the-Empire complacency, not anticipating that the generation being born was destined more for horrible deaths in the trenches than for towering achievements in cheese. At any rate, Jefferson's cheese bore the legend "The Greatest Cheese In America for the Greatest Man In America!" (somewhat biased source). Further down in the LOC document. we discover:

Daniel Dreisbach from American University in Washington presented his views about "Thomas Jefferson, a Mammoth Cheese, and the 'Wall of Separation Between Church and State.'"

Let me tell you, we rarely have such opportunity for deadpan wackiness in titling in my field. There is also a novel in which Jefferson's cheese plays a vital role, but it doesn't seem to be a retelling of the story so much as a kind of How to Make an American Cheese. (Indefinite article quite vital.)

That's about enough cheese for now. I still need to do a write-up on how great the Creaking Tree String Quartet are, but in the meantime: they rule.

"My home is not a place, it is a person, sir. People." -Lord Aral Vorkosigan, in Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

2003-03-10T22:52:00.000-05:00

One-liners and after

A couple of sayings made me think recently.

The first was not precisely a one-liner: it's that bit from, I think, Spider Robinson about librarians. Roughly: "Librarians are the secret masters of the world. They control information. Don't ever piss one off." Now, this has become one of those shibboleths that makes me want to put my hands over my ears and sing the Smurfs theme song at the top of my lungs. The only bits of business more annoying, I think, are the cutely defensive little digs at vegetarians: "If God didn't want us to eat animals, why are they made of meat?" Ah heh heh heh.

Apart from it being played, though, why do I find this so annoying? I think it's because it's the right cause, wrong arguments. Librarians are important and cool and deserve lots more respect than they get. But they are not "secret masters of the world". They don't "control information". I mean, come on! Librarians don't have access to your embarrassing personal e-mails, ready to be slipped to the press at the worst possible moment: your ISP does, and Echelon/Carnivore do. Librarians don't have access to your credit information, to wreak subtle havoc upon: the banks do. Circulation librarians know what books you've signed out; reference librarians know what questions you've asked. End of story. And it would surprise me if they're collating this information into a huge database deep beneath Ann Arbor, ready to be turned like Bill the Butcher's fist against their enemies.

Give props to librarians because organizing and classifying the vast amount of knowledge produced and required by a literate, technological society is a vital and worthwhile profession; and because keeping all of it accessible and usable, and guiding someone to the information they need, takes a lot more than a search engine; and for their advocacy of privacy rights and free expression. Respecting them because they "control information" and you "shouldn't piss one off" is not far from respecting doctors because they could poison you: insulting.

And since this came up recently, too, I want to re-assert that Spider is wrong wrong wrong about triads.

Which brings me to sex.

The other zinger which crossed my path recently was the Wildeism to the effect that "you don't pay a prostitute for sex, you pay her to go away afterwards". Like most Wildeisms, this strikes me as a quick laugh over absinthe but a poor guide to the actual world of human beings. Still and all, it got me to thinking. Okay, let's postulate that the sex trade exists because people are willing to trade goods for sex without affection. Dehumanizing? Perhaps, but not nearly so much so as the fact that we can buy and sell food and shelter without hospitality! Once, as a species, we have entered the Bizarro world where we can hand a person some goods, eat a meal they serve and sleep under their roof, and then depart in the morning with absolutely no sense of connection or obligation -- once we've swallowed that camel -- the idea of doing the same with sex, which is not even needed for continued existence, is surely a gnat. The fact of sex workers is not nearly so freaky, after a little thought, as the fact of 'hospitality' workers.

2003-03-05T15:26:00.000-05:00

Back to the movies

The first comment-worthy movie I've seen in awhile is called Destiny, and is a Franco-Egyptian costume drama about Averroes (ibn Rushd), the 12th-century Muslim philosopher, theologian, logician, and commentator on Aristotle. Logicians don't get their own movies very much, so this was an event not to be missed.

Obviously, of course, not much action comes out of ratiocination and writing, so the plot is driven by Averroes' opposition to fanaticism and fundamentalism. Subtlety is not the order of the day here: the fanatics are glass-eyed thugs in green who mutter things like "Every throat I cut brings me closer to Paradise"; they are led by a sinister Emir who supposedly only removes his creepy executioner's-style hood once a year, although we see his face several times.

But, of course, such people actually exist, which is what gives the movie its teeth. In the movie, the fundies are secretly in league with the looming Spaniards, which I'm not sure I buy.

Averroes' household is a paradigm of moderation and tolerance: the Caliph's sons rub elbows with dancing-girls and Frankish students. The philosopher's wife and daughter take part in conversation as equals. They eat good food, they sing and dance, they study; they enjoy life. Averroes tries to talk reason to an increasingly megalomaniacal ("I am Andalusia!") and fundie-appeasing Caliph ("These barbarians are destroying our culture!"), but to little avail. Death threats, arson and exile loom for our hero.

The history seems decent. Small quibbles: I'm not sure there was an Inquisition in the formal sense in the 12th century, as alluded to in the opening scene; I'm also not sure there was still a Caliphate of Cordoba, in the strict sense. Large quibble: why aren't there any Jews in this movie? At all? Maimonides was a contemporary of Averroes, and was influenced by him, though I have no clue if they ever met. Regardless of that, since we see him with a Christian student it's not difficult to imagine Jewish students as well, and whatever about that there would certainly be Jews in the economic and political life of an Andalusian city, and yet unless there were a few making 'rhubarb' noises in a crowd scene I didn't see any. Given that Destiny comes (in part) from a country where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are considered (at least by the government-run media; general opinion, of which I know little, may be completely otherwise) prime-time entertainment, I suppose mere absence is better than caricature.

On a more blessedly irrelevant-to-the-current-situation note, I also discover here that one of Averroes' translators into Latin was Hermannus Alemannus, better known to English-speakers as Herman the German, one of my father's favourite medieval names - along with Robert the Bugger.

2003-02-28T12:00:00.000-05:00

Light anatomized

It's very nice to have a real winter for the first time in years. One of the perks of winter is the quality of the light; like that crystalline bluish tint that snow gives to the air after it's been down for a little while but before it gets dirty, or orange light at twilight and dawn falling over snow, with long shadows. The visible eddies in the air during a snowfall, clothing the wind's complexity. The crunch underfoot. The gracious submission of bare branches bending under a load of snow. Opalescent grey skies in the early morning, turning to shockingly intense blue as the sun rises farther. It's wonderful. But I need new boots. And, if we get any more of those -20C with a -30C windchill, perhaps a balaclava. The Mountain Equipment Co-op summons.

A true holism should embrace not only the theory of living systems, but also the reality of the belly, of wind, hunger and snow-worms roasting over the fire on a cold winter night. A man or woman (or child), to be fully human, should always marvel at the mystery of life. We each should be able to face the universe and drink in the stream of photons shimmering across light-distances, to listen to the ringing of the farthest galaxies, to feel the electrons of each hemoglobin molecule spinning and vibrating deep inside the blood. No one should ever feel cut off from the ocean of mind and memory surging all around; no one should ever stare up at the icy stars and feel abandoned or alone.

Isn't that a great credo? It's from David Zindell's The Broken God, which I am currently about 2/3 done. Sometimes you read a passage, and think "Yes! That's what I've been trying to get at for years, right there." This is one of those.

2003-02-25T19:53:00.000-05:00

"Not thrilling.. but nice."

Today, I had a gratifying blogging experience: having somebody find my site through an amusing Google query. I've always been envious when people would mock-lament "Oooh, I'm trying to talk about serious things here, and people keep reaching me through the search term 'corblimey Tom Baker scarf bondage Leela'. Cut it out! No, really, cut it out! I hate that!"

Anyway, somebody in New Jersey found me by Googling for what is a Pobble look like. I feel helpless to comment on that, really, but it made me laugh. Hopefully it'll make you laugh, too. Person from New Jersey, if you're reading this, please don't be offended! My tiny audience and I are laughing with you.

And besides, we want to know if you got an answer. What is a Pobble look like, anyway?

2003-02-25T14:33:00.000-05:00

Squeezed into the tube-train next to you

Here at Epecho, we do not neglect or belittle the desert. For instance, here is a great picture of the famous Canadian robot arm, hovering over the Empty Quarter.

2003-02-24T13:45:00.000-05:00

Aquinas on Software, continued

I notice in passing that, according to the annotations available to me (full disclosure: text is The Pocket Aquinas, edited by Vernon J. Bourke, late of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies; Washington Square Press, 1960; and I might add that they are not kidding about 'pocket', it is about 1/2cm less high than a standard mass-market paperback) the word Aquinas uses for 'axiom' is dignitas, which I think is just great. I also note that a dignitas is a stronger notion than what I'm used to calling an axiom: it's a proposition which must be assented to if you are to learn anything at all. What we usually call an axiom he calls a postulate or positio: something that you're not going to bother demonstrating. Unfortunately, his example of a dignitas is the law of non-contradiction (~(a /\ ~a)), in which I do not believe (more).

Well, perhaps the trés peu of a certain archbishop.

Later on in the same chunk (from Exposition of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics) there's an excellent point about layers of abstraction. A geometer, he says, takes as a postulate that between any two points there exists a straight line; however, it's the physicist's study of the properties of actual space that underpin the postulate. In software terms, the geometer works with an abstraction of space. Since Einstein, we know that this abstraction is not entirely correct; but it's so useful that we still use it extensively, only peering down into the relativistic implementation details when absolutely necessary. The physicist's knowledge is wrapped up in a module that the geometer can re-use.

Comments as always to drangelicus@sorbonne.fr, or, if that's down, dumbox@yahoo.com.

2003-02-21T16:47:00.000-05:00

I want your skulls

Bob the Angry Flower (see "Updated weekly" links, at right) features the long-awaited return of Doctor Renticulus.

2003-02-21T16:36:00.000-05:00

I turned around to see the thing that made the sound

Tuesday night I went to a local live ambient-music night, The Ambient Ping. I've been on the mailing list forever, but actually been to about two or three shows, one of them being Robert Rich.

The band followed a common setup for electronic music: three guys on stage triggering samples, one guitarist, alleged improvisation. The early samples were very beat-laden, and the guitarist put me in mind a lot of Dave Gilmour or Mike Oldfield, yielding a sort of space-rock filtered through Detroit techno and funk, which is a great conception but really needed better beat science than was being displayed. Later on, the flow got considerably smoother, attaining that continuously-morphing-soundscape feel, but lost some of the funkiness.

While I was trying to form an opinion of it, I got to thinking about how much my appreciation of live music varies with technology, and depends on it. For one thing, how much I anticipate a live show depends on the instruments I see on stage: a standard rock or jazz ensemble will produce a yawn and the feeling of "This better be good", but electronic oddities -- especially old keyboards, theremins, effects boxes -- and unusual acoustic instruments, especially percussion and things made from found objects, immediately give me a tingle of curiosity. The combination of both is rarely seen, but I'm sure if I came to see a band and they had a theremin, a drumkit made of doumbeks, frame-drums, and several bits of chain and sheet-metal, a koto, a Hardanger fiddle, and a nose-flute, I'd probably be buying up the merch table before they even started playing.

All well and good. Much as I'm a fan of electronic music, the trouble with sampling and sequencing in particular, I find, is that it throws off any gauge I might have about:

How much skill is being displayed

How much rapport the musicians have with each other, and

How much rapport they have with the audience (alas, usually none is apparent, with heads bowed over gear shining little penlights into the control panel)

Bruno Degazio commented once that no matter how satisfying an electronic composition might be, if you go to a performance of it you tend to have a desire to hear some craft displayed: some musicianship as well as just composition. If I listen to a recording, I don't care if it was pasted together in Csound by people who couldn't actually play even one part of it in a live setting; but when I see them, I hope for something more than the pressing of the key labelled "Cool spooky flanged bit". And I'm afraid that, cool as Tuesday's music was, I'm not going to find electronic music performances entirely satisfying until they figure out a way to do that.

Actually, having mentioned him earlier, I should point out that Robert Rich did manage to do that in his show; he had a small collection of odd acoustic instruments (mostly flutes and a steel guitar), which would sample live, loop, then improvise over; it was a show -- rather than a tell. Not only that, but he has a Wild Mushroom Cookbook on his home page, and he uses just intonation a lot.

2003-02-19T14:47:00.000-05:00

A course of leeches

Patricia Pearson (heiress to a Nobel Peace Prize) sez: "...I'm thinking of establishing a Little Canada here in the town of Tepoztlan. It could be like a block-long neighbourhood where nobody makes eye contact or says anything loud, and all the stores have huge blocks of cheddar hanging in the windows, with bins outside full of maple fudge and President's Choice "Memories of Butter." You'd walk inside the stores, and they'd all have black and white TVs behind the counters tuned to the Air Farce, with a space beside the Royal Bank ATM along the back wall for an air hockey table. At the Beaver Hut Diner, you'd find framed pictures of the owner posing with Don Cherry, or the drummer from the Tragically Hip in a tilted sombrero. "Fabulous tuna casserole" would be scrolled on the picture, along with the celebrity's signature. During the World Cup, all the Canadian-Mexicans could gather in Little Canada to watch Wimbledon or have a health-care debate."

More Heike stuff: not much from Book 3, except that a goddess gives Kiyomori a halberd studded with silver to look like creeping leeches. (Cue Coil's "A Swelling of Leeches" as background music.) If this were an AD&D item, it would probably drain 1 level of experience from a victim unless they save versus death magic, and afflict the wielder with satyriasis. Or psoriasis, or some other embarrassing iasis.

More Aquinas on Software: not yet!

2003-02-18T14:43:00.000-05:00

He became a land

From the forthcoming (and hopefully soon!) anthology Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases:

"Dr. Daphne Longfort augurs that the Logorrheic Aphids syndrome is runcible for the case of patient E. Lear (1812-1888), who very pobble contracted it in 1845 from contaminated jobiskas. However, no other patient has exhibited Lear's additional symptom of bioluminescent penile growth (see The Guide to Psycho-tropic Balkan Disuse ed. Geraldine Carter, M.D., section heading "The Dong with a Luminous Nose"). "

And more stuff from the Heike, namely: two lists of Five Signs of Decay of Celestial Beings.

their robes become dirty

their flowers fade

their bodies begin to smell

their underarms sweat

they take no pleasure in their celestial status

and:

they lose their joyful voices

they lose their aureoles (no, not areolae, hush)

their bodies become wet when they bathe

they lose their freedom from the Objective Realms (whatever these might be)

they blink a lot

I think the last point is a little anticlimactic. Also, I can't tell if the second list is a further sign of decay; if it is, you start to get dirty and smelly long before you can actually wash it off, which would certainly kill my buzz at being a celestial being.

Attributed original source: Abhidharma-kosa, which I take to be some Mahayana Buddhist text.

2003-02-17T17:07:00.000-05:00

Lost on Ghost Earth Road

Recently I read Kara Dalkey's Genpei: A Fantasy, and enjoyed it very much. Twice before, it has caught my eye in the Lillian Smith Library, and I've picked it up; I liked her Blood of the Goddess trilogy, and I thought the title was an alternative transliteration of the Chinese toast kan pei! ("dry cup!"), a perfect title for a Bridge of Birds-like colourful and witty fantasy with a Chinese setting. And that's not what it is, so on those two occasions I put it back down.

What it is is a retelling of the events leading up to the Genpei Wars of 12th-century Japan, resulting in the capital being moved from Heian Kyo to Kamakura, and the displacement of a cultured aristocracy (the one that produced The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon) by a warrior class. The name is a portmanteau of the initial ideograms of the Chinese names of the two clans involved in the power struggle: the Genji or Minamoto, and the Heike or Taira.

In order that I could make some comparisons with the original material, I've started reading a translation of the Tale of the Heike, the principal source. The most immediate thing noticeable, apart from details, is that the feel and the overtones of the story are very different: the Heike conveys a sense of fate, and the evanescence of things. Dalkey sounds these notes, but her interest is more in morality, and in the responsibility of power: more Spider-Man than Buddha. For instance, the confrontation between the Taira clan chief Kiyomori and his son Shigemori over the fate of several courtiers accused of plotting against Kiyomori's rule (the chapter "Shigemori's Lesser Admonition" in the Heike) assumes, in Dalkey's hands, the character of a dialogue about the conflict between loyalty to family and loyalty to society as a whole, rather than between the Confucian duties of obedience to father and Emperor. And early in the book, when Kiyomori is offered supernatural aid, there is a deliberate allusion to the prophecy of the witches in Macbeth.

Then there's pacing. Genpei has the snappy pacing of a novel, which it is, where the much-longer Tale of the Heike rambles and discourses about all sorts of things. Chapters I haven't reached yet (but have surreptitiously flipped forward to) include "Nue, the Terrible Night Creature" and "List of the Emperor's Enemies". Among the great asides discovered so far is this nice commentary on blogdom:

Every person has a mind, and every mind has an obsession. Some say one thing is good, some another. Who then can decide what is right?... It is like a circle, having no end.

-from the constitution of Prince Shotoku, Japan, c. 604 AD

Lots more asides from the Heike to come. Also, eventually I have to write something about how all those little back-and-forth notes in The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon are like e-mail culture.

2003-02-14T12:32:00.000-05:00

'"Hergee berger snooger bork," says Mary Lambert, product line manager desktop, Opera Software. "This is a joke. However, we are trying to make an important point."'

Note to self: Buy Opera already!

2003-02-12T12:43:00.000-05:00

No longer a person, but a climate of opinion

Today is Darwin Day. Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman, and others signed this letter to the Times proposing it as a public holiday in Britain.

I wish I had something deep/thought-provoking/witty/erudite to say, but mostly I'm planning to spend the day working on my research, and hoisting a glass in Darwin's honour in the evening. So, with that in mind, in the name of harmony between religion and science I'll quote G.K. Chesterton, well-known Catholic apologist:

"I would gladly light a bonfire on Darwin's Day."

Me, too. It's cold.

2003-02-10T15:34:00.000-05:00

"Where are you going?" "Over there."

One reviewer dubbed Peter Mettler's film Gambling, Gods, and LSD "like Koyaanisqatsi with content". I can't pronounce on that: I did watch Koyannisqatsi about 15 years ago, in somebody's rec room, and all I remember is lots of slow-moving shots of rock and this very guttural voice chanting the title over and over and over again, in the Philip Glass soundtrack. To my undying shame, I haven't even seen Baraka, the other point of reference that keeps coming up.

That said, I'm not sure that Gambling, Gods, and LSD belongs in that ambient-film genre at all. For one thing, there's a lot of talking. Mettler chats with a lot of people who are definitely out on the edge, but he's not going for a cheap freakout; the interviewees are a constant surprise and delight. The enthusiasts at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship provoke laughter, with their eye-hurting clothes and their twitchy collapse into trance states to truly dreadful Christian rock, but immediately after seeing them en masse we are treated to a couple trying honestly to articulate a real vision of the numinous. In Las Vegas, we meet the inventor of a chair for electric autoerotic stimulation, demonstrated by a vixen in red PVC and fishnets whose succinct answer to Mettler's query "What gives you the most pleasure?" is "Cooking. And talking to my parents." The Monument Valley/Las Vegas sequence kicks off with an exhilarating accelerated drive through the desert and moody, gnomic images of a manhunt and rain; later, the demolition of an old Vegas hotel provides the anchor for several related stories touching on death.

In Switzerland, we meet recovering drug addicts at a poodle race, a research scientist who muses about mitochondria and immortality while gazing out over a mountain lake from his office window, and a customs agent; there's one beautiful sequence where meditative footage of cascading water in the Alps gives way to the flashing lights, shimmering beats, and gyrating bodies of a rave.

The last segment, in the old territory of the Vijayanagar Empire in India (reminding me of V.S. Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization) had less talk and more visuals, and is probably what justifies the Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka comparisons; still, Mettler's curiosity is still alive and there's talk and information. He describes gleefully how the south Indian language Malayalam uses "Where are you going?" as a stock greeting; to which the stock answer is "Over there." As well as rivers and temples, we see the inside of a high-tech office; a computer in a cubicle displays an animation of snow falling on a house decorated with Christmas lights. This I found very moving, strangely, after immersion in the sweltering green outside the office; I would miss winter terribly in such a setting. The final moments see a drift down a river, and we hear Mettler talk with a fisherman; for a change, he's the subject, being plied with questions about his home and his quixotic project.

Afterwards Mettler got up to the front for a Q&A. He came across as scruffy and relaxed, with not much ego but lots of drive, and impulsive: for instance, when asked how he decided the process of editing from over 100 hours of film down to 3 was done, he recounted stopping when he heard about September 11th, immediately after editing a sequence with an airplane in flight. It seemed to me that probably some more editing was called for; there was slack in the film. But I hate to carp too much, since it was a fascinating experience as it was, and given that it's been 11 years from conception to first public showing, he is doubtless at work on something new by now.

In brief, as my friend Gemma likes to say: it's worth.

2003-02-07T16:39:00.000-05:00

Tenser, said the Tensor

In Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, somebody has method, or a device, or something, for generating songs that stick in the head irremovably. I'm sorry that's vague, I haven't read the book in years. Anyway, I suspect that Kander and Ebb must have occasional, expensive access to such a thing, and they were using it when they wrote the "Cell Block Tango" from Chicago.

Because, really, there's nothing on the level of meaning that explains why "Pop, Six, Squish, Uh-uh, Cicero, Lipschitz" should be such a memorable line. And the tune isn't that compelling.

Still in Movieland, the other night I went to see La turbulence des fluides, aka Chaos and Desire. Something compels me to do this point-form:

Believable user interfaces in a movie: excellent. Aging geologists playing Donkey Kong in a movie ("If it weren't for this, I'd be smoking my pipe!"): even better

I realize that to an anglo audience, The Turbulence of Fluids probably sounds too arty. However, the English title is a half-quote from the movie, to the effect that the three elements of life are, not hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, but desire, disorder, and danger. Couldn't we have had that? Too alliterative? That's a rich decision for Alliance Atlantis to be making.

I don't think any of the promotion and reviewing really gave any idea of how much fun stuff there was in this movie. For instance, Alice the seismologist buys an old milk truck to drive around Baie-Comeau as a portable lab, with an 8-track blaring Hank Williams. The benefit is that there's refrigeration in the back, since there's a heat-wave going on, and she even keeps ice cream in it. Dammit, I want one too.

The dialogue sparkles. Not all of it translates successfully, I think; with my poor French, I even managed to pick up a couple of missed bits: like when Marc asks Alice "What's the most popular folk dance in Japan?" and she says "I don't like .. folk", the French has "social dance" and something that seemed like "I don't do social". Much sharper.

Alice strolls into a pathology lab with an armful of mussels, during an autopsy, and nonchalantly dumps them on a table and asks for an estimated time of death. The doctor does it, and I have no idea how realistic that is, but it was a great scene.

Anyway, this is a recommendation; it's a fun and fairly thought-provoking movie, though it didn't quite have its ideas in order. It's finished here in Toronto, sadly, but I imagine it will show up at reps, and appear on video ere long.

2003-02-04T21:46:00.000-05:00

O Dove of science and of light / Upon the branches of the night..

"We once were young and blessed with wings

No heights could keep us from their reach

No sacred place we did not soar

Still greater things burned within us

I don't regret the choices that I made...

-VNV Nation, "Beloved"

2003-01-31T21:32:00.000-05:00

F--ing ponderous

From the delightful Baraita, I contracted this meme: First Lines of One's Ten Favourite Novels. (I also regret that our philosophy department is not nearly so cool as the one described in that entry.) I notice that subsequent discussion has drifted towards Ten Favourite First Lines of Novels, which is tempting, but I'll stick to the formal specification, since I'm just like that.

However, I did choose the following refinements to remove nondeterminism: one, in the case that
there is a prelude before the first chapter, I pick the first chapter; basically, the absolute first line,
the thing that greets your eye once you cross the title page and the blank page after it.

"In the raucous Cathedral Square the crowd gathered to hang a pig." Mary Gentle, Rats and Gargoyles

"The point is not to make another Earth." Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

"There was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old low house in Wastdale, set in a gray old garden where yew-trees flourished that had seen Vikings in Copeland in their seedling time." E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros

"Nothing ever begins." Clive Barker, Weaveworld (I wish I could say Sacrament,
which has the killer opener "I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories.")

"'Palestine soup!' said the Reverend Doctor Opimian, chatting with his friend Squire Gryll; 'a
curiously complicated misnomer.'" Thomas Love Peacock, Gryll Grange (a bit of a cheat; it's hard to pick a favourite Peacock, they're all part of one leisurely stroll through the Peacockverse, where there is always lots of port, except for the one about Taliesin and the one about Maid Marian.. so I just picked the best opening line. I was tempted by Crotchet Castle's, which takes up most of a page, but my wrists protested))

"There was a wall." Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

"Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls." Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (And we all know how painful circumfusion is for a man over 30.)

"The remarkable person, called by the title of Old Mortality, was well known in Scotland about the end of the last century." Walter Scott, Old Mortality

"Towards the middle of the month of May, in the year 1660, at nine o'clock in the morning, when the sun, already high in the heavens, was fast absorbing the dew from the ramparts of the castle of Blois, a little cavalcade, composed of three men and two pages, re-entered the city by the bridge, without producing any other effect upon the strollers of the river-bank beyond a first movement of the hand to the head, as a salute, and a second movement of the tongue to express, in the purest French then spoken in France: 'There is Monsieur returning from hunting.'" -Alexandre Dumas, The Vicomte de Bragelonne (Oxford World's Classics, ed. David Coward; the translator does not seem to be named, rrrr)

and of course.. "This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history." -The Lord of the Rings

Yes, I'm a geek. I could have thrown in something which was neither SF/F or historical by maybe picking Fifth Business, but much as I like it I don't think it makes the cut.

2003-01-30T11:37:00.000-05:00

"It is educational that Lois McMaster Bujold was a panelist in both the Killing and Maiming panels."

This from a posting and subsequent fascinating discussion on writing, and the prospects of selling, fantasy.

There is, I think, cause for optimism, though. Just sticking to the United States itself, to forestall "Oh, of course it's easy to get something good published elsewhere" responses, recent years saw the publication of The High House, a thin, self-contained, idiosyncratic fantasy. It can't necessarily be called wildly original: it's a homage to, and almost a pastiche of, fantasists ranging from Lovecraft and Burroughs on these shores, to Chesterton and the Inklings on others. Also, it is true that the protagonist has an obsession - finding his father - and thus fits into some of the Worldcon panelists' specifications (but: no map!), and there's the whole quest thing, but still: it reaches into that deep well and pulls something out, which the fat fantasy tomes - and I do read them, I'm a sucker for anything with a fanciful map at the front and sword-fights - never manage to. Nobody else I know has ever read it, and I'm increasingly reluctant to urge books on others just because I happen to like them, so I haven't been proselytizing, much as I want to grab my dear friends and say "Will you for the love of God read this book, so we can make in-jokes about the characters and imagine other neat things to happen in this setting?" I'm well aware that this is sort of sad.

I'm that way with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, too, but at least one close friend has actually read that (turned me on to it, in fact).

Anyway, besides The High House, Patricia McKillip, another American, continues to get published, and though I find her stuff increasingly precious (like Sharon Shinn's fantasy, which I can hardly bear) The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and the Riddle-Master books are still great, and her characters are certainly not angstbunnies on Great Quests, as a rule.

Of course, patriotism compels me to mention that there is plenty of good, off-the-beaten-track Canadian fantasy. Guy Kay, of course, and Michelle West, who fits the genre mould so far as to have a map, and some of the viewpoint characters are obsessed to varying degrees, but the characters are complex adults, products of strange and varying cultures; and not stamped out identically by their culture, but shaped by it, reacting to it, even hating it sometimes while still acknowledging that it is part of them. Okay, that's not 'plenty' yet; I think subconsciously I was thinking of Karl Schroeder as well, but he writes hard SF. But they're all three not only from Canada, but from the, erm, T-Dot. A nice thing to contemplate when this city is driving me nuts, as it is doing now.

2003-01-29T11:48:00.000-05:00

Your golden streets that no one ever sees

"T Dot, people. Our city refers to itself as the T Dot. Our city has a dorky white rapper name."

I've never heard anybody actually use this name un-ironically, although there is a T-Dot Cafe west of Bloor and Lansdowne. But then, it's been a long time since I heard anybody say either "T.O.", the former canonical nickname, or even the much-discussed "T'ranna". My auditory memory may deceive me, but this seems to have given way to something more like "Tchronno".

At any rate, 'nt' doesn't seem to fit the Upper Canadian/Midwestern tongue at all, unless a syllable boundary splits it, like in 'onto', and even that is iffy. I love the factoid, though, that in demotic Greek this digraph (1) starts words and (2) is pronounced like a 'd', so that the Greek on signs for "Danforth Avenue" reads "Odos Ntanforth". (For some reason, Logan is spelled 'Logkan', and I'm less clear on the reasons for that.)

They try to dress you up like someone younger and more free

Ridiculous, they try to make you seem..

-Shriekback, "(Open Up Your) Filthy Heart (To Me)"

2003-01-27T20:51:00.000-05:00

Aquinas on Software

Tomorrow (the 28th) is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. Whenever I read philosophy, logic, sociology, or anthropology, lurking somewhere near the front of my mind is the question "What does this tell me about software engineering?"

I haven't read far, but already the Dumb Ox has made some interesting points. Here's one:

"Knowing agents differ from those that do not know in the
fact that the nonknowers possess their own form only, but
the knower is adapted from its origin to possess also the
form of another thing, in the sense that the species of
the known thing may be present in the knower."

-Summa Theologiae, I, 14, 1, trans. Vernon J. Bourke

This is a nice definition of what separates cognitive artifacts, like
software, from non-cognitive ones: they contain within themselves a model
in miniature of some domain of discourse: the form of another thing.

More Aquinas on Software to come, as I read in dribs and drabs. In the meantime,
sounding a cautionary note, here is some Frazer on Software:

"With him, as with the vast majority of men, logic is implicit,
not explicit: he reasons just as he digests his food in complete
ignorance of the intellectual and physical processes which are
essential to the one operation and to the other."

-Sir J.G. Frazer,The Golden Bough

To create software requires such logic to be made explicit.

2003-01-25T01:10:00.000-05:00

Fake names and other annoyances

Okay, is it just me, or are spammers subscribing to the same Ridiculous Name Service as bad science fiction writers? I just received spam from Susan FlashInsert, who sounds like a social butterfly from a very mathy cyberpunk novel, à la Greg Egan, and Roemen Dowst, who sounds like an antiheroic, vaguely Conradian mercenary - you know, the kind who frequently narrows his eyes, expertly hefts his laser pistol, and delivers cynical commentary on How Things Really Are.

Actually, it occurs to me that providing a Name Service to SF and fantasy writers might actually be a revenue stream. Maybe not as lucrative as providing technobabble for SF movies and television, but not bad either. (I don't know if anybody actually makes a living at that, but it sounds as though somebody ought to.)

2003-01-17T17:24:00.000-05:00

Two, you bait the line

Recently I read Cory Doctorow's online short stories, '0wnzored' and 'Liberation Spectrum'. I seem to know any number of people who know Cory Doctorow, but our paths have never crossed. Also, I notice he's a driving force behind the current incarnation of bOing bOing. I have tremendously fond memories of bOing bOing the print magazine, and of the first place I bought it, the Binary Café and Hexadecimal Emporium in Toronto.

I wasn't living in Toronto at the time, so the Binary Café was never a hangout. Once or twice only, on visits, I ascended to the tiny second-floor space on Yonge Street, and it was like a window on the kind of world I wanted to live in back then: caffeinated, clattering with industrial and trance, technical, bohemian; but clean, bright, with coffee and sugar as social lubricants instead of messy, smelly alcohol, tobacco and THC; a place where you can read, or dance, or code, or share information. A Nerdvana. And bOing bOing belonged to that world too: smartassed, retro-cartoonish, but on-the-button geekish: full of fun stuff like the Ribofunk Manifesto, interviews with Front 242, down-to-earth howtos on mailing lists (my copy of that issue still has the address to the Smothered-Hope mailing list scrawled across it)

Anyway, enough of that, on to the stories.

'0wnz0red' was a fairly fun read. I found myself enjoying it despite an increasing determination not to. Why didn't I want to like it? Well.. its reveling in the minutiae of code-monkey culture struck me as unseemly, and, worse, uninteresting. Did we really need to know that the protagonist was barred from checking files into CVS? Also, I have my doubts about whether prose like this accurately conveys the experience of programming; it doesn't speak to my experience, but perhaps it either (a) conveys it adequately to non-programmers, or (b) conveys the experience of being a first-rate programmer, which I certainly am not.

At any rate, the story was dominated by the now-classic Everything Is Code ubermetaphor. I'm as prone to stretching computer science metaphors to fit any situation as anyone you'll find, but it can't make a whole story. Unfortunately, I didn't, on a first reading, see anything else here: no more aboutness, no resonance. Lurking somewhere are some interesting thoughts about technology and control over the body, but they just seem to be lying about, not picked up. A lot is sacrificed to the relentless pace, which makes it a fun first read but doesn't provoke much thought or invite a second reading.

'Liberation Spectrum' exhibits the same assets and deficits: swift pace and wit on the plus side, and on the minus side, too much discussion of and exposition of technology, too many witty exchanges that don't develop character (or simply bang you over the head with a stereotype: the protagonist's lone-wolf shtick is Exhibit A), too little substance. Full disclosure: I like hard SF. I'm willing to give up some quality of plot, dialogue, and character for an author to play with ideas. But all I found here were notions.

So: am I going to invest the time to read Doctorow's novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom? I don't know yet. These two stories entertained me, but they didn't quite manage to intrigue me; but on the other hand, at novel length he might have time and space to slow down and be more thoughtful, explore the consequences of his assumptions a little.

2003-01-13T14:50:00.000-05:00

"All things were new; and all the creation gave unto me another smell than before, beyond what words can utter."

-George Fox, commemorated today

2003-01-13T11:30:00.000-05:00

Design Observations 1

Today's Theme: telephony, and limits of number of hands

The talk buttons on cordless phones make it far too easy to hang up the rotten thing by accident. If you are in the standard "holding phone to head with non-dominant hand" mode, then it's not much of a problem, but as soon as you wedge the phone between ear and shoulder to use both hands, it becomes absurdly easy to accidentally hang up by hitting the talk button. This happens to me constantly.

Really, who is an a hurry to hang up? It would be simple to have a recessed hang-up button that's hard to press by accident. Or put it down just above the microphone with the other function buttons.

Anyway, onto Thing Two. For Christmas, I got a little device that I've tentatively called a Thumb Pilot: it looks like a palmtop which has gone through the washing machine. It has a touch screen, with a little stylus attached, and it functions, by default, as a watch/calendar. Its other modes are:

Multiple time zone watch. You scroll through time-zones, which are identified by major city, and it displays the time there. Kvetch 1: Newfoundland is not included. Kvetch 2: you can't rename the zones. Fifteen years ago I had a watch with a time-zone mode, and you could not only rename the zones, but it had a map that you paged through. (Don't recall about Newfoundland, though.)

Alarms.

Telephone numbers. Herein lies my most serious usability complaint. The display for numbers is only eight digits! Not only do many of my friends live in other places, but my own city has three area codes. And if you are at a payphone - which I generally am when I use the thing, because at home I have a big list of phone numbers on my computer - then it's colossally inconvenient to page through the numbers with the stylus, phone held between shoulder and ear, and that voice demanding that you enter the number now, not later, now. As a hack, you can include the area code in the key to the entry, but that reduces your space for the name.

Email address directory. Cute application, and no serious complaints about the interface, but: what earthly use is this? If you're at home using a standard client, then you have an address book, and even Web mail systems have space for lots of addresses still. What I really need are street addresses, for discharging postcard obligations.

Calculator. Now, this by itself pretty much justifies the thing: it's pocketable, and avoids the tinge of geekiness that a calculator watch inevitably conveys. Kvetch: wot, no square root?

Currency converter. Actually, this is just a special calculator mode, allowing you to multiply by a constant, and see both the factor and the product onscreen at the same time. Kvetch: as a frequent traveller to the United States, I could really use a Fahrenheit-Celsius converter, and you can't use this mode for that. Maybe I'll put the equation on a little sticker on the back of the thing, but this is hardly optimal.

All that being said, I recognize that they had to make a lot of display compromises, because they use a telephone-style letter-entry system, and this takes up about half the display. A sizable line is also taken up by the little icons representing the modes, and this I think could have been slimmed down. However, that would probably mean that the touch-screen would have to have finer resolution, and that would drive up cost and make it frustrating to use. It requires fairly fine motor control as it stands.

Anyway, it's a neat little gadget, and the calculator is handy, but in general I have to say that it Needs Work. Or more to the point, it Needs Thought.

2003-01-10T13:45:00.000-05:00

Thai goes to the runner

Yesterday I started running again, getting up at a ridiculous hour to go to the track before it clogs, putting in a brief 2 km; not bad considering such a long hiatus, nearly 3 months.

I didn't actually have Thai afterward, I've just always wanted to say that, and nobody's provided me with an excuse in conversation.

2003-01-09T12:11:00.000-05:00

Via the always-interesting Arts and Letters Daily, comes this.

Which condemns:

people who think that their lives will be fuller, their opportunities greater, and their burdens fewer if they are allowed to treat sex as recreation, children as toys, and income as an obligation of government rather than a result of work.

and thereby illustrates a cheap trick for compelling assent. Two of them, really. The first: yoking together two things that reasonable people might in fact disagree on (points 1 and 3) with something that is an actual act of cruelty that no reasonable person would condone (treating children as toys).

Even many conservatives would not go so far as to say recreational sex was an evil in itself - I doubt Andrew Sullivan would, for instance. They might say that sex should not always and only be recreational, but in this a great many on the left would join them. They might believe that the proper place for sex is within a marriage, but that marital sex can be for recreation as well as procreation.

Not many conservatives could be found to defend a guaranteed income, though to the unprincipled and Machiavellian variety it might have a certain "bread-and-circuses" appeal for forestalling dissent. All the same, I think the arguments for a guaranteed income - that as an advanced technological society we produce enough surplus to make it possible; that it would eliminate the complex bureaucracies that decide who is "deserving" of welfare, and how much; etc. - may well be in error, but they are hardly on the same plane as "Children are toys who inevitably take second place to the gratification of my immediate desires".

Oh, and there is also the lack of case coverage: according to the author, you can either proudly work for a living or debase yourself with handouts from the government. What about inheritances? If a guaranteed income is wrong because of the large, intrusive bureaucracy it creates, and the intrusion on property rights needed to gather the funds, then inheritances are fine. But then there's no need to bring all this dignity-of-labour business into it. However, if you do bring the spiritual/social benefits of working for a living into it, then you also need to address the issue of inheritances, as Theodore Roosevelt did.

The second cheap trick is the cynical "Won't someone please think of the children?" nature of the device. Someone writing for the much-lamented Suck once referred to this argument-stifling tactic as a 'waif-and-switch'.

It's a shame that Wilson resorts to this sort of thing, because he otherwise presents a principled conservative (American-style conservative) viewpoint quite well. I don't agree with much of it, but the disagreement is civil. Given his defence of civility in the article, I wish he'd avoided slippery rhetorical attacks like the one I've described.

2003-01-07T20:03:00.000-05:00

Dispelling magic in a 20 yard radius

Looking at the vodyanoi in yesterday's entry, it strikes me how much folklore and literature came my way via gaming. I played Call of Cthulhu before reading a line of Lovecraft; I discovered the Kalevala through reading Deities and Demigods (before it was cravenly renamed Legends and Lore; I'm given to understand that in Second Edition AD&D, even devils and demons got renamed to avoid offending the fundies. Next: there won't be 'evil' alignments anymore, in case that tempts the kiddies to, y'know, consider evil as an appropriate lifestyle choice) and, of course, the first place I read about any number of mythical beasties, including the vodyanoi, was in the Monster Manual.

The second place I read about vodyanoi was in C.J. Cherryh's Rusalka. I read this with some reluctance, since, firstly, that spurious 'h' at the end of C.J. Cherryh's nom de plume has always picked me for some reason; secondly, most of her stuff was published by DAW, back when they had the uniform yellow spines and mostly published poo, with some exceptions (like Tanith Lee); thirdly, one of the major characters was called 'Uulamets', and that really sounded too much like a Unix utility (a la uucp or uuencode) to be taken seriously at all. But, I liked it. Gloomy, though.

(Now that I think of it, Manuel's father in Cabell's Figures of Earth was supposed to be a water-demon, and there was a lot of Russian folklore that fed into Cabell's world. Hmmm, maybe he was a vodyanoi, which Cabell opted to translate, unlike leshy which he left in the original. Must check.)

Anyway, right, the
Kalevala. I don't know what the compilers of Deities and Demigods were reading when they wrote the "Finnish Mythos" section, but it doesn't seem to be any English translation of the Kalevala I've ever laid hands on. The first one, borrowed from the library at age 16, was Francis Peabody Magoun's, which I haaaated. Partly because of the weird meter of the translation, and partly because it was so unlike what I was expecting: I mean, in the DDG, there's all this stuff about Pohjola, the Land of Evil, and Magoun translates it as "North Farm". The hell? I'm expecting some Finnish-ass Mordor, and I get a farm? No point leaving Southwestern Ontario for that.

Also, Loviatar, the Maiden of Pain? Nowhere to be seen. Okay, maybe a one-liner. The rest was doubtless woven from the fevered imaginations of the folks at TSR - those big ol' perverts.

To be fair to Magoun, neither of the other translations I've read - the recent one by Keith Bosley, and the old Everyman by J.F. Kirby - have any Loviatar to speak of either. I like Kirby the best, by a long, long shot. Bosley's introduction informs me that Kirby is way out of date and inaccurate in spots, but he keeps the Kalevala meter, and to me that really lends the whole thing that vital character of incantation - neither Bosley nor Magoun ever felt shamanic to me, and Kirby does. It was a happy day when I finally found both volumes of the Kirby at a book sale.

And yet, even as I was happily immersed in it, I couldn't help pausing over the passage where Lemminkainen - on skis! - is hunting the elk of Hiisi, and thinking what a great video game that would make.

2003-01-06T19:26:00.000-05:00

"Palgolak was a god of knowledge. He was depicted either as a
fat, squat human reading in a bath, or a svelte vodyanoi doing
the same, or, mystically, both at once. His congregation were
human and vodyanoi in roughly equal proportions. He was an
amiable, pleasant deity, whose existence was entirely devoted
to the collection, categorization, and dissemination of information."

-China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

This is one of those books that I have periodically looked at on the shelf, and thought, has enough time elapsed that it's not ridiculous to re-read this? Which is something that I only started doing in my late teens, when I realized that I was so familiar with Julian May's Pliocene books that there was no longer any oomph to be had from reading them beginning-to-end again. In my obsessive-compulsive fashion, it's fossilized into a nigh-unshakable conviction that at least a year needs to go by between re-readings. It's been close to a year and a half for Perdido Street Station, so it's Time. Besides, there's a sequel now.

Thoughts on a Second Reading: I bought this book in Copenhagen Airport, waiting for a flight home; I had miscalculated how much reading matter I needed to bring, and had nothing left except for about half of a Robert Louis Stevenson collection, which was no way going to get me through 2 more hours in the airport and an 8.5 hour flight. A bookstore with an English-language section was an unlooked-for delight, and getting something that came well recommended instead of some Tom Clancy thing was even better. So I read this on a plane, with insufficient sleep, not yet recovered from jet lag, and my digestion responding to these things in its usual rebellious way. This, perhaps, explains why I didn't notice how much of the detail is actually stomach-turningly visceral. This morning, however, it made me look at my peanut butter sandwich in deep suspicion more than once. The technology/magic of the book is very, very biological - sort of steam ribofunk. (I'm still sad the term ribofunk never caught on.)

I also don't recall the description of Palgolak and his church jumping out so much on a first reading. It's a very appealing made-up religion, which, like the belief system of Terre d'Ange in Kushiel's Dart, I could see catching on. Heck, which I'd even be inclined to adopt myself, if I were inclined that way. And the notion of a deity who travels the dimensions reading in the bath puts me in mind of my betrothed, who warns me that she will read my books in the bathtub, and occasionally drop them in. Hee.

2003-01-06T19:10:00.000-05:00

Hello, world

We always begin figuring out a new System by making it say "Hello, world". I'm fond of tradition. And new Systems.