Today at Farley’s again. I’m sure that the patrons and the staff must think that I am insane as I mutter and pace about as I hack and slash though this book.
I think that someone should have given this book to an editor. As a master of the recursive sentence, I can appreciate what MacIntyre is doing, but dammit man, sometimes your points are simply lost!
I also get irritated when philosophy writers think that they have to hide what they’re really getting at to keep you interested. If you want to string the suspense out over a paragraph or two, fine, but this novel format of philosophical treatises grows taxing quickly.
Interlude We live in an Emotivist culture characterized by the bureaucrat. It was not always this way, contrary to the Emotivist claim. It broke in the enlightenment era where man became conceived as independent from his social roles and where he became regarded as no longer a function object. From this cascades a difference between is and ought, and the belief that factual premises cannot lead to evaluative conclusions.
The manager appeals to effectiveness, a myth.
We threw off the Aristotelian conception as a limiting factor to our development and awaited the day when social science would overcome the vagaries of our existence.
On the up side, this gets us out of the relentless discussion of Emotivism.
I am not entirely sure that I understand why Chapter 3 was written. I assume
that this will be used as a target to attack later, but I think that we got all
the value out of this discussion in chapter II.
The argument goes:
“We have lost the ability to talk about morality, incommensurate (Ch I).” No this has always been the case, I am an Emotivist
“OK, the Emotivist world looks like this” OK, so what
Is MacI trying to say that this is proof that the Emotivist society is NOT
something that always was? It seems like chapter 3 is a lot of overkill to
make that fairly easily granted point.
I hope that he is going to use the paradigms set up in this chapter
to pick out qualities of older moralities that had it together(?) or what our
new goal should be (?).
Chapter 4 was pretty good. A lot tighter / faster moving. It basically gives
the specific instances in Kant, Kierkergaard, and Hume of how the Enlightenment
project of answering rationally “Why should I be moral” failed. He also
asserts a close similarity between the Enlightenment (which asked the same
question we ask, but they did it first) and today. They asked the
question that we, 300 years later, still have not addressed.
Chapter 5 promises the essential flaw that guaranteed failure, but I’m still
reading it.
Notes to Chapters 5-10 of AV In chapter 5, Mac. addresses the inherent contradictions which assured that any project (Enlightenment Era) which sought to rationally justify morality was doomed to fail.
In Chapter 6 we talk about how the world view must look in light of these failings.
Chapters 7 and 8 talk about the failure of ‘social science’ to provide us a coherent explanation of human behavior.
Chapter nine serves as a bridge as we ask, in light of the failure of social science, ethics persists, where do we go?
Chapter ten starts charting the birth of the Classical (Aristotelian) ethical mode’s genesis with the heroic cultures (Illiad, Oddyssey).
Chapter 11: The Virtues at Athens Many moral debates in real societies find context in the heroic tales Plato Is not showing error held by Athenians Is showing conflict in the inherited political / moral discourse Removing Homeric vocabulary from Athenian moral debate (purging) Disconnect between Homeric values and Classical values as explored by Sophocles in Philoctetes Odysseus displays Homeric virtues Ultimately resorts to deceit, a trickery praised by Homeric virtue schemes Neoptolemus disagrees, thinks this is immoral, represents the Athenian / Classical Model Sophocles exploys deus ex machina to resolve (Heracles) Orestes is civic obligation versus familial obligation The Athenian debate is not simply a result of familial versus state context Kinship nations survive and aristocratic society’s values endure Virtue becames detached from any particular person (Hector’s virtue virsus Virtue) The separation of virtue from any particular person was an Athenian invention Involvement in the greatest polis demands we know “good citizen” vis-a-vis a “good man” What do Athenians share?
I’m looking out the sliding glass door at the San Francisco skyline. I am sitting on on my futon. The summer fog drifts from the sea to the bay. Sometimes the fog is high and covers the tips of the city. Sometimes the fog lays thick over the buildings and the highway seems to vanish into haze.
And for some reason, I happened to think about S.E. Hinton. S.E., first of all is a woman. You probably don’t know this. But she is. S.E. Hinton has written some of the most gritty fiction ever put to paper. Her book chronicles lust, violence, anger, rage, isolation, and angst in a thoroughly authentic manner.
If you love sci-fi, especially the classic stuff, you may know one of the unique special pleasures of our love - finding a really pulpy, really yellowed, Ace, Trade, or Avon paperback release of a sci-fi book from the sixties.
Now, the book doesn’t have to have been printed in the sixties, although it helps. The key things we’re looking for are:
Finding a yellowed I, Robot or Foundation is a jolt of pleasure like no other.
Funky smell - the smell of the bookstore or spilled bongwater? Yellowed around the edge Funky artwork, preferably pastels Funkier typeface, preferably raised from the paperstock cover Today at the book trader on Castro in Mountain View I picked up a copy of the fourth book of the Dune series: God Emperor of Dune.
Asians love my shirt.
Being a single guy trying to make his way in, as they say on the Tejano radio, el Bayarea, I find that Pacific Sunwear is a pretty good place to score a T-shirt.
The designer Element produces the above shirt in a variety of colors and flavors but it boils down to their name, and the mentioning of 4 of the key elements: wind, water, earth, and fire (as shown above).
The semiotics of this shirt comes out to “live life, embrace interaction with the four elements: climb/board/ski the mountains of earth, surf/swim/snorkel/SCUBA in the deep blue water, traverse with the wind in your face, and stoke the fire of your own courage.
Warning:
Book by a woman who makes money from prurient endeavours is discussed further in this post. You may want to not look if you’re of a rather Victorian bearing.
I recently finished How To Make Love Like a Porn Star : A Cautionary Tale by the undisputed queen of the pornography genre: Jenna Jameson (née Massoli).
In this day and age in America, the third act of fame is the search for forgiveness. All of a sudden after being a Bad Boy or a Bad Girl you go on Oprah, blame it on your overbearing parents, on poverty, on drugs, on boredom.
Isn’t Ladytron’s Light and Magic the most perfect song to imagine Pattern Recognition by? I recently watched a documentary on William Gibson (“No Maps For these Territories”) and was thinking about that fine book and how fortunate I was to read that on the cold morning Caltrain from SF to Mountain View with those crisp synthesized tones of Ladytron.
Maybe because while I was away, Fall fell on the Bay.
I’ve added a consumed media section so that my “current media” side panels can be archived somewhere. Enjoy.
Over the last several days I read several books, bought some music, and watched my 3 Netflix DVDs. Media days! I shall now tell about some of these latest dishes. First up, music.
Back when I was having a terrible time with insomnia I would often see the Coheed & Cambria Video on MTV (yes, Virginia, they occasionally do play videos). I was struck by the awesome naming convention of their songs (“A Favor House Atlantic”) and albums (“In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3:”) and their dead-evident musicianship.
Here they are:
Unknown Originally there was an image here, but it’s gone and I didn’t put the title in text anywhere
I thought this was an interesting book. I picked it up thinking that it would be a book on the “clash of civilizations” perspective on the West versus Islam (see Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations). Interestingly enough, the thesis was different than I expected.
Thesis: The globalizing marketplace creates conditions which accelerate and abet Jihadism (not strictly Islamist but Nationalist, Segregationlist, pro-Quebequois, etc.). Their interplay is bad for democracy.
The Gnostic Gospels I’m interested in the plurality of Christianities at the dawn of the religion, but it was mostly familiar territory for anyone who’s seen a few documentaries on the Essenes or the Dead Sea Scrolls.
_This entry is rather long I may be refining proofreading over the next several days – sgh _
The Time Traveler’s Wife is the finest modern work of literature I have read in recent memory.
First, a spoiler warning. I will discuss spoilers in the extended entry, so you can read this first part without fear of spoiling any twists and turns. In the extended entry section I will ruminate upon the plot action. If you want to stay absolutely free of any tampering, do not read furthur. PLEASE buy the book, read it, and come back :) It’s that good.
Surprisingly clever, and perhaps the most consistent I have read with respect to its theory of time travel, this book is quite good, especially considering that it is Niffenegger’s first novel. It would almost be timeless, save for its odd (and unnecessary) references to early 1980s punk bands.
So says Dedman of The Time Traveler’s Wife.
He complaint follows this pattern of argument that For all books, if it is “timeless” then it does not contain references to popular movements of the day.
This is sheer nonesense.
The rhetorical retort to “for all” is to provide a single counterexample. I proffer two.
Spoiler content if you view the extended entry…
I was thinking about the death of Henry in a hunting accident in his and Clare’s sanctuary, The Meadow.
Henry’s death is senseless, he, as his condition dictates, materializes naked in a field while Clare’s brother and are hunting. In a fit of reaction Henry is shot by his brother-in-law and then spontaneously warps back to his normal time, New Years Eve, a bloody mess at the feet of Clare.
Ugh, it eats me alive to think about it.
Tim travel killed him.
In any case, Henry time-travels at a young age when, in the final moments leading up to the car crash that will kill his mother, he time travels elsewhere, and then back, along the roadside.
Back in the early days of cable (dating myself here), the then-fledgling MTV networks did not have the means to produce its own content (20 years later, it produces too much crappy content).
As part of the MTV Networks Umbrella, Nickelodeon (now “Nick”) imported a great amount of content from our friend across the pond, the BBC and Thames productions.
What the Hell?
They also imported many Canadian shows like “Pinwheel:”
Aside: T’was on Nickelodeon’s Today’s Special that I first saw the mysterious word “Ontario.” Today’s Special, You Can’t Do That on Television, and Pinwheel are all pivotal childhood media milestones and worthy of their own post elsewhere
Snow Crash was a great book! It’s one of those gold plated volumes of the cyberpunk fiction canon and rightly so. It features all of the standard conventions: cyberspace, rogue-ishly sexy mercenary girls, and a wily hacker with swords.
The part I found most interesting was the discussion of ancient Sumerian myth and “deep neurolinguistic structures”. The idea being that if you could master the fundamental linguistic atoms that humans use to perceive the world you could re-program them. Think a second. Can you think without using words?
No really. Try. Nope? Something changed in how you think when you started realizing you wanted to say something and the big people who bring you food and fresh diapers respond, curiously enough, to sounds associated with those ideas.
After 4 days of having to wake up at 0530 to make the train up to the city my internal clock finally adapted and this morning I found myself fully awake at that dreadful hour. To be fair, I had turned in at 10 due to “It’s friday and I’m out of training but I still have a bus ride and a long train ride and i just want to go home”, but that was no consolation when I couldn’t go back to sleep.
Fortunately I had ordered some books from Amazon earlier this week. The Japanese House (because I like to look at nice plates of houses using a lot of negative space) and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I finished The World is Flat.
First things first, I must call this a Whiggish [1] interpretation of the globalization of the world. There’s definitely a na?ve belief that things are getting better and will continue to do so, and, quite necessarily, they must continue to do so. Whether you will like this book hinges on your ability to tolerate such a perspective.
Whiggish attitude aside, what’s Friedman on about? Well, Friedman notices that during the years after 9/11 we may have missed the fact that it’s now incredibly easy to get data across the globe. For all intents and purposes data may be considered as equivalent to highly-liquid wealth, malleable power structures, and influence.
He was referring to the fact that ethical birth-control pills, the only legal form of birth control, made people numb from the waist down.
Most men said their bottom halves felt like cold iron or balsawood. Most women said their bottom halves felt like wet cotton or stale ginger ale. The pills were so effective that you could blindfold a man who had taken one, tell him to recite the Gettysburg Address, kick him in the balls while he was doing it, and he wouldn’t miss a syllable.
…
The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral.
Jim continues his 2-0 record of book recommendations with his suggestion of The Historian. It was an excellent book in the DaVinci Code style of intrigue, research, museums, and early Christian history. Make no bones though, this is a much stronger book than dVC.
The book is told, like Dracula, through the presentation of diaries, journals, and letters. I find thin an interesting convention, but it wore on me after about 300 pages. I suddenly wanted there to be a spirit of action, of live action story telling. The only time this convention falls away is in a climactic battle and but a few chapters thereafter before the end of the work.
Today I finished Macroscope by Piers Anthony. Back in junior high I was really into Piers Anthony’s Xanth series. The original 10 or so of these books were very pleasant reads at the time. They had a real knack for suspense, humor, wordplay and mischief.
I had put Anthony’s work away as something from a younger time, but recently, while doing some research on Snow Crash, it was noted that Macroscope also made use of the concept of an information bomb, a set of instructions that when encountered by the mind, could render it inoperable. I thought that perhaps it would provide some insight from the framework Stephenson was using for Snow Crash.
I finished Snow Crash a while back and was very pleased with the book. One aspect I found lacking was a discussion of the Asherah virus’ ( a key plot focus ) history, operation, place within the larger evolutionary scheme of
Many of us have a big jar of coins at home. My jar was a Hansen’s Grape juice (originally purchased at the Trader Joe’s on 9th and Harrison in SF in 2002). Over the last 3 years I’ve been filling that jar and finally topped it off. Now, rolling this into coin rolls would be a distinctly un-fun and laborious affair. Likewise, Coinstar takes an 9% cut out of what you bring in….until now!
Coinstar recently partnered with some major e-tailers such that they will waive their tax and give you 100% provided you convert your coins into the goods of an e-tailer….
I’m finally to the last doorstop installment of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. I’m only 892 dense pages from finding out how the story of these Baroque heroes and thieves winds up.
Boy, I sure will be glad to return to the realm of books that can be carried around smartly in the outer pouch of your bag. This thing causes a goiter-like presence to surface when put in my bag. I feel a bit like Charlie Brown lugging about War and Peace. Nevertheless, I’m excited to see how our wily blackguard Jack will go against the icy wiles of Isaac Newton in pre-Georgian London-town.
In the tradition of posting books that I have finished on this site, I thought I would do the traditional thing and post a quick bit of text for Bel Canto.
I will copy from my book journal (where quotes and analysis are written longhand).
….In which revolutionaries seize control of a Latin kleptocracy’s grand ball planning to ransom the president.
The revolutionaries are three adult generals served by a children’s army.
The guests are all the wealthy and ambassadorial class. Most attended the party so as to hear the guest of honor, soprano Roxanne Coss, sing.
After the seizure of the president fails, for he remained home to watch a soap opera (think GW Bush + Fujimori), they are prisoners to the paramiltary siege.
I didn’t like it.
It’s not to say that Augusten Bourroughs can’t put a pretty funny spin on growing up with a mentally unhinged family, getting adopted by said mother’s psychotherapist’s family, and having a boyfriend double his age (!), but the tragicomedy loses its Royal Tenenbaum’s “Hey life is surreal and filled with crazy people!” feel quickly and moves into that sick to the stomach feeling that comes when someone is so desperate for attention he doesn’t know he’s being raped.
I suppose I had this coming, I was biased by the film trailer which promised something zany, quirky, insane, but not quite horrid.
Dedman has been on my case for many moons now to read this book and I finished it today.
Setup
The dead move to a city (the city) after undergoing a crossing which has no objective standard (wandering a desert, a forest, going underwater, etc.). The dead or, more precisely, the living dead, rest in the city until those who remember them die at which point they go into a different beyond.
Good setup.
The population starts swelling as a pandemic wipes out the population: sending people into the city by the barrel-load and, given the setup, the people who remember them, into death quite quickly.
Upon posting my “Finished” response, Dedman asked the question that I ( consciously ) skirted the entire time: “Yeah, but did you like it?”.
Well, i think the plot was derivative, the setup failed to deliver, and there were a host of other problems but, yeah, I liked it.
I think that when the plot and structure sag, you can find a real sense of bliss is passages like this where the writing is ephemeral and beautiful:
That was what insomnia was, after all - an excess of consciousness, an excess of life…she couldn’t will herself to fall asleep. The only way to fall asleep was not to care whether you fell asleep or not: you had to relinquish your will.
First things first, there is nothing manlier than the name Cormac McCarthy.
I think if it were that name stitched into a leather belt…
versus
…a Ford F150 with a poker table in the bed around which cowboys were drinking a case of Black Label while arguing over football while getting straightrazor shaved by strippers while puffing on Cuban stogies
…I think the name on the belt may have an edge.
If you have a last name that can bear that manly weight, then I beg you, give us more Cormac-en.
About The Road, it’s an unsentimental and very realistic portrayal about life after a global firestorm.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday I took the opportunity to read the autobiography of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, iWoz.
Steve believes in “extreme ethics”: always tell the truth completely Steve was incredibly precocious in terms of becoming an engineer Steve seems to be one of the ’new atheism’ camp: Science, proof, reason, plus nothing else. So I never got any exposure to religion. Church, mass, communion. What is that? Seriously I couldn’t tell you.
As for religion, if I asked, my dad would say, no, no, he was scientific. Science was the religion. We had discussions about science and truth and honesty, the first discussions of many that formed my values.
I headed back from San Jose yesterday and used the time to finish up Volume 3 of The Baroque Cycle: System of the World. I could do with a little less mass in my bookbag, so I’m glad to be finished with the work.
But it was an enjoyable undertaking: ideas, gold, and the tying up of several plot threads that ran for the previous 1700-odd pages. One of my biggest complaints about Stephenson’s work is that he can’t relieve the exciting frission of tension he builds up in the preceding pages.
He acquits himself, decently this outing. There are no ridiculous deus ex machina devices ( I’m looking at you Cryptonomicon ), but I can’t say that the climactic resolutions that you feel you’re owed all happen ( some do, some don’t quite, and some flat-out don’t ).
I’ll not do a “he’s a little bit country, she’s a little bit rock-n-roll” comparison, but Oprah has chosen for her book club the sparse, scary, and beautiful as a razor blade novel “The Road” for her book club selection for the month.
I’m still in awe of this book.
Much hay is being made of the “Will the Wally Lamb fan set” who adhere to the Prophetess of the Miracle Mile be willing to ditch the South Beach and Hoodia chick-lit to which they’ve been accustomed for a world so isolated, devoid, and scary?
Ultimately, The Road, for its post-apocalyptic setting and disturbing themes is a story of paternal love and adults’ search for meaning as thrown into stark relief against the innocent optimism of a child.
The other day I got a spam mail from “Fentress Telling” who, in addition to having a name like a Jedi, sent me a mail entitled: “The Martians were there–in the canal–reflected in the water.”
Do you know the source of this quote? It’s the last line of one of my favorite books.
The book would, of course, be Ray Bradbury’s amazing collected work The Martian Chronicles which contains this line within the story “The Million-Year Picnic”. TMC hails from that particular time of early science fiction where answers are rarely given, and the endings are usually quite ambiguous.
That was something that drove me nuts about watching the syndicated episodes from the earliest airings of “The Twilight Zone”.
Reading this list I was put in mind of wanting to buy some of these texts. I have a great number of them already in paper-back, but was wondering where would I go if I were to want, say, a copy of the Republic in hardback? Or perhaps The Collected Aristotle?
I could see something like estate-sale staple, “The harvard classics”, but I always thought they were a bit too small and pretentious.
Is there some other ( insert: book ) solution?
Update:
The League pointed out the Everyman’s Library collection (which I had completely forgotten about). I remember when this came out because on BoingBoing there was a lot of fan-ism around the idea that for 2 grand you could basically have a collection of some of the finest works of the world.
Letterpress: 1a. The process of printing from a raised inked surface.
source
I’ve watched it now three times and I find a great peace in the slow narration and accentation. Makes me want to visit the northeast again.
It reminded me of Jessie Ferguson’s installation hosted by Make magazine.
Owing to the domain / DNS / hosting drama of the last few weeks, I’ve not been very motivated to post. Partly because I thought that investing any time and effort into the old site might make it harder to migrate to a new site. Further, after spending tons of time trying to get some non-responsive, irresponsible business owner to do what you contracted with them to provide, I just simply lost my zest for posting.
But, let me summarize a few things that tell where I’m at roughly.
Work Decommission and migration are the orders of the day. I’m working on an interesting project now for horizontal aggregation of tag metadata across vertical data channels.
After I got back from SXSW I needed some hard-core abandoning involvement in the world time. I had taken a peek at Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, which I had ordered some time back but had not yet read, and he first chapter managed to get me involved.
It’s a gothic story that had a hook that immediately engaged me. A shy archivist engages a famous, aged, literary master to write her biography. This task is slightly more daunting than usual because the author has achieved fame and renown for giving incorrect details to those who have asked to know her biography.
When I was in high school, I remember seeing this copy of The Stranger and being immediately blown away by the absolute weirdness of this stage troupe.
Aside: Does anyone know what group this is, who took the photo, what it’s about? I think it’s the Bantam edition.
I then proceeded to check the book out and I honestly can say I didn’t understand Mersault ( does anyone? ) and having read the book at least twice more and once in its native language, I’m still completely baffled by Mersault, his motivations, his identity. Mersault’s wedding plan, Mersault’s bliss over tablets of chocolate and cigarettes, his deadly flat attitude towards marriage, and ultimately his dispassionate choices standing on the sand.
As many of you may know I’ve been writing a lot. I mean a lot lately. One of the great things about being a humanities guy who knows high tech is that you know better ways than “email my gmail account a backup copy of this document that’s leeching my soul” to handle version control.
I used subversion.
A few weeks into my first project I became really aware of git, Linus Torvalds’ distributed version control system. My friends, the times that “getting interested in a new technology” has turned my KISS project into a monumental yak-shave is beyond count, so I resisted git.
During my blogging hiatus towards late April and Early May, I finished my fourth Latin class. During the class we covered the larger parts of Books I and II of the Æneid.
But we did not finish them. In a move that can only be considered arch-nerdly, I am reading the ending of these two on my own. In some ways, with several grand sunk, it seems like a very bad use of my funds to basically let all the knowledge leak out over the summer. On the other hand, couldn’t I be reading something else, something that doesn’t require a dictionary nearby?
First things first, this book combined several of my interests: grimoires, obscure Latin incantations, and a research topic that teases the boundary between the fantastick, the supernatural, and the 17th century. Gothick in its approaches, the book also features a mysterious key, a fallen garden, and the tetragrammaton.
In this, the book continues a trend that surfaced after “Tha da Vinci Code,” “The Rule of Four,” “The Historian”, e. al: a geek superans discovers a mystery, researches, comes to the boundaries of the rational and flirts with lethal danger.
In this “Physick,” the researcheuse is Connie Goodwin, a New England native, daughter to a spiritual healer mother of “free spirit” who has just passed her candidacy to the Ph.
Marla… the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it, but you can’t.
From “Fight Club”
There are those people, those special, special people who as much as you find reason(s) to be repelled by them – their boorish talk, their penchant for racist assumptions, the way they treat special moments of your life as a roadbump on the way to saying what they wanted to say, the way they indiscreetly ogle women as you talk to them – somehow you just can’t excise their cancerous character from your life.
I just finished Daniel Everett’s “Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes.” This work records his years spent living among the Pirahã, a small indigenous tribe of living along the Amazon in Brazil. Everett was initially sent among them to convert them to Christianity. The modus operandi of his support organization was to study the target civilization and then give them the New Testament in their native language. Therefore, Everett’s background as a linguist made him an ideal missionary. In the end, however, it was the Pirahã who converted him to atheism.
This reminded me of a story told to me by my AP English IV teacher in high school about a peer student who, the day before graduation, renounced his learning, renounced his faith, and left the seminary of Houston Baptist University.
I’ve always had a soft spot for noir.
Men are men, dames are dames, bartenders sling murky off-brand whiskey when they deign to look up from the LA Times crossword where they’ve been stuck on 46 across all day, the corrupt win, and with any luck the good scrape by to see another day, sometimes.
This genre’s icons bear hard names like Chandler, Hammett, Leonard. The form dictates roughing-ups, sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, lonely codas of reflection and loss, and sticking it to Mr. Big, when you can, and the general chill that comes from the inescapable realization that it’s still all law of the jungle out there and that sometimes when you win, you lose.
I don’t have cable but when I’m in a hotel (rarely) and up late (rarely) and happen to have a TV on (rarely) I like Chelsea Handler’s show. It’s about as much Hollywood as I can really take in a given sitting and, recognition where due, Handler is an able comedienne.
For these reasons, I decided to check out her second book without having read the first Are you there Vodka, it’s me, Chelsea. I was expecting something along the lines of David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day) meets Stephanie Klein (Moose).
Almost predictably enough, the opening vignette was about female masturbation.
Introduction I recently read The Shallows and found it greatly enlightening. I plan on doing a series of posts on the topic of this book. My first post will be a basic synopsis.
Synopsis Nicholas Carr’s argument in “The Shallows” is beautiful in its simplicity.
The human brain exhibits a property called neuroplasticity that endures through all stages of life. Therefore the mind’s physical structures are always mutable What we do, which tools we use to express thought, and how we think fosters or inhibits focus in our minds and alters the quality of the thoughts themselves.1 This is not merely a style of thinking change, but an actual change in the neural structures, per 1.
While Carr’s book, as I outlined in my previous post seems to follow a neutral, logical character, the book is also intensely personal. Carr himself starts the narrative not as a dispassionate researcher asking whether the neuro-anatomical structures of the brain are changing due to prolonged Net exposure. Carr begins, in Chapter 1, with a gut-feeling: “Why can’t I pay attention like I used to?”
For me this was very telling because I’ve been afraid to admit to myself that my mind has been changing over these last few years and that I’m not entirely sure it has been for the better.
Virality Previously I wrote about the mens nova, the new mind, and how, for some it is being programmed and encouraged by our peers and our workplace. It would seem that the mens nova should be localized among certain work disciplines or economically advantageous countries and age groups.
But it is not. As the elder generation dies away, the population will come to be dominated by those who understand and take as granted the mens nova. Further, the older and less digitally entrenched are not immune. Parents will be seduced by text messages, smaller, more frequent, offering status insights on a faster basis.
When last I wrote, I suggested that it’s not unreasonable to see the Internet as part of a conspiracy to reformat the human mind. I don’t believe it is part of a diabolical strategy, but its effect is pervasive and, I would suggest, most visible when examining one particular population: smokers.
My friend Bruce Williams tweeted:
The phone had replaced the cigarette in terms of many gestures
While this quote is certainly pithy and seemingly spot on, it misses what is actually happening. Historically when smokers left the building it was to disconnect from the work environment. In the lounge, turned smoking lounge, turned back alley behind the dumpster, smokers could congregate and “disconnect:” talk about the weather, talk about the cigarette, offer the new girl from accounting a light, and sometimes when no one else was out, watch the world go by.
Why are we so quick to bore, why are we so needful of new input? Why is the need for new information so recognizably similar to the need for a cigarette?
The conclusion that presents itself is unpleasant and simple. Our minds have changed to want more events of this type. “But how did I change my mind, I did no drug, I was not brainwashed.” Ah, but you were. You stood by, beguiled by the story of a lying Greek and didn’t realize that Troy was being sacked of its gold behind your back all the while you stood by, begging for more of the fabulist’s tale.
Cultivate idleness. Each time you’re not doing anything try to enjoy it. Don’t open BookFace mobile on the iPhone. Don’t open Twitter mobile. Manage your ingress points: don’t open the aggregator site and let its promise distract you Work in discrete units of time during which you turn off the information drug sites: Facebook, Digg, Reddit. A tool that sets 40 minute work sessions per hour (See: Pomodoro Method) that also blocks your most distracting sites might exist
De scriptibus meis:
Content seduces us (good, ill, pornographic) while the delivery mechanism re-patterns our thinking process. That is we can’t think about idea acquisition, as moderns, without “book.” We can’t think of “a day” without a notion of a measured, external reality that is divided into 246060 measured by the rattle of a cesium atom
Prologue McLuhan: “The content of a medium is ’the juice piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’(Carr, 4).”
Consider: Maxim that “content is king” heard at SXSW and other conferences. We celebrate the content which has been “the same for every new informational medium going back at least to the books that came off Gutenberg’s press.
I rarely buy or have bought comics or graphic novels. Of nerdly interests and attirbutes I have many, but comics, as yet, have not been part of that set (along with audiophilia, home electronics philia, and Dr. Who). Aside from a few titanic titles (“WATCHMEN,” “HELLBOY,” and the “SANDMAN”) it’s not been something I’ve gotten the bug for.
Over at The Signal Watch, Ryan recently posted arecommendation for Rucka and Williams’ collection of Batwoman’s adventures in DETECTIVE COMICS #854-860 called “Elegy.” His post had the following image whose richness and expressiveness had me over at Amazon lickety-split.
Thanks to Amazon Prime the book arrived today and, having read the first installment, I can say that the rave reviews were merited.
Ray Bradbury died a few days ago and I’ve been feeling rather reflective about his work and what it means to me. I’ve read many of the “classic” science fiction authors: H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Asimov and Bradbury. What strikes me as most special about Bradbury was that his voice was perhaps the most human of them all. Like Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s, his voice never stopped being human. Vonnegut said he always found it odd that his work was classified as “science fiction,” a genre associated with pornography and kooks when his messages were fundamentally human ones. But the best science fiction is never about the “them,” it’s always about the “us.
Based on an interview with Eagleman that I heard on To the Best of Our Knowledge, I thought I would give his book, Sum a read. The book
offers in its first four chapters a layperson’s guide for understanding
consciousness and provides an introduction to the neuroanatomical
features of the brain. The book then portrays how the brain operates
as, to borrow from Doris Kearns Goodwin, a “team of rivals” of which
consciousness quite often has no control. Thereafter Eagleman makes a
thoughtful presentation on how society ought punish and judge in a world
where the assumption of free will, a concept at the heart of
jurisprudence since antiquity, appears shaky by virtue of the previous
discussion.
While the opening chapters offered little innovation compared to other
pop neuroscience texts, their rudiments allowed the exciting
explorations around law and culpability to be presented in the latter
chapters.
http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/how-chris-mccandless-died.html
It’s a sad realization to understand these scientific mechanics that lead to the doomed conclusion of “Into the Wild.”
http://mentalfloss.com/article/52650/what-shakespeare-plays-originally-sounded
It wasn’t the received pronunciation of Olivier, it was a Danish-legacy-bearing, Scandinavian, robust sound.
Translation is a maddening and addictive past time. The more you spend time in that foreign tongue, the more you find its hear, mind, and beauty. Maybe sometimes you couldn’t leave after you reached “The End.” Seems to have happened to JRRR Tolkein and “Beowulf.” http://nyr.kr/1kdv8bA
It is commonly said that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Most people have a story where this wasn’t true and here’s mine.
Help me internet! Who designed this cover?
This amazing cover to Camus’ “The Stranger” got me to read this book and my life was never the same afterward. But before I tell the story of its impact on me I must ask: “Does anyone know about who made this cover or who this troupe on the cover is?”
This cover was one of my first exposures to conceptual art. I had never seen anything like this: the make-up, the absurd yet regimented uniforms, the implication of “theatah.
Introduction In 2000, Mark Z. Danielewski published House of Leaves. While ostensibly a genre novel (horror), the book is much more than that owing largely to its conceit, or if less kind, gimmick, that
there is a principal narrative reflected in a film called The Navidson Record that is presented as the subject of a number of scholarly analyses which were incompletely collected by a character who is dead but which are arranged to completion by an unreliable narrator who annotates the collection with his feelings about the action in a series of discursive footnotes (his name is “Johnny Truant”) which are collected by an editor who reviewed Mr.
Introduction Last summer I was prompted by my friend Danielle to read Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. As she urged me to read the book I gleefully said that I had alway been meaning to given that I was such a fan of “Haunted,” the album companion to the book by Mark’s sister, Annie Danielewski, who performs under the name “Poe.”
Truth be told, I had avoided the book in part because it was just too much like me. I had scanned a few pages shortly after its release and I immediately recognized a kindred spirit in the voice of Mark: discursive, recursive, rambling, annotated, polymathic, vertiginous.
In the previous post I explained that my interpretation of House of Leaves
was based on the honest, first-person perspective performed by Poe in her album
“Haunted.” Her story of struggling to be heard against the voice and pursuits
of her father (his Houses of Leaves) is a dominant theme in this work. In this
post I’d like to describe how I became so thoroughly familiar with this
recording.
In 2000 late I was in Campbell, CA on a rainy (yes, California had rain back
then), winter afternoon. I had been in the Bay Area for about 4 months and
still hadn’t met many people. To pass the time I would often go music shopping
at the Rasputin records and grab a set of tacos from Taco Bravo. On one
occasion I saw that a musician whose music I had enjoyed in 1996, and whom I
had even seen perform in Houston in that same year, Poe, had released a new
record, “Haunted.”
I approached House of Leaves, the novel, looking for a story of children
suffering or getting lost — literally or metaphorically. Also, I kept
wondering whether the book was an fictionalization of what it was like growing
up a Danielewski child. I went looking for support from Mark’s work and found
it on the very first page.
The Ignored Children
HoL opens with a collage photograph with this found snippet:
Note: The collage obscures key words, these are my best estimation. The
sentiment emerges regardless
Perhaps I will alter the whole thing. Kill both children. Murder is a
better word. Chad scrambling to escape, almost making it to the front door
where Karen waits, until a corner in the foyer suddenly leaps forward and
hews the boy in half. At the same time Navidson, by the kitchen reaches for
Daisy, only to arrive a fraction of a second too late, his fingers ….ding
air, his eyes, scratching after Daisy as she …. to her death. Let both
parents experience that…their narcissism find a new object to wither by.
…them in infanticide. Drown them in blood.
The children are named “Chad” and “Daisy.” Both are children of loving parents
(they’re working to save their children) but they are parents who have missed,
owing to narcissism (yet to be detailed), their children’s needs. Was it
coincidence that “Mark” and “Annie” have the same letter counts as “Chad” and
“Daisy?”
Thus the confusion and loss reported by Poe (the “House of Leaves” experience)
is triggered, according to Mark, by narcissism. I turned the page looking to
see if Mark explains what the narcissisms were.
The Narcissistic Parents
HoL (the novel) describes, in its innermost narrative valence, the story of
Will Navidson and Karen Green and their children in a film called The Navidson
Record. We learn that Will is a famous photographer early in novel (p. 6).
We also learn that Karen is a stunning beauty, a cover model (p. 57) whose face
has become a beautiful, learned mask that buries even as it distances. I tried
to keep an eye out on the narcissism of the parents as the story unfurled.
In the previous posts I have presented a key by which to understand the
allegory of the Navidson / Danielewski families. Peripatetic and insular, the
children grow up in a world that features great need of their parents; however,
their father’s ambitious pursuits swallow him and the mother’s need for his
support and validation swallow her along with him, leaving the children alone.
While House of Leaves, the novel, depicts that object of paternal obsession
as a House with a demonic nature, houses are metaphorical objects meaning any
sort of intellectual pursuit that consumes and isolates its pursuer.
The Children’s Experience
I’d like to take a moment to point out that the children’s neglect and fear is
not subtle or something that a busy parent with good intentions could miss.
No, I think their expressions of discomfort and need were quite clear.
Consistent care seems only to come from outside the nuclear family. Will’s
brother, Tom, crafts a custom doll house for Daisy (p. 62) where she spends
hours alone playing (ominously) “house.” Further, no one seems to recognize or
intervene when Chad “escape[s] outside, disappearing into the summoning
woods…his adventures and anger passing away unobserved.”
Even more frightening, from a Child Protective Services perspective, is that
the children’s bedroom wall is “covered with drawings (p. 316).” Elsewhere we
learn what their drawings look like (from a teacher):
[Chad’s drawing of his house] had no chimney, windows, or even a door. In fact
it was nothing more than a black square filling ninety percent of the page.
Furthermore several layers of black crayon and pencil had been applied so that
not even a speck of the paper beneath could show through. In the thin margins,
Chad had added the marauding creatures (p. 313)."
and:
[in the] kindergarten classroom…one [drawing] caught her eye…[t]he
same…[monsters]…two thirds the size of the page, an impenetrable square,
composed of several layers of black and cobalt blue crayon, with not even the
slightest speck of white showing through…drawn by Daisy.
No parent could see this in their children’s bedroom and ignore that something
was very, very wrong and that those kids needed out. Will is clearly not
visiting children’s most-protected sanctum, the place of one of the first
spatial violations, and seeing its violation [1]]. Nor is Karen.
In 2008 at SXSW I saw Alex Wright deliver a presentation entitled “The Web
That Wasn’t.” Wright enumerated a series of historical approaches to a
global distributed system for sharing knowledge that weren’t the World Wide
Web. His list included “low tech” visions such Vannevar Bush’s Memex and
Paul Otlet’s “Mundaneum” as well as higher-tech counterparts such as Douglas
Englebart’s NLS, and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu.
Having read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle not long before, I was interested
in what techniques fact-gatherers of yore had used to organize their data in
the era before the relational database or self-updating indices. In The
Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson clever gearworks, labels, and cabinetry make it possible to
“reassemble the library” literally to find the right fact. Wright’s few
remarks on Otlet’s “Mundaneum” piqued my curiosity: it seemed to be the
synthesis of the Dewey Decimal system, the URL, and microfiche. It seemed
to be a legacy information storage and retrieval medium that, like the card
catalog, I was on the tipping point generation of; I had used the predecessor
technologies and had learned, integrated, and come to prefer the successor
technologies. Being a geek, of course, I harbor a nostalgia for those old
displaced technologies and am awed by how they accomplished so much with such
rudimentary tools.
When I came across Cataloging the World it seemed to be a welcome deepening
into the world of Otlet’s technology, but also provided color on the man and
his times. Particularly of note was that Otlet was a creature of that odd time
before the Great War: The Belle Epoque, which marked a new spirit of
Internationalism (see: the IWW, et al).
Otlet’s Technology
Otlet leaned on the work of Conrad Gessner who advocated collecting books'
contents onto slips of paper (literally cut out, but in a more book-reverent
age, copying would be preferable) that would be fit onto a standardize
playing-card size. These cards would each bear a fact and each fact would be
noted in a fashion consistent with the Universal Decimal Classification.
Physical drawers would help identify and organize facts neatly. While card
catalogs may seem anqiuated they provided a scalable, organized means until
their successor, the relational database, came along. Notably Otlet advocated
the extraction of the content of books into cards, thus winnowing away the
author’s “voice” as but so much fluff (prefiguring the search engine). These
cards became atomic entities which Otlet called “biblions.” Ultimately Otlet
foresaw the birth of a new profession, the “documentalist” who would analyze
and synthesize biblions for new querents. Otlet also supposed “client” systems
that would integrate with the “home catalog” by which users could query, peruse
and synthesize links across archived information.
Otlet’s Institution
Nevertheless, this technological scheme supposes a small army dedicated to
order and control and a central organization for housing this body and their
efforts. Here we see most clearly the Internationalist sentiment that Otlet
held as a personal and spiritual requirement for his work’s success. Otlet
spent much of his life seeking patrons and real estate that would house this
collective: an institution he called the “Mundaneum.”
Otlet’s Weaknesses
For any information worker today it is clear as his dream’s most colossal and
glaring error: control systems simply do not scale. Considering the failure of
Internet directories (Yahoo!’s original charter) or the maddening task that
awaits anyone who seeks to groom a Wiki, a system of order and heirarchy like
Otlet’s seems woefully out of touch – or perhaps merely a relic of a time when
information was merely exploding versus exponentially exploding as it seems
to be doing in our era.
Conclusion
I rather enjoyed the book and am fascinated by the solution that Otlet imagined
in a world that predated the relational database. I feel Otlet’s story was
greatly assisted by Wright’s historical placement of him and his solution. The
last few chapters covered Otlet versus other information archive designers'
solutions. In many ways I feel like Wright was repurposing much of his
research from his work Glut. I didnt feel like these comparisons really
served Otlet’s story well and these chapters felt bolted-on. Nevertheless, for
anyone who would appreciate our information architectures of today, this slim
summary of Otlet’s context and dreams was a welcome introduction.
I recently read Nicholas Zackas’ The Principles of Object Oriented Javascript and I really recommend it. Many people I know (and students I teach) struggle with mapping the concept of object orientation onto a language that does not follow classical inheritance and lacks many of the visible signals that developers recognize as OO-ish.
The books makes forays into hidden attributes of the language but remains
friendly throughout. It offers practical tools and exploratory exercises that
will help JavaScript programmers learn more about this interesting and protean
language.
To grow old is a strange thing: you watch agog as all you loved turns cheap and
tawdry: gold to tin, elegance to chintz. The titillating becomes the
pornographic, the folly becomes incalculable error, the youth become parasitic,
and the open-armed city becomes a clutch of exploitative vipers.
The student of history knows that it has been ever thus. They can only smile,
sadly, faithfully reporting the reality of their times and accepting it as a
backdrop for the master narrative of their own life: whom they loved, the
career that seemed so important, the rituals and places whose importance seemed
natural and unfeigned.
In unremarkable times, death comes to the lucky and they never have to question
these narratives and backdrops. But for those caught at the locus of the
rupture, they feel their world change and wonder whether the most important
tatters of the old life and its beauty will make it across the gap with them.
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart is a story of a man in such a
time. A man in a future not so terribly far off from our own whose encounter of
utter, wrenching true love has the challenge of happening in interesting times.
Leonard Abramov: middle-aged, over-fond of rich food, moldering collections of
words on pages called books finds himself trying to court, win, seduce, and
become desirable to Eunice Park, a girl born part-and-parcel to the
zeitgeist.
Spoiler Warning: I recommend the book highly. If you want it in all its
unspoiled glory come back later.
Setting plays an incredibly important role in this book, so I’d like to note
some of the more interesting aspects of the dystopia where our rupture happens.
I recently heard Parag Khanna on the A16Z Podcast and I was sufficiently
interested that I bought and read “Connectography.” In this post I’ll give an
review of the book qua book and also cover an outline of its big ideas.
Note:
In subsequent posts I explore some of those ideas further:
[Connectography and Refactoring][cf]
Connectography
It’s the Hegelian in me: I love a Europe-coming-to-know-itself through history
(and economics) master narrative book. I’ve found the most predictive book for
the last 15 years of economic and global theory has been (Marxist) Hardt &
Negri’s Empire. Empire predicts a move to a global communist panacea only
after global capitalism (i.e. multinationals) guts and obviates the
nation-state. Accordingly to understand capital’s progression to this end, we
should listen to the most passionate global capitalists.
In the early part of the aughts I found the leading writer on the topic to be
(capitalist) Tom Friedman, NYT Op-Ed columnist and author of The World is Flat.
While Friedman always had big ideas, I found his over-emphasis on who he knows
and anecdotes a bit sloppy and frankly, taxing. Like Hegel, Friedman’s work
benefits from being read at a swift clip: he’s meant to be enjoyed like the
Romantics: with loud thundering emotions and sweeping torrents
of vision.
Khanna offers an update on Friedman’s work but with considerably more economic
data. While Friedman was occasionally insufferable in mentioning where he had
lunch and with whom, Khanna’s core critical ideas occasionally get lost in maps
or exhaustive detailing. Given a choice, I’ll take Khanna’s approach and take
the data versus the Friedman’s social itinerary, but we lose sight of many of
his core pillars in the sea of details about Malaysian trade agreements.
[Khanna suggests][prev] that the over-large nation-states of the 19th and 20th
centuries - many of which were created by the fiat and bureaucracy of the
British Empire or other colonialist machinations - be “refactored” in line with
the “SOLID” software design principles. In this post I take the SOLID
principles and try to transform them into the language of national identity
establishment.
SOLID and Refactoring
In my [previous post about “Connectography”][prev] I noted that one of Khanna’s
Big Ideas is that:
Many nation-states are held together by fiat or tradition but have no real
internal attraction to one another: we should let these break apart or break
them apart e.g. Iraq, Yugoslavia.
As a programmer I knew exactly what Khanna was saying. How many times did I,
as a beginner in object-oriented programming, allow a class to stand
unchanged because its functions had “always gone together?”
I began steering away from those negligent practices when I learned the [SOLID
principles][SOLID] listed by “Uncle” Bob Martin. These five simple dicta set a
new bar for how (new) code ought look. But how to go about fixing the
historical messes? For that, I read Martin Fowler’s book [Refactoring][] where
“refactoring” is described as:
…a controlled technique for improving the design of an existing code base.
Its essence is applying a series of small behavior-preserving
transformations, each of which “too small to be worth doing”. However the
cumulative effect of each of these transformations is quite significant.
Having learned from both of these inspirations I was able to methodically pull
apart complexity and limit its creeping in. So in software, so, too, in
nations.
One of the points Parag Khanna brought up in “Connectography” is that mobility
is a key to keeping influential cities thriving. The pointed example he pitches
(around page 122) is that of the city of Detroit (a city I love) which, at one
time, was the wealthiest city in America. As the automobile industry slackened,
the talent largely stayed put hoping that patriotic sentiment (“BUY AMERICAN”)
or trade protectionism would restore their coffers and their civic trajectory.
That, of course, did not happen. Hondas and Toyotas were bought by the boatful
and the future for Detroit diminished with each bill of lading.
But is there a lesson for us that we can take from this error? Let’s take a
look at the systems they had built in the early 80’s in Detroit:
early robotics-based industrial work
industrial development practices expertise
labor facilitation expertise
In 2016 all of those skills are valuable expertise that are, in essence, locked
in an old industry and which will share the fate of it (lest they find a way to
unbundle themselves).
But what might have history looked like if the experts had realized that their
host incubator was not necessary to their success earlier?
…WHAT IF those engineers who built the assembly lines had encoded better logistics systems in software (to rival Germany’s SAP)
…WHAT IF those engineers who built auto-assembly robotics had roboticized the port of SF, the port of Oakland (there might be dock work in SF), been influential in the upgrades to the Panama Canal, Corpus Christ’s port, the Nicaragua canal?
…WHAT IF….that expertise had allowed the first generation of port (re-)builders to win contracts in central America in the late 90’s instead of Chinese competitors in the 2010’s?
If that were the case I could imagine many snowy Monday mornings in Detroit
leading to direct flights to Managua, Corpus, or linking to a hop to Shanghai.
And the reverse could be true as well: Detroit could have become the home of
process optimization, industrial flow analysis and the flights (and capital,
and residents) would be flowing in to offset the decline in automotive
manufacturing dominance.
Based on my reading of Khanna there are two principal institutional changes
that could have helped and one cultural change. Ease of mobility, ease of spot
education, and the unwinding of American exceptionalism. I’ll start with the
last first, after the jump.
Here are my notes extracted from A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.
{ "title": "A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age", "author": "Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman", "highlightCount": 65, "noteCount": 7, "annotations": [ { "highlight": "But before Shannon, there was precious little sense of information as an idea, a measurable quantity, an object fitted out for hard science. Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits.", "location": 69, "annotation": "" }, { "highlight": "they could be used to evaluate any logical statement we could think of, could even appear to "decide.
I was talking a colleague about Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind” and how many Bay Area software developers are “microdosing” LSD and psilocybin to help increase their productivity.
He quipped:
Isn’t that the most Bay Area thing ever? Discover an ego-dissolving, God-revealing chemical and then, instead of getting up and going outside to become one with nature or relate genuinely with your fellow man they ask: “But how can this make me work better?”
Flawless.
I read Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice just after Lauren and I moved back to San
Francisco. It was a period of great insomnia for me. I’d sit up in the study of
our short-term rental on States Street in Corona Heights and look out over the
Castro Valley and the Diamond Heights neighborhoods. Winter storms would come
up the Peninsula or churn about in the Bay before whipping westward across the
Castro valley and on into the ocean. I joined the San Francisco Public Library
and started checking out books.
On several of the nights or early mornings during our tenancy, I would sit up
with a solitary lamplight on, reading. One of my favorite books in that era was
the book, Tokyo Vice, which has recently been converted into a limited run
series on HBO Max. Lauren and I watched the first episode (brought to the
screen by auteur of night, the underworld, and neon, Michael Mann) and found it
intense and compelling.
Back in 2010 though, after I posted a review on this site, I even got a comment
from Mr. Adelstein himself. I stopped hosting comments on my blog years ago
(too much spam to keep up with), but I kept Mr. Adelstein’s comment in a
snapshot. You can read what a great storyteller he is in it:
When I first moved to the San Jose in 2000, I didn’t know a soul. Driven by
ambition, hubris, curiosity and the desire to get out of the socio-political
and heat environment of Texas, I went as far to the West as I could. I remember
driving up from the Central Valley through the apricots, peaches, and garlic of
Gilroy. The wide tree-filled manors of Monte Sereno and the brown hills of
South San Jose served as pillars marking the entrance to the Valley of Heart’s
Delight. It was magical and the smell of produce and the richness of Earth’s
breast has never left me. I’m sure it’s all Kohl’s-anchored strip centers and
Targets now.
In those days, I was eager to start working and making my splash in the tech
world. There was still enough wheeze left in the coughing engine of “the New
Economy” that I was hoping for one last shot at the optionaire dream of wealth
and fancy. All that would be undone within 18 months, but knowing the sordid
future coming due does nothing to undermine the joy of dreaming the dream. But
in those early days, along in my tiny room, on Saturday night I had a ritual:
I would walk to the fast food options up the street and bring home my dinner.
I’d listen to KQED’s programing of “The World,” “This American Life, “Selected
Shorts,” “The BBC World Service” and then go to bed and sleep in late on
Sunday. Often, in those nights, it would be me, my computer, stacks of CD’s
loading Linux, or me working on programming projects. It seems small and lonely
now, and it was, surely. But it was also where I started finding out who I was
professionally. I can’t shun it.
To this day, I can still hear the introduction patter from program director
Isaiah Sheffer: “Recorded at Symphony Space in New York.” How many dozens of
times did I hear that over the years?
How funny it is, then, that I’ve now lived a few blocks away from where
“Selected Shorts” was recorded all those years ago. For a couple’s night out, I
got us tickets during Christmas to see a recording of “Selected Shorts” this
past Wednesday.
There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet
she had no luck…
It was a late night during the winter in San Jose in 2001. As was my custom in
those days, on Saturday night I’d often be at my desk working, reading, coding,
or gaming. I’d let KQED play all night long from Prairie Home Companion until
BBC World Service came on at 11:00 pm.
But when I heard John Shea start with D.H. Lawrence’s “Rocking Horse Winner,” I
stopped everything just to listen to his bewitching narration. I, of course,
knew of the reputation of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, but I didn’t
know of Lawrence’s output as a short story author.
But as Shea read the final, miserable coda of the story, I thought to myself:
“This is quite possible the pinnacle of the short story form.” As the last word
hung in the air and the applause thundered – and host Isiah Sheffer ended the
spell by drawing us into schedules and what was coming next week, I knew that I
would never forget this radio broadcast. And I never have.