In the Gilmore Girls episode “Help Wanted” Amy Sherman (-Palladino) treats, I daresay, her literary creative fans to a bit if shameless titilation. Lorelai (Lauren Graham) escorts her father (Edward Hermann) to a discount office supply story and they wax quick and quirky about the fetishes of the office place. I can only assume that Ms. Palladino (-Sherman) has killed thousands of trees and drained thousands of cyllinders of ink pursuing her craft. Here are some choice lines. “I can’t use all those [pens]….” “You won’t. You’ll lose half of them and then you’ll be thankful you have the other half.

On art: “An idea always lives in individuals. It seeks an individual to transmit its great intellectual force. It becomes alive in a brain, and seeks escape through the mouth. The idea is preached by individuals, individuals who will never be satisfied to have the knowledge remain theirs alone. You know that from experience. When one knows something one does not keep it hidden like a buried treasure, rather one seeks to tell others. One looks for people who should know it. One feels that everyone else should know to, for one feels alone when no one else knows. For example, if I see a beautiful painting in an art gallery, I have the need to tell others.

Anyone who has known me long enough has likely heard me extol the virtues of Unix or Unix-like operating systems. Largely, their eyes go gooey and I can feel the thought rattling in their head: But can I use Word on it? [Neal Stephenson][1] writes an excellent explanation about how using unix is

When you work in the UNIX / CLI-environment a simple fact of your work environment is that you simply must have a high-powered text editor to edit configuration files, write code, or write email in a non-GUI mail tool. You have your choice of consumer-targeted editors (pico), but the two that battle for the power user demographic are vi and emacs. I’m conversant in both and have even written an encomium to the power of emacs on this very site. But I should like to dwell on an interesting aspect of the vi/emacs approaches to doing things. I had occasion to reflect on vi/emacs as writing tools when I was giving my exceedingly patient girlfriend a bit of a demo of how to use vi ( being knee-deep in drupal, it is something she’s considering needing to know more about ).

http://www.kottke.org/09/03/growing-sentences-with-david-foster-wallace Growing sentences – la David Foster Wallace

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.

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2013/11/i-embrace-you-with-all-my-heart.html#.UnuWE_kNuXc.reddit Next time someone tells you that existentialists / atheists / agnostics / Humanists / Rationalists / Free-Thinkers have dead hearts, read this letter from Albert Camus to his childhood teacher.

“Don’t Sneak” http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/409927/dont-sneak-a-fathers-command-to-his-gay-son-in-the-1950s/ Wrenching and touching

Peter Naur was undoubtedly a great computer scientist: Turing award winner, co-creator of the influential Algol language, and co-inventor of the Backus-Naur notation used to explain the options of programs and program routines. The significance of Naur’s contributions are beyond reproach. One of my favorite works of his is “Programming as Theory Building”.

However, the language, style, and approachability make this article less-accessible, and that is a shame. In this post I’d like to humbly submit my edit: “Programming as Theory Building 1.01.”

Nick Cave describes the grief of a mother as an intimate to this most-tragic of experiences…

The content in /posts is per se rooted in time, things I said in the past were rooted to their time and moment (commentary on the game show “The Apprentice,” seems woefully anodyne in the early aughts, but today…no). Each “post” can be taken as a message in a bottle and feels “closed” once published.

Yet there are also things that aren’t really rooted in time. They’re things that might need to grow over time or that I might revisit. Ideas like:

• Most influential albums of 1994
• Favorite poets
• What Infinite Jest means
• The generation-defining books of my lifetime

To that end, I have created https://stevengharms.com/longform/. As my first “long-form” post, I’ve added a collection of my favorite poems by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats.

In 2008, I took the “Æneid” class at the University of Texas. It was a great class where we used Clyde Pharr’s student edition of the text for the course. In one of annotations, I found one of the most fascinating descriptions of ancient masculinity I have ever read:

92. frigiore: chilly fear; the ancient heroes were not ashamed to display their emotions, and often gave way to terror or grief. They weep copiously on occasion, and are no more dainty about the shedding of tears than the shedding of blood

In my late teen years, I started watching SNL (or, actually, on VHS delay so that I could get my beauty rest). One of my favorite sketches in the late-90’s, Mike Myers / Dana Carvey / Adam Sandler era featured a Japanese punditry show that emulated the arguing talking heads format of “The McLaughlin Group”, “The Arakawa Group.”

Leveraging Mike Meyers’ sense of random, absurdist humor (stolen whole cloth for pretty much every 15^th second of “The Family Guy”) and supported by the comedic delivery of Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, and Rob Schneider, the panel discussion follows a pugilistic talking-political heads format and then breaks à la Meyers’ “Sprockets” with a random non-sequitur (“Now we dance”) as Meyers-san bellows: “SHOW ME THE MONKEY.” Thus is shown a monkey salaryman in a suit falling over (it seems). Arakawa-san et al. are then shown wiping tears of mirth away as the cut ends and they utter in Engrish: “He sray me” etc.

At the time of airing, I found random jump and meta-meta spoof (more on that later) he-high-larious, but, looking back, it’s a cringe-o-rama of dated stereotypes, racism, and laaaaaazy writing that dodges the charge of unfunnyness by appealing to cheap racial stereotype.

It’s. Just. So. Bad.

And while I don’t believe we should go back and shame/re-evaluate the humor of yesteryear in light of current mores or “cancel” people over it (we all make mistakes that are bonded to the cultural moment in which the mistakes surface), that this ever got out the door and got Carvey / Hartman to stake their well-established bona fides on it is surprising.

Like many young men, in my youth I became fascinated with a fantasy series of novels with wooden dialogue, stilted characters, and naive models of human interaction: the writing of Ayn Rand.

There is so much that is inept, odious, gross, ugly and base in her writing that boasts self-importance and depth while it possesses neither. But there is one area where Rand showed an aptitude if not an outright gift: horniness. Especially the rush to rut as sublimated into … industrial Pennsylvania.

Like most American children, I was taught cursive writing around 4^th grade. I was then obligated to write in it, and my poor teachers were forced to read it, through the 8^th grade. As students entered high school, we were deemed intelligent enough to decide which handwriting scheme we preferred. All of that, of course, was becoming moot by the rising prevalence of electrical typewriters and computers. But when my school-supply-kit-issued Bic ball-point pen reached paper, I opted for print letter-forms.

But somewhere in my 20’s, I rediscovered cursive and now primarily write in it with a fountain pen (when I’m not at a keyboard). And when I saw linguist John McWhorter take cursive to task in a recent Times article, I saw both a pragmatic (wrist pain and hand cramp) and an aesthetic reason that it should remain in curricula.

While I was looking for the audio information about “The Rocking Horse Winner” as performed by John Shea on “Selected Shorts” (post), I came across a British short film of the story. I watched the first several seconds of the introduction and then I saw this title card.

I can only imagine how many kids had this title card scare the bejesus out of them, as Thames’ “Chocky” introduction scared me near senseless. How wonderful to frighten children.

Advice on the nature of drama from a master of the form.