But no. I overheard a great little bluesy riff on the radio whilst having dinner with Cara Sposa. I signalled to listen. She said "that's cool". It was just loud enough to make out a few of the lyrics. Google suppled the source. And then I discovered... I've found an anthem! I feel like a teenager again! I actually have found a song where every single line speaks to me right now, right how my state of mind is parallaxed. This hasn't happened since I was seventeen and heard Bowie's "Bewlay Brothers" (ETA: or was that "Quicksand"? Whatever it was, it was absolutely the final word ever and forever. I'm sure of that ;) ). (all this must be a sign of impending senility) Anyway, here it is. David Gray's "Draw the Line":
A poem has already emerged. I see a short story soon.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
asakiyume's blog in response to http://asakiyume.livejournal.com/56But go look at the question; it's a good one.
Anyways... Digressing a moment first, to make a point (with extra pomposity!)
The word is not the thing, as the map is not the road. All language is fiction, as all painting feeds on living light to represent dead life. All writing feeds on living thought to represent thoughts that have already been thunk.
So the Internet is a collection of representations. How honest is a person with their self, with their identity? It takes years to find out who you are, and if you're honest, you find you are many people. Each one of these people is an act, an artwork of its own, often blurring with other people, sometimes in strangely contradictory things, all of us dancing the song of ourselves like that childless lonely old bugger Walt Whitman.
I'd go so far as to say that only these eyes reading now, this breath pulsing now is the real self, and you are all alone, and all the other parts of you that you call "you" are constructs of memory and emotion. You feel attached to them and protect them as you would your own vitals, because they are the collection of behaviours that allow you to continue to be you, which is essential for your biological existence.
But we can create these people to some extent with any other representation. In fiction, we want engaging characters who make us feel alive, in non-fiction, we want to see those vistas of understanding that are granted by master teachers, and we read blogs to get a taste of someone's story, to briefly experience someone else's life. We dive into that exercise with the same kind of offering up of trust that we do to the others.
So when we offer up the I to be absorbed in the words, to build a picture out of them, we hope for honesty, that what we're getting is the real deal...
As long as it doesn't offend...
As long as it isn't wrong, or stupid or deceptive...
As long as we can agree with it, or at least see its point of view...
In other words, we don't really want honesty. We want affirmation. We want to find the part of our experience that intersects with the other in a way that we can bring meaning into our lives. That part of us that wants affirmation is not choosy about truth, goodness, or beauty, necessarily. It just wants what it wants, and is happy to decieve itself if it gets more affirmation.
On this rock, many ships of state are wrecked. I'm lookin' at you, Rupert Murdoch.
In other words, we're poachers after meaning. And as often as not, we toss back what we catch when we're tired of its flavour, or we find that the source is not entirely honest or untainted by bias.
So when we bring home some of these gains, when we incorporate them into our experience, the risk is always there that we have taken on something we shouldn't. Something that will do us harm. One of the purposes of High School is to try out some of the bits of personality we've picked up in our education and enculturation. Try them on for size. And my, aren't a lot of them things we really DO need to get out of our system early. It's harmless fun... mostly. Sometimes, these things stick with us far too long and do us harm.
So, I think I agree with most people that the least detestible of these examples is the computer programmer, since their material on offer is solid computer advice, and there isn't much room for harm taking this material on in ways that might be harmful.
Second is the librarian. They aren't passing on a lot of the daily hardships, dangers, and quandries a real firefighter can get into, but their research is good. The harm they might cause is to lead a person who isn't really suited to firefighting to ultimately lose their life fighting a fire. We can only hope that the recruitment process will filter someone like that out before they've wasted too many of their days.
But the child one is fraught with peril, since someone may take on that job, thinking it will be as rational and well-thought-out as the father's imagination exercise. That could lead to the permanent emotional harm of several people, at least one of which has no say in the matter.
But I think the most dangerous is the kind of person we have in "Ender's Game". The armchair politician that tries out ideas on people, bringing them into a political system that does not exist, that has not been "tried out" in real life. These sort of deceptions are open-ended, and they lead who knows where? Mien Kampf, Atlas Shrugged, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Dianetics... These are some deceptive blogs of earlier in the mass-communication era. Look what they did, getting people committed to uncompromising political agendas in a way that the "playing out" of their faults led to great evils... one even as far as genocide.
So I'm particularly distrustful of pseudoscientific "social science" theories written by untried academics, filled with made-up or strongly rewritten facts. Especially the ones that affirm hidden prejudices and seething resentments.
Very tired.
Very, very tired.
And tomorrow, off to Prince Edward county to investigate cheeses and various other gastronomies. I hope there will be wine. There had better be wine.
peadarog admonished me for putting my thoughts on multiculturalism and colonialism as it relates to storytelling and appropriation behind a f-lock. Shaking out the personal references, I've had a chance to put together my rambling thoughts on it into a kind of less-rambly exposition. Put some use to that long-neglected university degree, with some apologies to James P. Carse, who was a huge influence on me when I was apple-green at seventeen:Let's start with a false but convenient dichotomy. Let's make a distinction between societies and cultures.
A society is made up of many things, but for our purposes, let's say a society is a voluntary collection of a people or peoples, a language or languages, and a method or methods of ranking. I say "voluntary" because rebellion and dropping out are the means by which one society leads to another. People can volunteer to leave or join societies. Immigration and conversion are two well known routes of moving from one society to another.
Within a society, there has to be a certain amount of agreement, or rules, that define how the society will continue. There are also stakes to be had, which we call a society's values. Wealth, honour, distinction, praise, and celebrity are all common stakes that are being competed for within a society. The rules define the value of these stakes. One has to have found a means within the rules to the acquisition of stakes for those stakes to be of value. Adultery of this value by breaking the rules is an essential adhesion-force in societies, and if rules are disregarded enough, a society is said to no longer exist.
The process of colonialization occurrs when one society's rules inveigle another to the point where one society is able to parasitize the other. The parasite is called the colonial power, and the society under dissolution is called the colony. It is accomplished by replacing peoples, language, or rules/ranking with those of the parasite society. Because of the internal cohesion-force of societies, this situation almost never goes well for the parasitized culture, because conflicting directions of censure tend to force splits within the society. Conflicting loyalties and conflicting senses of justice war with each other. This war occurs in all aspects of a society, in the mind, in the family/social group, and in the economy/judical system/stakeholder's marketplace.
The "global society" or globalization, is the ultimate parasite in this case. It provides a set of international and intersocial rules which serve the most dominant stakeholders. From the perspective of globalization, all societies are fodder for parasitization.
By contrast, a culture is also a voluntary collection, but instead of people, it's made up of symbols, traditions, and a narrative or iconology that arises from the combination of symbol and tradition. The stakes being competed for within a culture are more subtle and difficult to define, but they boil down to "meaning", where the persistance of a cultural icon is dependent on the meaning it provides and the meaning that is re-inforced/re-inculcated through a placing of importance on the icon and the repetition of its narrative.
In this way, a culture doesn't have rules that enforce it, but may adopt rules and rule-systems into itself in order to acheive meaningful narrative/iconology. In this way, cultures which exist within provincial or isolated societies become very integrated into the societies in which they arose, and it may be hard to distiguish, in many cases, where a social cohesion is being replaced with a narrative. Biblical interpretation has become a bugbear of European culture and its colonial offshoots, for example, and the shifting cultural underpinnings of religion frequently come into conflict with social authority.
Another social intrusion into culture is the "definitive narrative". This occurs when the rules of a society attempt to enforce a single narrative from a culture and attempt to enforce it in any other stakeholder arrangement. Copyright and academic tradition fall into this category of social-cultural interaction. Culture is "dead" when it can no longer adapt or generate new narrative, so this is a social triumph over culture which may occur on any scale.
But cultures are also social bridges. They provide a no-social-stakes arena through which individuals and groups of one society can participate in the society of another group. The cultural meaning that arises from these meeting-places often becomes a dynamic force in both socities, since it provides new narratives and new means by which conflicts between social cohesion-forces can be adapted and circumvented.
But except in extremely isolated situations, which are very rare in our current state of exploration and communications technology, there is no clear boundary between one culture and another. Cultural influences can be said to have greater or lesser meaning closer to certain centers and away from certain margins, but in any living culture, real barriers between one culture and another are not definable.
So, ultimately, there is one culture. Anyone from any society can participate, and the stakes are only to achieve as much meaning as possible.
Now... should I set it to "fine" or "coarse"... or "mince?" Wow, there's a lot of settings on this thing.
trans:
Before us, days and nights have gone by
The wheel turning, destinies molding
The dust lying beneath your steps
Was once the pupil in a beloved's eye
And speaking of tiny little songbirds, put aside an hour or so and go read
asakiyume's story, "Tilia Songbird" on Gigantosaurus. You won't regret it. And don't worry. It will be around ready for when you have a moment. It's brilliantly evocative, with an excellent conflict between different senses of honour and honouring, and a very real telling of the kind of choices that diplomats once needed to make far away with little guidance. There's truth there, and the pain that comes from healing.All of this, I admit shamefacèdly, to make up for the time she threw away her future by changing her university degree from Wildlife Biology to English Literature in order to graduate quickly and marry some fool in Georgia who was frankly not worth her time in the first place. I can't believe that was twenty years ago...
So, she got notice yesterday that she now qualifies for TWO certificates at once. Don't know what can be done with said pieces of paper, but in celebration, I went all baroque in the kitchen. Dinner last night was a small sirloin roast in Waterloo Dark gravy with roast onions, yorkshire puddings (in little cupcake tins), pickled cardamom-beet and dill-carrot salad, A sour-cream-and-dill cucumber salad, and dessert was these little peach and raspberry crumbles in ramekins with cream.
This, of course, accompanied by my deadly cranberry-and-Tanqueray martinis, Pelee wine, and finishing with some 'orrible sweet anise thing from Italy and ginsing-mint tea.
[Ironically, we watched "Cronos" that evening, followed by an episode of "One Foot in the Grave"]
Very proud of my sweetie, and hoping she can take some time and relax before finding something new to consolidate and conquer.
Very bright orange crest. In full mating form, no doubt.
F--- the machine
That took our Emmy Away
There it sits, glistening
by her bedside.
Now why the hell would I dream that? And who's Emmy?
Dry
Her first child was a monster
Driven from light and sound, she had a master
And that master was her sound.
Today it is too dark to see where her master lives,
but a lone dark house invades her street
and threatens to drive her mother out of ground.
Shady, Elizabethan, it palms a knife while seeking a home.
But these homes were torn from unwilling earth
The homes of the locust
And the locust never forgets the rainfall
That made the rain such a loving victim.
It started with a lamb breast quartered. Which is to say "lamb ribs" but if anyone called them ribs, they'd just be asking for trouble. I can't take the credit for the saying, but the most accurate way of describing eating lamb ribs is "like gnawing on a corset made of rubber bands". The connective tissue is very springy, there's only a tiny amount of meat on them, and even that is too tough to chew.
So, I braized them on low heat for three and a half hours, which also gave me all the rendering fat I'll need for a years' worth of Yorkshire puddings. After cooling and sitting for hours, it's fairly easy to separate the inner and outer membrane from the ribs and pull out all the meat, which is probably the most flavourful part of a lamb, except maybe the neckbones.
So the rest of the soup was very simple. I had half a quarter bushel of shallots that had been overwintering in the basement. They were starting to sprout and attract fruit flies, so I chopped about three dozen, fried up half in olive oil with garlic, then added water, salt, and a dash of soy sauce and brought to a boil. Then I used a hand blender until smooth, added the other half of the shallots, the pulled lamb, two big handfuls of lentils and pot barley each, two bay leaves, ten cloves, some sliced pickled carrots, a can of chopped tomatoes, salt, and, later, cubed potato.
Excellent stuff. And we're still using produce from last fall, so the frugal part of me is happy.
In other news, I'm trying this out on an iPad to see if I really need a laptop anymore.
It's time to get a new Laptop. Three battery changes, two power sources, three keyboards, and a creeping tea stain inside the screen. Oh, yes, and screws that keep falling out and a lid that won't hold closed anymore. And everything that's happened in the past week. Yep, time to take it out and shoot it.
Can't say I don't get the most out of my equipment, though. If computers were people, I'd be remanded for severe abuse.
DID manage to get my pictures off it before it died the death of a thousand cuts, though.
As a side note, there's a sickening little story I put together more in reaction to what I don't like about urban fantasy about what it would really be like to be a werewolf trying to live in the modern world. One piece of feedback on it was "this would be interesting from his psychologist's viewpoint". I think this is a similar problem. The protagonist of "Sundown" is not an interesting person. It's what he sees in the character of Sundown that's interesting. But it's a visual/voyeur kind of interesting. In text, the interesting part is what Sundown is not saying. Because "she don't always say what she really means."
In Tarot (for me at least—everyone's an expert), the three-card combination is particularly topical for fiction. It can either stand on its own as influence/counter-influence/field-of-pla
But I don't know what's in that woods yet. And until that comes up, I'm really really stuck. Perhaps it's the black goat after all (Iä!). At least that fits the plot...
Or possibly, this is like the collision of two galaxies. A period of intense and life-destroying radiation that changes the shape and impetus of both bodies from the point of collision outwards. IOW, I ran into my novel with a short story and made a mess of both.
But enough speculation about speculation. Time to get back to work on making things that don't exist except in the mind get up and do work. Writing prompt: Try explaining computer programming to a celtic minstrel. Is it music or magic or mundane?
Been away for four days inflicting my personality on innocent bystanders. Wrote a tiny fiction thingy some people liked sufficiently to give me a book in a small brown wrapper. I think I'll rewrite it, put it out to the flashy little podzines.
A tipping point, I think. Planets aligning or something. Pluto in retrograde. Everywhere I turn, I'm hearing that it's time to quit crit grouping in the way I've been crit grouping, whether this is said to a room of us or just alone. Maybe time to climb out of the safe little clubhouse and just lob fic at friends when it needs a quick view. And I am very grateful by the offers to do the same I also collected like shiny little shells on a string through the weekend. I took no pictures and got very little sleep and used my liver as a dumping ground for vile black fluids of the bitter Candice Jane Dorsey persuasion.
I found a very good book of poetry a couple of weeks ago and bought a paper copy. You should read it. Buy it if you can. It is a treasure that lurks below the water of consciousness with all the promise of a ticking alligator.
ETA: Translation for SOME people who think I'm being too poetic. You know who you are.
- Went to Ad-Astra in Toronto
- Had a good time despite my nervousness and annoyingly over-compensating personality
- Entered the flash-fiction contest and won second place. The prize was a book wrapped in brown paper. The humour of this was brought to mind.
- I'll be redrafting said piece and adding it to the dozen or so other pieces I have in circulation to markets.
- By Coincidence, my own statements and things being told to me are pointing to the idea that it's time to move beyond the current format of my crit group. This culminated with Julie Czerneda's workshop where she explicitly made this admonition to everyone present. I talked to her about it afterwards (she was one of the flash-fiction judges), and she made a convincing case. But part of the problem is that she and I have very different chemistry, and although I respect her wisdom and experience, I can see where it doesn't apply 100%, so I have a modified view. In the final analysis, though, I have to agree.
- I was deeply gratified at the number of people who I also respect and admire the work of who offered to provide the main thing that the crit group has helped with, which is short relevant feedback and reality checks (alpha/beta readers so to speak).
- I brought a camera, but found I was not really interested in photographing anyone or anything. I'm really not into the whole media thing. I think it's partly that I'm on the other side of the career and marriage boundary, and cosplay is really what SCA was in my day: a hook up service and a means to the hominid mating ritual of display and congregation. I appreciate fantastic costumery, though. In moderation.
- I went to the CZP party, and I have a real love of bitters. There was Fernet Branca, and I partook much to everyone's horror and dismay. When I read Candace Jane Dorsey's Black Wine, I always imagined the liquor of the eponymous title as being something like Fernet Branca
- I took advantage of being there to buy a copy of Helen Marshall's book Skeleton Leaves, which is a marvellous take on Peter Pan, sexuality, coming to maturity, and the attaction/influence of a psychopathological condition. I don't think I've enjoyed a book of poetry as much since I read Howl twenty five years ago or so. And I've read some rather fine poetry in the intervening years.
And then there's my folks old floppies, and my own floppies and burned CDs, and so on. They die. They have a limited shelf-life. About 1/2 the shelf-life of a cheap (non-acid-neutral) paperback book, and that's being GENEROUS.
So now, I'm using a RAID-NAS, and I'll upgrade it to another RAID-NAS in three years or so. At least hard drives have a five year no-questions warranty, and one will be working when the second fails. But I'll more or less have to keep the hard drives around. But the technology for reading them is getting more and more abstract. I'm reminded of the crystal in Ultan's Library that contains all the books of the world if only somebody could find a way to read it again.
So thinking about how the last dark age was escaped: men labouring in bad conditions to save books whose shelf-life of 150 years or so made them unable to survive a millennium if nobody was around to copy them. This morning, watching a documentary online, there were two Nuba women singing in the field. The song they were singing went (according to the subtitles) something like "Omar Bashir and John Garang made a treaty. So that the Nuba people could live in peace."
The first thing that occurred to me is "what an interesting way of disseminating propaganda. I wonder who wrote that and why." But I have to rethink that. All of this sort of epic stuff was once propaganda. Was Roland actually killed in the way he was, or was that just anti-Moor propaganda. And who cares anymore, since Roland's name has long outlived the conflict.
It's a matter of cost of duplication sometimes. And if you have no electricity, or paper and ink, or typewriters, or server-cloud... You still have songs. I wonder if Omar Bashir will be remembered for as long as Roland? Probably not.
And that got me thinking about the two epics about Shaka Zulu. And how one was pro-propaganda and one was con-propaganda. And the same for Alexander. The Syrian oral tale about Iskandar is of a terrible, blood-soaked tyrant (with horns!) arriving from the west and destroying everything in his vanity and rage. Still sung in Damascus today (!)
He is, in fact, A ZOMBIE!
I was discussing early influences with asakiyume the other day, and it led to a series of thinky thoughts. See, my father was not a spiritual man. One of the few hard materialists I've ever met. But he believed in the "spirit of places" and the nouminousness that people endow on objects, whether physical or abstract.
Towards the end of his life, he became obsessed with a particular kind of painting. Not a technique; that he hardly changed in all his years of painting, although he became more interested in simplistic planes of colour the longer it wore on. But it wasn't a generic subject either. It's the sort of painting you get when you are trying to capture a person's soul instead of their form. And, of course, the eyes are the windows of the soul. Sumerians knew this instinctively:
And you can see why early and middle biblical history has so much material about the banning of idols. It's hard to compete with a god that you can see can see you, instead of a god that you know can see you. I mean, how do you know that you know? Very poor evidence. Nobody gets the burning bush treatment. Except for madmen and liars. The visions of madmen are only worth something to them, and the visions of liars are worth fifty dollars or more.
I remember showing him an LP album cover when I was in my teens that I thought was pretty cool. It was of archetypes. People a little older than me might have even bought it when it came out. I put it on the chest in the living room and we looked at it for an afternoon. I didn't realize he absorbed any of this idea until he started painting faces of his own and putting them in the same location. Most of his artwork went there for consideration while he worked on it. Sometimes he'd stare at his paintings for weeks before moving on to a new project. The album cover was, of course, King Crimson's "In the Wake of Poseidon".
Clicky on the widget for the eponymous track which has a lovely poem as its libretto.( Lyrics under cut )
So, being of the byzantine persuasion, he drew on christian iconography to create this kind of work.
What he came up with I think is his best work. It has all the crudity and intense colour of Byzantine iconography. I keep them in the stairwell of my house, since they are life size. These are of St. George and the Archangel Michael. Note the "holy red socks" and the childish scrawl above (just like an Attic pot from BC). But also notice the intense colour, designed to shine through in a dim church and under layers of incense-soot:
But what might be interesting is that because he was so steeped in the culture of the Mediterranean, his real inspiration for these paintings was the Fayoum portraits. These portraits, being caught between paganism and christianity, tried to preserve for judgement day rather than the afterlife, the visage of the dearly departed. It's a poignant moment in human history captured in time, and thanks to the aridity of the Sahara, preserved to this day. There are hundreds of them, all capturing a little bit of the soul of a person, looking out of the portrait with all the human traits of pride, and worry, and lust, and hope. Beautiful stuff. But notice, if you click on the Google link in this paragraph, it takes you not just to the prints, but to modern painting capturing the same feeling, that same desire to capture a soul through an image. I don't think the modern ones succeed as well. Perhaps we are different these days. We wish too much to have realistic flesh and realistic proportions. We're not so interested in a realistic peek at the soul. It's all too intangible.
But sometimes it works. In a funny way. When this cover by Erik Mohr came in by email for me to put on the CZP web site, I immediately saw the reference:
It was a couple of months, though, before I went looking for the original Fayoum painting, and I couldn't find it. But then I noticed the chipping of the paint on the portrait's cheek, and went looking for that. I found it not long after. Here's where some portion of the cheek was lifted from:
But there is a modern face worked into there. A very different one than the naïve, distracted, and somewhat melancholy look on the original. And some sort of headdress that I haven't identified. Probably won't—I can't decide if it looks Czech or possibly Hmong. But the eye has a kind of life. More of a life that has seen a bit too much. A tired but defiant eye. And what kind of a soul inhabits that eye? I'm looking forward to reading the book myself. Perhaps Mohr is capturing something about a character in the book. Or not, but the image is tantilizingly familiar and yet distant by time.
And isn't that a kind of a parable for the modern era? We are a hodgepodge of the ancient and the modern, the holy and the mundane, ethereal in eternity and yet also cracked and peeling egg-tempera pictures, just like those half-pagan-half-christians in Fayoum. But how effective to block off one of the eyes? Perhaps there was a mundane artistic reason, to cover over the join between two elements in a composite artwork, but it also brings a level of mystery to the picture that captures the transition between one way of being and another. As if the soul is half-hidden to itself. Like Odin, or, for that matter, Spazakia.
See... without these unintended delays, the point of this post would have been lost.
Because as I stepped over the curb to go into the bank entrance, something struck my arm from above. I looked down, and it was a male red-naped sapsucker (a kind of woodpecker), its legs clenched up at the sky. I hesitated before picking it up, wondering if I had anything to keep it warm. I figured my breath would have to do, but on lifting it, I saw that its lower beak was shattered and its head was lolling in that unmistakable broken way, exposing its brilliant scarlet throat. I watched the last flicker of life leave its eyes, the black lids quiver still. I didn't want it to get crushed on the pavement, so I took it to an out-of-the-way grassy place and put it in a hollow in the grass.
Then I went in, used the disinfectant they make available to the public, and made my deposit at an ATM. The bicycle had thrown the chain in falling, so I had to adjust the derailleur before getting on my way home.
So, pagans and aficionados of all things ancient and Roman... What does this portend? The fall of a sapsucker isn't one of the classic portents. But we need our own portents for our own birds here in this rugged land we claim as our own.
Here's Richard A. Clarke's solution to the theft of valuable corporate data by foreign states and non-states actors:
Under Customs authority, the Department of Homeland Security could inspect what enters and exits the United States in cyberspace. Customs already looks online for child pornography crossing our virtual borders. And under the Intelligence Act, the president could issue a finding that would authorize agencies to scan Internet traffic outside the United States and seize sensitive files stolen from within our borders.
And this does not have to endanger citizens’ privacy rights. Indeed, Mr. Obama could build in protections like appointing an empowered privacy advocate who could stop abuses or any activity that went beyond halting the theft of important files.
Real, successful "cybertheft" (and for that matter, child pornography distribution) is performed over P2P-styled VPNS and has been for years. They are generally supported by a double-blind encryption mechanism and are highly resistent to any method of subversion via man-in-the-middle attacks. That you could go "steal back" files from this virtual space is a bizarre claim for Mr. Clarke to make. Even his nation's own State Department (and anyone who has worked with the DoS knows, they are always a decade behind the times in terms of technology) has gone on record for supporting such networks (E.G. The Tor Project) for their use in support of human rights communications across hostile packet switching networks (like the Iranian PTT).
Or to use an analogy the people Mr. Clarke would like to speak to could understand, there is no "where" to put your monitoring equipment in. There is no wire to tap. A "file" is not an object on the 'net, it's a series of packets, and even if unprotected by VPNs, a hacker worth half his salt can make it look like any other HTTPS or SSL traffic. Which means (unless the hacker makes some stupid mistakes) you can't distinguish a file theft from a bank transaction from any other encrypted stream.
Except in one place: at the point of attack. But installing mandatory monitoring, shutdown and disclosure equipment on corporate servers could only be accomplished by Government Mandate. In other words, REGULATION. The one thing corporo-republican bozos like Mr. Clarke are totally allergic to.
So instead of letting the government give tax breaks to the poor and middle class or support them with something useful like education or health care, this representative of the Mil-Int complex wants to further drain USG resources to empower private corporations to go on cyber phishing trips in foreign countries with a vague mandate of attacking people who have a proven record of using your own tools against you.
Not very bright, Mr. Clarke, to make such a transparent money-grab on the Op-Ed pages of the U.S.'s pre-eminent newspaper. I'd like to credit stupidity not evil in this, but we've just had too much stupid to buy it any more.
Frost on Purple Crocus
© 2012
But lately, I've been reading Four Fish by Greenberg, which is more or less the child, in spirit of Cod, and both interesting and staggeringly thought-provoking. I hadn't been paying attention to fish offerings in the supermarket, and the book brought home the whys and wherefores of what we see there.
I have a lot of problems with farmed Salmon, which I won't get into here, but suffice to say that, as Four Fish points out, there couldn't be a worse choice for domestication from either a practical or ecological viewpoint. Best intentions being what they are...
In it, there is a somewhat tempered endorsement of Barramundi, since they are a perciform fish like Bass, and therefore have the clean flesh and the easy boning, plus the texture and flavour that people crave. I remember being fed grilled "Loup de Mer" (Mediterranean sea bass) as a child, and to me the quintessential grilled fish is that. All my attempts to grill fish point back to that experience.
But who would have thought that a vegetarian fish, raised in brackish, not salt, inland anoxic water (all the qualities that would make it a GOOD contender for domestication) would be any good? (one name for it now, by the way, is Asian Sea Bass, which is a complete piece of poppycock rebranding) Well, I put it to the test and bought a pound filet of Barramundi from our Supermarket and made a standard, no-hard-work soup out of it (it was skinned and boned already, so not a contender for grilling IMNHO).
Asian Shallots, coconut milk, yellow curry paste, water, salt, golden mountain soya, lemon balm (to substitute for lemon grass).
Very impressed both with the flavour and the texture. And the boning was perfect. Far better than I can manage, when I have to bone a fish!
So, since a work-compatriot left me in the lurch (so I had the time to do this) I took out my watchmaker's tools, and my tiny, tiny, prybar for dealing with tiny, tiny, electronics. And my tiny, 000-sized phillips screwdriver and my massive, clunky, Lithuanian-Peasant-Genome fingers, and my shaky-delerium-tremens grip and took apart my old 1998 digital camera that at-the-time cost $1200, that I bought for the massive discount of $600, and would cost $600 minimum to replace.
And after four hours of careful vivisection, I found the fault. It was a cam that had been dislocated, causing the auto-focus to jam because it was trying to make the manual focus follow the scope of the telephoto, but being confined to too small a focal length. Once re-shifted into place (a procedure which caused barry-the-fumble-fingers to spend a couple of hours carefully placing black-plastic-parts-against-black-plastiSo in celebration, let me give you this photo of a Chickadee that I made with it today. I am so relieved that I won't need to spend $600+ to replace this camera.
Because that would never happen.
This article goes right to the heart of what has bothered me for years about people like me: people who work for humanitarian organizations, with good intentions, with a desire to do real good in situations that are challenging, complex, and in which there are no clear answers. As a writer, I am keenly aware of the moral ambiguity of so much of human endeavour and sense of self, and I relish telling that story. As a person, it gets me depressed as hell. But it's true.
And this is particularly true of "our" work. At some level, practically every statement of moral outrage is hypocritical. Practically every effort for good is counter-productive in some way. Practically every evil has a legitimate and understandable reason behind it.
Which is not the same as saying anything goes or nothing matters. There is still the need to avoid that slide into moral vacuum, the desire to face that challenge and to do the thing appropriate to the situation. Which means 99 percent listening and only one percent talking. Which means doubting everything and still choosing to act. Which means repairing the wrong you've done in trying to do right.
I asked a lifelong human-rights campaigner if he felt like he had made a difference. I was helping him close down his office after Bush came in and his funders had said "your approach is wrong in this current political climate," and he was forced to go fallow for some years. He told me that I was asking a stupid question. That it was never about accomplishing anything. It was always about pushing back. And that game, he said, you will never win.
It's all hard. All the time. And it never gets better. It was never meant to. That's why we should be proud of being cynical sons-of-bitches and keep fighting. Ourselves most of all.
Anyway, my gnocchi from the other night bear a passing resemblance. And since Cara Sposa has bought a small waterproof point-and-shoot for her school project, I have a means of showing you them. This is they. They, them. Like little larva, all rich and succulent.
Not having yours? More for me, then.
Here’s a meme I picked up from
The Rules:
Go to page 77 of your current MS.
Go to line 7.
Copy down the next 7 lines/sentences and post them as they’re written. No cheating.
"I will only be a minute or two, I assure you."
Marta groaned inwardly. Akhmer would man the board, but he would try to cajole drinks into people who didn't want them in order to drink the leftovers secretly. She knew he didn't know that she knew. By night's end he'd be entirely useless for cleaning up. Nevertheless, she told him to take charge for the time being.
"I hope we can afford some new help," she hinted to Lord Ghurbar as she pointed him to the private room and a chair.
But I came across a quote today that explains why more succinctly than I can. It's from the Google Drupal 7 Usability Study 2011. It states:
Building a Drupal website for the first time is like playing connect the dots. But some dots are invisible, most are not numbered, and you have no idea how many dots there are.
They took eight of those technical wünderkindern that populate the halls of Mountain View. People you would expect would have no problem adapting to a new CMS. They sat them down and said. OK, you want to make a website. Here's Drupal. Show us what you're thinking...
And the results were sad. And at not time did they crack the hood and actually try to look at using the API. No, seriously. And if the interface is confusing and intimidating, Trust Me. The API is a dozen times worse. And Drupal's decision to rewrite itself every major iteration means that any existing documentation must explicitly say what version it's for. Or else it may not apply. Actually, will likely not apply AND waste hours of your time if you try it.
I can't tell you how many pages of "here's how you implement a theme_widget_alter_memory_after_register
You literally have to open up all the code and poke through it as if translating some arcane Rosetta Stone by loading your site in a browser window while looking at the error log and the database log in order to understand what it's doing. Or you can download other modules and see how people "in the know" do it. And discover that there is not that much shared technique between them.
The real problem I'm facing is that at any point in the process of solving a "problem/task/feature", there are a half-dozen possible ways of proceeding to the next step. And every step is another exhausting search for the following step, weighing the relative merits of alternate options.
I'm beginning to think that the core Drupal development team has suffered a kind of schism from their user-base. As if they have become so specialized and so distant from the land of clear explanations that they are no longer capable of doing so.
And I know why. I've been there, writing that kind of documentation. It's a psychological state you get into when you really understand your code.
Thankfully a smattering of real, thought-through technical books has started to trickle out. If my current project hadn't been delayed, I'd still be trying to do this with NO sane documentation at all. Only the incomprehensible, out-of-date, and machine generated api guides (here's an example of how NOT to write an API guide) a handful of video demos put up by an eccentric Swedish non-tech developer full of lines like "oops--why did it do that. No, let me try this. No. Well, if it worked the way it should have, you would see this. No, not this. Well, it would be different. I guess it's a bug".
So, being determined to make my starch more local, I've started making gnocchi instead of pasta. Well, no, I made very watery mashed potato last night. With lumps. But I had riced far too many potatoes, so today, I was able to adjust my mix (add more flour, you fool). Much better now; with a basic tomato sauce with a little minced bacon to liven it up.
But also with Spring 2012 comes a new issue of the young-but-determined magazine The Colored Lens which features my novella, "Pythia", a story that investigates the nature of gods, marriage, and fate, and hinges on the ancient question of what exactly is real: facts or visions?
I would have said something about this last night, but I was having a back and forth with the editor of Star*Line who want to use my poem "Promethea" in an issue later this year. Very happy about that. It was one of my only ever attempts at Sci-Fi poetry, and I'm glad it was up to the task (if needing a little editing). Very strange, though. I don't have a TV and I've been working far too much these past couple of months, so I hadn't realized that "Prometheus" is going to be the name of this summer's big SFF blockbuster.
No, really.
Yes, clearly. I live under the shade of that red rock.
But let me 'splain a little first. The core of the film is about a couple and a breakdown of reality. He shaves off his moustache of many years... and nobody notices. His wife denies he has ever had a moustache. He looks through his photos and sees a moustache, gets confirmation on his own. But this is the thin end of the wedge. Soon there are dozens of facts about their lives that she denies are true. Who is right? The relationship fades quickly into paranoia, enforced by the timing of everything; nobody quite gets a chance to definitively say what is fact and what is fantasy, nor can anyone's motives be definitively captured. The tension that builds is one of intimacy; of a pair of intimately connected people suddenly dealing with a psychotic break and watching their lives unravel.
It's a tension that is nearly as painful to watch in this tragic form as really good comedy of errors is. But in Hollywood, the tension would have to be relieved somewhere. There would be a hallucination scene that clearly points to one or the other's madness. Or there would be a really strong denouement, something like Jack running through the hotel with an axe. Or there would be a mystical person appear to assure him or her that he or she is sane. Or the madness would overwhelm, and all reality would break down. Or they'd find a room and it would all blow over with a laugh.
La Moustache does none of those things. And in so doing, it moves the terror of loss of self from the visceral into the cerebral, which is much more disturbing. Instead, when the protagonist's action occurs, it leads to a flight, a foreign episode that feels very like a dream, and then a return to reality with a very important assertion on his part. These episodes are broken out from the rest of the film subtly; a return to the theme of light on dark water, a sudden transition of Philip Glass' score into silence.
In the film's completion, it leaves us with something that is very real about intimacy; that there is a point beyond which what is real and what is illusion does not matter as much as the assertion that one will continue, and be a willing player in the game, the music, that is going on between two people. The film has has no clipboard with a checkbox at the bottom, saying "ah, OK, it's all alright now." Instead, it says "this time, I'm going to choose to ignore this piece of evidence and accept the mystery into my life."
It's a crucial element, that acceptance. Because once you've pushed the boat from the shore, you will never return to the same point on the shore. But you can return and accept the ways it has changed.
Hollywood, and especially the current Syfy tradition, can't cope. Somehow THIS world is more important than any other world. The time traveller MUST NOT step on that butterfly. The other version of you from the alternate universe MUST GO BACK and if it refuses, IT MUST DIE.
No. (Ah, a Hollywood moment: see, I'm asserting.)
You and your world are intimate with each other. You, yourself, must choose what you will be together, and that choice is always now. And the huge price of growing is letting go of who you were. If you can't do it, life has a big surprise for you at the end.
Very pleased. It's an odd little story. It began with hearing this song:
and not really hearing the lyrics, but the feeling of it.
Then I got some sort of stomach bug and was on my back for three days, listening to some affected Victorian version of Herodotus' Histories in audio form. The story sort of grew out of that listening, more or less by itself.
The only intentional element I forced on it was that I wanted to tell a story that could really take place, so the supernatural elements can all be explained away as hallucination if you choose to look at it that way, but for Spazakia*, it's a real and whole life she makes for herself out of the broken bits she's given.
*Bonus points if you spot the pun.
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