I just read Michael Olesker’s piece: “The sad, sad state of college English” in the Baltimore Examiner. Sometimes I need a reminder of how bad things are to frighten me into doing even better.
I’m here today to make the bold claim that language is just another technology. And that many people would rather leave technology to the experts.
No… That’s wrong. What was I thinking?
I’m actually here today to make the even bolder claim that literacy is not that important. Literacy is just a symptom of mindfulness and careful thought. If you have those things, who needs literacy? Literacy is a side-effect. It’s completely unnecessary to a rewarding life of the mind.
No really.
I spend a lot of time reading and writing. And, it isolates me from people. Couldn’t I spend all my waking hours talking to people about those things I read and write instead of being alone? Isn’t it possible that all those people talking on their phones are discussing theories about - what are the cliches? - Rocket Science or Brain Surgery? Weren’t we all going to learn by watching TV in the future?
Hmmm…
I started out here thinking it was nice that I would never write something like: “Michaelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sixteenth Chapel”. Or: “Christopher Columbus discovered America while sailing in Spain”. But: why is it necessary to read those things? And: is a poor writer simply making a typo because they are out of practice? We’re not facing absolute proof that the marginally literate are mistaken here - could be that maybe it’s just not their strongest communications medium(?)
This is an old idea for me. I remember learning that Nancy Reagan was involved in literacy campaigns (How did I learn that? Probably saw it on TV) Which I felt a similar need to criticize on principle. There is something too trite going on there: A play of demographics - Some statistic showing correlation between literacy rates and GNP growth in a range of countries. People are expected to have reading and writing skills. That doesn’t explain why wisdom cannot infect us - like an epidemic - solely through word-of-mouth.
Now I think maybe I was right when I said that language is just another technology that people would rather leave to the experts. That theory would explain why most people are not using language to become smarter. There’s no reason why they couldn’t teach each other - share what they know - without the aid of a single written word. Would you estimate that it is faster to read it in a book or hear someone say it. When someone won’t read a badly written instruction manual, don’t they typically ask for help? Or maybe that’s a bad example - maybe the help they seek is not explanation but assistance. I’ve seen enough material on different “learning styles” to know that people take the idea seriously: It’s okay if you learn better by listening to lectures or talking things over.
It also occurred to me back when I was learning electrical engineering that so many people were living their lives taking advantage of electronics technology they couldn’t begin to fathom: Computer chip-driven appliances that I needed coursework in Logic Theory, Semiconductor Physics, Circuit Design, and Control Theory to even begin to understand. I knew then that people had the motivation and the wherewithal to delegate that knowledge - even to ‘offshore’ it to other countries. And, what would they be doing instead - With all that freed up mindspace?
Now let’s talk about my personal problems.
It’s easy to laugh at poor language mechanics. “Sixteenth Chapel”, indeed. Or my personal favorites “Taken for granite” and “Deep-seeded”. Plausible guesses that pass the spell-checker but suggest a blind-spot in the idea someone would be motivated to communicate. (Like… Why don’t they just STFU? Instead of exposing their own ignorance?) Spoken, these gaffes can be excused as simply misheard. But uh… They’re still superfluous. Your editor would scratch them right out. If you’re lucky enough to have an editor.
I’m quite comfortable with my language mechanics. I can spot errors in a text (and I read a lot of un-proofed advance copies from my old bookstore). I have at least one friend who enjoys sharing a conversation with me about the idiocy of errant apostrophes. I feel no fear breaking rules in the service of a higher grammatical goal: Pushing the envelope for effects of ‘voice’ and ‘tone’. Or something. I was told that a single noun wasn’t a full sentence…
Balls!
Posted in writing-craft | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:50:00 GMT
I was reading the chapter on Haussmann’s transformation of Paris in the 19th century in “Cities In Civilization” when I came across some untranslated French. It is common for an author to provide translations for such quotes.
An observer in 1882 described the traffic situation in Paris as “le dernier mot de l’obstructionnisme”.
And that was one of the shortest examples. So it was over to Google Translate for some answers.
That was when I remembered that I wanted to road test the machine with some Japanese. Well, it didn’t take long to find a stinker.
Japanese is not like English. Maybe that’s why I found it so durned interesting.
As you can see, I’ve taken the liberty of color coding the sentence. This will allow you to see how different the grammar is, and I hope it helps understand what went wrong with it over at Google.
Here we have a transitive verb “To Eat”, and ostensibliy we have a subject and an object… Then it gets weird. In Japanese, there are postpositional particles (which often function like English prepositions) that mark the role of a phrase within a sentence. With no spaces between words, you have to rely on other strategies. “Wa” marks the end of a “Topic” which replaces another marker - obscuring the role of that phrase. “Sae” adds the idea of “even”, thereby replacing another marker - which is also now missing, obscuring the role of that phrase, too. What we do know is that “tabenai” is the negative version of a transitive verb requiring an object to make sense. We’ve definitely got a subject and and object here in this sentence (sometimes we don’t have them - they could be implied because they showed up in previous sentences…), but which one is which? Cat or Fish?
Google (#1) thought Fish was the subject, and Cat was the object. How naive. They were probably relying on phrase order to figure it out. Phrase order is not that important in Japanese. In the English version, you know immediately from context that this is wrong - but that doesn’t prove anything: Nonsense can still be grammatically correct. It’s a theory. Isn’t that exciting? Every little sentence needs a theory. I love that. “The fish” is wrong, anyway: it’s quite clearly ”this fish”, and “Even this fish do not eat my cats” forces the verb into “would not eat”. So that’s two problems already. “Uchi” and “neko” are neither singular nor plural, so it could be “my cat”, “my cats”, “our cat”, or “our cats”. I see why they picked “cats”: Doesn’t “eat” suggest an ongoing or habitual activity where the object is likely to be plural? I’ve become more sensitive to the way some English nouns like “fish” can be a substance - an indistinct quantity. One or many fishes can still be described as “fish”.
The textbook I took the example from (William McClure’s “Using Japanese: A Guide to Contemporary Usage”) supplied (#2). This represents the theory that Cat is the subject and Fish is the object. I agree. They editorialize thusly: “Sae places extreme emphasis on the noun in question, and is often followed by a negative”. There is another thing the Topic-wa construction can do: Provide a contrast. I only mention it because it’s a perfect way to pull an object to the front of the sentence. Here in this sentence, the contrast is this fish versus all other fish (the “not this fish”).
I moved the “not” for #3. It’s subtle, I know, but I like it. I just had to have the last word.
As I think about it, the textbook is less concerned with giving a natural-sounding English version than you or I would be. In fact, most of the Japanese textbooks I have seen do the same thing: English translations that make the subtleties of the Japanese examples more explicit, at the cost of sounding ridiculous.
I like to pull “not” to the beginning of the English version, even though there is nothing wrong with #2 here. The distinction may not be completely neutral, but having both versions available is nice when you have to fuss with the rhythm, timing, cadence, or alliteration of the larger utterance this sentence would appear in. On the face of it, though, as a stand-alone sentence, I get inspired by the distribution of the “Noun-sae, Verb-nai” construction in the Japanese version to produce another distributed construction in English. I just feel a little uncomfortable leaving the “not” with the verb when that “even” is there: Better perhaps to have them together. And I wonder if #2 is not simply trying to leave as much of the original as unmolested as possible.
The only thing left now is the “yo”. I was looking for some reason “yo” would inform the emphasis in the English version, and I didn’t find any. In Japanese, in addition to “phrase particles” (“wa” and “sae” in this example), there are sentence particles. The sentence particles typically indicate the speaker’s understanding of who knows what. That can be powerful in a language of subtlety: If I don’t want you to think I’m claiming to know more than you do, I might turn a statement into a question, or an imperative into an invitation. That’s part of the famous “can’t say no” reputation of Japanese, having the option to shift to the less confrontational version in every circumstance. “Yo” is the strongest member of the group: It means that I don’t think you know about the content of the preceding statement. It’s not so imposing when it refers to personal facts - in this case literally the inner workings of my house, and the dietary habits of its feline member - which won’t cause much embarrassment when I imply that you don’t know. So with the English translation, it might be nice if we could capture that revelatory tone. But the emphasis provided by “sae/even” seems to do the trick.
Posted in computer-interface, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:52:00 GMT
(Or, Should I Really Bother Waiting for the DVD of this show?…)
Something Jason Kottke said the other day about television shows irked me, and I didn’t know why at first. I am talking about the “Megamovie”:
Megamovies take television seriously as a medium. They have dramatic arcs that last longer than single episodes or seasons. Megamovies often explore themes and ideas relevant to contemporary society – there’s more going on than just the plot – without resorting to very special episodes. Repeat viewing and close scrutiny is rewarded with a deeper understanding of the material and its themes… …For many, bingeing on entire seasons on DVD or downloaded via iTunes has become the preferred way to watch these shows.
Yes, maybe they’re right. ‘Bingeing’ does seem to be the way to go with a lot of television. But, I’m still suspicious…
For one thing, I’ve never been all that comfortable with standardized packaging of stories: Movies that take about 100 minutes, television shows lasting precisely 23 or 47 - and, I’m talking here about televised fiction, not unscripted reality or game shows. This causes a lot of what I consider to be time-wasting subplots - a watering-down of the main storyline by carrying on multiple stories. Sometimes you have several parallel developments that create a species of suspense based on the uncertainty of how those developments relate, and other times you have subplots which only serve to develop minor characters.
Now it is quite possible that if you sat down to watch all the episodes from start to finish, the weaving of so many subplots, unresolved for hours at a time could create brilliant effect. But that’s exactly my point - “The West Wing” clocks in at over 100 hours… Much of that is a waste of time. When am I going to get the story?!?!
The changes in media that go along with the popularization of the Internet are potentially as sickening as driving straight off a cliff. Maybe people are scared to pay attention to what is really happening when they can pretend they are still happily cruising over the pavement. Luckily, the Internet isn’t quite so life threatening as all that… If I care about a show on TV I am forced to be there the moment it is broadcast. And, now they’re telling me that in February I will also have to get new receiver gear or switch to a leased system like cable.
When I spend much of the day examining the Internet, practically at random, utterly fascinated by one thing or another for a while, then switching to a new thing, I feel absurd coming home (or these days just switching on the TV) to watch only the handful of channels that are available. Or resequencing my evening to be in front of the set, as I might very well do tonight. I have demonstrated an ability to be in front of a TV set when ‘they’ require it of me should I value the result. Varying start times would be much more difficult to keep track of, so I must concede the fixed duration of episodes, no matter that I think it means a lot of wasted time with subplots that delay the main action.
Deep down, I just know none of this is earth shattering… Television writers and producers create episodic stories. The good ones revel in working within tight constraints. I am not actually arguing against creative constraints. Some of the results are very entertaining. I don’t know if I consider it “Art” - that may be arguable.
To get back to the concept of the “Megamovie”… I think the entire idea of sitting through multiple episodes of a TV show on DVD is misguided. It is presented as if the same viewing constraints are still in force. They’re not. I, like generations of viewers, tuned in to weekly prime-time shows - many of them with suspenseful cliffhangers from one week to the next - and felt vaguely dissatisfied that I had to stop watching. Presented all at once, these shows could omit much of the devices that were intended primarily to ‘level off the measuring cup’ of 47 minutes, or what ever size they were going for. There are things you would do to slow the progress of a series that you would not do in a 100+ hour long movie. Am I wrong?
For example: In 2001, I thought “Alias” was a good show: I missed the first couple of episodes due to the normally bizarre scheduling of fall network television premiere scheduling, but the pilot was rebroadcast and I saw it ‘by mistake’. It had a strong woman character, an interesting premise, good spy-movie action, and just a bit of self-conscious James Bond campiness. I watched the first season mainly by videotape. (I can no longer remember what prevented me from being at home to see it on occasion - but the ability to ‘time-shift’, review and pause episodes was helpful - that’s part of my larger point…) And, eventually, the gaps in my viewing memory (and tape collection) were filled in with reruns.
One day a few years later, I saw the Season 1 DVDs up on the shelf at the video store. I got very excited for about three minutes. I cringed at the realization that there were a lot of time-wasters I would prefer to edit out… I would prefer to relive the experience in a different way.
There is a lesson here for me: It holds up a mirror to show me my habits of interpretation… I cared about less than half of what I saw. I wanted better exposition on what I did care about, but I didn’t get it. Like drinking diet cola, it didn’t get any more satisfying as I consumed more, and the taste in my mouth kept getting worse. Why was it one of my favorite shows? I regret a proportion of the time I spent watching it - the joy and satisfaction related to the remaining bits: Those well constructed moments. The whole experience is reduced to a thin oatmeal, made briefly exciting when I got the occasional raisin(!).
Life isn’t going to be very fun if I continue to be this critical.
Posted in film-and-TV, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:07:00 GMT
Hunh… It sounds like more “Small Is Beautiful”:
STEVEN MILLHAUSER - “The Ambition of the Short Story”
I particularly liked: “The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.”
Posted in books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:12:00 GMT
I had planned to go to the Takoma Park Street Festival yesterday. I knew about it at least a week in advance - which can be a long time for my planning apparatus. Too long, even. I was getting ready to go over there when I had a writing idea. “This should only take a minute.” Ha. It was 3:30 when I was satisfied with my rough drafts. Much of the work went into the extended rant on Wall Street. For some reason those ideas were in my head Saturday night during the movie, but I couldn’t express myself. Part of the problem is an issue I’ve talked about before: Commercials can be a boon. WETA has no commercial breaks at all during movies. And “Wall Street” was two hours long. So I can’t run to the kitchen for a snack without missing something, or reflect on what I’ve watched. After not producing anything the night of the movie, I was predictably unsatisfied - So, when the ideas did start to flow, I wasn’t going to stop for anything. And I was too late to catch much of the street festival.
But that’s all right… Because it was on to the next thing. Yet another get-together with the brokenhearted of Olsson’s. This time it was very Alexandria-centric - they held it at the Union Street Pub, across the street from the old “Book Annex”, or as I sometimes liked to call it: “Store 4” - Or - the one voted most likely to flood.
I took advantage of the new Yellow line Metro service. The trains that used to turn around at Mt. Vernon Square (don’t you just love telling tourists that the Mount Vernon they’re looking for is twenty miles due south of where they’re standing?) now turn around at Fort Totten. Although, I think that’s only true during non-rush hour. With that new service, I can ride non-stop from Columbia Heights to Alexandria - which helps me rest up for the long walk from the train station to the waterfront.
I was running a little early, so I stopped in at Hard Times Cafe for a bowl of chili. Dry Texas with chopped tomato and onion on top. The service was crappy and the food was excellent. Actually, the cornbread could have been fresher, but since it took so long to get it - deja-vu! - I included it in the service category. I’m easy to please, so screwing it up is an impressive feat.
King Street in Alexandria is a template of memory. I never hung out there much, but most of that was more than ten years ago. The place haunts me - just to walk down that street today is an exercise, physical and mental: Many businesses have been replaced over the years, but I never pinned down where everything was anyway. More than once, I thought something was gone when I got to the corner I remembered it on, only to discover it still there, further on. It is just not a route that I can play back in my imagination and get right. One segment near the courthouse is clogged with the chains - Starbucks and Gap and Austin Grill to name a few. Starbucks is starting to feel old to me, though. One year around ‘93 or ‘94 we had Liz Phair play at the store, and when they ran late arriving from Philadelphia, I remember going up to Starbucks for a cafe mocha with orange colored whipped cream on top. It must’ve been a Halloween theme. Since then, another outlet has opened at Union, so there would be no need to walk all that way.
I took a minute to look in the window of Olsson’s - a place I haven’t been since who knows when… Was it an overnight inventory four years ago? The PC screen-saver was still going on the ticket sales computer. It looked ready to open in the morning. Part of me was hoping to be seen by a stranger, looking forlornly into the closed store for unknown reasons. And if they were a thoughtful stranger, they might wonder at the nature of my relationship with that place - the worlds of unknowing in a chance encounter.
A big group had assembled by the time I got there, but I think I arrived at the half way point. (I suppose in any normal distribution or arrival times, most people would appear to have arrived “in the middle”, though). There were book sales reps, the long silent former employees, friends who hadn’t drifted too far away, the veterans and the recently hired. People who seem like surrogate parents to me, and people who were only names on my computer. The drinks were flowing, and I didn’t have to pay.
Posted in DC-roaming, ontology, olssons, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:46:00 GMT
When I talked to my friend (and Olsson’s coworker from long ago) Troy, I told him that my choice of the wood-grain design for the Olsson’s Testimonial page was an attempt to capture a feeling I had about the wooden bookshelves. His reply was “and, it’s like a coffin, too!”.
Yes, well…
Soon we were off on a tangent: Because of that page, and the necessity that someone moderate the comments, I have been doing it. I didn’t see a setting for allowing all comments, and frankly, I wanted control over the nonsensical - like botnet spam or incoherent ravings. To which Troy replied “you mean, like a Sarah Palin speech?”.
Not… exactly.
So that was weird, but in “The Drunkard’s Walk”, Leonard Mlodinow reminds us not to be fooled by patterns we think we see in random events. Sarah Palin is obviously in the news, so for someone to mention her name the same day I was just looking at a Sarah Palin interview parody is not weird at all. Nor is it weird that the very same book about randomness should talk about Markov chains, which are the method that generates those fake Palin speeches.
And Markov chains are the mechanism I couldn’t recall that generated the text in that old program we had on our Mac when I was a teenager (what was that thing called?… I found it fascinating). I started to think about how to reverse-engineer that program recently, and came up with a sketch of associative arrays in Perl, or the essentially identical hash object in Ruby. If you think about it, Markov chains are just the framework - probability for any word showing up after any other - and, that means a couple of things, at least: 1) You have to have one program component learn these probabilities from existing texts, unless you want completely synthetic results (I can’t help thinking about music synthesizers vs. music sampling). And, 2) you might need a lot of memory to store a probability for each ordered pair of two words. This gets worse if you plan to extend the concept to what word will follow a particular combination of words - the so-called ‘memory’ of the chain. This is what suggests associative arrays in the first place - they’re more efficient for large but sparse matrices.
If you take a look at the Wikipedia page on Markov chains, you’ll notice that there are a lot of equations. One of my high school physics teachers was convinced that normal people just ignore the equations in a text. Therefore, good science/math writing has to explain everything well, but I love equations because they save me the trouble of wading through so much descriptive text. It’s the same issue with computer code, like when I wanted to tell those guys on the bus the other night about how the politicians should shut up and show me the code revisions they were proposing.
If you’re not going to look at the equations with me, just remember this: The probabilities in that article are context dependent - Every different Markov chain is like a chart with values for those numbers filled in. The numbers are a kind of ‘signature’ that we experience subjectively as uncanny reproductions of Sarah Palin speeches, or scholarly journal articles. Every different generator (i.e. set of those probabilities) applied to a specific vocabulary falls on a point in a multidimensional phase-space - an inherent product of the vocabulary itself (this is referred to as the ‘state-space’ on the Wiki). Even if you consider a two word ‘vocabulary’ like the Heads and Tails of a coin toss, the Markov chain concept implies a continuous space of different actual Markov chains for that vocabulary. Texts generated from those mechanisms are going to feel subjectively similar if the points in phase space are close - i.e., all the probabilities are close enough. This is fortunate, because an exact point in that space can only be estimated in practice: We estimate it by analyzing the texts we want to imitate.
But rest assured, I’m often exhausted by equations like the ones in that article. I have a threshold for what equations I can comfortably examine while reading, too.
I feel a bit relieved by all this: If I ever want to take a break from blogging, at least I know that I could write a Markov chain generator and train it to the previous posts. How long would it take for people to decide that I wasn’t just writing in a self-conscious imitation of my own style?
Posted in politics, programming, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:49:00 GMT
So, if I’m reading a biography about one of the most memorable directors of the French New Wave, I’d better make sure to watch some of the films, eh?
“À bout de souffle” seemed like a good place to start. You probably know it as “Breathless”, and it was Godard’s breakout film from 1960. From this remove, it can be hard to see how revolutionary it was. I wasn’t watching a lot of the films that existed before it. Heck, people were still getting fussy about hand-held camera on the TV show Firefly in 2002. So the technique still isn’t that acceptable. The excuse given in the book “Everything Is Cinema” was that it was filmed as a documentary - a fictional story ‘captured’ as it was acted out. Both the book and the interviews on the DVD (which, I’m guessing constitute some of the primary material for the book anyway) make a point of how skipping all the rigging, cables, and crew allowed them to casually record without too much planning. They ignored how films were supposed to be made.
On the other hand, it’s also a film known for its jump-cut editing well before rock videos started doing it. The whole thing is recorded without sound, which meant overdubbing in the studio.
In the book, Brody has a remark that startled me when I first read it:
“[Antonioni’s next step was] to show a society of mass culture and media, of technology and ostensible progress, and to consider the transformations in individual consciousness that were taking place in this new world”
Cause - you know - I wish I could do that. It wouldn’t take too long to come up with a list of SF writers who do that. Maybe it comes through when those films are made, but… Wait! There’s more:
“Rossellini believed so strongly in the freedom of individuals that he could not make sense of the idea that […shouldn’t this be ‘of’?] people who could be alienated from themselves by the mass media, which he considered merely to be a form of rhetorical persuasion that should be rejected by claims of reason.
Yes, that’s right, Rossellini! it should be ‘rejected by claims of reason’. So explain to me why it isn’t.
This is one of those subjects where I can be pretty sure a lot of ink has already been spilled. I don’t see what sense I can contribute to it today. But we can leave it at this: The jump cuts, when I pay attention - you see, they’re not even noticeable to me under normal viewing conditions - are brilliant. The scenes are not necessarily even in the order they were shot, as film running through the sprockets usually demands. Or, might I add, the sequential instructions of computer code. That overdubbing is a concession to convention. If you’re going to chop up the frames and rearrange them however you want, then why even have dialogue? Why have events in sequence? Why not ‘ensembles of imagery’, like the junk in a junk shop, which probably could tell a story, but lies around in piles instead?
Posted in film-and-TV, books, media-studies, writing-craft | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:22:00 GMT
I may have finished the latest round of changes to the Olsson’s website. That all depends upon whether I really had a single goal, or whether I was just making requested changes, ironing out the ramifications, and generally ad-libbing.
I am in the process of changing all the ancillary pages to the same design as the main page. Some of the (relatively) high-traffic pages needed to be in PHP so that content could be updated more rapidly. I don’t know if it’s simpler, but it might be easier to explain. There are just some days I can’t make it any simpler than: Get the file with ftp, edit the file in a text editor, and put the file back with ftp. Why don’t I just instruct people to log on to the server through Network Solutions and use the file manager they provide? Well, that’s an interesting story…
I wanted to give it a try myself - as a test pilot. It was a disaster. They should rename it the “File Mangler”. I went down the list to open a bunch of pages with navigation bars so that I could update the file names in the hyperlinks. The File Mangler thought I wanted to look at the files in WYSIWYG - but I didn’t. So, I switched to text mode. Every single one of those files was damaged by the online editor. I spent part of my afternoon yesterday fixing the damage in my text editor. It doesn’t look like I can instruct anybody to do it that way.
I had to go in to the template for every single blog we have on Blogger to edit those same hyperlinks, then republish all associated pages. I have spoken many times about the difficulty of republishing a single blog on Blogger. You can imagine that it probably took me 5-6 days to accomplish this, and that is how long it took, and now it is completed. Blogger actually came up with new bizarre error messages, and a screen that included everything at once: “No publish results to display”, “Publishing files to your blog (with ‘spinner’ animation)”, “Uploading via…”, “Show Transfer Details”, “Hide Transfer Details”, “Files Transfered: (big blank)”, “Your blog published successfully”, “Last successful blog publish: (apparently never)”, “Your blog published with errors”, “You publish is taking longer than expected. To continue waiting…”, and all the other junk that you eventually see after it succeeds. It had everything!
I’ve been wanting to write myself a script to check links on the site. I probably have access to something that already does this. “WinHTTrack” is a program to archive entire sites. I’ve used it in the past to create backups, and it does a fine job. More to the point, it gives you a report of all the trouble it encountered, so that might be helpful. I’ll probably use it as a double-check, but I ought to write the script anyway - It shouldn’t take long. The site is at a cusp in some ways: It’s not big enough to really need a strategy, but it’s still more pages than I can conveniently list. I should probably aslo ‘take out the garbage’: eliminate as many useless or marginal files as I can.
Oh, and I still need to tweak the customerror pages for 404, etc. Gotta go do that now…
Posted in writing-craft, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:35:00 GMT
On the bus this morning, I was writing in my black Moleskine notebook when some guy sat down next to me.
Public buses have their own special geometry. I would like to sit facing forward, and have enough legroom. There are about five seats like this on a bus. If I want some quiet time to think, I avoid the crowds - sometimes that’s the front, sometimes the back. That doesn’t leave much.
A note to policy makers: If you want people to ride public transportation, think about the inside of your limo, and work from there. It doesn’t have to be luxurious, but it’s in your best interest to allow the actual workers in a society to get some work done - or alternatively get some rest on their way to do the work. I understand why a bus ride can’t be smooth, but it would help me out a lot if the bus didn’t try to bounce me out of my seat every half block along the route.
So I’m trying to compose a thought in my notebook. The back corner faces forward, but doesn’t allow me enough leg room. It’s one of those buses with the access panel to the engine instead of a center seat. That’s an ideal seat, should you get a bus that has one - it not only gives my legs enough room, but they don’t get in anybody else’s way either. I’m happy (relatively speaking) with the seat I’m in when this guy wants to sit in the corner seat next to mine - I have to break my concentration to let him sit down, but usually if you prefer that corner seat, you’re an introvert and won’t bug me. But then, another guy sat down in the sideways facing seat right in front of us. They must have known each other - it wasn’t really a conversation, but they did occasionally mutter something disinterested to each other.
The guy in the corner said something incomprehensible, and when I darted a quick glance over at him, he muttered more as an apology - I could tell from the tone of it. “What are you writing, there? Porn?”… Huh? What? Is my brain that tired? I can’t tell what he’s saying, or why that would be his first guess. I’ve just about latched on for a full analysis when I get “You know - Porn - Rhymes?”… (Oh, you’re saying “Poems”!?!? Why did I… Nevermind.)
“No, it’s just stuff that comes to mind. No big deal.” It’s not strange in the city to imagine that everybody is a budding rapper-poet. By a strange coincidence, I was thinking about poetry while waiting for the bus. When I don’t have a whole thought, I will latch on to little atoms of meaning - a turn of phrase that works well with an visual image. But in fact, I’m having trouble being anything other than literal these days. I write the truth of what I see, and I use my camera in the same way, so I’m mostly about documenting reality. It’s tough for me to commit to a fantasy, even when those fantasies percolate through my conscious mind.
If I was having trouble concentrating before, now I’m shattered. All I can do is daydream and wait for the ride to be over… I’ve got some gibberish written down about digital images, and the snapshots people deem worth taking and keeping - I was working up to two different ideas when I got sidetracked and could have benefited from some concentration:
First, Who gets to claim photos as art? And, should I be paying more attention to Marcel Duchamp?
Second, What is the nature of the casual photography on cheap digital cameras? How does it relate to the snapshots the Replicants cherish in the movie “Blade Runner”? How are we to think about these photographs as artifacts?
But I can’t think about one thing without immediately feeling the push of a thought at right angles: I’m already on to the film’s prophesy of photographs on the same Kodak style paper… Not everything in the future is going to be futuristic (books come to mind) - but the prediction is not so easy: The desire to retain old forms and the desire to use the newest innovation are both subject to the will of producers. Having your photos on a stack of photo paper or in flash memory LCD screens will depend on unforeseen changes. And, it’s not hard to imagine that technology as a class boundary: Nice photo paper could be the luxury item if the digital version remains cheap. Or, the opposite could turn out to be true. You can imagine the reversal, the conventional wisdom probably already has it: Paper for the poor people, clutching their ‘precious photos’, on the run from disaster, or toward dubious opportunity.
I’m still trying to imagine what happens after the breakdown - partial or total. The partial breakdowns are more interesting for the sake of variation. If we run out of some crucial ingredient for the status quo of this world, and we can’t find a reasonable substitute, then what happens? Cheap energy is a linchpin: With it, we make whatever industrial-scale transformation we desire. But without it, we have to be very creative, and that still won’t be cheap. If you follow the ‘Peak Oil’ crowd, then you know that all our flexibility in crafting new solutions depends on both innovation and cheap energy. All the innovation in the world won’t help if the pantry is bare. I listen to the voices of optimism: “We’ll find a solution because we always have in the past”, and I can’t help thinking they’re right… until the battery runs out. We haven’t been thinking about how to recharge that battery, and we don’t know how much is left, or how expensive the future transformations will be in practice.
Add a Link: Kevin Kelly’s “Where the Linear Crosses the Exponential”.
And, be careful how you choose that discount rate…
Posted in photography, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 06 Jul 2008 12:54:00 GMT
