Real-Life Dialogue (Remote Possibility Edition)

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[The scene: a home in suburban northwest Florida. He and She are in the living room, watching TV (by way of a satellite-TV DVR). She clicks the remote control, pausing the show in progress to ask Him a question. Discussion complete, She clicks the “un-pause button” to resume viewing. Nothing happens.]

She: It’s not doing anything.

He: “Not doing anything”?

She: The remote. It’s not starting the show again.

He: Try changing the channel.

She: [Pushing various buttons] Doesn’t work.

He: Can you get to the program-listing screen? Or the list of shows we’ve recorded?

She: [Continues to push buttons] I’m telling you: it’s not, doing, anything… Wait. We can use the remote control for the TV, right?

He: Uh-uh. We can use the TV remote to adjust the volume, or, y’know, select whether to watch satellite, or DVD, or the VCR, nothing else though… Let me try.

[He “tries.” Confirms: it is indeed not, doing, anything. He polishes little transparent smoked-plastic cover over the thingum which flashes infrared signals to the DVR. Nope. No button has any effect at all. He puts remote back on end table, goes to DVR, dons reading glasses, squints at DVR’s front panel.]

He: Oh, I see. Watch. If you want to change the channel, you can just press these up and down arrows here.

[She contemplates scrolling through hundreds of channels in this way, and shoots Him a look telegraphing Her reaction.]

She: One channel at a time?!?

[She goes to DVR herself, begins experimenting with buttons on its face. They all “work,” inconveniently.]

He: Look, it’s not perfect, but at least you can watch it that way. I’ll call the satellite company, get ’em to send us a new remote.

She: So we’ll have to do this for DAYS until the new one gets here?

He: Nah. They’ll probably overnight it. They’re real big on customer serv— Hey, wait. It’s probably just the battery. The battery in the remote’s probably dead. I should’ve thought—

She: I’ll do it. I’m already up. Just sit there. I’ll get the battery.

[She retrieves new battery from cupboard, replaces old one. Trembling with anticipation, They both watch as She points remote control at the DVR, at the TV, back again. Their faces fall.]

She: Maybe we can watch something we’ve got recorded.

He: [Gets up] I’ll go to their Web site, see if I can find out something. At least how to request a new remote.

[At company’s Web site, He learns of an intriguing possibility: not all AA batteries are manufactured to exactly the same size. Particularly problematic for this company’s remote controls have been AA batteries like the one She just installed. Technician in forum recommends inserting a scrap of aluminum foil between positive battery terminal and metal contact in remote. He goes downstairs, eager to test this little bit of too-wacky-not-to-be-true electronic arcana.]

He: Let me see the remote a sec… Guy on the Web site said to put a little bit of foil… [Moves to better-lighted area.] …foil between the…

[Prolonged pause as He gazes, blinking, into the remote’s interior. He removes battery, re-inserts it.]

He: There. Try it now.

She: It works! Yay! What did you do?

He: I turned the battery around.

She: Turned the battery— Wait. You mean the old battery was dead, and I put the new one in upside-down?

He: Yes.

She: [Laughing] Oh.

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Experience, Meet Hope

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[Video: “Wiley vs. Rhodes,” a live-action Road Runner cartoon]

From whiskey river:

Ten Thousand Idiots

It is always a danger
to aspirants on the Path

when they begin
to believe and act

as if the ten thousand idiots
who so long ruled and lived inside

have all packed their bags
and skipped town
or
died.

(Hafiz [source: none canonical, as far as I can tell, but it’s quoted at various places around the Web, including here])

…and:

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. It’s true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

(Carl Jung, from Memories, Dreams, Reflections [source])

…and:

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

[Read more…]

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When Bad Writing Throws Down with Good Intentions, Which Wins?

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Bad Writing, per its production company:

…is a documentary about a wannabe poet who sets off on a quest for answers about writing — bad writing, good writing, and the process in between. What he learns from some leading figures in the literary world will inspire anyone who has ever dreamt of creating art.

Here’s the trailer:

It’s just gone into very limited release, at maybe a half-dozen cities so far. Bet it’s that pesky It Was a Dark & Stormy Night Fan Club keeping it from wider circulation.

This comes courtesy of our friend Marta, over at the fairy tale asylum, who calls it a horror movie. Oh yes.

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Books Beyond Books

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The whole e-books vs. traditional books debate spins crazily about one question: What is a book, anyhow?

Let’s pursue that question a step further: What is a reader?

Science-fiction (etc.) author Cory Doctorow tackles both questions in a very interesting project of his, called With a Little Help. It’s a self-published “book” — an anthology of short fiction — available in a dizzying variety of forms. For starters, he’s selling multiple physical editions of the anthology: paperback and hardcover print editions, and CDs of an audiobook version. He’s taken it a step further, though, by offering With a Little Help in multiple e-book formats (from plain text on up to EPUB, MOBI, and so on) and multiple audiobook formats (MP3, WAV, OGG)… and all the downloads are free.

He’s taking the free-digital-download release further:

The full text of all the stories in this collection is available as free downloads under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, meaning that you can copy them and make your own versions, but you can’t make money off them and you have to let others remix your creations. The audiobooks are likewise available as free downloads on the same terms.

I myself am not interested in remixing anything, but I thought you’d enjoy this story, “The Right Book” (read by Neil Gaiman). If you’d like to read along, the text is here (opens in new window/tab). It’s a tale reaching 150 years into the future, giving us a peek into not just how books (or “books”) might be sold, but how the readers (or “readers”) of books may change as well.

[Click Play button to begin listening. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 17:54 long.]

[audio:03-The_Right_Book_-_Cory_Doctorow_-_With_a_Little_Help.mp3|titles=’The Right Book’|artists=Cory Doctorow (reading: Neil Gaiman)]
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Book Review: Who Hates Whom, by Bob Harris

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My latest review is up at The Book Book. This time around, it’s a non-fiction title, Who Hates Whom. (Subtitle: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up: A Woefully Incomplete Guide.)

In brief, it’s a good overview of world “trouble spots” — where they are, how they became troublesome in the first place, who the major players are — as of the time the book came out, in 2007. One man’s “good,” though, is another man’s “Huh?” So let me rattle off what I liked about Who Hates Whom:

  • It’s brief — 218 pages.
  • It’s not tedious. Harris’s past includes a stint as a stand-up comic; his previous book was a memoir of his time as a (successful) game-show contestant. He’s smart enough, in this case, to know that the reader will need relief from time to time, from the page after page of more or less exclusively bad news: he includes jokes, many of them at his own expense.
  • It’s informative. I left the book with a much better understanding of why Country X and Country Y have been at loggerheads for centuries — including the story, often, of what Country Z keeps doing to stir things up just as X and Y seem about to kiss and make up.
  • It’s fair. Harris is not out to grind any axes; as he points out, you can’t honestly consider all these situations in hopes of identifying the “good guys.” (Who the good guys are changes from one day to the next: yesterday’s officially designated terrorist is today’s freedom fighter.)
  • And ultimately — perhaps surprisingly — it’s hopeful. Harris points out, truthfully, that this is not the most dangerous time to be alive on Earth… not even close. Things keep getting better, on average. I like that.

Note for e-book readers: Who Hates Whom includes dozens of maps and photographs. You might want to consider that fact when deciding to go the e- vs. traditional book route. I read it on a Kindle, and didn’t mind it — but I know such things drive some people crazy!

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The (Mostly Bogus?) War Between Men and Women

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From Seems to Fit, Chapter 23(ish):

Bonnie loved her own laugh. Or rather, she loved that George and other men loved it, that spontaneous eruption of trills and musical bubbles which erupted from her throat and open mouth when something struck her as especially funny — especially when the something wasn’t meant to be funny. She loved the way it made men’s heads swivel in a restaurant or crowded train, looking for the source of sudden brooksound. This laugh always caught even her by surprise, the first blurt and the ripple of voice and breath which followed quickly on its heels: it felt like a rabble of schoolkids at recess, chasing after and tumbling over one another.

But she also knew the trouble which could follow when that laugh emerged at a moment not funny at all to those around her, to men especially, no matter how deeply ridiculous the moment (and the seriousness with which men regarded it) might be.

How different are men and women? And what, exactly — even approximately — takes place at the vertices where they bump into one another?

I’m not talking physical vertices, of course. (This isn’t that sort of blog.) It’s like… Well, a couple years ago I devoted a blog post to the importance of edges: those (sometimes invisible) lines where two disparate things meet. In simplest geometric terms, an edge occurs where one two-dimensional plane intersects another. (In order to intersect at all, the two planes must “differ” in at least one respect: their angles in space.)

But all kinds of things scrape up against all kinds of other things. The taste of one cupcake ingredient juxtaposed with another. The sound of a musical note against a silence. Countries. Cultures. Ideas.

Are you familiar with the word frotteur? It comes from the French word frottage, rubbing, and is a term applied to someone who derives physical — often sexual — pleasure from rubbing against someone else. While the pleasure isn’t physical (I’m not that far gone), I sometimes think of myself as a frotteur of ideas and facts.

So what the heck is it, exactly, that happens in that narrow, narrow, quark-wide little gap where men and women intersect? Is it a “war”? Is it even friction? Is it even confusion?

(In what follows, please understand that I’m certainly not ignorant of extreme cases — relationships of brutal violence, physical or otherwise, or weird power trips and perversions. I’m just not talking of them for now. I’m talking of “normal” relationships — whatever the hell that means.)

[Read more…]

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The World Turned Inside-Out

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Just saw this on the BBC’s YouTube channel. Sobering, exciting, fascinating… and sobering. The economic progress of 200 countries over the course of 200 years — demonstrated and discussed in a four-minute video:

As always with simple presentations of complex issues, especially statistics, there’s such a thing as reading too much into this. Politicians and ideologues of all stripes can likely find support for their points of view here. For the rest of us, maybe it’s just the ideal opportunity to contemplate the age we live in.

(Coincidentally — and I swear this really happened — last night a monster cold-front rainstorm passed through. As I was getting ready for bed, I thought, Two hundred years ago, people would have thought it a miracle that I’m getting into a dry bed.)

I’ve been working on a regular post, off and on, for a couple days now. This was just too interesting not to pass on to you!

Update: For a really absorbing view of these statistics, go here. You can track individual countries’ paths of progress (or otherwise), change the statistics used, and so on.

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Hanging in the Sky

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[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

This is the Dream

This is the dream we carry through the world
that something fantastic will happen
that it has to happen
that time will open by itself
that doors shall open by themselves
that the heart will find itself open
that mountain springs will jump up
that the dream will open by itself
that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known.

(Olav H. Hauge, translated by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin, from The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems)

…and:

Wonder begins with the element of surprise. The now almost obsolete word “wonderstruck” suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment. Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence. We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home. The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded. We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which is being revealed.

(Sam Keen, from Apology for Wonder)

…and (italicized portion):

You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world. At this moment, you are breathing some of the same molecules once breathed by Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, or Colette. Inhale deeply. Think of The Tempest. Air works the bellows of our lungs, and it powers our cells. We say “light as air,” but there is nothing lightweight about our atmosphere, which weighs 5,000 trillion tons. Only a clench as stubborn as gravity’s could hold it to the earth; otherwise it would simply float away and seep into the cornerless expanse of space.

(Diane Ackerman, from A Natural History of the Senses)

[Read more…]

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