Forward Bravely, into the Past!

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Bogus RAND computer (click to enlarge)

This March — the 12th, and isn’t it interesting I remember the exact date? — marks my 30th year as a computer guy.

When I started out at AT&T, my job title was Member of Programming Staff (with a digression into Managerhood); at my present job, I’ve been a Distributed Systems Specialist, a Business Systems Analyst, and a Database Analyst. (Oh, and throw in whatever you call a departmental Webmaster, too. Probably exactly that.)

And then I’ve built and maintained other Web sites, as well, and RAMH is, like, my fourth or fifth blog since 1999-2000 or so.

By now, you might think, I’d be right up there in the vanguard doing the Pied Piper thing, urging everyone else to join the cyber/systems/virtual revolution.

Er, no.

Into my Inbox recently drifted a plaintive email from a young guy with a computing question. In purchasing a new computer, it seems that he had to choose between two options: a souped-up whiz-bang up-to-the-minute model? or scale back on the computer itself, and spring for a really nice monitor?

I counseled him to choose Door , introducing it with the (perhaps surprising) claim:

I tend to be conservative in matters of computer hardware: I don’t want my computer to make my heart race; I want it to be INVISIBLE.

That pretty much sums it up.

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Paying Attention to Meaning

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'Gray,' by Lego brick artist Nathan Sawaya (click for more info)I wanted to try something… something different for our writing workshop back then.

Not something funny (or was it?). Not something in the psychological horror line. Not a genre piece, not an obviously literary piece. For that matter, none of the things that would pop into workshoppers’ heads when they sat down to read it and started to answer the question, What sort of story has John written?

I wanted to overturn expectations. They knew what sort of story I wrote, after all, or so they thought: a story with some quirky protagonist at center stage, acting out some strange mental drama in a world which stubbornly resisted his or her preconceived ideas of the way the world should work. A story with a lot of… of… thwarting going on.

They’d expect a story, furthermore, that went on for thousands of words.

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“I Have un Gros Ventre.”

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I see Moonrat is dipping one of those little furry paws into the deep sparkling waters of Yiddish. Reminds me of one of my own forays into non-Englishdom…

When we first became acquainted, online, in 1991,The Missus and I decided for reasons that probably made sense at the time that we wouldn’t exchange photos until (and of course unless) we’d actually met already.

At the time, The Missus had written a short story whose protagonist, a woman named Alice, was taking French lessons and liked to try out new words and phrases by dropping them at random into conversation. As I recall, The Missus herself either was taking a course in French at the time, or had already taken one and was renewing her interest in the language.

I had never taken French (my high-school and college “foreign language” was Latin). But in my travels somewhere, I think at a bookstore on Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, I’d once picked up a reference book called Harrap’s Slang Dictionary: Anglais-Français/Français-Anglais.

Why that book?

Exhibit A: On the front cover, people at a cartoon cocktail party were saying, in English, things like “One for the road,” “Go jump in the lake,” “It’s my shout,” and “Up yours.”

Exhibit B: On the back cover appeared a mini-quiz, labeled “Test your English slang.” For each of the five English phrases, it offered three possible French phrases — from among which, one was supposed to choose the correct translation. But my eye was caught by the nature of the English phrases:

  1. To get tanked up
  2. Pull your finger out! (This one cracked me up right there in the bookstore. Loudly.)
  3. The grapevine
  4. To frame someone
  5. A nice bit of stuff

In short: How could I have resisted it?

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“… 3… 2… 1… 0… I Said ZERO, Dammit, ZERO!”

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[This post’s title alludes to this little tidbit of news: 2008 will last
a second longer than most years.]

The New Year, per usual, calls to mind resolutions about what we hope will come within the next 365ish days. I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, though, I want to note that whatever else it stands for, December 31 also marks the anniversary of a pop-culture phenomenon’s passing. I speak of the final Calvin & Hobbes strip, December 31, 1995.

The frames reproduced in this post aren’t from that last strip. Its creator, Bill Watterson, had for years fought with newspapers about the constraints imposed on cartoonists by conventional newspaper page size and layout. Eventually he won that battle, at least for his Sunday strips, and the final one (like many others preceding it) shows the result: a gorgeous sprawl of irregularly-sized and completely non-rectangular moments in his characters’ lives, much of the space simply blank. The idea of either (a) reducing the whole strip to fit RAMH‘s layout or (b) slicing it up for the same reason, well, it just felt blasphemous.

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Here Be Dragons

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[Caption: “It must be yours. I have no imagination.”
Cartoon by Charles Barsotti in The New Yorker, November 27, 2006]

The end of a year heralds all sort of soul-searching not just among writers, of course, but among everyone else. Did I do everything I could do? Did I do it as well as I could? What did I overlook? How did I fail? And so on.

And yet — at least for (re-)beginners — the professional angst of writers and other creative people seems especially exquisite. We have a product, after all, a product we’ve spent many lonely hours producing. With no assurance of “success” (however we choose to measure that). With no firm idea, in many cases, why we embarked on the latest project (or the career itself, for that matter).

We have to finish the work in order to sell the work — just to find out if it’s at all salable or even remotely interesting to people in a position to get it “out there.”

I mean, I myself know this is how it works but it terrifies me.

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A Quirky Eclectic Christmas Music Playlist

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Okay, let’s do this playlist thing… These artists and numbers appear, back-to-back, in the playlist:

  1. Peter Robbins et al.: dialogue from A Charlie Brown Christmas
  2. Anonymous 4: Hodie Christus Natus Est
  3. Waverly Consort: Three Spanish Villancicos – Dadme Albcrecias
  4. Perry Como: Home for the Holidays
  5. Mannheim Steamroller: Joy to the World
  6. George Winston: The Holly and the Ivy
  7. Celtic Woman: O Holy Night
  8. John Denver and the Muppets: The Twelve Days of Christmas
  9. Al Hirt: Nutty Jingle Bells
  10. The Roches: Deck the Halls

(Note: After some experimentation, I’ve found there doesn’t seem to be a simple way — like a single button to push — to fast-forward to the end of a number. What you do instead is drag the little progress-meter thing all the way to the right, to the end of the track; this cues up the next number in the list.)

Next: I can’t put a YouTube video into this audio-playlist thing, but Christmas music doesn’t get any better than this. Judy Garland, in Meet Me in St. Louis, introduces the world to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” — and more or less ruins it for every succeeding performer:

(As Jordan Baker of the Dealing in Subterfuges blog recently reminded readers, the original version has none of this hang-a-shining-star/highest-bough stuff. What that verse actually — much more piercingly poignantly — says is:

Someday soon, we all will be together —
If the fates allow.
Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow…
So have yourself a Merry Little Christmas now.

Got that???)

Finally, the music of Christmas writing. Dylan Thomas reads his own A Child’s Christmas in Wales (in two parts, back-to-back — thanks, WordPress Audio Player plugin!):

(The complete text is here, if you’d like to follow along; link opens in a new window/tab, so you can move back and forth from the text to the audio stream.)

________________________

Bonus: Video from 1979’s Christmas Together special, which shows John Denver and The Muppets singing the Twelve Days of Christmas (audio only is in the above playlist, obviously):

Don’t you wish you could see the chaos “backstage” as all the Muppeteers, their arms waving, squeezed in around John Denver?

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Story Starters: The Writer’s Idea Bank

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When I first started programming, both I and a brother-in-law worked for AT&T. This was back in the days before all the local phone networks got spun off into their own companies — when the entire US phone network was called, collectively, “the Bell System.”

My brother-in-law, whom I will here call The BiL, was at the time an electrical engineer. As such, he too knew some things about programming. Like me, he also had (has) a flair for, umm, let’s say for an anarchic sort of jokes. And so we entertained ourselves for a brief time with a a thought experiment: an idea for a proposed software package, never built, which we called “BellPorn.” (In the post below, rather than use the actual P-word and attract all manner of unseemly traffic, I will indicate it thusly: p*graphy.)

It was a simple idea, or so it seemed:
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How It Was: Deck the Halls

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The time: late fall, 1990.

The place: Ashland, Virginia.

A young(ish) man sits at a card table by his bedroom window. He is temporarily jobless, by choice, and living on accumulated savings while he writes what will become his first book.

And he is panicking, inwardly, because nowhere in his budget is there sufficient flexibility for anything like Christmas presents for his family…

I think back on it now and know, know with certainty, that the panic was silly (if not foolish). Nevertheless, panicky I was.

And then I suddenly thought to myself: Well, self, you are after all presuming to be a writer. Surely you can put that to use. Give them something unique, something written, something true (if fuzzily factual)…

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Perfect Moments: The Boy, The Boy’s Father, The Sandwich

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Hoagie (click for full-size version, alas not for takeout)When The Boy grew up, he would tell people — with slight hesitation, thinking first of pizza — that his favorite food of all was sandwiches.

But there was a time when this was not true. There was a time when all that The Boy knew of sandwiches was what his mother made for him, and what he learned to make for himself:

Peanut butter and jelly, of course; tuna (with mayonnaise, lettuce optional); American cheese (in casual or formal versions, with jelly or mayonnaise respectively); ham and cheese (margarine and mustard); liverwurst (sometimes with cheese, always with mustard). Regardless of specific ingredients, these sandwiches all had one feature in common:

White bread.

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