Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Paying Attention to the Click

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Nearly every writer, I imagine — maybe we can even dispense with the nearly? — has favorite words. It’s certainly true of me. Some of them are words I just like the sound of. Some of them have meanings just too right: I can’t help reaching for those words whenever I set to writing or talking about a favorite topic.When I’m editing something I’ve written, one of the toughest jobs is ridding the text of these pets, which after the second or third occurrence on a page start to jut out at me like snaggleteeth just begging to be attacked by a cosmetic dentist.

But I’ve also got favorite words which I’ve never used. Words which I’ve been hoarding, waiting to be spent at just the right moment, in just the right piece…

This is about one of those words.

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Notice What This Post Is Not Doing

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From whiskey river:

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds

(Daniel Goleman, quoting R.D. Laing [source])

…and:

You know, all mystics — Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion — are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.

(Anthony de Mello [source])

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Midweek Music Break: The Mellotron, and The Moody Blues

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[A view of the interior of the Mellotron M400. Click the image to enlarge. To learn more about how the Mellotron works, see this page (where I found this image) at the Candor Chasma “information about Mellotron, Fairlight and other vintage keyboards” site.]

A dim little back corner of the cabinet which houses musical-instrument history is occupied by an odd device called the Mellotron. It was an early “synthesizer,” sort of. But it didn’t create the sounds of other instruments artificially, by generating electronic pulses and sending them directly to amplifiers and sound boards. The Mellotron played strips of audiotape, several seconds in length, on which had been recorded a host of musical instruments: at its simplest, one note per instrument per strip of tape. Choose your instrument and press a key on the keyboard; the corresponding tape strip moves over a playback head; and out comes the sound of that instrument playing that note. When you release the key, the tape is repositioned so the playback head returns to the beginning of the strip.

(It puts one in mind of that Samuel Johnson wisecrack: “It’s like a dog dancing on its hind legs. The wonder is not that it does it well, but that it can do it at all.”)

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Book Review: The City & The City, by China Miéville

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My full review of this book is up, over at The Book Book.

Part conventional murder mystery, part dark urban fantasy, The City & The City is constructed on a bizarre high concept which the author makes somehow believable: two Eastern European cities are not just neighbors, adjacent to each other; they’re even closer than that. They […wait a beat…] overlap.

Note that this departs from the parallel-universes or -dimensions premise employed in many science fiction and fantasy novels since the mid-20th century. Those other narratives generally suppose that the two places have completely different timelines, perhaps branching off from each other, so that events in one place have no direct impact on the other; people can move between dimensions only with difficulty, by way of some exotic technology or talent.

The people in The City & The City have no such weird abilities or devices. They’re just normal human beings. Physically, they can move from one city to the other just by stepping from one to the other.

The key word there: “physically.” For the two cities have developed legal and cultural barriers preventing crossover. They have different languages. They have different architectural and clothing styles, favor different color schemes. Their cuisines smell and taste different. (They even differ in their diplomatic relationships. One city is recognized by the US and Canada; the other, by Canada only. If you want to fly from the US to the latter, you must do so from some other country — like Canada.) From childhood, people learn to unsee the people and objects in the other city. They are forbidden to cross back and forth except at one location, a single otherwise conventional border crossing with gates and guards.

All of which has no bearing on the investigations and solutions of most crimes. But now, an American woman has been killed in City A, and the body found in City B…

When I started reading this book, I knew pretty much nothing about it. I’d seen comments on it on various blogs I read and respect; these comments praised it highly but never for specific reasons (other than with expressions like “blew my mind”). Even after I began reading, it took me a while to catch on — by Miéville’s design, I think. The body is discovered; the detective talks with eyewitnesses and colleagues, and collectively they start developing some theories. But then at the end of Chapter 1, a dozen or so pages in, I came to the following passage. The detective-narrator, in an idle moment, finds himself watching an elderly woman on a nearby street.

… In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone.

That screeching sound, that crash you just heard? That was the echo of my collision with the word unnoticing. Even when I read back a few sentences, and then ahead — “should not have seen her”? “her foreign street” vs. “local GunterStrász”? — I was still confused as hell. I couldn’t wait to turn the page.

And that, above all else, is what I want from a mystery.

Where Worlds and Art Forms Overlap: The Icebook*

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I feel somewhat at risk of turning this joint into one of those blogs which serve as dumping grounds for videos, rather than actual words. But some videos just demand circulation, y’know?

This came to me by way of an email message from my great blog-friend, Froog, who just knew it would appeal to me. (Actually, he suggested that I save it for a Friday whiskey river-themed post. But I think it deserves a spotlight (no pun intended) of its own.)

From the Vimeo page where you can find the original of the below video, from the minds and hands of artists Davy and Kristin McGuire:

The Ice Book is a miniature theatre show, a pop-up book that comes to life as if by magic.

It tells the story of a mysterious princess who lures a boy into her magical world to warm her heart of ice. It is made from sheets of paper and light, designed to give a live audience an intimate and immersive experience of film, theatre, dance, mime and animation.

And, at The Ice Book‘s own site, you can read of the behind-the-scenes process they used in assembling what is, apparently, a traveling show.

I always had the dream of creating a theatre performance that opened up like a pop-up book. A show that would mix video projections with live actors to create a totally immersive experience. We wanted to create a full scale, life-size theatre production.

The idea for the Icebook was to create a miniature maquette for this dream — a demonstration model to show to producers and other funders in the hope that they would give us some money to make the full scale show. (And we still hope that this will come true one day!) The Icebook has since however, grown its own legs and turned into a miniature show all by itself. An intimate performance for small audiences.

Thank you, Froog!

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* Whether this should be a two-word phrase or a single word seems uncertain. I opted to go with the one-word variation, per the title as it appears in the video.

Perspective, Proportion, Sweet Spot

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[Image: “Perspective,” a portion of Engineered Biotopes; this was an entry in a 2010 Greek architectural competition called “Piraeus Tower 2010 — Changing the Face/Façades Reformation.” For more on the competition, and this entry in particular, see this page at the Bustler architecture/design site.]

From whiskey river:

To My Doppelganger

You were always the careful one,
who’d tiptoe into passion
and cut it in half with your mind.
I allowed you that, and went
happier, wilder ways. Now
every thought I’ve ever had
seems a rope knotted
to another rope, going back
in time. We’re intertwined.
I’ve learned to hesitate
before even the most open door.
I don’t know what you’ve learned.
But to go forward, I feel,
is to go together now. There’s a place
I’d like to arrive by nightfall.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and:

It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours — arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short just wants to be.

(Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything [source])

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Updates: Watson on Jeopardy!

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If you were interested in the subject at all, you’ve probably read all about it already. But for what it’s worth, I updated my “What Is Hubris, Alex?” post of a couple days ago with three longish comments recapping the three nights’ programs.

The first one is here; scroll down on that page for the others.

Midweek Music Break: Madeline Kahn

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Not only was the late Madeline Kahn almost unnervingly funny; she could seriously unhinge me with her voice. Says a writer for the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s Opera News:

That note! Madeline Kahn’s sustained “Ah!” on A-flat, the first volley in Victor Herbert’s “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” and the climax of Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein — has any singer ever made more impact with less?

Here’s the moment he refers to:

In that one Opera News article, by the way, I found more information about her singing than anyplace else I’ve seen. It includes the tidbit that Kahn did in fact briefly consider an opera career before settling on theater and films. Not really surprising — either the opera possibility, or her ultimate choice.

In the Sesame Street clip below, she again puts both extravagant talents to work, with Grover, in “Sing After Me”:

“What Is Hubris, Alex?” *

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I’d heard of this little demonstration of computing power some time ago; last week I caught a documentary about it on PBS’s NOVA program. On the way into work today, I also heard a more up-to-date report of it on NPR’s Morning Edition. The event itself takes place tonight through Wednesday, during the regular Jeopardy! broadcast time slot.

One of my favorite moments in the NOVA program: The Watson project leader at IBM, David Ferrucci, was for a while quite discouraged with Watson’s performance in dry runs. He’d invited his two small children to the set to watch one of these earlier tests. Onstage, Watson’s screen was set up as in the above video, between two human competitors. The part of the “host” was played by a comedian. Every time Watson got a question wrong (which happened many times during that stretch), the host laughed and made a wisecrack. Because, y’know, the wrong answers were often surreally wrong. People in the audience and Watson’s competitors always laughed at the host’s commentary.

What did Ferrucci’s kids take away from the experience?

Not that they’d witnessed something important, an historic event.

Not that machines aren’t as “smart” as humans, nor even as “smart” as their advocates claim.

To my knowledge, they didn’t remember — all kid-like — something completely irrelevant like the vending machines.

No, what they got was emotional confusion:

Why was that man picking on Watson, Daddy? Why was he making fun of him? And why was everyone else laughing and applauding with the man? Didn’t that hurt Watson’s feelings?

The highway of electronics history is, as they say, littered with the road-kill of assertions that thus-and-such task will never be successfully performed by a computer. So I lay no bets on the outcome of this Jeopardy! challenge.

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* Note that this can refer to human hubris, either on the part of Watson’s designers and builders, or — to the contrary — on the part of everyone who thinks this will validate the conventional wisdom: that a computer cannot out-“think” a human on any task requiring natural-language processing.

More interesting, maybe, to wonder: Will it someday refer to machine hubris?

Rigged — Involuntarily — for Silent Running

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Grrrrr.

…Grrrrr…

…oh, and in case I haven’t said recently: Grrrr.

As a good number of you already know, ’cause I’ve already told you: I cannot comment on your blogs during the work day. (I’ll detail some technical reasons for this at the end.) This post is to let you know that during those eight-ish hours of every weekday:

(1) If the main part of your blog’s address ends with wordpress.com, I can read it and comment there only via my BlackBerry. This is unchanged from recent months.

(2) If your blog’s address ends with blogspot.com, I can still read it during those hours. However, whether I can comment there at all then depends on two things:

(2a) If comments on your blog are entered on a completely separate page from where the posts are displayed, I can comment only via BlackBerry.

(2b) If comments must be entered on the same page as your posts, in a little box at the foot of the given post, I can’t even use my BlackBerry to enter them.

(3) If your blog’s address ends with things like livejournal.com or tumblr.com or ning.com or posterous.com or various other standard social-networking addresses, I can’t comment during work hours, probably at all.

(4) If your blog’s address ends with anything other than any of the above — that is, if you have your own domain name (as is true, e.g., with Seven-Imp — or with RAMH itself, for that matter), no change: I can both read and comment freely during work hours, just as I always have.

Note that the above supersedes any earlier email you may have gotten from me on this subject.

All of which means that you won’t see any sign from me that I’m actually still reading — and being engaged by — your writing on weekdays, unless I can post comments via BlackBerry… and maybe not even then. (If you monitor your site’s traffic, you will however still see my footprints in the damp ground outside, under the windows.)

To say that this drives me crazy really understates the case. I am, oh yes, annoyed. I am wroth. I am, indeed, mightily pissed off.

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