No, alas — not here to report anything like the conclusion of Seems to Fit. Just sharing a tidbit from the irrepressible xkcd webcomic. The first three panels of today’s contribution to the collective wisdom are above; click the image to see the final panel.
Voice Tech Follies
I’m really not a fan of the telephone: give me good-old when-I-get-to-it email any day, y’know? (People at work long ago got used to the idea that I intentionally sit with my back to the phone — so I never even have to see the red “voicemail message waiting” light. They all email me, even the ones who work in the next cubicle.)
Under the circumstances, it might surprise you that I signed up for Google Voice (even more assumption that I might use the telephone?!?)… at least until you learn that, among its other features, it includes a speech-to-text translator.
Closed captioning for voicemail messages — zowie!
Needless to say, it’s not perfect. So far the only person who’s left messages for me is my brother, whose voice sounds so much like mine that even I myself can’t tell the difference except by checking to see if my lips are moving.
Alas, this also means that his voice is husky — breath-driven rather than vocal-cord-driven — and this seems to confuse Google Voice quite a bit. In the most recent message, giving me a heads-up about videos from Conan O’Brien’s final show, the transcription software kept “hearing” the suddenly-former talk-show host’s name as “calling O’Brien.” Earlier, I was myself confused by a transcript in which he talked about his recent “conversation with Oscar.” Oscar? I kept asking myself. Who the hell is Oscar? I don’t know any Oscars!
Then I listened to the voicemail. Oh. He had a conversation with our sister.
Another cool thing you can do with Google Voice is get the transcript — and the recording itself — forwarded to you as email: invaluable if you get so few voicemail messages that you almost never visit your voicemail Inbox. (Like, oh, say… like me.) Here’s the text of Google Voice’s own welcome message:
Welcome to Google Voice! Google Voice gives you a single phone number that rings all your phones, saves your voicemail online, and transcribes your voicemail to text. Other cool features include the ability to listen in on messages while they are being left and the ability to make low cost international calls. To start enjoying Google Voice, just give out your Google Voice number. You can record custom greetings for your favorite callers or block annoying callers by marking them as SPAM. Just click on the settings link at the top of your inbox. We hope you enjoy Google Voice.
And here’s the message itself (which of course is perfectly accurate for this occasion, cough):
[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is :29 long.]
[audio:googlevoice_welcome.mp3|titles=Google Voice welcome message|artists=Google]
You notice how the voice suddenly switched from that of a”normal” American to a sort of Central European sound over the course of the last couple sentences? I like to think the original transcription was accurate only for one half of the message, so they went back and re-recorded the other half.
For what it’s worth, the “voice of Google Voice” — the one which walks you through the menus, and such — is that of an actress and voiceover artist named Laurie Burke. What a… what a… what an interesting thing to have on one’s résumé. (Although personally, I’d much rather be known as the voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Open my Inbox, HAL.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that, David.”)
Enchanté
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
The whale moves in a sea of sound:
shrimps snap, plankton seethes,
fish croak, gulp, drum their air-bladders,
and are scrutinized by echo-location,
a light massage of sound touching the skin.
The small, toothed whales use high frequencies:
Finely tuned and focused sound-beams,
intense salvoes of bouncing
clicks, a thousand a second,
with which a hair, as thin as
half a millimeter, can be detected;
penetrating probes,
with which they can scan
the contents of a colleague’s stomach,
follow the flow of their blood
take the full measure of
an approaching brain.
From two cerebral cavities
in their melon-shaped heads,
they can transmit two sonic probes,
as if talking in stereo,
and send them in any direction
at the same time:
One ahead, one behind, one above, one below…
lengthening the sound-waves,
shortening them, heightening them,
until their acoustic switchboard
receives the intelligence required.
Spoken to in English,
the smallest cetacean, the dolphin,
will rise to the surface,
alter its vocal frequencies
to suit the measures of human speech,
pitch its voice to the same level
as that of human sounds
when traveling through air —
an unfamiliar medium —
adjust the elastic lips of its blow-hole,
and then, after courteously waiting
for silence,
produce a vibrato imitation
of human language:
Words, phrases, sentences…
(Heathcote Williams, Whale Nation)
…and:
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot’s turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm’s blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its [absurd] worst… it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then — and only then — it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk’s.
(Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life [source])
Blurring Around the Edges
[Note to regular readers: You may have noticed a change in my online tempo in the last week — I sure have: my visits to your blogs are a little more erratic, my postings here a little less… I don’t know… “focused,” maybe?
Partly, true, my spotty attendance is because the pace of my 9-to-5 workdays has gone up. But mostly, it’s because the parts of my mind shared between the online world and the fictional are starting, once again, to be given over to early-morning and (on Saturdays) all-morning writing sessions. I’ve been so distracted by other stuff since November, in short, that I haven’t worked much on the novel. That’s changing — for good, I hope, at least until this draft is done.
In the meantime, you’ll probably continue to find me fading into and out of view.]
The prospect of having a stroke has always terrified me, even more than the prospect of Alzheimer’s; at least to my way of thinking, the gradual dissolution of the self in the latter case is a kindness (surely the only one) compared to the sudden wham! of the former: the blow to some faculties while leaving others intact.
And because I’m someone who lives with words so much, not surprisingly, the most terrifying of all faculties to lose would be verbal ones. What (I wonder) would I do if I could never talk again — and knew it? What if I not only couldn’t talk, but couldn’t even within my own head any longer form a particular word when I needed it? How would I cope with losses like these? Could I cope with them?
Such questions drove the opening of the excerpt, below, from the current chapter-in-progress. This chapter takes place (if anywhere) inside the head of a main character. By this point in the story, the reader, like some of Al’s friends, has seen Al topple suddenly to his driveway on a Sunday morning, and has seen him in the hospital, alive but inert.
All the usual disclaimers about first-draft work apply. :)
The Sky Calls to Us
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
The landscape opens its eyes and sits up,
sets out walking followed by its shadow,
it is a stela of dark murmurs
that are the languages of fallen matter,
the wind stops and hears the clamor of the elements,
sand and water talking in low voices,
the howl of pilings as they battle the salt,
the rash confidence of fire,
the soliloquy of ashes,
the interminable conversation of the universe.
Talking with the things and with ourselves
the universe talks to itself:
we are its tongue and ears, its words and silences.
The wind hears what the universe says
and we hear what the wind says,
rustling the submarine foliage of language,
the secret vegetation of the underworld and the undersky:
man dreams the dream of things,
time thinks the dream of men.
(Octavio Paz [source])
…and (italicized portion):
If you had never been to the world and never known what dawn was, you couldn’t possibly imagine how the darkness breaks, how the mystery and color of a new day arrive. Light is incredibly generous, but also gentle. When you attend to the way the dawn comes, you learn how light can coax the dark. The first fingers of light appear on the horizon, and ever so deftly and gradually, they pull the mantle of darkness away from the world.
(John O’Donohue [source])
Perfect Moments: The Boy, the Wintry Day, the Film, the Flash of Panic
On a recent wintry day, The Boy (Who Was No Longer a Boy) and The Missus decided to go to a movie.
Now, because the day was in fact wintry, and because “wintry” seldom applied to weather conditions where The Boy and The Missus lived, they needed to undertake certain careful preparations in advance. Warm clothing needed to be retrieved from dusty closet recesses. Human bodies needed to be tanked up with caffeine and/or cocoa.
And then there was the matter of The Boy’s hands.
Especially in chilly, dry conditions, the skin of The Boy’s hands — more precisely, his fingers — tended to dry and chap and split rather painfully. Depending on his mood and energy level and the available time, he might choose to ignore the problem; to “lotion up”; or to go the whole hog — applying ointment and BandAid(s) to the affected digit(s). On the afternoon in question, The Boy decided to go the whole hog. Indeed, not only did he swath his index finger in two BandAids, he actually sealed the edges and the fingertip with waterproof tape: the finger wasn’t merely bandaged, it was sheathed in what the Crayola people used to call (in benighted non-PC days of yore) “flesh-colored” plastic.
And then he and The Missus embarked.
Earnout!
From my tech-writing agent, in an email message yesterday:
Did you want us to send you a check for the payment due, or did you want an electronic funds transfer to your bank acct?
It took 7½ years, but my last tech book finally brought in more for the publisher than the size of the advance.
(And no, I do not take this as a hint to return to tech writing. Heh.)
Woot!
P.S. To answer the obvious question: thirty-six dollars and change, after subtracting the agent’s commission. Of my five tech books (depending how you count), this is the only one to have crossed the magic threshold.
P.P.S. I’ll probably request payment by check; I have a feeling I’ll either want to frame it or (depending on circumstances at the time it arrives) maybe just frame a photocopy.
Your Dreams, and the Long Haul
[Image above: “The Long Haul,” by artist Robert W. McGregor]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Excerpt from
“Sabbaths 1998: VI”But won’t you be ashamed
To count the passing year
At its mere cost, your debt
Inevitably paid?
For every year is costly,
As you know well. Nothing
Is given that is not
Taken, and nothing taken
That was not first a gift.The gift is balanced by
Its total loss, and yet,
And yet the light breaks in,
Heaven seizing its moments
That are at once its own
And yours. The day ends
And is unending where
The summer tanager,
Warbler, and vireo
Sing as they move among
Illuminated leaves.
(Wendell Berry [source])
…and:
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!
(Fyodor Dostoevsky [source])
There’s Got to Be a Morning After
Centuries after the Eastern Orthodox Church began celebrating the Epiphany, the Roman Catholic Church decided to start doing so too. But for some reason, the Western Church really latched on to this image of the Persian priests bringing gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and gold to the infant Jesus, guided from their homeland of Iran by a shining star. The Magi are mentioned only in Matthew’s Gospel and he never specified how many magi there were — just that there were three gifts. In 1857, the Reverend John Henry Hopkins Jr. wrote some lyrics for a seminary Christmas pageant, a song that begins: “We three kings of Orient are / Bearing gifts we traverse afar / Field and fountain, moor and mountain / Following yonder star.”
(The Writer’s Almanac, January 6, 2010)
The scene: a roadside on the outskirts of a small town in the Middle East. It is morning, lots of years ago. Three travelers sit beside a fire, waiting for a pot to boil, warming their hands, rubbing the sleep from their eyes. Their names are Balthasar, Melchior, and… uh… The Other Guy.
Balthasar: So… so that’s it, then?
Avatar and the Uncanny Valley
We saw Avatar the other day, and did the whole 3D, IMAX nine yards. It complicated things a little — there are many more showings of the plain-old 2D version, and for that matter of the 3D in non-IMAX theaters. But after all we’d heard about the experience, it seemed the only way to go.
My original intention with this post was just to provide a thumbnail review, along these lines:
James Cameron, damn him, has done exactly what he said he’d do: delivered a kickin’-good movie with mind-blowing special effects and cinematography. He may not be king of the world — any more than Orson Welles was in 1940 — but…
Etc., etc.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was interested mostly in one thing: one facet in which the film didn’t disappoint, exactly, but also didn’t (probably couldn’t) quite succeed. Before getting into that, though, let me say:
- The 3D effects in Avatar — at least, as viewed in an IMAX theater — go way beyond the lame, unimaginative poke-the-audience-with-a-sword precursors. When little flies and moths beset the characters in the jungle, you may have to fight the impulse to try swatting the bugs away. Or, like me, you may find yourself looking over your shoulder to draw the projectionist’s attention to the need for an exterminator.
- Motion-capture technology, likewise, has leapt ahead since even the (justly) celebrated tools which Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis employed to bring Gollum to life in The Lord of the Rings — particularly in capturing facial expressions.
- Technology aside, you’ll recognize Avatar‘s plot and love story from numerous “civilized man goes native” films that came before (Dances with Wolves, anyone?)…
- Yet, you may still find yourself welling up from time to time.
- I thoroughly enjoyed every second of the film. Thoroughly. (At some moments, indeed, I felt that I may have been undercharged despite the almost $14-a-pop admission price.)
So what didn’t succeed?
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