*sniff*

*sniffsniff*

Hmmm...I smell a site redesign. Must...wrangle...content.

Coming soon.

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There will be some mucking about with categories and archives and such for the next few days, so don't fret. If it's broke, it will be fixed soon.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (3)
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You know, I've written 572 entries over the past 13 months. Assuming a paltry average of 200 words per entry (could be more, could be less, who knows?), that's a little over 100,000 words.

Hell, that's a novel!

I've realized that this site has gotten me into the habit of writing nearly every day. The natural conclusion to draw is: if I can do that, why not make one of my half-dozen unfinished mansucripts the focus of my shiny new habit?

So that's what I've been doing this week, using my new toy (that would be the Jornada mentioned over there on the left). Train ride in and train ride out, I pop open the lid of the Very Small Machine and type away. That's at least an hour and a half of writing each day. That's a good thing. Me like.

But it does mean that my energy for other writing--namely, this--is being redirected a bit. I think I may only have a set amount of it. We'll see, who knows, who can tell? Not me.

So that's a roundabout way of saying that things may be a bit light here for awhile. Or not. But if they are and you're dreadfully bored, there's 571 other entries hiding out in the Monthly Archives section just waiting for you.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (1)
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A peculiar bubble: no news, the television is blank and silent. No linkage and furious words, I have not visited the infoscape today. No newspapers, magazines, or radio. No nothing! I...am...safe as houses in my house. Cold and damp out. Pea is across the hall in her office, wrestlings with freelance issues. I'm here in mine, cutting the crap out of an eight-year-old prototype novel. Bob the Cat is downstairs, being fat and having a good cat's life.

Gosh! I am reasonably content. I mean, except for the lack of several published novels and a Hugo Award.

Whodda thunk it?

And now: back to the grind...cut, rewrite, write anew, break for coffee, and so on. Onward and upwards!

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I am trying to immerse myself in creation. Despite the sound of the phrase, that is not a Helpful Hint from Mr. Bova (see far left, and down a bit), it's me being fed up with wanting to have written, but not doing any actual writing. So I've been focusing. Getting down with the craft: picking names that don't sound like soap-opera characters, hacking out the crap, killing the poodles. Researching the backgroundish bits: nanotechnology, neurochemistry, quantum computing, Romantic poets and Gothic cathedrals.

The little Puter (see left again, a bit lower) helps immensely. I snagged a 256 MB Compact Flash card for it off of eBay, so now it carries the manuscript plus the research.

Back in 1989, my first computer was a GRiDCase 1520. It had a blazing 80286 processor that ran at around 12MHz. It had 2 megabytes of RAM, a 20 megabyte hard drive, and a speedy-quick 2400 baud modem. My particular model featured a 4-color CGA gas plasma display, which was a very cool orange. The computer was sheathed in a black magnesium case, and it weighed twelve pounds. Its gas plasma display actually grew too hot to touch at times. The display had a dimmer switch: dimming it meant that you might get 15 minutes of battery life. With the screen in full-on egg-frying mode, battery life was five to ten minutes. Or, you could shell out $300 and get an eight-pound extended battery that gave you 50 minutes' worth of juice...maybe. I knew where the wall outlets were in every classroom I sat in.

The GRiD was built like a tank. You could knock it off your desk while it was running--like I did--and it wouldn't notice. Inside, it had a little g-shock meter, so the techs could tell if it had been subjected to more than eight gs' worth of impact force. It was such a fab-looking piece of hardware that it was used in the movie Aliens--the computer that the android, Ash, used to remote pilot the drop ship down to save Ripley and the Marines was a 1520. They also used 1520s to control the automatic perimeter guns...when you see the orange readouts counting down the ammo as the guns shatter screeching aliens into molecular acid goo, that's my machine. The perimeter gun peripherals, it turned out, were only available in Europe, so I made do with a groovy little Diconix 150, a portable, battery-powered dot-matrix printer made by Kodak. It was ingenius: the batteries went into a little hatch in the platten, which spun around them as the paper tractor-fed through the printer.

New, the GRiD cost around $3500. Today, I've got a computer that weighs 10 pounds less and runs at 15 times the speed, with more than ten times the storage capacity in a RAM cartridge the size of a matchbook. It also has well over ten times the battery life, plus a modem that is 24 times faster and a full-color screen. In 1998, this device cost less than two-thirds the price of the GRiD. Now that it's obsolete, I picked one up for one tenth the price of the GRiD.

Charitable fool that I am, I gave my GRiD and the little printer that went with it to my then-girlfriend's journalist roommate when I left Mexico. I've regretted it ever since, but at the time--when I had an urgent need to flee the situation immediately--lugging 15 pounds of hardware back to the States, in addition to my newer Packard Bell craptop, wasn't appealing. The craptop died a month after I got back, which was not entirely unexpected: I was in the appliance section of a Mexico City supermarket (they sell everything in suopermarkets down there), and I saw a stove with the exact same Packard Bell logo on it. Apparently, the company is one of those multi-armed international corporate monstrosities that makes everything they possibly can, including baby food and nuclear weapons.

Ysterday, while unpacking one of the ever-multiplying supply of unpacked boxes from September's move to Peapod, I came across two more bits of old technology, each dating from 1981: the Tomytronic Tron and the Coleco Galaxian tabletop arcade games. This was what kids whose parents wouldn't give them Colecovision did for fun when they couldn't hang out with their friends whose parents did give them Colecovision. I had forgotten about these little brightly-colored gameboxes.

I popped in some C-cells, and the tinny, monophonic beeping noises threw me back 22 years, when I used to play these games long into the night under my bedsheets, the beeps and blats muffled with a pillow. Both games use a multicolored LED display, and of the two, Tron is the most impressive. It's based on the movie, of course, and manages to present light cycles, discs, and that bit of the movie where Bruce Boxleitner has to bust up the Master Control Program. This is all done using the same LED technology that's used in digital clocks, only instead of number sections, the illuminated bits are tiny parts of light cycles, flying discs, little Trons and Sarks. The designers had a 1.5" by 2" space to work in, so each illuminated bit serves multiple purposes: the curved tops of the light cycles are also the zipping discs, and the little wheels and chassis also form the barriers that trail out behind the cycles as they zip around. It's all very clever, and it still works. The bright-blue of the LED display is perfect for a game about bright-blue heroes inside of a computer.

Galaxian uses the same LED technology to create both the original Galaxian arcade game and its progenitor, Space Invaders (which you can play, right now, here). But bright-blue isn't a Galaxian color, so they put red and yellow lenses over sections of the game screen.

Today, I can climb into a 60-ton mech and blow stuff up in 6.1 Dolby surround sound.

But it's not really the same. Twenty years from now, 30-year olds who use fully immersive holographic video displays will find a dusty box of video games, all stored on the old CD-ROM format and, if they're lucky, they'll have packratted a clunky 2-gigahertz machine away somewhere. They'll play a few rounds of flat-screen nostalgia, remembering how it provided a break from the war that summer, and how cool it was.

And twenty years from now, hopefully, I'll find the little Jornada 820 tucked away in a drawer somewhere, and remember how I wrote my first novel on it.

That won't happen unless I get back to it, but the snow (friggin' snow!) has put me into a bit of a winter mood, so I'll probably just waste more time, looking at online bits of my technological childhood, and finding out which parts of it are still available on eBay.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (3)
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Man, I've got the big blue wobblies today.

I think it's the result of carbohydrate overindulgence. See, my ancestors lived on the heath and painted themselves blue, or somewhere in the Rhein valley, or just off the big bendy bit in the Thames, over by that pile of rocks. They ate moss and the occasional deer, and didn't have refined wheat products or white sugar or beer (well, maybe beer, but it was flat and warm and yeasty and gross). Then like civilization happened. Now my genes think that I'm having a Really Good Season and they're storing up the big big fat so that I don't have to eat my young when winter comes. But I've got a house and lots of vitamins and a cat that's plump like a Christmas goose but won't get eaten if I can possibly avoid it, so all this genetic machinery is just doing me wrong, see?

When I crash-landed at my mother's house after fleeing Mexico City, I noticed one day as I hiked up the street to hop on the bus to get to work at the copy shop that I was highly susceptible to the Sugar Blues. I put two and two together: stuffing the face with TastyHostKakes results in loooowww spirits for the next couple of days. So I stopped it with the face-stuffing TastyHostKakeness and took up theater, which worked well for a time. Now I'm older and a bit less dramatic, and while there's not much of the face-stuffing TastyHostKakeness going on--except for the odd bucket of ice cream covered with miniature pies--there is an awful lot of carbo loading, which consists of pancakes and syrup and oval fried-potato things and tortillas and pasta and the occasional spoonful of apricot jam. I think I'm discovering that it's not the Sugar Blues with which I am afflicted, but the Carbo Crappiness, which means a loooowww spirit for the next couple of days following the ingestion of too many carbolicious substances.

This morning I oooozed out of bed and didn't even wake up during the Pea-ride to the train station, and once on the train I cracked open the Jornada but couldn't put myself in the midst of the fantastic sparkly cathedral rave chapter. Yesterday: 1200 words. Today: nada-zip-bupkus.

So, as an experiment, I'm going to eat nothing but moss and deer for the next few days, and see what happens.

If that fails, I'm going to hit the boards again, I swear to god. Look for me in this summer's production of I Was A Fat Modern Man Who Couldn't Dance.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (1)
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They've turned on the big projection televisions in the meeting rooms up the hall, and there was a big projected Peter Jennings narrating the events in Baghdad, where it's 8PM.

I just watched them yank down a towering bronze statue of Hussein, and it didn't go easy. First it fell over, the metal legs bending and folding, and the torso hung straight out from the pedestal, a tyrannical synchronized swimming move. Noooo! Another yank and it folded and snapped off, toppling...the bronze upraised arm briefly bounced up into view. Hoh no!

Then it was lost in the sea of dancing people, pouring over top of this inert hunk of broken metal, jumping up and down, obscuring it from view. They stuck an Iraqi flag to the pedestal.

That's right: not ours, yours.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (2)
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Deb--one of the first people, if not the first person, to link to A-Head--had her baby on Saturday: Bradley Vincent, 9lb 11 oz, 10 fingers and 10 somewhat-squished-but-fixable toes. Congratulations to mum and dad and siblings!

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (2)
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In yesterday's Commentarium, John points out the Media bias about the temporary swaddling of Saddam's big bronze head with a big Old Glory. See! They drooled. Looook at the impeeeerrialism! Loook! Don't mention the cheers, though...or the flag's subsequent removal and replacement by a pre-Sadaam Iraqi flag. Jarvis says,

Cpl. Edward Chin, the man who brought down Saddam yesterday, is on the Today show right now. The flag he put up there was in the Pentagon when it was attacked on 9.11.

Which is only proper, I think. Susan Sarandon (who was recently bitch-slapped along with her roommate by the Baseball Hall of Fame president, which amuses me greatly) wants to know what Iraq has "done to us." This is because she's a simpleton whose humanitarianism is apparently flexible enough to support the continued rule of murderous despots.

I, on the other hand, want to know about how Hussein helped maintain a regional culture in which a stateless terrorist group garnered enough material assistance and training to kill 3,000 Americans on our own soil. And I want to know why the maintenance of that regional culture is acceptable to people like the pacifistic Sarandon and Tim "I will fucking find you and I will fucking hurt you" Robbins.

I find the image of Saddam's bronze mustache draped with red white and blue almost as satisfying as the image of the bronze head to which it was attached being dragged through the streets, followed by a small boy enthusiastically whacking it with both of his shoes. And I feel a certain frisson of delight when I see photos of Marines drinking tea with Selwa Meseen, and I am amused by the teenager behind the cartloads of liberated government computer equipment, victoriously lofting a dozen looted eggs.

To get to some of the images I've mentioned, you must click past other images: explosions, bodies, tears. Linger there, too. Yesterday wasn't a cost-free day, and that shouldn't be forgotten or glossed over.

But what was purchased with that pain and suffering shouldn't be ignored, either.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (4)
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Whoops--bit of a fake-out, there. I posted a new bit that wasn't quite done, so my little -U- for "Updated" flag was a lie. Only technically, though...I mean, this is a new post.

Anyway: it'll be up in a few hours. Really.

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Man, I've had it. I should just admit it. People freak me out. All kinds of people, but especially smart people who use their powers to berate and abuse and belittle. The Web is stuffed with these sorts of people, and they come in all colors of the political spectrum. You know them, you've come across them time and again: the arguers. The sarcastic flippant commentators. The ideologues of all stripes, committed with a junkie's strength to the meme-load they're carrying around in their own particular skulls. I recognize them instantly, because I used to be one...quite recently, in fact. A perusal of this site's archives will turn up more than a few instances of The Head Holding Forth, with mockery and derision.

It's like crack, that method. Even though I've sworn off it, it still tempts: some yahoo somewhere will spout off about something, and I've just got to write a comment, can't let that one alone, no sir! Must... demonstrate... cleverness!

But what's the point? The Web is full of clever people being clever. I recall the two sorts of people I encountered while studying Philosophy. One sort wants to discover whether they can find truth by studying the methods that others have used to find truth. The other sort wants to learn how to argue so that they can be publicly clever or, failing that, can demonstrate how everyone else does not know how to argue and is not clever. In my experience, the latter sort were the loudest in class. They pursued the most irrelevant lines of questioning, which always seemed to demonstrate what the questioner knew--or thought that he knew--rather than leading anywhere new or revealing anything different.

Language is a funny thing. It tends to define, to a great degree, the ways in which we view the world, and in my experience, the less we think about what we believe, the more this is true. Paradoxically, well-considered language can also act as an epistemological salve, giving us the illusion of knowledge and truth when what we've really got is a bunch of nicely structured words and phrases. An intelligent person expert in the use of words can simply roll over another intelligent person with a more imposing argument, by virtue of the sheer volume and intricacy of the word-facade that he builds. In Plato's day, such people were called sophists. You can often recognize them online by the sheer volume of their production: there are so many if-therefores, embedded within such a profusion of ideas and claims and refutations, that there is simply nowhere for a dirty-footed pug-nosed peripatetic to interrupt and say, "Forgive me, but I do not understand...let us begin with this term, here. What do you mean by it?"

Back when I was laboring under the impression that going to Harvard Divinity School might resolve my insecurities about my own intelligence, I attended an open house there. I was surrounded by smart prospective Harvard Divinity School students. We talked about smart things. I remember one fellow, who was a keen admirer a philosopher whose name escapes me at the moment. A small group of us was talking about God, and the perspectives of various theologies, and this fellow said to me, "You should read so-and-so, and I'll watch you shake in your boots." What position does he hold, I wanted to know. "Oh, he can argue about anything."

"Interesting," I replied. "But it seems to me that so-and-so may lack a certain conviction, don't you think?" He didn't have any response that I can recall, but our brief exchange has stayed with me. It was so-and-so's facility with language that impressed this smart, prospective student of Harvard Divinity School. Not so-and-so's grasp of something resembling the truth, or even the resonance of so-and-so's original ideas within the prospective student's own ideology. Sheer argumentative ability was the admired quality here, and it was so impressive that the mere name of this philosopher was regarded as cause to cower.

That's not intelligence...that's a cudgel.

Facility with language is quite often an ability with an outward focus, particularly online. The written electronic word is usually directed at someone, or at an idea, or at an ideology. Although newsgroups and comment forums and the like present the facade of interaction, what happens there is a pale imitation of serious dialogue. Face-to-face conversation stops and starts, permits the interlocuter to interrupt, and allows for pauses in the argument to question assumptions and request the definitions of terms. Generally, this doesn't happen as easily on the Web. Regarding this difference between the written and the spoken word, Plato reports that Socrates had this to say:

I cannot help feeling [...] that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.

Socrates, of course, was speaking about the static words of books and manuscripts. It is quite true that modern electronic text is more interactive than a book of speeches. But consider: when you are in an online forum, and the local intelligent troll posts three dense paragraphs of argumentation explaining why he is correct and you are a fool, where do you begin? With his first premise? With the definitions of his key terms? There is in fact nowhere to begin: he has finished his argument without any interaction with you whatsoever. You've just been subjected to a speech, not a dialogue. Unlike the written words of Plato's day, modern text can be "protected and defended" by its author...misimpressions can be corrected, clarifications can be appended. But the very nature of the medium lends itself to the use of intelligence as a cudgel with which to defeat others, rather than a tool to use in co-operation with others to get at the truth of a thing. Furthermore, the illusion of interactivity gives modern sophists the mistaken idea that they are masters of dialectic, rather than of speechwriting.

Unfortunately for all of us, this is not a phenomenon that is restricted to the peculiar cultural bubble of online communities. Although as human animals we have become creatures of language, before that we were visual creatures. Just as a particular phrase becomes shorthand for an entire way of thinking, in modern times a photograph can become an entire argument, and is regarded as sufficient refutation. But an image isn't an argument. It does not constitute dialogue, nor does it reveal the truth of a thing. Like paintings, all of our modern media have the attitude of life, but preserve a solemn silence. Such imagery can only be the beginning of sincere dialogue. It can never be a conversation, and as such, can never reveal the truth.

Of genuine dialogue and the committed, truly interactive pursuit of truth, Socrates said:

...far nobler is the serious pursuit of the dialectician, who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness.

The key words here are congenial soul. When confronted--online or in meatspace--by the raving rhetorician, building his impressive edifice of argument and imagery, I have started to ask myself some questions before I give in to temptation and respond in clever fashion. What sort of words is this person planting? What crop do I hope to reap? Does this person want to discover the truth with me, or is this person more interested in demonstrating my foolishness?

The answers to these questions help me determine whether this person's words are truly "intelligent word[s] graven in the soul of the learner," or whether they are mere cudgels, soulless images of knowledge. From that determination, I can decide how best to use my own time and energy. And it does take time and energy: to read carefully, to craft a response, to try to arrive at some sort of conclusion that makes sense. What point is there in making all of this investment, only to discover after several exchanges that your supposed partner in this venture really isn't interested in your words, really doesn't care about approaching any truth, and only wants to buttress ideas which he already believes to be true by using the rubble made from your own honest efforts? It's just not worth it.

Unfortunately, knowing all of this does not stop people from freaking me out. All of those minds out there, peering out at me from within their enclosing brainpans...none of them, really, possessing any greater apprehension of the real than I, but all of them so convinced, so passionate, so willing to pummel and crow and strut. Absolutely maddening!

If everyone would just agree with me, there'd be no problem.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (7)
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What? Oh, hi!

I, uh, should probably have mentioned that I'm taking a break kind of thing.

How Many Heads in the Commentarium? (5)

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