January 2010
Some Problems with The Wire

Filed under Aleatory Research

I’ve been more-or-less frozen in here in South Louisiana the last few days, which isn’t too bad as it gives me a good excuse to eat massive quantities of gumbo and watch as the weather takes revenge on the many unwanted plant species in my yard. The city utilities folks also charged me for 29000 gallons of water usage last month and dug a picturesque ditch in my front yard. Any correlation between those two events remains uncertain.

In addition to eating, and working on a paper about a lesser-known work by a very well-known writer (a great genre for inspiring existential dread about your research, by the way), I decided to start rewatching The Wire.

Obviously, this show has been long since canonized, and I eagerly await the New Orleans-based one David Simon has in production. I didn’t watch all of Generation Kill, but I assume it was good. As good as The Wire is, however, it’s not perfect.

1. Credits Theme. The lugubrious closing credit theme is terrible.
2. DVD Quality. The Wire is the only DVD of a TV show I own that doesn’t project to 16:9.
3. Herc. Herc was not written for very well, at least not until the later seasons. The bit about moving the desk in the office is not at all good.
4. Accents. Though I’ve always been an admirer of the scene where Dominic West imitates an American doing a bad British accent, his actual imitation of American speech is not naturalistic.
5. Verisimilitude. The second season features a stevedore with a π tattoo who also listens to the Stooges. The scene where they mourn Ziggy in the playground is overacted.
6. Verisimilitude (cont.). Several of the actors are too theatrical. Avon’s sister and Lester on several occasions.
7. Dialogue. I think the word “malakas” was overused in the second season.

There are other things, but that’s just what’s on my mind at the moment.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-09  ::  Jonathan

December 2009
Mickey Mice Better Beware!

Filed under Aleatory Research

Hep-Schmaltz Era is Dawning!
NEW YORK, July 4—Now that hepster Harry James has hit the heavy dough by hiring a flock of fiddles and blowing trumpet solos strictly from the sugar mill, and now that hepster Tommy Dorsey, in the heavy dough to begin with, has added catgut and a harp besides, the band biz finds itself in the throes of a trend. Said trend is more than the removal from the relief rolls of several dozen previously impoverished fiddle scrapers—it is the dawn of the hep-schmaltz era, as contrasted to the ragtime days, the jazz age, the heyday of the crooner, and the era of swing, all trends and all now dead. (Billboard, 11 July 1942 [viewable at google books])

I found this delightful paragraph while trying to track down the cultural/etymological reference that would have led the author of a work on children’s literature to refer to Lord of the Rings as “schmaltz.” It was written during the “hep-schmaltz” era, after all, and I’m reasonably sure that Tolkien was a big fan of catgut and fiddle scrapers.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-12-30  ::  Jonathan

December 2009
Mulholland Drive: A Glance

Filed under Aleatory Research

Once you know the cancelled pilot backstory, it’s hard to deny the narrative logic of transformative fantasy; but what complicates matters, for me at least, is that the dinner party scene and the rest of the putatively real content shows a Camilla so cruel that the viewer is tempted to forgive contract murder. More likely is that the “real” content of the film originates with a fantasy of the waitress called Diane truly and Betty falsely, and her failed affair with the woman she switches apartments with. I’ve read a lot of Lynch scholarship lately, and if someone had advanced that interpretation without me realizing it, I apologize.

1 comment  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-12-16  ::  Jonathan

December 2009
The Wanton Student

Filed under Aleatory Research

Much about the TLS annoys me, though I still subscribe. Here is one happy thing I found in the latest issue, a non-watermarked version of which I was unable to find elsewhere:

That’s “The Wanton Student” by Arie de Vois.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-12-12  ::  Jonathan

December 2009
A Brief Remark on Stephen King’s Under the Dome

Filed under Aleatory Research

I’ve said this before, but the proper analogy between an alien intelligence capable of placing impenetrable spheres around the exact boundaries of a human township is not ants to humans, as in King’s novel, but a virus colonizing some type of formicative intestinal bacterium to Colette, say.

I’ve been amusing myself thinking of the type of apoplexy that Stanislaw Lem may have worked himself into when considering the consequences of the book’s premise, as in his essay on Roadside Picnic. I suspect he may have decided that the leatherfaced pueriles were in fact from futurity, conducting a chronoeconomographic experiment on the isolation of North America’s largest meth lab. Some work could be done on the ideogram as well.

2 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-12-10  ::  Jonathan

November 2009
Um so schlimmer für die Tatsachen

Filed under Aleatory Research

Ernst Bloch’s first wife owned gold mines in Russia: “I used to say that I paid 30 million marks for the Russian Revolution, but that it was worth the price to me!”

There’s something very cheerful about that remark, which was made in 1974 or so (note the “used to.”) I’m teaching selections from The Principle of Hope this week in my utopia and modernism seminar. Like many of Bloch’s readers, I’m fascinated by his discussion of the relation between ideology and utopia, that the former could produce only crudities without the inherent anticipatory illumination (“Vor-Schein“) of the latter. It seems that a type of default critical understanding of David Lynch has been produced through reference to Lacan and Zizek; I wonder if Bloch can’t add something.

Why Lynch, of all people? Well, I’m glad you asked. The levels of being—the embedded realities—in INLAND EMPIRE are rule-governed in a sense. They reflect an inevitable political understanding, one tied closely to Lynch’s nascent ideas about Poland and the United States. I don’t think that Penderecki is used as prominently as he is, for example, just because of Kubrick (or because Lynch had a defining moment with him and his Altec-Lansings, as recounted on one of the second disc’s interviews).

I presented a paper about this last week in Atlanta where I didn’t have time to go into the Blochian underpinning, but I’m thinking about it more now.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-11-16  ::  Jonathan

November 2009
On Being A Mac User

Filed under Aleatory Research

I used a Mac in my office at Georgia Tech, and I’ve had one in my office at UL for about a year now. But I’ve only been using Macs exclusively for about a month now after the purchase of a Macbook Pro. Now, it’s important to understand that the Gateway laptop I had been using before, which had come with Vista and improbably enough had a driver incompatibility of some type with Ubuntu that I wasn’t able to fix, was one of the shittiest pieces of hardware that’s ever been manufactured. The hard drive on my previous laptop failed immediately after I returned from an overseas archive, and, when I purchased this latest computer, the one I replaced it with was on the verge of failing again. Windows Update had gotten hopelessly entangled, and it may have even been the case that the computer had become infected with malware. Vista is such an incredible waste of an operating system, that I, who have been using and programming computers for almost twenty-five years now, was actually unable to tell if it was a hardware or software problem, or some pas de deux into planned obsolescence.

Other than one brutal Open Office crash, I’ve had no problems at all with the Mac. It’s powerful and well-designed enough that it seems, as most people notice, like alien technology compared to most PC products. (The effect is even greater than the disparity between the Honda Accord and S-10 of roughly the same model year I both once drove.) Finder is, it’s true, probably not as flexible as the Windows equivalent, but with easy shell access this doesn’t matter. I don’t seem to be able to adjust the sleep/power settings the way the systems preferences seem to claim that you can, but I’m willing to accept this as user error.

I haven’t been able to get Devonthink to do anything useful, and I’m not sure I understand the point of Scrivener, but the Open Office writer is fine for my needs. (I’ve long had a goal of switching to emacs and LaTeX, but that’ll probably have to wait until I write something with many formulae.) I also haven’t tried the ILife suite of products, but I hear good things about the presentation software. I have almost never used presentation software for a conference presentation or for teaching, but I’m thinking about trying it out on a provisional basis. I’m also impressed by the little things; the ITunes visualizer is the best such thing I’ve ever seen, and Stickies works nicely as well.

I really have to work on solving the bibliography generation/database problem. I either need to figure out how to make Zotero work, though I can’t imagine that it’s going to be able to fix all the non-workable files I’ve saved in it (again: if you save current page as new item in zotero in Jstor, for example, it does not, unless I’m missing something, record the bibliographic information. Hundreds of times I did this with nothing to go on but a proxy-bargled URL and title text snapshot.)

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-11-09  ::  Jonathan

October 2009
Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City

Filed under Aleatory Research

It’s still early, certainly, but none of the reviews I’ve read of this seem to understand its premise. There are acknowledgments of direct quotations in the back of the book, an unusual paratextual gesture, but a key conversation in it comes almost directly from an essay by Robin Hanson called “How to Live in A Simulation”. The paper is one of those rare cultural artifacts that instantly refutes any attempt at ideological analysis through proud transparency:

In sum, if your descendants might make simulations of lives like yours, then you might be living in a simulation. And while you probably cannot learn much detail about the specific reasons for and nature of the simulation you live in, you can draw general conclusions by making analogies to the types and reasons of simulations today. If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal it seems that you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look likely to become eventually rich, expect to and try to participate in pivotal events, be entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happy and interested in you.

Early on in the book, the apparent former child actor Chase Insteadman, who lives the virtues listed above quite well, watches an episode of Columbo that he was in with Perkus Tooth, about whom more in a bit. This episode starred John Cassavetes as an evil conductor, and, in the novel, dates from 1981, starring Insteadman and Molly Ringwald as the “spoiled teens.” When I first read the book, I was so unsure of what was identical with this world and what was not that I passed over this more-or-less in readerly silence. A quick trip to the relevant IMDB page reveals that such an episode did exist, but that it was aired in 1972 and, obviously, did not have Molly Ringwald in it nor was it directed by Paul Mazursky. Myrna Loy was in it, which is one of Tooth’s points of interest, however, as was Pat Morita. I haven’t seen the episode, but it appears from going over the cast list that there weren’t any children in the episode, at least not any who plausibly could have been teenagers. Is Steven Bochco’s presence significant? The plot device of Columbo’s imaginary wife, similar to that of Chase’s imaginary fiancée? (Since Perkus seems to want to guide Chase to this realization, this would seem somewhat plausible.)

Peter Falk is then described as being in The Gnuppet Movie, along with Marlon Brando, released around the same time. “Gnuppets” are important, and this is one of the ambiguous onomastic issues, because I suppose it’s at least somewhat possible that this is a fair-use copyright issue, or at least it intends to suggest itself that way to us. One of the major characters, Oona Lazlo, appears to be a ghost-writer, and two of her books were for a scientist named Emil Junrow, who seems to be a conflation of L. Ron Hubbard and Richard Feynman. Junrow has just died. We learn later from Laslow that Junrow was behind the idea of simulation theory, which is explained with reference to Nick Bostrom’s various notions and the Hanson paper quoted above on pp. 228-29.

Lethem seems to be interested in the overlap between the libertarian-inspired fantasy of the simulated world and the older nightmares of gnosticism. Tooth has prophetic (“ellipsistic”) insight into the true nature of things for several reasons, but one of them seems to be that he has (involuntarily) renounced the flesh. Mirrors and copulation are abominable, etc. Chaldrons, first seen in an office reproduction of a trendy acupuncturist who may be sent from beyond, blend this world with the other, a sub-simulation or a link to the simulating reality. We learn that a Second Life-like game called Yet Another Life features chaldrons as a designer-created object of priceless value in an environment where everything can be fabricated effortlessly. The designer of this game turns out to be the brother of the enigmatic Claire Carter, aide to Mayor Arnheim, whom we first meet at a banquet given by the Manhattan Reification Society. It is Claire who confirms to Perkus that the chaldrons have only a grail-significance in Yet Another Life and that Chase Insteadman’s fiancée, suffering from foot cancer in a space station rendered inaccessible by Chinese mines, is imaginary.

As Perkus, truth-haunted, begins to die, he reveals this to Chase:

“Something’s happened, Chase, there was some rupture in this city. Since then, time’s been fragmented. Might have to do with the gray fog, that or some other disaster. Whatever the cause, ever since we’ve been living in a place that’s a replica of itself, a fragile simulacrum, full of gaps and glitches. A theme park, really!. Meant to halt time’s encroachment. (389 [note that there are blank spaces in the original text, meant to signify Perkus's ellipses, I suppose, which I didn't feel like trying to reproduce])

After Chase confronts the Mayor with his suspicions, the Mayor tells him that “the secret protects itself.” He also thinks he loses a bit of his view. Janice Trumbull did exist, Chase thinks, and they were lovers in high school before she went to MIT and became an astronaut, only, Chase is sure he remembers, to lose her life along with the rest of the crew when their station hit the aforementioned Chinese mines. So the world forgets the war-related tragedies and can be manipulated into sentimentalism, a type of found or living drama. Through a type of reverse augury, birds watch the characters, or at least Chase comes to believe that they do. (Richard Abneg, a squatter-turned-fixer with a pregnant-sounding name, is eagle-haunted in the early parts of the book. Bald eagles, improbably enough, whose rapacious behavior is discussed in a nationally symbolic context.)

A few of the reviews of the book commented on its length, and, even an overly thematized tour of the major plot points such as the one offered above was surprisingly difficult to write without constant reference to the book in hand, after I had just finished reading it. The pace is exceptionally slow, and I think this is in part an attempt to show something like what might be called the “stickiness of the real,” or, in other words, that Lethem did not want to rely on the conventions of simulation narratives, particularly on the overt digitization tropes and rather tired metaphysics now reflexively associated with them. It’s really quite unusual that Chase reads Wodehouse and apparently has a good recall of other interwar British literature. (Graham Greene comes to mind for him at point.) This is so contrary to type that it seems purposeful, yet I can’t explain it. Philip K. Dick’s work, who Lethem has edited for the Library of America volumes, is the main source here, though Steve Ericsson’s Arc D’X is referenced by name (and this is outside the long bouts of list-making that Perkus engages in, mostly real figures with similar concerns).

I’m a bit worried about the tiger. It’s probably not a “juvescence of the year,” though its dual nature invites some type of religious/gnostic interpretation. As with many things I read, I would like to be able to read the editorial correspondence associated with this book. I wonder how much fact-checking went into the carefully fabricated references, for example, and I’m not entirely sure even now what to think about the Gnuppets.

4 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-10-31  ::  Jonathan

October 2009
Perdition’s Flames

Filed under Aleatory Research

Since my last few posts have been about interactive fiction, an enthusiasm I tend to revive around the time of the annual competition, I will write a few words about Mike Roberts’s Perdition’s Flames (1993). I had students in an introduction to literature class at Georgia Tech write a brief IF interpretation of some the things we had been reading in class, and I suppose what I had in mind as the ideal result would have been something with the same sense of humor and technical facility seen in Roberts’s Return to Ditch Day, though I did realize at the time that it was an unrealistic expectation. It was the engineering background combined with a certain wry humor that really appealed to me about that game, and you see these qualities, in a somewhat embryonic form, in Perdition’s Flames.

The premise of the game is that you are a recent arrival in Hell and have to figure out what seems to be a way to get to Heaven. It quickly becomes clear, however, that your presence there is not punitive. The afterlife is a large and random bureaucracy, and you are presented with the typical series of interlocking obstacles. I pride myself, wholly without warrant, on being able to solve puzzly games of this type without resorting to hints, and I made substantial progress in this one before turning to the walkthrough. (What eluded me turned out to be what I might blame on a failure of the parser, which is not as generous in its understanding of things as most contemporary efforts. While in a container, the command “search <container>” did not produce the same result as “search <object in container>,” which might not seem that objectionable but for the fact that the object in the container was at the time the only thing, absent myself in said container. I understand that this type of parsing issue tends to put most non-initiates completely off the playing of these game.)

The plot resolves itself into joining a club of like-minded folks, and the game also suggests that a character you encounter has created the very world that you inhabit. None of this is treated with anything other than light satire, of course, a type of humor less stark than that found in the similar Douglas Adams’s effort Bureaucracy.

At one point you’re required to solve a deduction exercise similar to those found on the former logic section of the GRE (and which I remember learning how to solve as part of my academically gifted class. Why exactly these type of logic puzzles are thought to have any cognitive benefit or psychometric validity remains one of the more puzzling questions of the 20th C.) If you can’t get the puzzle on your own, or lack the patience to set up the grid, you’re also given two multiple choice geometry questions. The mimetic break of these being part of a DMV test in hell wasn’t quite working for me, but it does give you some flavor of the arbitrariness inherent in the puzzles q.v. the brutally hard but more internally consistent puzzles in Curses!, released around the same time.)

I’m currently finishing up Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City about which I hope to have more to say, along with some words on C. S. Lewis’s Silent Planet books, one of which I’m currently teaching.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-10-28  ::  Jonathan

October 2009
Moonflowers

Filed under Aleatory Research

These reseeded themselves from an adjacent vine the previous year.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-10-12  ::  Jonathan