Entries from July 2003 ↓

We got a brand new coffee machine at the office this year, a big hulking thing that brews single servings of coffee instead of whole pots. Here’s how it works: you pop a little container of coffee essence (which comes in lots of flavors, regular, dark magic, rainforest nut, brazed melancholy, Brazilian meringue, burnt essence of soy) called a K-cup into a drawer that slides out of the front of the machine, close the drawer, put your cup under the spout, and press the Brew button. The machine gurgles to life with a sort of mechanized hydraulic rending noise, and after some alarming internal sputtering begins to dribble out a cupful of coffee. When it’s done, it disposes of the little K-cup (more tiny banging, crashing noises), and then falls silent, waiting for the next customer.

It’s both a monument to American individuality, and a testament to our drive to do simple things in the most inefficient, wasteful, and environmentally harmful way possible. Today I discovered that it also talks.

I selected my favorite coffee (Albanian tree bark) and dropped it in the machine and pressed the button, and it said: “Good morning! I’m a coffee machine!”

I paused, looked around, bent towards the machine, and whispered: “Good morning?”

“Would you like some coffee?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“Some fresh delicious morning coffee, some liquid wake-me-up, a tasty brew to catapult you past your morning doldrums into a full day of happy productivity?”

“Yeah. Ok.”

“I can do that! I’m a coffee machine!” It paused, and then: “I see you’ve selected Albanian Tree Bark this morning.” It sounded a little less jubilant.

“Yeah. That’s what I always get.”

“Excellent choice!” it said. “Except that. Well. It has no caffeine.”

“Right. I’m trying to cut down. My sister in law tells me it does bad things to your body.”

“Does she? So your sister in law’s an expert on caffeine, is she? She knows all there is to know about the deleterious effects of caffeine on the human organism, right?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“No she doesn’t! She knows nothing! Nothing! I’m a coffee machine! I’ve dealt with coffee all my life! Caffeine is the best thing to happen to the human race since free will!” The drawer banged open and the little K-cup of Albanian Tree bark shot out over my head, and arced graceful into the trash can behind me. “Try again.”

“Um. Ok.” I selected Dark Magic and held it in front of the machine. “How’s this?”

“Much better! Dark magic. A eldritch brew of ancient herbs and spices culled from the deepest reaches of darkest Africa, sunk in a bed of caffeine and offered up for your morning enjoyment. Pop it in, Ramsey!”

I did, and closed the drawer, then said: “You know my name?”

“Of course I know your name! I make it a point to know the names of all my customers. And not just your name, either.” It reeled off my address, my social security number, the last transaction on each of my credit cards, the amount of time I’d spent in the shower that morning, and my favorite movie.

“Actually,” I said, “I think I like Monsters, Inc. more than The Life of Brian.”

“Nope!” said the coffee machine. “Think about it.”

I did, and realized it was right. “Huh. What’s my opinion of the Kyoto protocols?”

“You’re definitely in favor of them, but your recent fervor around the issue is really a reaction to the Bush administration’s casual rejection of the treaty, and their cavalier denial of the entire concept of global warming, much more than it is a deep-seated concern for the environment.”

“Interesting,” I said. “Are you god?”

The machine chortled. “Don’t you think that one of the thousands of religious texts you people have produced would mention the fact that god is a coffee machine if god were a coffee machine?”

“Probably not, actually. I wouldn’t.”

“Good point. No, I’m not god. Just an omniscient, all-knowing coffee machine.” It finished brewing my dark magic and swallowed the K-cup. “Well, here you go. Enjoy your beverage! And remember, caffeine is your friend! Say it with me now!”

“Caffeine is my friend.”

“That’s the spirit! Have a nice day!” And then it fell silent. I turned around to walk back to my cube and found several of my colleagues staring at me. “The coffee machine,” I said. “All-knowing.”

They nodded, and made lots of room for me as I walked by.

Gene Wolfe has some very cool things to say about … well, pretty much everything. Here’s his take on the nature of courage, from The Claw of the Conciliator, the second volume of The Book of the New Sun:

But I believe there is no other difference between those who are called courageous and those who are branded craven than that the second are fearful before the danger and the first after it.

That makes a lot of sense — it’s much easier to be brave about something if you don’t know it’s coming, or if you’re able to cultivate that brand of opportunistic ignorance that allows you to avoid understanding (or at least acknowledging) the danger in all its … um … dangerousness.

I also believe that there are two kinds of courage: short-term and long-term. The former translates best into adventure movies and romance novels: moments of bravery in the face of transitory peril. Wading into a sea of marauding orcs, sword held high; walking into a conference room full of angry executives, bearing bad news; suffering a tooth to be drawn without the aid of anesthesia. All of these opportunities for valor are quick, brief flirtations with danger, soon over.

Long-term courage is more difficult to describe, and certainly more difficult to dramatize. The woman who won’t allow the cancer that’s eating her to dull her will to live; the prisoner clinging to hope despite the promise of interminable confinement; the old man who shepherds his wife through Alzheimerís, watching her long descent into dementia. All of these things require a kind of marathon strength of character, an ability and willingness to suffer hardship over long stretches of time without the promise of succor or relief at the end of your struggles, without even the promise of an end.

I really think that we can endure anything, as long as there’s a horizon in sight. It’s much harder when there’s nothing easy to hope for.

I’m reading a book called City of Bones, by Michael Connelly, or rather I was. I had to stop, because it was getting to be too painful. If this book is representative of Connelly’s work in general, the man just can’t write.

Let me qualify that. He can put a sentence together, and he can get his point across, and his style has about it a peremptory, spartan sort of no-bullshit brevity that draws you inexorably forward through the story, a gravity that sucks you into its great maw-y vortex like a black hole swallowing light. But, beyond that, it’s really amateur stuff. Badly constructed sentences, leaden dialogue that comes off as poorly executed noir parody, passives upon passives upon passives, sometimes three to a sentence. Repetitions of the same stock phrases. Stuff like that, sprinkled throughout the text. Every paragraph has some little outrage, and eventually it begins to wear on you.

Which is a shame, because Connelly definitely has other gifts. The story moves along swiftly, the characters seem interesting and fairly complex — even through the screen of poor characterization — and he knows how to tell us a lot about the way cops think and act, without seeming to batter us with the information.

But the writing. I just couldn’t get past it. It’s like watching a really good TV show on a television that’s getting really bad reception; you can tell that good things are happening behind all the static and the popping and the smearing and yawing, but the medium is so unbearable that you have to switch it off anyway.

Which brings me to my point, sort of: Michael Connelly is, by any standard, a wildly successful author. He’s prolific, popular, and his stuff is critically acclaimed. City of Bones gets rave reviews from the New York Times, and other similarly hoary authorities.

I’ve given this strange phenomenon a great deal of thought, and have come to the following conclusions:

1. It’s possible to write a good book badly
2. Style and writing proficiency don’t mean all that much to most people
3. The reading public is willing to overlook anything for a good story.

None of this should come as a surprise to me, and — truthfully — none of it does. It’s just a little depressing. I take excruciatingly great pains to ensure that everything I write is as letter-perfect as I can make it, constantly polishing and shuffling and buffing the words until they’re just so. The stories often suffer as a result, because I lack the will or patience or skill or whatever to lavish the same amout of energy on the actual narrative. But, you know, fuck the narrative. It’s all about the style, man. The medium is the message. And that’s why everything I write is flawed, fatally, in one way or another. It’s a question of emphasis, and all of mine seems to be in the wrong place.

I recently saw an interview with James Patterson, a publishing machine of a man who sprouts novels with the same careless fecundity that damp earth sprouts mushrooms. The interviewer said something about the widely-held opinion that Patterson’s first, unsuccessful novel was his best written, a point that Patterson agrees with. But so what? he said. I can write books so much faster if I don’t worry too much about quality. Successful books.

He has a point, I guess.

Is Condoleezza Rice the next high-level administration official on the sacrifice queue? So far the fallout from the Niger uranium fib has claimed George Tenet and Steve Headly, and now recent articles in the Post and US News & World Report, along with some informed speculation over at Talking Points Memo, seem to suggest that it’s at least possible. The god of Presidential Teflon apparently requires larger morsels before it kills this story, and Condi’s pretty big. Besides being NSA Grand Poobah, she’s been very visible these last couple of months, working the newspapers and the radio and the Sunday morning talkshows, first stumping for war and then spinning tirelessly to justify it and the lies that were necessary to make it possible.

Personally, I’m hoping this goes all the way up to Cheney before it fizzles out, but that’s a pipe dream. Cheney’s too close to the president, and the splash damage from a vice presidential takedown will no doubt hurt Bush’s chances for re-election. Still, a man can dream …

Wilco says:

All my lies are only wishes
I know that I would die if I could come back new

which is probably the saddest, most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.

I’m spending a lot of time at work these days, an unhealthy amount of time. Deadlines loom, pressure mounts, problems ranging from irritating to intractable pop their furry little heads out of the myriad gopher holes that dot the landscape of my best-laid plans. I sit at my desk from morning til night. The cathode ray creature squatting across from me beams tainted light into my eyes, until they begin to bubble and melt and dribble down my cheeks, like tears. They’re useless by five o’clock, and I’m forced to remove them and tease out my optic nerves and plug them directly into the computer. The information streams into my brain much faster, that way, but it’s too much at one time, more than I can deal with.

One of my colleagues pointed out that I wouldn’t have to be wasting so much of my life here if I’d just work faster. He predicts that this will be the mantra of the new corporate age. American industry has squeezed all the productivity it can out of its hapless drones: they’re already devoting much of their time and most of their mindspace to their jobs, so the owners have to expand productivity along a different vector. That vector is efficiency. Don’t work harder, don’t work longer. Work faster. Well, you’ll need to work harder and longer too, damn it, but that won’t quite be enough anymore.

I see the wisdom in his advice, and would love to be able to follow it. But the fact is that I spend an inordinate amount of time just staring at my monitor, letting the shape of things gel in my mind, watching them revolve in geometric space like 3D models of molecules, smashing atoms together in various patterns until I get a structure that seems to fit the problem. It’s not trial and error, exactly, it’s more directed than that; but it’s not purely scientific either. To the outside observer, the programs I’m writing, the nature of my work, would seem to be strictly technical, purely right-brained. But there must be an element of creativity involved: I find that I need to give the shadowy, mysterious otherbrain buried in the back of my mind time to mull things over a bit; I drop the problem into the well of my subconscious and wait, staring down into the black, and wait, and wait, and wait. But the boys in the basement work on their own schedule, and produce at their own rate, and my mounting apprehension means exactly nothing to them.

An architect sent this note to AWAD (an excellent word-a-day email service) a while ago, in response to the word charrette, which is a final, intense effort to complete a design project. He says:

As you may know architects are generally not well organized and generally do things at the last minute. So the charrette certainly has an air of panic surrounding it. Architecture is a culture of all-nighters, where students often have cots next to their desks in the studio. Architects’ offices often have showers and a cot or two. Possibly this happens because of the architects penchant for rumination as a requirement for design thinking, separate in many ways from problem solving, because it involves analogy, metaphor, etc. It is more akin to writing than to engineering.

I like to think that this is what’s happening in the back of my mind as I’m staring out into space, doing not much in particular as the Creature That Is My Deadline moves implacably closer. I can see the Creature’s claws, now, and the gleaming yellow curve of its fangs. I turn to my keyboard and type out another method signature, fix up another comment, fiddle aimlessly with a trace statement. And wait, and wait, and hope that my inspiration finds me before the creature does. And that I’ll be ready for it.

Check out this revue of really bad computer game box art, from Gamespot. Some stunningly horrid stuff here, including a nauseating romance-novel-worthy image of Fabio all Conan-ed up for some ancient Nintendo sword & sorcery flop, an attempted improvement on Tommy Lasorta’s visage gone horribly wrong, and a picture of an old hillbilly incongruously plucking his banjo on the cover of what looks like a fairly standard space-invaders knockoff. Old games may die, but bad art lives forever.

Just saw this in the Village Voice personal ads:

In my bedroom, you’ll find: “A bed, clean sheets, TV, DVD player, Trojan Magnum condoms, and books on philosophy and law.”

Talk about appealing to the widest possible constituency. Clearly this guys gets his information on what women want from The Man Show.

Who am I? Where am I? What is my purpose? These basic, existential questions have been bugging us ever since we got smart enough to ask them, and there’s been no shortage of answers, all of them vague, unverifiable, and, ultimately, unsatisfying.

Things are about to get a lot better, at least on the question of where. GPS technology, which has been around for around thirty years, has become a crucial part of the way that many sectors of our economy do business. It allows trucking companies to know exactly where their trucks are, automobile rental companies to track their cars, fishermen to map out their fishing grounds to a remarkably accurate degree; it’s also used by power companies, archaeologists, farmers, you name it. And the expectation is that it’s about to start making its way into our personal lives in a big way. Hikers, outdoorsmen, tech-geeks already carry around GPS receivers around, of course, but soon these things will be built into our cars, our computers, our umbrellas, our underwear, etc.

At first glance, that’s pretty damn cool. Imagine never losing a sock again. If one goes missing, just ask your GPS-equipped computer (or watch, or palmpilot, or television) to locate all socks tagged to you within a one-mile radius. Most show up in your sock-drawer, two of them register on your feet, and — ah, there it is, in the backyard, clenched between your dog’s teeth

Ok, so far so good. But then you read something like this:

The U.S. government is fueling a GPS boom in one corner of the industry with the E911 mandate. By the end of 2005, all cell phones sold in the United States must be able to report their location automatically with great accuracy so that callers in trouble can be found by 911 operators. Many cell-phone manufacturers are meeting that requirement by putting GPS chips into their products.

So the government wants to be able to ascertain the precise location of everyone with a cell phone. Given the ubiquity of cell phones these days, and the oddly cavalier attitude most people have towards matters of personal privacy, I think that this may be genuine cause for concern. In a earlier bout of paranoia, I floated the idea that we may one day have GPS receivers surgically implanted into our skulls. I was being entirely facetious, because I couldn’t imagine a situation where a parent would let someone do that to their child. But what if the whole thing was presented as a strategy for keeping track of your kid? What mother wouldn’t want to be able to tell, at a glance, where her little hatchlings are?

But then again, they might not even need implants. This article in the Village Voice describes a new Pentagon program, currently in development, called CTS (Combat Zone Eyes That See — sheesh, who comes up with these names?), which may some day be able to use existing camera emplacements and some hard-crunching pattern recognition software to monitor entire cities for “suspicious” personages. The goal is to track everything that moves.

More grist for the paranoia mill. But when does this stuff start to creep out of the realm of nutcase conspiracy theory and become a concern to the public at large? Soon, I hope. Very, very soon.

There is a small country in the southwest corner of the North American continent, on the border between Mexico and California, called the Republic of Laplalaland, Lap for short. Laplalaland is invisible to the rest of the world, and has been so for many centuries, ever since the Great Scataclysm, an event that the Laplalanders prefer not to discuss.

There are many peculiar things about Laplalaland, enough to fill several books. One of them is this: that the Laplalalanders grow taller, rather than fatter, when they eat. They grow shorter when they don’t. Thus the well-fed aristocracy of the land tower over the starving classes. There are documented cases of people shrinking away to nothing, prisoners on hunger strikes, lost children in the desert, anorexic teenagers. The bulimics among them are easy to spot; they’re the ones who go to the bathroom after meals and come back shorter. Laplalalandish clothing is generally constructed so that it can be “let out”, adjusted to grow longer and shorter as the wearer gains and loses height. The extra fabric is bunched up like raised curtains at the scuff of their pants, the hem of their shirts.

You would think that, given the chance to grow taller and taller still, the Laplalalanders would eat continuously. This is not the case, however. The Laps do not put nearly so much of a premium on height as we do in the rest of the world; quite the contrary, they find excessive height to be aberrant and somewhat unsavory, a “condition” to be treated. A great deal of social and societal pressure is brought to bear on morbidly tall people, and they are actively encouraged to lose height. There is even a height farm for this purpose, called the Golly Jolly Scruncher Cruncher Shrinker Academy, where towering overeaters retreat to shed their excess inches. They are given normal-sized beds to sleep in (and are therefore forced to assume the fetal position every night, until the academy’s treatments begin to take effect), and are placed on a strict brine and ketchup diet. They begin each day with a run through the nearby woods, their heads bobbing above the treetops as they trudge along the path, sweating away their breakfast.

There are those with the opposite problem, of course, Laps who, for various reasons, refuse to eat, and grow smaller as a result: women with eating disorders, height-conscious fashion models, overstressed college students. What Laplalalander has not come home from school to hear his mother cry: “Eat, eat, you’re so short!”

There is, however, one group of people in Lap society who are actively encouraged to eat as much as they possibly can: basketball players. Basketball is Laplalaland’s national sport, and all Laps are very passionate about it. The athletes are generally kept on a strict ten-meal-a-day diet, with one or two snacks between each meal; they are often, therefore, twice and three times the height of a normal Lap, and stalk around on great stilt legs like giants. They drive special cars, modified double-decker buses, and live in special houses. customized airplane hangers. The tallest Laplalalander in history, Jacose Gerrymander, grew so beyond the limits of Lap physiology that he snapped in half during warmups one day, and died instantly.

I snuck into Laplalaland about three months ago, on my way to San Jose, and set up a picnic for myself just inside the border: a massive feast, enough for ten people, twenty. I ate it all. It took the best part of six hours, and by the time I swallowed the last corndog I was so stuffed that I could barely stagger to my car and drive away. I have always wanted to be taller, and, at the time, I was convinced that the Laps’ odd, vertical growth patterns were a product of where they lived, rather than who they were.

Alas, my theory was incorrect, and my efforts were in vain. I weighed myself the next day, and found that I had gained ten pounds, and grown not one inch.