Category Archives: Arts & culture

No TV

The Neilsen people, the ones who do the ratings for television programs, called me up yesterday. The pleasant man who called wanted to know if I’d received the postcard they had sent out. Yes, I had. He asked if I would be willing to keep a log of my television viewing habits for one week.

“Yes, I’m willing,” I said. “It’ll be easy since I don’t really watch any TV.”

“Oh,” said the man. He seemed momentarily flustered. “OK. Well, I have a few questions I have to ask you, even though some of them won’t apply to you.”

He asked his questions, and I replied that I did not work for the Neilsen company or any related company, that our house does not have cable access, that there is one television in our house (it’s twenty years old and Carol’s parents gave it to us, though I didn’t bother telling him that).

He told me that I should expect a booklet in the mail, that it would have five dollars in it to thank me for my trouble, and all I have to do is write “No television viewed” on it and mail it back. He confirmed my mailing address. Then he said, “Be sure to open the booklet before you mail it back to us, and get your five dollars out.”

“OK,” I said.

“You know, this is an unusual call,” he said. “Usually when I reach someone who doesn’t watch TV, they tell me that they refuse to participate. But we need to hear from the people who don’t watch TV, too.”

So that’s why he had sounded flustered when I told him I didn’t watch TV. He wasn’t flustered because I don’t watch TV, he was flustered because I didn’t give him a hard time about the fact that I don’t watching TV. “Well it’s no big deal to me,” I said, laughing. “I don’t have to do anything except mail the booklet back to you.”

“That’s right,” he said. He thanked me again, and hung up.

What an easy way to make five bucks.

Bon mot

Carol and her co-author are close to finishing their latest book. I will be glad when the book is done. I will be glad when the late nights and the cries of frustration from Carol’s office finally end. Having said that, when Carol is working intensely, she sometimes throws off good ideas like a grinding wheel throws of sparks. A couple of months ago, she was typing away in her office and I was sipping a cup of tea in the dining-living room while reading the newspaper.

“The age of the paradigm is over!” she called to me.

“Huh?” I said.

“The age of the paradigm is over,” she repeated. “The time has passed for creating new paradigms. This is the age of actually doing things.”

I’ve been thinking about that idea for the past few months, and I think she’s right. I think we’re no longer living in a time when being overly conceptual will pay off. The age of the paradigm has passed, at least for the foreseeable future.

30th anniversary

Thirty years ago today, the Science Fiction Club of Concord Carlisle Regional High School went on an afternoon field trip. Actually, it was just me and Mike Saler who went on the field trip, because the other two members of the club couldn’t make it that afternoon. Mike and I stood at the entrance to the high school grounds waiting for our ride to pick us up (but I can’t remember if our faculty advisor, Mr. Williams, gave us a ride, or if Mike’s mom did). We engaged in typical science-fiction-fan behavior — Mike found a basketball-sized rock, captured it, and tied a scrap of clothesline around it as a leash.

“His name is Spot,” said Mike, “and he’s coming with us.” Mike dragged Spot by his leash, until the clothesline broke. “He’s escaping!” cried Mike, and we both started laughing.

We got to the movie theatre in Boston and bought our tickets to the new science fiction movie, “Star Wars” by a young director named George Lucas. “His first film, THX-1138, was really good,” said Mike, who was already a member of NESFA (the New England Science Fiction Association), and a contributor to at least one science fiction fanzine. “They showed THX-1138 at the last Boskone.”

“This film is better,” said a guy standing near us. He said he had already seen “Star Wars” twice that day, and he was going back in to see it a third time. He was a little strange.

We got into the theatre just after the film had started. The scrolling text that told the background story had just about finished scrolling its way up the screen. We made our way into the dark and crowded theater. “Half these people are NESFA members,” Mike whispered.

We loved the movie. It was a real science fiction fan’s movie. At the beginning, as the characters make their way across the desert planet of Tatooine, they pass what looks like a huge dead worm. “Sandworm!” Mike and I whispered to each other, and we could hear other science fiction fans in the audience whispering the same thing. Lucas had obviously included it as an homage to the novel Dune. We loved the bar scene — “Better than Spider Robinson!” whispered Mike to me, and that was saying a lot, since Mike was a big fan of Spider Robinson’s bar stories.

But then the character Han Solo said, “Fast?! The Millennium Falcon can do three parsecs!” You could almost hear all the science fiction fans thinking for just an instant — “‘Three parsecs’… waitaminute, a parsec is a unit of distance, not velocity” — and then everyone hissed.

That was really the only sour note. Aside from that, it was the perfect movie for us science fiction fans, obviously made by a fellow science fiction fan. Even the ending, where you find out that the evil bad guy, Darth Vader, wasn’t really dead, was perfect. It harked back to the old Flash Gordon movie serials — they still showed old, scratched copies of the Flash Gordon serials at science fiction conventions — where there’s one last scene showing that the evil bad guy actually survived, so you know there will be another episode.

We made our way out of the movie theatre. Thinking of Flash Gordon, I asked Mike, “Do you think they’ll make another movie?”

“Nah, it’s too much of an insider film,” Mike said. “No one except science fiction fans will get all the jokes.”

I had to agree. This just wasn’t going to be a successful movie. As we were going out the door, they offered us buttons that said “May The Force Be With You!” Neither Mike nor I bothered to take one. After all, the movie was just going to disappear, only to reappear year after year at science fiction conventions, with more and more scratches appearing every year.

How very wrong we were. Within two years, I noticed that at the summer camp where I was a counselor, all the little kids were playing with Star Wars action figures. “Stah Wahs! Stah Wahs!” they’d say, in their diminutive Boston accents. I couldn’t figure out why little kids liked a movie that made so many references to science fiction books that they had never read.

I still don’t get it. “Star Wars” is not a particularly good movie, it’s just a fan-boy movie, and it should have faded into obscurity. Unfortunately it became wildly successful, which completely derailed George Lucas from what could have been a wonderfully creative career as a film writer and director.

In some alternate universe, “Star Wars” didn’t achieve undeserved success. It made enough money so that the movie studios were willing to give Lucas another shot, as long as he stayed away from science fiction in his next films. Instead, he goes back to his 1966 short film “Freheit” and picks up on the idea of freedom, goes back to his big hit “American Grafitti” and the characters of middle America, and makes a powerful film about a young white man in a midwestern town who finds his way to intellectual freedom through his friendship with a young black man. In that alternate universe, Lucas builds on that success to make an updated versions of “Hamlet,” and spends the rest of his career making a wide variety of films that continue his exploration of freedom and individuality and response to authoritarian power.

In that alternate universe, George Lucas is compared to Stanley Kubrick instead of to the anonymous makers of the Flash Gordon serials. I would prefer the George Lucas of that alternate universe to the the sterile and unintelligent George Lucas that has evolved in this universe.

No wonder Mike repudiated science fiction, and now leads a mundane life as a history professor who is occasionally interviewed on NPR and writes popular articles about John Le Carre’s spy thrillers. As for me, I have remained a science fiction fan, somewhat to my regret, and thus toil in obscurity as the 21st C. American version of a provincial English curate. And George Lucas is laughing all the way to the bank. Tanj.

Happy 300th birthday

Today is Carl Linnaeus’s 300th birthday. Linnaeus invented binomial nomenclature, those two-part Latin names biologists have for living organisms.

I celebrated Linnaeus’s birthday by going out for a walk.

Just down the street from our apartment, I noticed that several Alianthus altissima — an invasive exotic that can be difficult to eradicate — are springing up near the pedestrian bridge over Route 18, and I wondered if the city would remove them before they overwhelmed all the nearby plants. Then I realized that the nearby plants were Euonymus alatus, an equally pernicious invasive exotic.

On the Fairhaven side of the bridge, the tide was low. Standing on the mud flats I saw quite a few Larus delawarensis and Larus argentatus, and a Larus marinus standing there preening. Two Branta canadensis swam in amongst the gulls.

Happy birthday, Carl Linneaus. For even though using binomial nomenclature in ordinary conversation is a pain in the neck, we still admire your genius as a taxonomist.

Blog nightmare

My sister Abby, who is a children’s librarian, writes a blog called “Children and Books.” She does book reviews, writes about the librarian’s life, and other good stuff. Everything was going fine — until a week and a half ago when her blog stopped working.

First, she wrote to her Web host, Deerfield Hosting, to see if something was wrong on that end. Dennis of Deerfield Hosting (who is wonderful to deal with — he administers my Web sites, too) said he could find nothing wrong on his end, and suggested reinstalling the blog. Abby asked me to see if I could figure out what was wrong. I worked on the problem for several hours, and came up with absolutely nothing. At last we decided to back up the old blog, and reinstall it, as Dennis had suggested.

Except that Dennis wrote another email to Abby saying that he thought he had found the problem. Abby had posted an entry on her blog that she had written in Microsoft Word format, simply cutting and pasting the Word document into the blog. But Word embeds all kinds of peculiar characters in its word processing documents, and it looks like some of those peculiar characters bollixed the blogging software and/or the MySQL database on the server.

To make a long story short, I installed an entirely new blog on Abby’s Web site, and now she’s going to have to laboriously move her old blog over, post by post, to the new blog. All because Microsoft Word is a horrendously flawed product. I’m now looking for a new word processor for myself. And if you use Word, please don’t use it to write drafts for blog posts or comments.

Email [curse | blessing], part two

The second installment in an occasional series where I think out loud about using email effectively.

First off, reader and comics fan Craig pointed out this wonderful comic strip on the perils of email: Link. Thanks, Craig!

Next, here are some of my own current ruminations about email….

Spinning out of control (and how to stop)

Sometimes you have to use email to conduct business. The problem is that email discussions have this habit of spinning out of control. Sometimes people write things they later regret. Sometimes people stop reading carefully, and talk at one another instead of with one another.

Recently, I was participating in an ongoing email discussion. Another woman and I separately sent out perfectly innocent email messages that unwittingly stirred up strong emotions in someone else. That person sent out a very restrained reply, but suddenly it occurred to me that something was wrong.

Suddenly, it felt like things might spin out of control very quickly.

Fortunately two other people sent out nearly simultaneous email messages:– one person wrote, Let’s wait for our face-to-face meeting next week and discuss this there;– the other person wrote, This can wait until we have our next meeting. And our email conversation stopped immediately, while we wait for our next face-to-face meeting.

I’ve decided that when you’re communicating via email, you always have to be ready to stop and say, I’ll call you and we’ll talk on the phone — or, Let’s meet face-to-face and discuss this. In addition, I’ve decided that when you’re communicating via email, you always have to be ready to listen when someone says, Hey I’ll call you on the phone — or, Hey let’s meet face-to-face and discuss this. You always have to be willing to stop the email discussion at someone else’s request, and move to a more interactive mode of communication like the telephone or a face-to-face meeting.

The thing about email is that you often don’t know the emotional state of the person with whom you’re exchanging email. When someone else asks for a phone call or a face-to-face meeting, you have to trust that they really mean it. I’m thinking that when someone else asks for a phone call, the only appropriate email response is:– What are some times I can call you, and what’s the best phone number to reach you at? (or: What phone number are you at right now?) If someone asks for a face-to-face meeting, you can say:– When and where? That should keep things from spinning out of control.

Two other possibilities:– I believe that the better you know someone, the less likely it will be that an email discussion will spin out of control (which means that team-building for committees using email heavily is probably a good idea). I believe that having regularly scheduled face-to-face meetings helps a little to keep things from spinning out of control (because you know that you’re going to have to come face-to-face with those people).

But everything I’ve said here is up for debate. What are your experiences with email spinning out of control? What goes on when email discussions spin out of control? Once they start spinning, how to stop?

Next installment: Email [curse | blessing], part three

Video haiku

Perhap my favorite site for Web videos at the moment is Video Haiku. Filmmaker/videographer Kevin O has the following rules for video haiku: the video should be two minutes or less, with five or fewer cuts, natural contemporaneous sound, and realtime playback. In other words, like haiku the videos are short, and there’s very little “rewriting.” And like written haiku, video haiku attempt to express a moment or place in a very compressed format.

What I like best about these video haiku is how you get a sense of the videographer’s body position during the film — as if the video almost manages to includes a muscle sense, or proprioception, as well as the senses of seeing and hearing. There’s been an overlap between performance art and video art since at least the 1960’s, of course, but the smaller video cameras and image stabilization available today allow the videographer even more latitude in staying off the tripod. At their best, these video haiku allow the viewer to feel as if they inhabit the space that the videographer originally inhabited.

My sense is that much of today’s Web videos are heavily influenced by performance art. However, most Web videos simply serve to document the performance of the subject/videographer. Think about the classic video blogger tricks and techniques — holding the video camera at arm’s length and pointing it at yourself, extreme close-ups of facial expressions — these are really tricks which document the videographer’s body, which force the viewers to feel as if they are in close proximity to the videographer, but which don’t allow the viewers to be (as it were) inside the videographer’s space. Given this distinction, Kevin O’s video haiku are more like poems which allow us to experience the world from the poet’s frame of reference.

Mind you, I’m not thrilled by all the video haiku on Kevin O’s Web site. But that too is in keeping with the haiku tradition — haiku are written in the moment, and many of them are later discarded by the poet. In general, though, I’ve found this to be a Web site worth looking at.

Concert

Every month, downtown New Bedford has an arts and culture night — AHA! Night — with concerts, art exhibits, lectures, and tours. For the past six months, our church has hosted a free classical music concert on AHA! Night. And tonight, Ann Sears, from the music faculty of Wheaton College, played Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

After the concert, Ann told me that the stillness was so profound that she was tempted to look up after the first variation to see whether everyone had walked out. I told her that was my experience of New Bedford audiences as well; that sometimes when I’m preaching everyone’s so quiet I wonder if anyone is actually listening; and I think maybe it’s a cultural combination of New England Yankee reserve and Portuguese politeness and reticence. Yes, said Ann, after the concert people came up to me and told me how moved they had been.

They had been moved. I greeted people as they walked out, and you could see it in their faces. The man who had shouted Brava! at the end of the concert had a transcendent smile. The hip young couple who had literally run in at the beginning of the concert, talking and laughing on their cell phones, went out smiling and she gave me a thumbs-up sign — Good, she mouthed (she was on her cell phone again). Everett, who’s a poet, stopped to talk with me for a while. Wow, said Everett, wow. I said to him, My head’s in a different place than when I came in.

I walked Ann out to her car. She said, It’s such a good thing to have free concert series like this. You know, I said, there were at least a couple of people there who didn’t have two nickels to rub together. She said, I thought so. And, I said, there was one woman who had just come back from chemotherapy today; this was very healing for her. Ann said, Yes. I said, You don’t get that kind of audience in a concert hall. Ann said, I know; I’d love to come back and play again.

Reading Boswell

Over the past ten years, I’ve been desultorily reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Today we’d call it a masterpiece of non-fiction that combines psychological insight, reportage, collage, anecdote, and narrative. But really, it’s a book about the moral and spiritual life of a public intellectual.

Last night, I came to this passage:

1777: Ætat. 68.]–In 1777, it appears from his Prayers and Meditations, that Johnson suffered much from a state of mind “unsettled and perplexed,” and from that constitutional gloom, which, together with his extreme humility and anxiety with regard to his religious state, made him contemplate himself through too dark and unfavourable a medium. It may be said of him, the he “saw God in the clouds.” Certain we may be of his injustice to himself in the following lamentable paragraph, which it is painful to think came from the contrite heart of this great man, to whose labors the world is so much indebted: “When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time, with some disorders of body, and disturbances of the mind, very near to madness, which I hope He that made me will suffer to extenuate many faults, and excuse many deficiencies.” …

If Boswell were writing today, he would no doubt attempt to psychoanalyze Johnson; he would find that Johnson lacked sexual outlet following the untimely death of his wife, that Johnson’s “constitutional gloom” was in fact a clinical depression which could have been cleared up with a mood-elevating drug, that Johnson had Tourette’s Syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and that the disability of being blind in one eye (the result of a childhood bout with scrofula) affected him throughout his life. And if Boswell lived here in the United States, he probably would have gotten infected with our national mythology that the “pursuit of happiness” is the highest good, and he would have recommended a combination of psychoanalysis and happy consumerism to end Johnson’s woes.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly have surveyed my own life and thought, What a barren waste of time! –How little I have done (nothing, really) to leave the world better than it was I came into it! Better to say what is true than hide behind a bland psychologizing:– The usual liberal psychotherapy provides a pitifully meager answer to the question, How ought I to live out my life? Nor do the conservative platitudes of our time offer anything more; they just cloak psychology and pointless pursuit of happiness in strident nationalism or religious excess.

So we find more and more essentially sane people getting diagnosed as crazy-depressed and dosed up with anti-depressants. Our public discourse doesn’t allow us to carefully and honestly survey our lives, let alone admit that when we do survey our lives we are likely to find a good deal that is barren. Last night I took a long walk, thinking about what I’ve done with my life; and I found much that was barren. Anyone who is honest would find the same. What to do? Having already rejected strident nationalism, prosperity theology, religious fundamentalism, bland psychotherapy, over-medication, happiness through consumption, and a few other pointless things, I settled on some good honest soul-searching. I was not particularly happy to do so, and it’s never pleasant to realize that the barrenness of one’s own life is in part a reflection of the barrenness of public life. My deficiencies and faults didn’t go away. But when I went to sleep, my dreams were rich and untroubled, and I awakened with renewed energy.