Category Archives: Arts & culture

Public service announcement

The Register, an online journal that covers computer security issues, reported yesterday on the first Mac OS X “Trojan,” or computer virus. Mac users should be wary of anything that prompts them to enter their login name and password. Link to article

According to a February 8, 2006, article in The Register, computer security experts expect Apple computer users, long free of viruses, worms, Trojan horses, etc., to experience increasing numbers of security breaches in the coming year. This is partly due to Apple’s switch to Intel processors for new Macs, processors which are more familiar to malicious hackers. But it’s also due to Apple’s increased market share in the personal computing world, making them a bigger, and more tempting, target. Worst of all, Apple has had little or no experience dealing with malware, while remaining uncommunicative as to its security measures.

“The reality is that security work does comes from a trial by fire,” [independent consultant Dan Kaminsky] said. “And Apple really has not had that experience. It had not had the experience from some 20 years that Unix had and that Linux has absorbed. It has not had the experience that Microsoft had with its summer of worms.”

If you’re a Mac user like me, take note. Link

Those Brits…

You, too, can calm traffic in your own home town. If you’re a Brit, you might try placing a lovely 3-piece living room suite in your road. No, I’m not kidding. According to the BBC:

Initially the street was legally closed, to allow the setting up of this outdoor living room, including such middle-England touches as a standard lamp.

It was then re-arranged to allow traffic to pass through, but Mr Dewan says the reactions of motorists showed how motorists expect nothing to stand in their way.

“A driver of a 4×4 didn’t so much disapprove – he was too crazed and violent for that. He seemed to be made psychotic by the idea that roads could exist for anything other than him to drive on,” he says….

It’s this sense of entitlement that he says he wants to challenge – leaving a 4×4 blocking half the street is called parking but a couple of chairs and a magazine rack put in the same place is seen as a senseless provocation.

Here in the boring old United States, the same impulse –to make our cities liveable and enjoyable places — drives what’s called “New Urbanism,” which so far is the province of only a few forward-thinking urban designers, architects, and real estate developers. Pragmatists that we Americans are, we try to design good solutions for the future; those crazy Brits just engage in performance art. On the other hand, maybe the Brits have a good idea: perfomance art done now might make cities of the future into places where cars and pedestrians can co-exist on the same streets, and have fun at the same time.

In fact, here in New Bedford, when Home Depot goes to demolish the historic Fairhaven Mills building to put up their new “category killer” store (a store which will add an insane amount of insane traffic to that street) — maybe someone should set up a beautiful living room suite. You know, a sort of performance art piece in front of the bulldozers — photograph the bulldozers running over a dining room table on the way to the mill building — show the photographs at the New Bedford Art Museum. It would be a hilarious artistic statement about what the ironically-named Home Depot really does to our home city.

Just thinking out loud… feel free to steal this idea….

Hot jazz

Abe Lagrimas, ‘ukulele master plays with Akamai Brain Collective with Randy Wong on bass and Eric Lagrimas on guitar, and they serve up some hot jazz over on the Midnight ‘Ukulele Disco Web site. Check out their version of Spain. Abe does a nice solo version of Skylark. The band also does a tune called Tocada with more Spanish or flamenco influence. None of this sounds like stereotypical ‘ukulele music — but like the best of Hawai’ian jazz it combines diverse influences into a relaxed swinging whole.

Unfortunately, the cuts from his new solo album that are up on Abe’s Web site suffer from being overproduced. Let’s hope Abe does more of the kind of work you can hear on Midnight ‘Ukulele Disco.

(Thanks to blog Ukulelia for pointing the way.)

The War

Thursday evening, Upstairs Used Books off Union Street was open for AHA! Night. Among other books, I picked up a copy of The War, a memoir by Marguerite Duras. I love Duras’s writing but find her fiction hard to get through, so I thought I would try some of her non-fiction.

The War is a collection of diary excerpts, memoirs, memoirs thinly disguised as fiction, and fiction; all have to do with people associated with the French Resistance in 1945, before and just after the Allies liberated France from the Nazis.

Duras introduces the story “Albert of the Capitals” thus:

[This text] ought to have come straight after the the diary transcribed in The War, but I decided to leave a space in which the din of the war might die down.

Therese is me. The person who tortures the informer is me…. Me. I give you the torturer along with the rest of the texts. Learn to read them properly: they are sacred.

“Albert of the Capitals” opens this way:

It was two days since the first jeep, since the capture of the Kommandantur in the place de l’Opera. It was Sunday….

Someone says that there’s a man who was a German informer who used to work with the German police. Therese is waiting for news of her husband who was taken away by the Germans to a camp; she doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive. One of the leaders of the Resistance captures the informer, asks Therese to question him, asks two young men to help her. As members of the village watch, muttering “swine, traitor, swine,” the informer is told to strip naked and he is beaten until the blood flows, while Therese conducts an interrogation. They get little information that is of use. Therese wants to leave at first, then she wants him beaten, she wants to see him beaten, then she does not know how to feel.

Liberal religious tracts?

“The Internet is the tract publishing venue of the 21st century.” Thus spake Chris Walton, editor at UU World magazine and uuworld.org, as well as the author of the blog Philocrites. Chris was speaking to a meeting of ministers this morning at the Braintree, Mass., Unitarian Universalist church.

Unitarian and Universalist denominational organizations began as tract publishing organizations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The two organizations continued to focus on generating and disseminating ideas through the 19th C. and into the 20th C. “We’ve lost that momentum,” said Chris, over the past few decades. Today, we’re neither generating nor disseminating many religious ideas.

Chris also noted how the number of publishing venues for Unitarian Universalists has been dropping — UU World magazine, for example, is down to a quarterly schedule –and he urged us to find new ways to disseminate our liberal religious ideas. “Sometimes what you have to say has a much larger audience” than your local congregation, Chris asserted. The Internet could be a good vehicle for distributing this writing to a national or even international audience.

Chris summed up by saying that currently the religious right is focussing on ideas. But that’s not happening on the religious left, and it’s time we got back into the world of ideas.

A great, thought-provoking presentation. At lunch afterwards, I happened to wind up talking with two ministers about blogs, the Internet, and liberal religion. One of my lunch companions said that all this technology is fine and good, “But who’s our William F. Buckley of Unitarian Universalism?” — in other words, who’s the writer whom people will read, and who will excite people about religious liberalism today?

I said, “He’s got red hair and he’s sitting two tables over from us — it’s Chris Walton. He was in the right place at the right time with his blog, he’s a darned good writer, and he stays abreast of all the current debates about Unitarian Universalism. Because he’s at the center of things, people keep sending him their ideas, and so he becomes more at the center of things,” I continued, waxing eloquent. “I got introduced to his blog by a minister in her thirties who said, ‘Do you read Philocrites? I find it to be the one essential Unitarian Universalist publication I read.’ And I think she’s right, especially for people forty and under. It’s partly by luck and partly through skill, but whatever the reason, his is the one blog you have to read.”

It’s all true, and I’ll go further than that. If you’re looking for something to give to friends whom you think should be Unitarian Universalists, send them to Chris’s blog (www.philocrites.com). So far, it’s the best example of a 21st C. Unitarian Universalist tract.

Moby-Dick marathon, finis

I managed to catch much of the last hour of the Moby-Dick marathon. I walked in at 12:08, Chapter 134, “The Chase — Second Day”; Carol came in just after me. They saved the best readers for last, including a repeat appearance by Peter Whittemore, the great-great-grandson of Herman Melville. By my estimate, just over a hundred people in the room to hear the end of the book. Carol heard almost all of that last hour; I had to duck out for a phone call about tomorrow’s memorial service.

This year, thirteen people stayed for the full 25 hours, including people from New Bedford, Westport, Nantucket, and Centerville, Massachusetts; Connecticut; Washington, D.C.; Maryland; and Nevada.

The marathon ended at 1:03 EST, with these last words:

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. JOB

The Drama’s Done. Why then here does any one step forth? – Because one did survive the wreck.

It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So. floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another ixion I did revolve. till gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin like-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

Finis

I see in my copy of Moby-Dick the following written in pencil, in my writing, after the word “Finis”: July 4, 1984; that date, I guess, when I finished reading the whole of the book for the first time. It would have been marvelous to hear the whole of Moby-Dick read aloud this time; maybe next year.

Moby-Dick links:

Online Moby-Dick, marred by occasional typos but easy to navigate and search.

Moby-Dick marathon Web page on the site of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Moby-Dick marathon, part 3

New Bedford Whaling Museum

8:30 a.m. I stop in for 20 minutes before heading up to the office. Carol is already sitting with our copy of Moby-Dick, nursing a cup of coffee. Quite a few more people at this hour: 1 reader, 15 spectators, 18 readers waiting, 5 volunteers, a number of people in the back; but my count is inaccurate, people are coming and going all the time; perhaps like me they are stopping in on their way to work.

I should mention that the volunteers all wear navy-blue caps with gold braid or “scrambled eggs” on the brim, and the words “Moby-Dick: The Marathon” emblazoned across the front in gold letters. This morning, the Timer is particularly intent on his duties, seated at the table in front of the two reader’s podiums, lightly tapping his text of Moby-Dick with a pencil as he follows along, checking the clock, checking whatever is written in the notebook open in front of him.

***

Today’s New Bedford Standard-Times, begins the story on the marathon thus:

NEW BEDFORD — The man with the black boots made his way loudly to the front of the chapel.

Those seated couldn’t help but turn in the pews to watch the man, wearing a long trench coat and wide-brimmed black hat, make his way forward.

“Who is that?” people whispered as Peter Whittemore, the great-great-grandson of Herman Melville, read Chapter 7 of “Moby-Dick” as part of the 10th annual 25-hour “Moby-Dick” marathon.

The marathon began at the whaling museum yesterday, but some 80 participants walked across the street to Seamen’s Bethel to read Chapter 7 — the chapter about the minister’s sermon to the whalers.

Mr. Whittemore, 55, was in the middle of reading when it became clear who the man in black was.

“Oh! He’s the minister!” people whispered, as the real-life Rev. Edward Dufresne, took the pulpit as “Father Mapple” and read his dialogue in character.

The Standard-Times also quotes volunteer Mimi Allen as asying, “We have about 20 people who stick around every year for the entire 25 hours.” (Given what I saw last night at 3 a.m., my guess is that this year there are less than 20.) The Standard-Times also reports that “everyone who stays the entire time will be awarded a Melville biography.”

***

10:05 a.m. I’m taking a break from writing a memorial service, and stop in for fifteen minutes. Carol has been there since 8:15; I manage to get a chair next to her. Still more people now: perhaps 20 spectators and 20 readers waiting to read, half a dozen volunteers, but it’s hard to get a good count as people are moving about, coming in, going out. Though there isn’t much room on the spectator side of the room, no one will sit in the front row of chairs. We are sitting right behind some of the all-nighters; their faces are pallid, their eyes a little puffy.

A young woman reads:

Chapter one-twenty-two. Midnight aloft — Thunder and Lightning. The Main-top-sail yard. – Tashtego passing new lashings around it. “Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What’s the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don’t want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!”

Her voice doesn’t quite manage to make me believe it is Tashtego speaking, but she doesn’t need to. The book is speaking through her, as it speaks through each of the readers. The concept of a Moby-Dick marathon sounds a little silly, I suppose, and I find I cannot convey the power of hearing the book read in this way, all at one time, by multiple readers in their individual voices. Even though Carol and I have caught just pieces of the complete reading, we have known it is going on this whole time. We have lost something in our culture, now that we no longer read aloud to each other; audio books, while fine in their own way, are too disembodied. Sitting there in the flesh, listening to a real voice, makes the book come alive in a way that transcends merely reading it by yourself, or listening to a recording of it.

Moby-Dick marathon, part 2

New Bedford Whaling Museum

2:55 a.m. Chapter 78. 1 man reading, 4 spectators wide awake and sitting upright, 4 spectators asleep and lying down (one snoring too audibly), 3 volunteer staff, 7 readers awaiting their turn to read.

I had awakened suddenly at 2:35 a.m. “Want to go over?” I had asked Carol; amazingly she had come awake enough to reply rationally (she’s a very sound sleeper); “No, I don’t need to go,” she had said. “Guess I don’t either,” I had said. But I couldn’t get back to sleep, light sleeper that I am, and over I came.

Two of the sleeping spectators have come awake. I assume that these eight are the ones who, this year, are staying for the whole marathon reading of Moby-Dick. The young woman Carol spoke with last night is one of them, now attired in pajamas and bathrobe. Two more spectators have come awake. Less formality at this hour: the spectators who are awake whisper among themselves now and then.

A new reader, a good one, who manages to make chapter 79 lively. In spite of his good reading I’m definitely sleepy. Plus I think the snoring behind me is having a soporific effect.

Chapter 80 describes the whale’s vertebrae, and I look up at the skeletons hanging from the ceiling above me. I find Melville’s descriptions of whale vertebrae to be fanciful.

One of the spectators is asked by a volunteer to read (presumably a reader has slept through his or her alarm). He reads with real passion of the chase and the harrassment of the great old Sperm Whale in chapter 81; and when he’s done I head home to return to bed.