Sailing: An Odd Essay

A Little Talk Against the Literary World

I love literature.  I love stories.  Science fiction, fantasy, “literary”, mystery – I love them all.  I’d love to get paid for writing them someday, so I keep submitting to different magazines.  Entering contests.  Practicing as much as I can, as time and energy permit.  One of those dreams which waxes and wanes.  The fact that it refuses to die even as I move into comfortable middle age means I’m more or less stuck with it.  That’s fine.  There are more dangerous and expensive habits than writing stories.

It was a treat when I got a copy of Boulevard in the mail a couple days ago.  I wasn’t expecting it.  I’ve enjoyed the magazine in the past.  I guess a one-issue subscription was included in my entry fee for a contest I entered last year.  So I threw it in my bag and flipped through it on my lunch-break today.

I love stories, but I’m under no illusions that telling a good yarn is more important somehow than, say, building a house or changing a timing belt.  I’ve never forgotten what Lin Yutang wrote in the preface to Moment in Peking:

What is a novel but "a little talk," as the name hsiaoshuo implies? So, reader, listen to this little talk awhile when you have nothing better to do.

Isn’t that a lovely, remarkable, and humble statement?  He’s written a novel and he hopes you enjoy it…when you get around to it.  Novels are polite that way.  They’ll wait.

I don’t mean to say that a good story can’t be life-changing and world-altering, as well as entertaining.  But then, “a little talk” can be all those things at once as well.  (And a new timing belt can get your engine to run for another 200,000 miles!)

“Literary” types, in general, tend to take themselves a lot more seriously than Lin Yutang.  (I suppose if I paid $100,000+ for an MFA in creative writing I probably would too.) 

The Symposium that Boulevard printed in this issue (nos. 71 & 72) made me chuckle.  From the description in the table of contents:

There is a powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe is still the center of the literary world…not the United States,” Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, recently said.  “The US is too isolated, too insular.  They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature…That ignorance is restraining.”  Do you agree or not?

Engdahl’s statement seems so absurd on so many levels, I can see why there might have been a temptation to use of 24 pages of a lovely journal talking about it.  But wait.  No, I can’t. 

I mean, honestly!  People in America are going to write books about Americans that appeal to other Americans because that’s what’s of interest to Americans.  Europeans are going to do the same.  Europe might have its countries crammed a little closer together and so some kind of inter-cultural dialog might come a little more naturally to them.  But to say this makes them the center of the literary world…what the hell is the “literary world?” 

I guess you could say that Europe is the center of the literary world the way that France is the center of the wine and cheese world, China is the center of the Kung-Fu movie world, India is the center of the extravagant musical world, and Japan is the center of the Sushi world.  Doesn’t mean I can’t have some pretty good sushi in Boston.

Engdahl has already said that his statements were "perhaps a bit too generalizing".  That’s fine.  We all shoot our mouths off once in a while.  It’s just a little talk.

Just seemed a shame to give 24 pages of Boulevard over to it.  I mean, my story submission could have been in there, instead.

Unlimited Growth versus Preserving Old Things

We could go back to a world where things were preserved, repaired, saved and traded.  It would be terrible for the economy.  But we're coming to understand that economic models built around assumptions of unlimited growth are doomed to fail. 

"If a business isn't growing, it is dying."  I think I read that in one of those Rich Dad, Poor Dad books, and of all the vague empty promises and crazy lies in those books, that's the line that stuck with me and bothered me the longest.  

Sure, you can interpret growth and death in those terms.  Uninterrupted decline does lead one, inevitably, to zero.  No way around that.

But how about understanding you can have ups and downs, and changes in direction, and periods that are more or less flat and peaceful?  How about acknowledging that ever greater numbers on a spreadsheet might have consequences that human beings living in a human culture might find toxic?

What's wrong with a man opening one store - a grocery, say, or a tobacconist - and having some years where he does more business and some where he does less, but over-all he manages to put aside enough to get through the lean times and keep his family and his employees fed and comfortable.

Why is it that, once the profits start trickling in, you've got to get out there and start saturating other markets?  You'd better get them covered sooner than later, or else your competitors will be moving into town to shoulder you out?  Free market capitalism is supposed to encourage survival of the fittest providers of goods and services.  Only now it seems to foster only the survival of the biggest.

What has changed in the past 30 years to five rise to the super-corporation, the franchised chain, this unlimited growth and sublimation of stores into ever-larger companies who insist on performing the same operations the same way across the entire planet?  Was it the economics of scale brought about by lowered trade barriers, ease of travel, and networked communication?  Was it that, once corporations reached a certain size, they were able to lobby and influence the legislative landscape and buy an advantage while taxing and penalizing smaller companies? 

And why have we, as a nation, concurred that this scale of enterprise - where the individual employee or investor exercises no control and has no stake in the outcome beyond his returns and his dividends - is an appropriate engine with which to drive our economy and build our communities?

* * *

Think of all the goods that are floating around the planet right now, in containers, on ships, trucks, and trains.  Think of all the wealth sitting in warehouses, stores, and homes.  With the exception of food, how long could we, as a planet, survive, if we just ceased the production of everything?  We could switch to maintaining the things we already have, repairing our cars instead of buying new ones, reading books that are already printed, communicating with the computers, telephones, and typewriters that we already have.

I don't really want to do this, of course.  I enjoy innovation, and progress, and unexpected solutions to problems like cancer and polio and intercontinental travel as much as the next guy.  Certainly if we'd stopped production 100 years ago, we wouldn't have any of these things.

What bothers me is this idea of growth for its own sake, and all the marketing and advertising that goes on in service of it.  I don't like the creation of desire, and the invention of solutions to problems nobody had before the solution was manufactured and marketed.

Ah well.  One great consolation is that we can, as individuals, step back from this whirlwind, and we can take the little bits that we need from it while letting the great mass of the storm pass us by.  Thank God for eBay, Craigslist, Freecycle, and the local dump's swap shop.  All of these wonders our economy has kicked up with their value driven down near zero, and all we have to do is pick them up again and assign them our own personal value. 

These are my old things.  Nobody else wanted them, but I'll love them.

My Wife 1950s Gal Interviewed on Australian Radio

Holy Cow!  The Wife's blog on living through 1955 is getting better and better.  She was just interviewed by a radio station in Australia about her experiences! 

You can hear the interview from the link at the bottom of this post, just above the comments.

Operation Upgrade Old PC Continues

More Computer Salvage & Request for Ubuntu Linux Help

So after railing against toys for a couple thousand words yesterday, I stayed up until 3 AM last night messing around with a computer, trying to make it run Ubuntu Linux. (I know, I know. But like most preachers, I have a hypocrisy bone the size of an elephant's femur.)

At least it's not a new toy. This is the old Dell Dimension XPS we bought back in 2000, when the looming 1 GHz benchmark was something to celebrate. I seem to remember that we paid about $500 less for sticking with 933 MHz rather then the more impressive sounding 1 GHz model.

We gave the machine to my father in law a couple of years ago. Now that he's moving on to better machines, he offered to donate it back. I immediately got excited about seeing how well I could make this thing run with a few cheap upgrades and my favorite Linux Distro.

I was able to max out the once-cutting-edge Rambus memory to 512 MB for $24. I thought about upgrading the processor. I could have gone to the maximum 1.4 GHz for that socket for under $5, but the thought of dismantling that fan and heatsink assemblage had me feeling that was more trouble than it was worth. I popped in a wireless network card, burned all the old family photos onto CDs, and then dug out the trusty Ubuntu 8.1 Live CD which has served me so well with every machine it's gone in to.

No dice. The boot sequence starts fine, but once it finishes loading it just goes to a black screen and locks up. My tech-buddy Woki was here, and suggested maybe the graphics card was too old and incompatible, or maybe it was the DVD drive, which wouldn't stay closed and start reading a disk until you bumped the tower gently on the top. Fortunately he had a spare drive and graphics card at his place, so I swung over and picked them up.

I'd forgotten how much fun it was tinkering with PC hardware. I had to disconnect all the drives, unbolt the drive cage, out with the old, in with the new, then piece the thing back together. The little metal plate on the side of the graphics card wasn't the right size either, so I had to switch that out with the old one. Puzzles! It would be great to get paid for this sort of thing, although I suspect I'd have to move to India to do it.

Anyway, none of this made any difference. Still the black screen. So then I tried Puppy Linux, and that live CD wouldn't even recognize my keyboard.

The good news is this machine is running Windows XP without a hitch with the 512 MB of RAM, even though it could hardly stumble along with Windows 98 before the upgrade. Certainly not my first choice of OS, but it'll do for now.  And it actually seems pretty responsive and nimble.

So my question for Linux techies that know so much more than I do – what am I doing wrong? Is there something incompatible in the motherboard making this unfriendly to Ubuntu? And is there anything I can do about it? Come on, help me give this old box the dignity of an open-source operating system!

Can We Put Away Childish Things In A Play State?

The Wife and I talked a bit this morning about our generation's fascination with toys.  We continue to collect them and even play with them as we grow up.   It seems to grow out of a sense of entitlement, irresponsibility, and a core discomfort with the aging process.

Our friend Mandrake came and spent the night with us this week.  It's been too long since we've gotten together - he's finishing up school in the city and we've moved back to the 'burbs.  So we had a great time, catching up and playing a game.

We stayed up until 2 AM playing Rock Band on his Xbox 360.  He brought his whole kit with him: the drum-set, microphone, two guitars, and the console itself, of course.

The game is addictive.  It creates this illusion of accomplishment as you tap buttons or hammer on drum pads in an attempt to match the patterns being flashed past you on the screen at increasing levels of difficulty.  You create avatars to represent your band in the game, and after every gig, the machine tells you how much virtual money you've earned and how many imaginary fans have started to follow you.  Then you can buy new virtual sexy clothes and hire virtual publicists to further your imaginary career.  You can buy tour buses to get to different gigs around the country, and eventually a jet to carry you to opportunities around the globe.

I was hooked.  The game simulates so much.  There's the challenge of music, which is pretty damned tricky even in a game, and you feel the satisfaction that musicians must feel when they actually get together and pull it off.  I mastered the drums on medium difficulty pretty quickly.  Ivy did a great job with the karaoke vocals, while Mandrake and Snake pinned down the lead and bass guitars.

There's that sense of accomplishment when you've earned enough to unlock new songs and venues, which makes you want to keep playing to see where you'll go next. 

Plus, it's a thoughtful way to listen closely to a lot of good songs you might have heard before but never paid attention to.  I have a new respect for drummers after playing this game, and Snake is noticing base lines in a way she never has.

So I'm not going to knock it, despite the fact that it can't be as satisfying as, say, actually playing an instrument.  It's a good way to have some fun with your friends - a heck of a lot more fun than just sitting down in front of the TV and getting stoned.  (We missed Obama's speech on account of Rock Band, and I'm all right with that.)

But once I got past the utter concentration required by this new skill, my mind had a bit of free space to reflect on what I was doing.  I couldn't help feeling a bit foolish - and futile.  This is my Puritan ancestry speaking up, I'm sure.  I often wonder if I was born missing the gene for a simple and straightforward appreciation of fun. 

But video games, in general, have been leaving me cold, lately.  This, despite the fact that I originally started this blog to write about game culture in detail - at least the games we could afford.  I lost that focus a long time ago.

When the latest generation of consoles came out (Sony PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii), we went and got the previous generation machines we'd missed out on so we could try all those games we'd passed on for budgetary reasons.  (Really, how can you justify being a multiple-console household when the things cost $300 apiece?)  I'm glad we got these old, used machines so cheap.  After putting a couple of hours into Metroid Prime - a game of the year, back in some year - and watching my wife wander around the fields of Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, these pursuits just felt like fruitless labor.  There's real crops to be planted and animals to feed, and the weather's getting warmer!

Another friend of mine has had an Xbox 360 since it came out.  We've played some games at his place, on a truly stunning hi-definition projector.  It was overwhelming, sensually.  But I decided not to spring for one, because all these processor cores and graphics chips are just driving the same old game-play through more and more polygons.  Dramatic and immersive, no doubt.  And buying games might be good for the economy.  But gaming on the 360 did very little to plug up that gnawing hole at the center of my self-worth.

So to the extent that Rock Band meant fun with friends, I had a great time.  Mandrake claims that buying the game has already paid social dividends for him, with all the parties he's taken his kit to around the city. 

But in terms of being an experience I want to pay for, then practice and master?  Not so much.

* * *

So, toys.  There used to be a time when we put away childish things.  Then our grandparents came back from the most brutal war of all time, made a bunch of boomer babies, and set about building a safe, comfortable, and structured world for them to grow up in.  (The Wife is deep in study and appreciation of that era right now, and I'm loving it.)  It seems to me that, for many of these Boomers, they came into a world where they really didn't have to grow up.  There was no urgency to their childhood, no sense that if they didn't pitch in and pull for the family, people might not make it.  This was probably the first time in history that this was the case.  So childhood expanded to fill the space it was given, because childhood is fun and feels good.

The amount of schooling it took to start a career increased, until our parents could piss away four or eight years after high school in pursuit of something called a liberal arts degree.  Then birth control came along, and so with their adult bodies they could have the most fun that a human being can have - all without consequence.  When the government drafted a bunch of them into service, they certainly didn't like that one bit, and that was understandable too, since their leaders didn't have any more understanding of what was going on than a child would, anyway.  So the boomers who whined like babies or ran away were let off the hook pretty easily, and we won't see a draft again. 

Social Security, Medicare, education spending and other government programs grew until our parents really didn't have to make a grown up, responsible decision at any point throughout their lives.  They might be more successful if they did.  And they might raise more responsible and well balanced children.  But if they weren't up to it, or just didn't feel like it - well, it wasn't like the universe was going to reach down and crush their families, like it would in the old days.

At least the Boomers managed to get up to some gritty, real-world, consequence laden fun.  Free love, LSD, all that hippy-dippy alternative lifestyle bullshit - if they really played hard enough it could still get you killed.

But they seemed to wake up one day (maybe it was to crack and heroin, or maybe it was to AIDS), and they decided that the world needed to be made even safer for their children.  Playing with adult things was too dangerous. 

Unfortunately, rather than teaching their children to be adult with adult things, they encouraged them to play with playthings all the way into adulthood.

Now we have the Gen-X kids who were warned that drugs would kill them, only they've been bottle fed Ritilin to keep them calm and Dexedrine to help them concentrate.  Kids who would once have walked, ridden their bikes, and played across entire neighborhoods and towns that have been locked inside their bedrooms to protect them from pedophiles, cannibals, and every other vague threat trumped up by Fox News and their brethren.  Kids who were told that as long as they stick with the program and stay in school (and then continue to stay in school again and again while taking out government loans to pay for it) they'd be able to get a job, have money saved for them, and retire at a comfortable age.  Now those Gen-X kids are all grown up.

And most of them believed it all, because they've never been told anything else.  They've gone to school and done what they're told and come straight home.  They've kept their minds busy with the only things they're allowed to control, which are toys.  And it seems inconceivable that their kids will have to do anything different.

It was fun.  I mean, the toys are good, immersive, dramatic and stimulating - more shiny and responsive than anything in the real world, anyway.  But now we're getting to the point that, by the time this batch of kids grows up, they just want to keep playing with toys - the latest computers and consoles, preferably, while the toys which are too simple and obsolete to entertain them any more are shelved, collected, and revered the way we used to honor our ancestors.

I mean, what's with the Star Wars and Pokemon figures in office cubicles?  The collections of old comic books?  The action figures and Hello Kitty USB drives and this horrible, horrible torture toy?  Is the world so safe now that we have to turn on our toys and abuse them to convince ourselves we're alive?

This brings me to Japan, the ultimate Toy State.  (Play State?)  Our obsession with disposable plastic amusements seems fleeting in comparison with Japan's, where the people work hard and play hard - they play like nursery school children on meth.  Seriously, where do they build all these toys?  And what must their landfills look like?

I suspect the Japanese infantalism is so much greater than ours because their welfare state hatched pretty much the day after the last bomb dropped and then grew into a behemoth that would seem positively Marxist if they didn't somehow simultaneously climb to the top of the world in manufacturing and trade.  (Niall Ferguson does a nice job explaining the Japanese economic system and the consequences it now faces in The Ascent of Money.)  So much modern fun seems to come from Japan: Nintendo, Sony, anime, cosplay, trance vibrators.  It's a beautiful country, I hear.  It's a wonder anyone ever goes outside to look at it.

* * *

So what's my problem with toys?  I don't know.  Maybe I'm just hitting middle age and feeling, shit, I ought to get out and look at something real while my legs still work.  And I'm wondering why the rest of my generation seems so hung up on childhood, when really, we're only children for such a short time.  Are we ever going to get our hands off our simulators and stimulators and actually do something?

Unfortunately, the real world has this against it: it's damned expensive.

I first cut back on the video games when we got the boat.  Sailing was a tremendous unmediated experience, I tell you what.  Hopefully someday we'll have the money to get back to it and enjoy again all the joy and life-threatening terror it involved.  Meanwhile, the latest Xbox and a batch of plastic pretend instruments are immediately attainable, whenever we want them.

I have another major concern: that America and Japan and the rest of the Play States are going to take themselves out of the picture in a couple of generations.  Because while we're completing our decade-long degree programs and having protected sex and playing video games, an awful lot of babies are being brought up in damned serious countries that cannot afford to coddle them, and aren't inclined to, either.

Not that it really effects me.  I mean, I'm not making babies for the team.  But, you know, somebody should.

Running Shoes Meet Dirt For Mood Enhancement

Just got back from a run through the woods.  I am confused but happy.  After a winter of not running at all, and getting in a funk about lack of physical exercise, and procrastinating about buying running shoes because the weather was so crappy, anyway - after all of that I just headed out and completed the same four mile circuit I was running last fall.  Took me about five minutes longer than it used to, but what the hell.  Somehow I've kept fit by sitting around, commuting, smoking, and eating bacon and eggs four days a week.

The run felt glorious.  My mood went through a complete 180, I'm feeling relaxed and focused, and now I can smoke a pipe confident in the knowledge that I've already undone the damage it's going to do, in advance.

But mostly I'm just glad to be out of this funk.  I don't run so much for the well-being of my body as for that of my mind.

And the fact that it's finally warmer than ass-butt cold out there is helping a great deal, too.

Computers These Days

I'm old. I'm getting my first gray hair.  And sometimes I wear my trousers rolled.

I grew up waiting for my turn at the classroom's Vic-20.  And my fourth grade class only had it because this particular teacher liked technology, and had bought it himself. 

He had an early Apple, too.  Maybe a Lisa.  I don't know.  The display was monochrome green and he made a big deal out of tracking our grades with it, instead of using one of those ledger books all the other teachers used. 

By the time I got to high school I wrote most of my papers on an Olympia typewriter or a hand-me-down IBM PC.  For kicks I picked up a 1940s Remington typewriter.  I had to cut a wooden block to replace the missing rubber foot, and my mother stitched the carriage return strap back together on her Singer sewing machine.  Then I sprayed all the guts down with WD-40 and let it drip-dry for a couple days. 

I loved torturing my teachers with the tiny, hard-to-read typeface.  "I can't afford a word-processor right now.  Sorry, but you're going to have to deal with it."

And then the internet came along and for a few years there, we were living in the future.

* * *

The future's mellowed out, man.  These kids, they won't know a world where they can't take their $300 laptop to Starbucks and connect to the sum total of human knowledge.

Bitterness.

I took a lot of pictures when I was young.  My father left behind a Pentax SLR.  But I was limited by parental budgeting to one roll of film each week.  Then I got older and had to pay for my own film and developing, and didn't take so many pictures.  What would I have made if I'd grown up with digital cameras?  Something like this girl, who is brilliant already and certainly destined for great things? 

I lost three years to mastering Bach and Beethoven on a grand piano that weighs, what, 900 lbs?  I can't get rid of that thing.  It's like a millstone, a tumor.  It's still taking up 36 square feet in my house.

I'm old.  These kids these days are taking the reins of this marvelous new technology.  But it starts to seem a bit like the same old, same old corporate machine, gears driving up numbers on a spreadsheet.  And that's a betrayal. 

Don't you kids know this is supposed to feel groundbreaking, illicit, gleamingly futuristic and alien?  How can you drive all those pixels and polygons through the same old wargames, the same old violence and degradation? 

We've all played Castle Wolfenstein.  It's time to move on.

Getting Comfortable With An Artificial God

I am increasingly convinced of the existence of an Artificial God.  This God is created by our brains as we grow up, I suspect, because we really need someone to talk to while we're exercising our language centers, and because he's the quickest and most sensible explanation for why we're here and what we're doing.  And I'm coming to believe that, even though he may be artificial, he is no less real.

When man disappears, of course, God disappears too.  This doesn't mean there's not other gods manifesting in other corners of the universe as collections of molecules accrue in increasingly complicated ways and start clawing their way towards sentience.  It does seem that intelligent life needs God, whether we actively believe in him or not.

And I'm increasingly okay with that, too.  After a lifetime of resisting religious patterns of thought, it's almost a relief to shrug and say, "I yam what I yam," and sit down to a big can of spinach.

Richard Dawkins will be ashamed of me, of course.  The man has been a hero of mine since I was a teenager and I really hate to let him down.  But if evolution gave us these patterns of thinking, how do we end up saddled with the moral obligation to fight them?

Well, I suppose there are the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and those endless centuries of superstition-driven witch burnings to atone for.  Such crimes seem a pretty high price to pay for the psychological convenience of using faith in a deity to hold our personal narratives together. 

So where to put the compromise?  With the Unitarian Universalists, getting together and practicing a different faith's rituals every week in an exhausting effort to say, "Meh, we're probably all right in our own way?"  Or maybe through the founding of a new church, call it the Church of the Human Farce?  Perhaps we can jump on the raft with the Pastafarians, giving sarcastic thanks to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  At least that gives us a designation to write on our census forms.

No, I think our Artificial God deserves more respect than that.  He's still God.  He's so deep-rooted in our psyche that it took all of human history up to Douglas Adams until we could work out that he was artificial.  He drives us to band together in tribes and form communities and at least pay lip service to getting together once a week so that we have a reason to listen to some stories and then talk to neighbors who we might otherwise never see.  (No, I haven't started going to church.  But the thought of dressing up and going to an afternoon party every week to see if your neighbors are all right really doesn't seem like that bad an idea once you start to think about it.)

So now, is belief in an Artificial God enough to let me into the Freemasons without perjuring myself?

Wait A While And You Can Export Your Evil Plans

There are demons who see themselves as angels.  This is not so strange, really.  Why should there be any distinction between the one and the other?  At least they are, neither of them, human.

* * *

Why is it that children are fascinated with werewolves, vampires, and other monsters?  Is it because most people are, at heart, good, and they realize they are going to spend their entire adult lives striving to be as good as they can?  So when you have the time to play and fantasize, why not spend those hours as something you'll never strive to be, in real life?  Why not let yourself be monstrous?

Is evil banal, as Hannah Arendt said?  Or is it something sharp and exciting and solid that works its fingers into us, something with weight and substance and a corrosively low pH?  Is it something we can flush our bodies free of, through spiritual detoxification and daily prayer? 

As with subatomic particles, I suspect it's both things at once.  Banal and desperately real, a wave and a particle, an idea and a substance.  I suspect it starts as the former and tends to build up over time, until it registers on our minds and so, in turning our senses to it, it finds a home with a definite location.

It is at this point that we make a choice.  We can gather, sequester, and throw the evil away.  Or - 

We can ignore it (only pretending it is still banal) and convince ourselves it isn't there.  Or -

Finally, we can embrace it and sculpt it like clay, or use it as a tool.  We can add weight and features and, hell, we can buy and sell it like a commodity, bundle it up into securities to make them seem a little more substantial, and then sell them off to foreign banks and governments who think they're just looking out for their pensioners.  We can count our money and wait and see how long it's going to take them to wake up and realize what they've bought.