Quickly

I have 19 minutes to post something before going to work. (I start at noon on Fridays to accomodate a meditation/discussion group thing that Susan runs in SL at 10am my time.)

Work has been utterly crazy lately. The concrete work is falling behind schedule, the steelwork is being held up by the façade contractors who can't get themselves organized, they are being held up by the electrical engineers who keep discovering new things that need to be cabled up. That we have been asking the steelwork and façade contractors since February to send us detail plans for approval is somehow irrelevant to the fact that they cannot send their unapproved plans for fabrication today. And all of this is of course the architects' fault.

Anyway.

I had a really nice day so far. Went to bed early last night (before midnight, for the first time in ages), got up early, went to the post office to collect two books from Amazon, and took them downtown to my favourite cafe on a nameless square to open. Perfectly blue sky, gentle breeze, birdsong, temperature around 28°C which is in my opinion all it ever needs to be.

I bought two books on virtual worlds, which will feed into Susan's workshop this summer. Zach Waggoner's "My avatar, my self" is about the construction of identity in real and virtual worlds, and how these affect each other. Edward Castronova's "Exodus to the Virtual World" seems to be primarily about how RL and VL will be affected by the withdrawal of the time and money that we VL'ers are not spending in our RL environments. It seems like he will have a lot to say about happiness too:

For every happy, fulfilled person, how many are there who are bored, frustrated, unappreciated, defeated, unhappy? There's quite a lot of self-medication going on. Whatever people learn in schools, it doesn't seem to be leading to stable homes, happy childhoods, and emotionally grounded adult lives.

I'll be in Canada in less than a month. Sis and BIL are getting married this summer, after twenty-five years together. There will be a small but select ceremony and celebration, with only the most immediate of family in attendance. Various other plans are afoot too, including a further meditation retreat in Halifax (after Malta, and in the place of San Francisco in April).

Harpier cries, 'tis time, 'tis time.

Awake

Woke at around 6am from dreams of being peripherally involved in an inter-family Mafia scam; blogging briefly while the hot chocolate cooks. The clock says it's late enough that I could declare this to be early morning rather than insomnia, but that is not how it feels. I definitely need more sleep.

What's new? Not a lot. Working long hours on the project; the official "breaking of the sod" ceremony is on Saturday, so construction will start very soon indeed. It feels like we are desperately far behind in producing the drawings, but nobody is much worried. I am still the only person actually drawing on this project, and since the weasel-like prime helper is going to be doing the site supervision (touch wood, better him than me) he's not going to be drawing much in future either.

Winter continues, the length and severity of this one are practically unprecedented. Still, I walked home last night through slush and the drip and trickle of meltwater rather than the soft rustle of snowfall, so perhaps there is hope. We shall see. [Later: Froze overnight and currently snowing again. Ah well.]

Reading three books at once: "Anna Karenina" by Tolstoy, in the new-ish translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky (and how smug am I that I got those names right without looking them up?), "The ascent of money" by Niall Ferguson, and "The folklore of Discworld" by Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson. No prize for guessing which is the most fun.

I'm going to Malta at the end of the month, for a real-life meeting of the SL meditation group that Susan joined. I flew so much and so far in the last two years that I was able to get the flight for free. More about that as the time approaches, though in fact it is less than two weeks away. My gods, where does the time go?

Interlude the second

I'm not finished with Israel yet, there is at least one more post in the works. In the meantime, I've been re-reading Evelyn Waugh's marvellous Brideshead Revisited. This book has gone through a complete cycle of affections with me: when I first discovered this novel as a student in England, I loved it and re-read it many times. For some reason, probably a slowly arising general discomfort over Waugh's often caustic wit, it drifted out of favour for a few years. I tried again in the early Eighties, and disliked it: it seemed dated and contrived, full of unloveable characters and improbable incidents. I put the book down after about fifty pages and left it for two decades.

Then I moved to Germany, and it was out of reach and forgotten until a friend brought me a box of my books (one of many from an attic in East London, where the rest hopefully still remain), which proved to contain my copy of Brideshead. I remembered my vague distaste and didn't pick it up for years, until I returned from Israel last week. I'm enjoying it again, and I think I know why.

When I first read the book, I associated with Charles Ryder, the narrator and not-exactly-hero as we met him in the initial pages: I too was freshly arrived at University, feeling exhilarated and also vaguely out of place, excited by the people I was meeting and the unknown worlds opening up to me. When I read it again in the mid-Eighties, there was no character of my then-current age and station to identify with, except perhaps the prig and bigot Brideshead himself. Reading it again now, thirty years on, I can again associate myself with Ryder, this time with the older, wiser and sadder narrator. Or perhaps I was just unfair to it the second time around.

Anyway, here's where I am right now, at a paragraph that brought a lump to my throat and a certain moisture to my eyes. (WARNING: This is a pretty serious spoiler. Those who have not yet read the book should stop reading now.)

"Poor Sebastian!" I said. "It's too pitiful. How will it end?"

"I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I've seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He'll live on, half-in, half-out of the community, a familiar figure pottering around with his broom and his bunch of keys. He'll be a great favourite of the old fathers, something of a joke to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking; he'll disappear every month or so for two or three days, and they'll all nod and smile and say in their various accents, "Old Sebastian's on the bottle again," and then he'll come back, dishevelled and shamefaced, and be more devout for a day or two in the chapel. He'll probably have little hiding places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and then on the sly. They'll bring him forward to act as a guide whenever they have an English-speaking visitor, and he will be completely charming so that before they go, they'll ask about him and perhaps be given a hint that he has high connexions at home. If he lives long enough, generations of missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old character who was somehow part of the Home in their student days, and remember him in their masses. He'll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he'll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he's expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he'll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It's not such a bad way of getting through one's life."

Indeed.

Awake

Woke at 5:15 from a strange dream, waiting now for hot chocolate to cook. I left my working glasses in the office last night, so forgive the typoes.

I was in SL, talking about unhappiness with Beta (from the wedding party). I decided to visit them at their RL home, which was not suburban Milwaukee but a cottage rear the river Thames in the village where AH lived. Beta was in the garden, sitting under trees at the end of an ancient, crumbling red-brick wall (not sure where Noctis was in the logic of the dream). We talked for a while there, then the scene changed and we were walking down curving streets of north London, near Highgate Cemetery, talking about a book that zie had written; then we were back indoors and zie showed me hir latest rejection letter: a YouTube-type video by e-mail from a school principal. I replied that it was wonderful that zie had written a book at all, and not to be worried about rejections. I told Beta about my father and the realities of the publishing business, and somehow the dream changed to farming! I was a self-aware cow, walking around a farm talking to other animals and looking at the new barn being built to replace one that had blown down in a storm. The place where it had stood was occupied by the house my favourite cousin grew up in, which was now painted yellow and in use as a Portuguese restaurant (yes, in the midst of the farm); by this point I was in my human body again. The owner was possibly a disguised AH since there was a dog that held my hand tightly and pulled on it to get me to play, and the other people (guests?) reminded me of his friends after Pat died.

Speaking of books, I am 200 pages into my second reading of Infinite Jest, and am both appalled and amused to realize how much I missed the first time. IJ really does need to be read twice, at least, to understand it. The thing is full of clues and hints about what is going on, but these can only be recognized as such by someone who already knows the story. Fascinating. I'm enjoying it even more this time around. Highly recommended to patient readers with a lot of time on their hands.

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

… is upon us once again. Chestnuts and acorns rain down like hailstones these days as I walk up that last steep stretch of hillside to work (though only by daylight: they don't fall as I walk home at night, interestingly). The heating is on in the office already, because it's cold and damp (a) at that altitude and (b) on the edge of the forest; at home I'm going to hold out for the rest of the month, or until Saturday.

What have I been up to? Mostly work, with a small amount of play. The office is swallowing my life right now, I'm working over 50 hours every week. And it's strenuous work too, lots of thinking. Some evenings when I get home, I am too tired even to read e-mail. This will continue until mid-October, then there will be a downward shifting of gears. The reason is this: the project is on a flat and sandy site beside a lake, the basement is below ground-water level. We need to have the basement floors and walls built and waterproofed before the level rises to its annual high in May, and that means that the construction company will need to start digging on January 2, and that means that we need to get the bulk of the tender documents written and the bids collected and a construction company chosen during November.

Building below the water level is unexpectedly exciting. We are spending entire days in meetings with hydrological engineers and concrete specialists.

I finished Infinite Jest, and after a pause of three weeks (and several other books) have started reading it again. I'll write about IJ some other time, it'll take longer than I have available now (writing in my pyjamas before work), but let me say this about that. IJ is in many places a frustrating and annoying book, nowhere more so than at the end. The diffference between reading a book and listening to a storyteller, is that the reader has physical clues that the tale is about to end ("only 20 more pages"). The reader of IJ holds on to the great big brick of a thing, feeling the immense weight of known story in his left hand and the rapidly dwindling sheaf of unread pages in his right, and thinks "How on earth can all of these loose ends be tied up in the remaining N pages?" Well, dear reader, they aren't. IJ doesn't have an ending, it just stops. This grates, dear readers: it feels like is the author is cheating us, perhaps even mocking our expectations. But then, after a week or so of being annoyed, an interesting thing happened: I found myself reconsidering whether the loose ends had perhaps been tied up after all.

IJ is not written consecutively, event after event, week after week, in the manner of a police procedural: it moves chapter-length in jump-cuts forwards and back across several decades. Perhaps, I thought to myself, the answers are in there somewhere. So I started reading it again, as a surprisingly large number of people apparently do. I'll let you know.

Time to go. I hope you are all well and happy, my dears.

DFW on worship and truth

Not actually from "Infinite Jest," but quite marvellous nonetheless.

The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see [life, the universe and everything]. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship…

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Taken from that now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005. Read it here before it disappears behind a pay-wall.

Shabbat shalom, my dears.

Towards a post about reading "Infinite Jest"

I haven't been doing enough of this since getting back to Germany (in fact, not really since leaving Germany, I fell far behind schedule while at the wedding and elsewhere this summer), so this will not be that post. However, I want to state for the record that I am still reading "Infinite Jest" and am still enjoying almost all of it greatly.

Are there dull bits? Hell yes. Oddly enough, the bits that people complain most about in the forums are the among the parts that I most enjoyed. I am a sucker for arcana and apparently-trivial-but-well-written detail: I have read Proust twice, and every sentence of "The name of the rose" (yes, even the church-history bits).

But there is dissent in the ranks. In her latest post at Infinite Summer, Avery Edison said

I am not enjoying "Infinite Jest."

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not going to quit. I’m going to read the whole thing and talk about it over the summer because I said I would, but that doesn’t mean I have to lie and pretend I’m having a super-fun experience, right?

The forums immediately filled with people saying "Not liking it? so quit."

Wrong — in this context and community. Infinitedetox posted an excellent reply:

[H]ere’s the thing — is it ever really enough to dismiss a work of art on the grounds of taste-incompatibility? I’m going to say no, because look — there are certain things in life that transcend personal taste, and yes, goddamn it, art is one of them.

Let me give an example. I kind of hate Thomas Pynchon. I find his writing glib and moronic, and I can’t make heads or tails of "Gravity’s Rainbow." But I’ve come to recognize that this is my failure, not Pynchon’s. That there is a large group of reasonably intelligent people out there who have the highest opinion of Pynchon’s writing, and that rather than convincing myself that these people are all full of shit, my position is that I am somehow failing to do the work necessary to arrive at a robust understanding of Pynchon’s work. […]

The crowning irony of this entire discussion is that this notion of personal taste — personal happiness, if you will — elevated above all else is pretty much the intellectual crux of "Infinite Jest." And so we have people using personal happiness as the primary criterium for deciding whether or not to read a book about the dangers of using personal happiness as a primary criterium for deciding things.

Exactly.

Milwaukee and Toronto

I haven't written about being in Milwaukee yet, because I couldn't find a way to say anything worth reading (assume for the moment that my ramblings are potentially worth reading) that didn't get into matters that should remain private. "What happens at [the wedding] stays at [the wedding]," as it were. There is much that I would like to say about it, about the people I met and the things I learned, but these stories are not mine to tell.

I can say that it was the happiest wedding I've ever been to, completely free of tension and status games. There are two reasons for that, I think. First, that no family members were present (other than N's daughter): the group consisted solely of friends, and while nobody but the happy couple knew everyone, it is also true that everybody knew at least a half-dozen of the others. Secondly, and relatedly, that we were composed of two overlapping self-selecting groups: we had a buttload of common experiences and interests to unite us.

The ceremony was conducted in the couple's back yard; a friend from Second Life officiated, and we all took turns to say a few words of congratulation and blessing, after which we celebrated with margaritas, sparklers, live music and waterpistol fights. Woot.

On the last evening, we had a spontaneous meet-up in Second Life, which was vastly amusing: picture us sitting at our laptops around the dining table or in the living room, chatting both in SL and across the screens in RL. It was vastly amusing; but you probably had to be there to appreciate the humour of the situation.

It was a wonderful weekend, full of joy and companionship and great conversation and fine food, and of near-constant and near-random hugs and headscritches. What I miss most is the hugging, actually, the easy and comfortable bodily contact between friends. There's not enough hugging in the world, peoples. Get to work on this, please.

I have been in Toronto for four days now, talking with my parents and hanging about downtown. I'll write about my father's condition another time. Tomorrow I fly south to visit another SL friend.

"Infinite Jest" is proceeding well. I'm reading the chapter about AA meetings, and am finding it so rich and so thoughtprovoking that I am artificially slowing myself down, making myself take time to think about it as I read. There were several Twelve-Steppers (as they call themselves) at the meeting, reading this makes me see them with different eyes.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. I hope you are happy and healthy, and encourage you to hug a friend — or even a stranger.

July already

Odd to think that I will be somewhere in North American airspace at this time in a week. Booked several flights, about two years' worth of flying by my usual measures.

The itinerary is unnecessarily complicated, due to North America's inability to offer sensible and convenient train travel. Case in point: Milwaukee (destination two) and Regina (destination three) both have train stations, but one is Amtrack and the other is VIArail. Their networks connect at precisely three points, none of which is in the Midwest. So I will fly from one city which has a train station to Toronto and there take a connecting flight to another city which has a train station. Absurd. This hub & spoke arrangement might make economic sense for the airlines but it is hell on us passengers.

In case you are curious, the list of places I will voluntarily visit is: Chicago, Milwaukee, Regina, Durham NC, and New Jersey. I will pass with gritted teeth and not-only-subvocal expressions of dismay through: Toronto, either Calgary or Edmonton or Denver, and possibly Raleigh NC.

I have started reading Infinite Jest by the late DFW, responding to the challenge/invitation issued by the crew at Infinite summer: to read the whole damned thing, all 981 pages (in this edition) and 388 endnotes, some of which have footnotes of their own. I'm up to page 212 and endnote 74* and am loving it.

I can't for the life of me think how IJ stayed below my radar for these thirteen years***, because it is very much the kind of book that I love: Excursive, discursive, voluble, laconic, fond of words as things in their own right, curious about and amused by the whole world. Probably I was put off it (or DFW, as I hadn't read anything longer than a magazine article by him) by the enormous hype. In this case, surprisingly enough, it was justified. IJ is quite marvellous, it's sure to be one that I keep and re-read.

Other than that life has been going on much as it usually does. Lots of panic this week, with an average of 10.5 hours a day on the first four days. Tomorrow will be easier, Fridays are always only half-days for me (because Susan hosts a meditation session in the mornings) — but architects' half-days are often six hours long anyway.


* I think I've had that one already. It's hard to be sure because I tend to keep reading beyond the end of the note that I flipped** back to read.

** Well, I say "flipped" but in fact I have a second bookmark set in the notes.

*** Actually this should be no surprise at all that I didn't read IJ when it was new and highly praised, as that is my usual response. I assume that the reviewers are in fact praising the item's fashionability and up-to-date-ness, and further assume that it will be seen as nearly worthless once the fashion changes and the calendar has shed a few leaves. This spares me having to read a buttload of dross, but means that I occasionally miss out on significant delights. Ah well, better late than never.

Still

As in "still here," but also as in "motionless."

It's been a busy month, much has happened in my work and social (and Second) lives, though having said that there are few examples that immediately come to mind that I might mention. I'm reasonably calm and not unhappy, and even getting a few things done.

Weather was miserable for most of the last month, cold and windy and raining most days, and sometimes snow on the ridge of the Killesberg when I looked out my kitchen window mornings. Last year at this time it was sunny and warm.

Listening to Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, a surpassingly wonderful piece of music which I have written about before. Fine accompaniment to a greyish and idle weekend's bloggery.

I've been using Twitter as a kind of microblog, writing sometimes several tweets a day (and occasionally none for several days at a time, yes yes). Unfortunately there seems to be no way for non-Twitterers to access this, my current tweets are displayed on this page but if you don't want to keep refreshing the page you will have to get a Twitter account of your own.

Thinking about summer. Beta and Lumi are getting married in mid-July; I am invited and do want to attend. The SL meditation group is holding a week-long retreat in Berkeley at the end of August; that too I would love to attend. There's no way that I can afford to cross the ocean twice this year, but neither can I spend six weeks hanging about in North America. To further complicate matters, Sis and BIL are planning a tour of Italy in late September/early October, and we have arranged to meet in Venice for a long weekend or equivalent. I guess the Berkeley retreat loses out. Perhaps I could find something retreat-like a little closer to home?

I've started reading the New Testament again; not really sure why, but probably prompted by discussions in the meditation group meetings in SL. We were brought up in the ethics and standards of the Protestant tradition, though neither the Bible nor God were ever explicitly mentioned at home (Sis, feel free to comment on this if your memories differ). As far as I can remember, my first encounter with the Bible was in Grade 6: over the entire year, we read and discussed a chapter of the King James Version every morning. I don't know that this was a formal part of the curriculum, but it was in any case never challenged by us or our parents. Mr. Bowman was a very good and thoughtful teacher: he didn't present Christianity as the absolute truth that we must believe, we simply read this particular book and talked about what "good" or "right" might mean. I found it fascinating and very moving, this was perhaps the class and the subject in which I learned to think.

That experience had a lasting effect, years later I could still quote from memory much of what we had read, and I can see now how strongly it shaped my thinking. I could not have said so at the time, having neither the mental tools nor the necessary critical distance, but at least part of my strong positive response to Camus (and Buddha, and Mahatma Gandhi) was in the echoes of Ecclesiastes raised by their thinking. Right action seemed obvious and self-evidently true when I first encountered it years later, as did the Wu wei of Taoism.

Thinking about that now, I cannot believe that I would not have discussed that with my mother, so much of it would have been new and confusing to me as a 12-year-old, yet I have no memory of doing so. Perhaps I should ask her, while I still can. [Updated: perhaps we did discuss religion at home after all. I remember seeing a particular Playmobil set, of a Roman centurion on horseback with a cloak, and a beggar on foot, and saying to Slim that this was clearly Saint Martin (she, the supposed Christian, didn't know the story). Now, Martin is not a Biblical figure, he dates from the fourth century AD, so I would guess that I did not learn about him from Bible lessons with Mr. Bowman.]

The play's the thing

I've started reading my Christmas present books, beginning with Bill Bryson's biography of Shakespeare in the Eminent Lives series. It's well written (of course, Bryson hasn't disappointed me yet), amusing and erudite. The book is a kind of meta-biography, it talks about how we know what we think we know about Shakespeare, and how little is actually documented of the life of a fairly significant person of that time. There are several stretches of up to five years where there is no evidence that Shakespeare was alive at all, bar that he demonstrably did something later on. (On the other hand, it is also true that we know more about him than almost anyone else who was alive then.)

Here's Bryson talking about Shakespeare's "Globe" theatre in Southwark:

The Globe itself didn't last long... But what a few years they were. No theatre — perhaps no human enterprise — has seen more glory in only a decade or so than the Globe during its first manifestation. For Shakespeare this period marked a burst of creative brilliance unparalleled in English literature. One after another, plays of unrivalled majesty dropped from his quill: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra.

We thrill at these plays now, but what must it have been like when they were brand new, when all their references were timely and sharply apt, and all the words never before heard? Imagine what it must have been like to watch Macbeth without knowing the outcome, to be part of a hushed audience hearing Hamlet's soliloquoy for the first time, to witness Shakespeare speaking his own lines. There cannot have been, anywhere in history, many more favoured places than this.

Aye.

Life etc.

Yes, I'm still here despite the silence. Time is flashing past at a frightening rate, even faster than usual. I will be on my way to Canada in ten days, for two weeks of family and food and properly cold weather.

Speaking of which, it continues to snow lightly (as I twittered a few days back), but the ambient temperature down here in the valley is still too high for the snow to settle. I am trying an experiment this year: I am only heating the living room (because I sit here for hours on end) and the bathroom (because I'm a wimp), letting the other rooms do as they wish. (This is Germany, there is no danger of anything in the apartment freezing). Getting undressed for bed is pretty grim, coming as it does after a few hours in the warm living room, but I find that I wake up toasty warm and very comfortable despite the temperature. This was prompted by reading a claim that central heating and suchlike actually make us more susceptible to colds and the flu by de-training our natural bodily resistance. We'll see.

That last tweet should not worry anyone, nothing happened, everybody is safe. But there were a few long and quite harrowing late-night conversations until X arrived at that safe point. I'll tell you this for free, dear friends: whatever therapists earn, it is nowhere near enough. [Updated: Dervala writes movingly about loneliness and unhappiness: "I’ve come to believe that Starbucks may be the largest private mental health organization in the country, a place where anyone with two bucks for a drip coffee can get smiled at and can sit safely next to other human beings for a while." Go read.]

Just finished reading a kind of autobiography, "Istanbul" by Orhan Pamuk, he of last year's the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. It's a strange book, no more a true autobiog than say "Tristram Shandy" was. It is actually about Istanbul and anger and melancholy, in nearly equal measures, with young Orhan popping up now and then to point to things. Very well written, at least in the English translation, recommended for readers who aren't after cheerfulness or action.

For those who do want some cheerfulness: put on your headphones, close your office door, and watch this video. Very funny, pix are harmless but the words are definitely not safe for work. Enjoy.

Awake

Rain falling against my window woke me from a pastoral dream which had turned to dystopian violence. What I feel in such dreams is equal parts fear and humiliation at my helplessness in the face of unreason, my inability to do anything about the situation.

It's been two weeks since I posted. What have I been up to, you ask? 'Tis a fair question, for which I have no particularly pleasing answer. I might well say that I have been on a sort of internal holiday, since I have also done very little work during this time. I have spent a lot of time, entire working days, in Second Life; though again even there I would be hard pressed to tell you what I did in SL too. Mostly talking and listening and a fair amount of worrying, about two friends who are going through rough patches in their real lives. I don't feel that I can say much about this, because they aren't my stories to tell. I am slightly uneasy at the amount of time I spend in SL, and the increasing proportion of my emotional life that takes place there.

Working slightly less than half-time with G and U on the two competitions due this summer, with moderate comfort. Working very semi-occasionally for the Münsters, I've hardly lifted a finger since delivering the last batch of changes.

Reading quite a lot: the King James Version Apocrypha, Terry Pratchett's "Making money" which I found quite good despite the Lioness's poor opinion of it, Michel Houellebecq's "Plateforme" (in German, a Christmas present; very disturbing, quite a good read), "The black swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (expect the unexpected), and currently both Charles Frazier's "Thirteen moons" (coming of age in the Appalachians during the Indian Wars) and a collection of essays on reading "the classics" by various German authors. The disappointment of the summer has been re-reading T.S. Eliot after more than a dozen years, sparked by my remembering "Prufrock" recently: much of it is unreadable. Many poems come across as badly dated, as fusty as the Victorian stuff that the Modernists opposed. I still have a soft spot for Prufrock and "Ash Wednesday" and the "Four Quartets", but the rest is superfluous. Sorry, Tom. And let me draw to your attention a book review in a New Yorker from this Spring, about economics and choice and what utter fools we mortals be: fascinating stuff, well worth reading even for non-economists.

Hot chocolate is ready, so I shall sign off and take it back to bed to read myself to sleep. Shabbat shalom, my dears, may you all be happy and healthy this weekend.

Update

Doc says "no more heparin" which is probably a good thing, and "the thrombus is measurably shrinking" which is definitely a good thing. I shall continue to bandage my leg every day for another week or so, then see how it looks. He ordered blood tests, to be certain that I am otherwise in good shape; the last such general test was made in 2001, so it's probably well overdue.

Doc also says that the vein will probably remain blocked for the rest of my life, not to worry though because the body is full of veins and the blood will find another way back into circulation. This puzzles me: is it to be considered a positive outcome?

On the other hand I am thankfully aware that my burdens are far lighter than many others' and I do count my blessings often. One doesn't wish to be as self-centered as the man who, on hearing that his barber had had to cancel their appointment because he'd broken his leg, muttered "Damn, why does this always happen to me?" However, having said that: I have become aware of the mass of twitches and twinges and flashes of discomfort in my body, which I'd never taken full notice of before. Walking home from a cappuccino at the Dead White Male Poet Cafe, I realized that I had a knot in my chest, and was able through poking and prodding to identify it as being the effect of a mildly out-of-place rib and overtense shoulder and upper back muscles.

It's been about two weeks since I started cutting down on coffee, reducing my intake from two or three cups a day to one or two a week. Having done so, I notice the effect that caffeine and sugar have on my nerves, temperament and stomach — and I don't like it. I am jingling and twitching all over, irritable and unconcentrated and easily annoyed. A resolution: I will give up sugar completely (coffee is the last holdout, I gave up putting it in tea and on cereal twenty-five years ago), and will continue to drink coffee only as a rare treat on very special occasions.

I read an interview with Peter Sloterdijk about doping scandals in sports and the Tour de France in particular. It's available in English on the website of "Der Spiegel," the magazine in which it appeared, in a very good translation. Fascinating reading, as always with Sloterdijk.

The Mauersegler are still here, though to judge by the experience of the last few years (after I began taking notes) they should be gone within a week. The days are already getting noticeably shorter, the weather seems to be cooling and calming down.

Getting ready

Because it's a mere fifteen hours before I have to leave home for the airport, and because I have had a whole month in which to do the work, I am only now compiling Mac and Windows versions of my database to be released for download from our website. This is an utterly idiotic thing to be doing, I know, because I shall be unavailable for the first week after releasing them. Any problems that might arise will go unpatched, to the great joy of our customers as you can imagine, until after my return. I should really stop this nonsense and get on to more useful things like cleaning and packing. [Updated: the new version has indeed been put on hold.]

Booked flights on a last-minute website again, and once again the cheapest route to London was via Zurich. I'll be landing this time in the new-to-me City Airport in the Docklands, which will be quite exciting. I hope there will be a reasonably convenient bus route from there to the centre, rather than having to take the Tube in.

(Just spent half an hour browsing around satellite photos of London (page titles are all wrong, just ignore them), quite fascinating. I wish that this resource had been available when I lived there, I would have seen — and explored and inhabited — the city quit differently.)

I shall have my laptop with me, e-mail for the answering of, but whether I can get online often and long enough to blog or visit your websites remains to be seen — to say nothing of logging into Second Life. In case I cannot get online, I wish you all a pleasant week, and hope to be back in contact on my return to Stuttgart on Friday the Thirteenth.

But first parallel to all the above, I've been reading a review by Daniel Mendelsohn in a recent "New Yorker" of a new edition of Herodotus' 2500-year-old "Histories" of the Greco-Persian wars, which I have been reading for several weeks now. It's a great review of a wonderful book (though I am reading not the edition in question but an older Penguin translation by Aubrey de Sélincourt), and I recommend both to your attention. Here are Mendelsohn's penultimate paragraphs:

All of which is to say that while Herodotus may or may not have anticipated hypertext, he certainly anticipated the novel. Or at least one kind of novel. Something about the Histories, indeed, feels eerily familiar. Think of a novel, written fifty years after a cataclysmic encounter between Europe and Asia, containing both real and imagined characters, and expressing a grand vision of the way history works in a highly tendentious, but quite plausible, narrative of epic verve and sweep. Add an irresistible anti-hero eager for a conquest that eludes him precisely because he understands nothing, in the end, about the people he dreams of subduing; a hapless yet winning indigenous population that, almost by accident, successfully resists him; and digressions powerfully evoking the cultures whose fates are at stake in these grand conflicts. Whatever its debt to the Ionian scientists of the sixth century B.C. and to Athenian tragedy of the fifth, the work that the Histories may most remind you of is "War and Peace."

And so, in the end, the contemporary reader is likely to come away from this ostensibly archaic epic with the sense of something remarkably familiar, even contemporary. That cinematic style, with its breathtaking wide shots expertly alternating with heart-stopping closeups. The daring hybrid genre that integrates into a grand narrative both flights of empathetic fictionalizing and the anxious, footnote-prone self-commentary of the obsessive, perhaps even neurotic amateur scholar. (To many readers, the Histories may feel like something David Foster Wallace could have dreamed up.) A postmodern style that continually calls attention to the mechanisms of its own creation and peppers a sprawling narrative with any item of interest, however tangentially related to the subject at hand.

Then, there is the story itself. A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land—an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man, far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For although it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at best seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations.

Indeed. Go read. But don't buy the particular edition being reviewed: the translation is said by Mendelsohn to be awful.

Cognitive surplus

A brilliant article this morning by Clay Shirky:

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation. [...]

So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."

At least they're doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list... However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

Indeed. Go read. And then participate: Blog, comment, edit, post. Or be an elf.

And put a hammer through your TV while you're at it.

Grumpitude

The man ahead of me at the neighbourhood mags-and-smokes shop spent 100 Euros on lottery tickets this morning. He looked like a local resident, an ordinary citizen, certainly not someone rich enough to spend (I'm trying to avoid the value-loaded word "waste") that amount of money with impunity.

The purchase didn't seem to make him happy, there was no sign of cheerful anticipation or even of a particularly generous portion of hope in his manner. I would rather say that he was resentful of spending so much money, perhaps even feeling himself a fool to do so; and I could hardly disagree with him.

And before you ask, the answer is yes: I too paid my share of the Idiocy Tax (as people call it here), and wasted 2.50 Euros for a single lottery ticket. I am amused to consider that my chance of winning is not significantly worse than his.

Second Life has been struggling for the last 24 hours with database-server and network problems, and at present is offline (closed entirely) for the second time in that period. I remind myself at such moments of the utter improbability of what the Lindens have achieved, how much like an absurdly optimistic science-fiction the current state of the art of SL would have sounded even five years ago. Nothing has ever been attempted on this scale before, neither in the number of concurrent users nor in the freedom of creation and movement allowed them. Most of the tools and technologies used are brand new, many are being invented right now as we speak; it's all running on prototypes and theories that need testing, and that some of these fail the test should really neither surprise nor unduly dismay us.

I guess I shall have to spend the evening reading more of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace."* This is no hardship, it's a wonderful novel well translated and I am enjoying it greatly. But the physical book is infuriating me no end. It's been computer-typeset, of course, as all books have been for several years now; and an error has crept in. After page 157, the footnotes to page N appear not where they should, at the foot of that page, but at the top of the next page. I thought this was funny when I first saw it, presuming that the error would be solved in the current episode or chapter, or the next section at the latest. But the problem recurs right through the whole goddamned book, up to the very last footnote. What a miserable piece of shit! I am inclined to write and ask for my money back, just to register a protest.

Much as I admire the translators' efforts, much as I am enjoying reading this novel in its new form, I would advise book lovers not to buy this particular edition (purchased in London: Vintage Classics, a British Random House offprint). Wait for it to be revised and reprinted (as it surely will be), or for a paperback version of the translation to appear. Those who have already bought a flawed copy may register their displeasure on the VC website's contact page — and bloody good luck to you trying to get the "submit" button to work. Bah humbug. Incompetence abounds.

* Google bomb, hoping to warn anyone who might otherwise buy this flawed edition.

Awake

Bone-tired but wide awake at 2:45 a.m. Changing to and from summer time always discombobulates me, like a mini-jetlag without the pleasures of travel. I slept for about two hours this afternoon, waking in semi-darkness at what my alarm clock informed me was "6." I assumed 6 a.m. until I noticed that I was fully dressed, then remembered lying down for a nap at 4 p.m. and realized that it must be afternoon/evening.

Recovering slowly. Still coughing, but without pain; still feeling as though my lungs were full of goo; still weak and tired.

22°C on Sunday, 12°C today on Monday.

I've finished two of the ten books I bought in London, and am about to start on the third, Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, after reading about it in the New Yorker. I tried W&P once before, many years ago, in a Penguin Classics translation; it didn't hold my attention. I am curious to see how this new edition will be. [Updated: first notes on the novel, and the book-as-object, here.]

Like a patient etherized upon a table

Being another dose of dailyness.

Blogging for a break from translation. It's going well, I started earlier than usual today and so will be finished here at 7 p.m. despite doing an hour and a half more than my daily target of five hours. That's actual constructive working hours, by the way: we self-employeds don't get paid for taking coffee breaks or stealing paperclips or discussing football around the water cooler like you office-worker types do.

The weather is changing: the day has turned overcast and windy, and the temperature is dropping fast. The forecast is to return to just-above-zero for the weekend. It's both a good thing and a bad decision, that I seized the opportunity to wear my leather jacket today for the first time in 2008: it'll be a while before I get another chance, but let us hope that I don't freeze solid on the eight-minute walk home.

It amuses me to watch myself becoming part of the neighbourhood of Rose Street, to be on nodding terms with the pram-pushing moms and their kids, to be recognized by the mailman and the UPS guy when we pass. I am glad that I made the decision to move my office here, and extremely fortunate that G and U are so seldom here. Their presence is far more distracting and interrupting than the view through the window; even when they leave me in peace I am disturbed by their actions and interactions behind me.

Spoke to a friend from London last night, who phoned up to invite me to his fiftieth birthday celebrations in three weeks. I am inclined to go, just for a weekend, even if both time and money are short at present. Makes me think again about my own upcoming birthday, and think that I should really consider doing something celebratory-ish about it. At the very least, I should delve deeply enough to establish why it is that I feel such a reluctance to celebrate, and deal with what I find under that particular stone. One step at a time, dear grasshopper.

[Updated a little later] I've just re-read "Prufrock," having googled it to be sure that I'd quoted correctly in this post's title. Damn, but it's good. I had forgotten what a fine poem it was, and what a superb voice Tom had; and I had definitely forgotten that it was rhymed verse. It's been many years since I last read this, because I gave away my copy of the Collected Poems and have never found a replacement.

Read the poem and the Wikipedia article, and enjoy.

What now?

Being a short exercise in self-flagellation

Blogging in the not-so-new office, on my own on a partly-sunny day, Beethoven's 6th Symphony (filtered through Liszt) is playing quietly, throat and lungs behaving only moderately badly.

G and U invited me to move my office here should I wish to do so, and I am thinking of taking up the offer. Several reasons: first, the one or two cappuccinos I drink here are healthier than the half-litre of filter coffee that I would drink at home; it would give me a guaranteed minimum of 2 x 8 minutes' walk every day, which I sometimes don't manage otherwise; thirdly, the discipline of coming here to work, and really working when here, would be very good; but mainly because my landlady has given me notice to quit. (Yes, not even the scare last summer could make me pay my rent regularly. Am I not the biggest idiot alive?) I am looking for a much smaller apartment to save on rent, so moving my office here would be a sound first step.

Discipline would be a fine thing too. I charged 55 hours to the Münsters for January, eleven half-days, in practical terms a quarter-time job. What sort of arsefoolishness is that? Do I expect to keep this job with that piddling pittance of work? To put things in perspective, I spent nearly three times that long lollygagging about in Second Life last month. I haven't touched my own database since before Christmas, customers and partners are beginning to grumble and whine.

The plan for February is to find a new small apartment ASAP, do 120 100 hours work on the Münsters' translation and 50 hours on my own database, and get caught up on taxes for 2007. SL can have what is left; how annoying that I should have just yesterday been offered a Second Job there, but it's highly unlikely to pay an hourly rate that is comparable to what I can earn from the Münsters or even from McDonalds.

So I sit here and wonder in more practical terms, how to move my office here. What is "my office"? Four dictionaries and a computer, really; the translation needs nothing more now that we have access to the Internets here. If I were to do this sensibly, I could get by with hardly any new investment at all: I could use this current (office) computer's keyboard, monitor and mouse with Alberich, carrying him back and forth (because I would still need to send and receive e-mail at home, and no other machine there can run SL. Priorities again, bah). The second-most cost effective step would be to buy another Mac Mini and leave it here, still using the existing KVM setup. Probably the least cost-effective step would be to buy a new laptop as I fantasized before Christmas, when I thought I'd be earning 5000 Euros a month from the Münsters (an impossible dream, I now realize, given that my brain starts dribbling out through my earholes after about five hours' translating; but the real obstacle was and remains my laziness and rabbit-in-the-headlights hysterical frozen-stiff panicking).

Make it so. I shall arise now, and go to the local Mac dealer, and a KVM adaptor buy there, and try carrying Alberich back and forth for a week or so. We shall see.

With that in mind, dear friends there may be some interruptions in blogging and commenting (as there were during the last few months, I know)—and should be some interruptions in SLing—in the weeks to come.

And finally here's Régis Debray writing on "the material forms in which [ideas] were transmitted" in the New Left Review, in which he suggests a new way of looking at historical, cultural, time:

First, what we may call the logosphere: that long period stretching from the invention of writing (and of clay tablets, papyrus, parchment scrolls) to the coming of the printing press. The age of the logos, but also that of theology, in which writing is, first and foremost, the inscription of the word of God, the ‘sacred carving’ of the hieroglyph. God dictates, man transcribes—in the Bible or the Koran—and dictates in his turn. Reading is done aloud, in company; man’s task is not to invent but to transmit received truths.

A second period, the graphosphere, runs from 1448 to around 1968: from the Gutenberg Revolution to the rise of TV. The age of reason and of the book, of the newspaper and political party. The poet or artist emerges as guarantor of truth, invention flourishes amid an abundance of written references; the image is subordinate to the text. The third, still expanding today, is the era of the videosphere: the age of the image, in which the book is knocked off its pedestal and the visible triumphs over the great invisibles—God, History, Progress—of the previous epochs. […]

Yet although these three regimes succeed each other in historical time, each asserting its own predominant forms and modes, it should go without saying that any one of us contains all the ages at once. Inside each of us there lies a calligraphic East, a printed Europe, a widescreen America; and the continents negotiate within us without losing their respective place. Each one of us is, simultaneously, God, Reason and Emotion; theocrat, ideocrat, videocrat; saint, hero and star. We dream of ourselves as standing outside time; we think about our century; we wonder what to do with our evening.

Love that last sentence; how true, how sadly true. Even if you don't want to read the (long, slightly pompous) article, do please follow the link and scroll down to the bottom, and have a close look at the comparative table there (from which the tripartite examples of the last paragraph are taken). I found it fascinating.

Shabbat shalom, my dearies. Enjoy the weekend.