Ambrose & Elsewhere

Farhad Manjoo has a pretty good column up at Slate.com on the advantages and disadvantages of Ubuntu, probably the most user-friendly flavor of the Open Source operating system Linux.

My little Eee PC has Ubuntu installed on it; this was my primary computer for the seven or so weeks I was in Italy last summer. On balance, I’d say it was a good experience, and whenever I have occasion to use the little notebook these days (usually when I’m giving a slideshow to one of my classes), it’s with a certain nostalgia and affection.

Hey! I feel like saying. Do you remember that time I was updating your software on battery power, and your power ran out, and your OpenOffice was more-or-less borked, but I figured out how to fix it by going in and removing the damaged files with the command line? Good times, eh? Remember that?

It doesn’t; it’s not a sentimental machine. But I remember, and I think it illustrates the best and worst things about Ubuntu. The Mac OS or Windows (in any iteration) may have various disdvantages, but they’re not very breakable. Linux is different. An unskilled user can easily destroy or damage essential parts of the software. In fact, this is rather likely, as Linux requires more tinkering by the user than proprietary operating systems.

On the other hand, there’s a huge community of extremely helpful Linux users online; pretty much every question you might have has been asked and answered on some Ubuntu forum somewhere. If not, you can ask it, with confidence that you’ll get some sort of civil and helpful answer. I never would have figured out how to repair the damage I’d done to my computer without the help of the Ubuntu forums. The patience, dedication and knowledge of the Open Source community is a tremendous resource.

And, if you go Open Source, you’ll need that resource. That’s the bottom line: most Open Source software just isn’t as user-friendly as its proprietary equivalent. It’s for people who like to pop the hood and tinker with the engine. That’s not usually me nor, I suspect, most computer-users, so I don’t expect any version of Linux to hit the big time especially soon.

1. I’m completely against the anathematizing of specific words or word-types. Except. You know. Sometimes.

Does anyone except a geologist ever really need to say “epicenter”? And “virtually”: there’s virtually never a reason to use it. Those are old complaints. The thing that’s bugging me lately is “basically”: what does it tell the listener except that they can’t trust what you’re saying? But “basically” is the new “virtually”–people are using it all over the place, sometimes several times in a sentence and–this is the main thing–they should not. It makes the angels cry. And I believe this strongly and sincerely, but I heard myself using “basically” this morning, so maybe there’s nothing that can be done about it.

2. It has been perfect biking weather lately–cool and clear, with the color changes in the leaves well under way. But time pressures of various sorts have kept me off the bike-trail. I’ve been trying to keep up on the exercise thing by using the old rowing machine we’ve had around the house, eh, basically forever.

The thing is, this practice causes one of our cats very deep concern. Clark is an older kitten, maybe five or six months now, and he evidently considers me his second-string human, worth paying attention to when my daughter isn’t around. When I sit down on the rowing machine, he usually comes from wherever he is in the house and perches in a window nearby, staring bemusedly at me as I work the machine or vice versa. He clearly thinks the rowing stuff is puzzling and stupid.

Once, though, as I started to row, it happened to start raining. Clark whipped his head around to stare out at the drops falling on him through the screen, then whipped his head back to stare at me accusingly: What did you do?

“Post hoc, propter hoc,” I said to him, but he was already out of there. It probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference if he’d stayed to listen; kittens are surprisingly unresponsive to Latin or logic.

The SF Signal guys have a new Mind Meld feature up, asking a bunch of writers, “Which Authors and Books Have Most Influenced Your Writing?”… and for some reason they asked me. Odd to see my byline in there with Lois Bujold, Joe Haldeman and others.

Over the past week I was doing line-edits of Blood of Ambrose and a new(ish) Morlock story for Black Gate and I was forcibly reminded that I cannot read my own work attentively. I don’t mean that I find it unbearable (though that’s a point of view, I guess). But if I sit down and try to proofread something I’ve written, soon I start fiddling with the writing, and I drift away from the text-as-it-is toward some glowing Platonic ideal of the-text-as-it-was-meant-to-be. It’s a pleasant state, a very pleasant state–in some ways better than the urgent fever of initial composition. But it’s the worst possible state of mind to spot, say, the dozen or so instances where I wrote “they” but should have written “the” (or vice versa). The best way for me to tackle that assignment is with a hardcopy and a pen and work in short stretches, but even that doesn’t always keep me on task.

So it was as a fellow sufferer that I saw recently some graffiti in a building where I teach a class. Someone had written, in bold black marker and carefully formed capitals,

Maybe some oblique political comment here, but the main thing is that all the Palindroning about the Weathermen lately has been reminding me of the old video-from-before-they-were-videos of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”… and, in turn, of the Weird Al parody, “Bob” which (as the huge hand of fate would have it) is made up entirely of palindromes.

To celebrate her second collection of stories, Kelly Link is giving away (most) of her first collection, Magic for Beginners, as a digital download.

I will not lie to you: most fiction that could be classed as interstitial makes me merely tired. But Link pulls off some very cool things, especially in the famous title story. And it’s free!

[Seen at GalleyCat.]

In the course of eviscerating one of Robert Sheckley’s early stories, James Blish penned (or typed, more probably) the immortal line “they look like rabbits, but if you call them smeerps that makes it science fiction.” This made its way into the famed (and partly infamous) Turkey City Lexicon as an injunction against “false exoticism.”

I thought about this recently when xkcd published the fiction rule of thumb” (embedded approvingly by John Scalzi on Whatever):

The first time I saw it I sort of shrugged: I know where the complaint comes from. You don’t call a rabbit a smeerp.

But it bugged me, too, because you also shouldn’t call a smeerp a rabbit. Say your heroes ride vipplequangs around, and a vipplequang is like a horse–except it’s a kind of lizard and whenever the three moons are aligned in the sky it turns into a relentlessly carnivorous land-fish that is prone to devouring its rider. Should you call it a horse just to make it easier on the reader? Obviously not. It doesn’t really do that, for one thing, if the peculiarities of vipplequangs are important for some story you’re telling.

Also, people read SF/F, in part, to enter a landscape that has vipplequangs not just horses and smeerps not just rabbits–other worlds, with real exoticism, not false exoticism. SF/F that doesn’t meet that test, that makes imaginary reality into an unfunhouse mirror of the mundane, may have other virtues that make up for this glurky sucking quality that reeks of fail. Or, you know, may not. It’s a case-by-case thing.

Either way, I argue that the proposed rule-of-thumb be rejected. Everyone gets to make up as many words as they want for their stories; success or failure depends on whether it’s well done or badly done, nothing else. (And, from what I’ve seen, Stephenson does it well in Anathem and xkcd’s criticism is the sound of someone not getting it. But I’ve only read excerpts so far, so take that with a pinch of salted thumb.)

1. A Meme

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Seen latest at rimrunner‘s LJ.

I often do the book meme, but I never post it. That’s because the books stacked around my computer are for mostly for work, and not the fun amusing parts of work either. The sentences always turn out to be boring or pretentious.

But today I had a stack of to-be-read-mixed-with-have-read books sitting next to me, and on top of it was Binary Star #1: “Destiny Times Three” by Fritz Leiber & “Riding the Torch” by Norman Spinrad.

“Give me Leiber Three or give me death!” I shrieked (not really meaning it) and plunged in.

He plummeted, frantically squeezing the controls of the flying togs he was not wearing.

That’s perfect by itself. I refuse to break the spell by quoting the next 1-4 sentences.

2. A Theme

Everyone’s checking the “search inside” function of Amazon’s page for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror to see if they’re mentioned in it. Who am I to start acting like a maverick this late in my go-along-to-get-along life? I checked it in the sublime confidence that I would not be mentioned. But I was, twice–not in the usual “And as for that rat-bastard Enge…” way.

3. A Bad Dream

Except I was awake while it happened. Today I had to do some career paperwork that involved numerical summaries of my teaching evaluations by students for the past five years or so. I have mixed feelings about teaching evaluations. On the one hand, a student is usually in no position to say whether a subject has been adequately treated. On the other hand, they can say if they’ve learned something; their opinions about texts, and lecture styles etc. can be very shrewd–useful even when (perhaps especially when) they’re negative. So I usually look at the comments and leave the numbers alone.

But now I had a couple pages of these numbers and they were devastating. My score had been slowly but inexorably declining over the years; last year was the lowest score yet. In one course I scored a flat 1. Every student in a class had given me the lowest score!

God, I was depressed. Sometimes I worry that, by the 17th time I’ve taught Latin or Myth or what have you I might be phoning it in. (You know the old joke about the old prof: “Last night I dreamed that I was lecturing to my class and when I woke, by God, sir, I was!”) I stumbled through the rest of the afternoon thinking that maybe I should go into some other line of work, one where I was less likely to harm people. Sniper, maybe, or bank robber. Mime. Anything.

But when I went to file away the dreaded numerical summaries at the end of a long day, I noticed something. The numerical options went from 4 (poor) to 1 (excellent). My student evaluations had been steadily improving over the years.

What a relief! This does not mean that I’m a better teacher, of course–maybe I’m just an increasingly effective panderer. But, whatever I’m doing, this is one measure that it’s working.

1. Sorry I’ve been so silent here lately. Part of that has been due to technology: my beloved but ailing eMac finally became unusable, so I took part of my advance for Blood of Ambrose and bought a new iMac; several evenings in the past week have been devoted to data recovery, transfer and playing with the new toy acquainting myself with the specifics of this very serious work-related hardware. Then there was the post mortem on the old computer. I feel that it may have been defeated by illogic, as I understand from Star Trek that this is the way most computers bite the dust. My son thinks there was something wrong with the cooling system, pointing to several components that seem to have been scorched. I observed that really persistent illogic has a scorching effect, often causing logic-based entities to emit smoke and sparks. I was gratified to see my son displaying exactly these symptoms, but his cooling system, fortunately, is in perfect order and the damage in his case doesn’t seem to be permanent.

2. I’ve been having a weird series of dreams involving cars. A few nights ago I had a very intricate black-and-white dream like a 1940s noir movie featuring two private detectives who didn’t get along very well and were both engaged in some complicated mix of shadow-job and con-game with the same target. I badly wanted to see how that one worked out, but my alarm woke me up. Last night I dreamed that I was hitchhiking in a brightly colored, rather futuristic Minneapolis. John Scalzi (no, I’ve never met him) drove by and offered me a ride. I told him I needed to go to the Foshay Tower, but we ended up at Como Park, which was much seedier than I remember it and full of homeless people. I’m not sure what this means, but I suspect that it has something to do with general anxiety about my writing career and the chaotic financial markets. (Foshay went broke and lost his property in the Great Depression.)

3. I’ve been slowly becoming a Neal Stephenson fan. I think this guy is up to something interesting, and he might really be going places in this little sf genre. I was on the fence about whether I was going to get Anathem, but the following useful dictionary entry tipped me over into the “buy early and often” category.

Beneath the bloody sky,
upon his mountain throne,
the Stalker waits for wolf-days
and his hands-of-fire bide their time.