My Scattered Thoughts

I’ve been reading quite a bit about comics lately. Some sites which reek of quality:
Peiratikos
Eve Tushnet
Comics 101
Ninth Art

(These being mostly notes to myself.)

Jonathan Lethem is one of my favorite writers. I’ve been reading his books since I stumbled across Gun, with Occasional Music years and years ago. Here, Lethem writes an ode to his dream of what science fiction might have been…

Here’s an interview with Grant Morrison that I hadn’t found before.

I haven’t read it yet (this is more of a marker, really), but he always has interesting things to say.

I’ve always had a thing for computers. Ever since that morning in–what was it? 2nd grade?–that my class trooped down to the library to get a look at the (probably) brand-spanking new Apple IIes. (I remember staring at the poster of the (re)boot and thinking, “Huh?” I was a very literal-minded child.) Hey, I mean, it was like television–which I loved, except for M*A*S*H, which I hated–only you could make it show you anything you wanted! My fate was sealed. I’ve been a computer-junky ever since. (Maybe this is why I don’t really watch television anymore? The computer got pretty enough to replace it?)

The funny thing is, though, in spite of my technophilia, I’ve never really been that interested in the programming end of things. Oh, I’ve tried. There was a time when I tinkered around on my trusty Commodore 64, trying my best to write a decent text adventure game. I took a computer programming class in high school, which was a joke, because it was filled with “computer geeks”, who already had it down pat, and complete computer illiterates. There wasn’t really a place for a dilletante like myself. I mean, to give you an idea, for our final we watched a Moody Blues documentary.

In college, I tried again, with a C++ class for one of my math requirements. Which is about the grade that I got in the class. Again, it was a class filled with kids who already got it, who had been doing C++ for years, probably. I did my best, but there was a conceptual chasm that I just couldn’t bridge. I just didn’t get it, after a certain point. I remember having a conversation with the prof about computerized random number generators. It was driving me crazy trying to figure out why my random number generator program kept generating the EXACT SAME NUMBER every single time. When he explained, with some exasperation, that computers didn’t actually generate random numbers, but only simulated it, I didn’t know what to say. I still didn’t really understand what he was talking about.

So, last month, when I read The Bug by Ellen Ullman, certain things clicked into place. It helped me to think about programming in a way that I hadn’t quite thought of before. It helps that one of the narrators, Roberta, is an English major turned (reluctant) programmer.

The story is set in the early 1980s. A software company is designing a graphical interface for their spreadsheet software. Berta, who works a s a tester, encounters a bug in the software that crashes everything, but that no one can reliably replicated. Ethan is the programmer whose life crumbles around him as he fails to find the cause of this computer glitch. Berta is instructed to learn C, in order to assist in finding the bug, and, in spite of herself, becomes mesmerized by the structure and beauty of computer code. It’s a stunning piece of writing.

The other part of the story describes Ethan’s slow death spiral into oblivion. A cautionary tale about the dangers of obsession and monomania.

In short, well worth it.

The book even got written up on Slashdot!

It’s funny. The interviews with Ellen Ullman tend to focus almost exclusively on her as computer programmer, with very little focus on the book itself, as you can see here and here.

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aliens enter the conversation and some old thoughts blow away like dandruff in the breeze…

This caught my eye over at Bruce Sterling’s weblog–Beyond the Beyond:

“The latest craze in the virus-worm-spam war has seen computer worms crawling inside of other computer worms – like watching maggots crawl on top of each other as they make their way through a tender piece of meat.”

Computers. Which reminds me, there’s a book I’ve been meaning to write about… I’ll get to that shortly.

For some reason, this whole computer metaphor made me wonder how things would’ve needed to be different in this world in order for a certain song to exist…

“Living in a metaphorical world/And I am a metaphorical girl”

Okay, so the rhythm doesn’t work, but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless.

those bigheaded childers are stuff of nightmares?
nay?

hysterical or ontological?

who can say? there is one who recommends this to this one. doesn’t he, now?

A Christmas present from A., The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson, is not the sort of book that I usually read. It’s about the construction of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and its attendant success. It’s a miraculous story. It’s almost unbelievable the logistical and architectural nightmare that Daniel Burnham had to overcome. It’s inspiring, the ingenuity and gumption described in the book. At the time, the World’s Fair in Chicago was very important. It was said that there were three years that would live on in American history 1776, 1861 and 1893.

There’s even a bit of family history associated with the Fair.

Interwoven with this, another barely believable story, is a recounting of the nefarious exploits of H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer. It’s amazing. It reads like a really bad slasher novel. (I’m surprised that USA hasn’t made a tv-movie about this… Maybe they have!?!?) Basically, Holmes, whose real name is Mudgett, constructs a building, inside of which is some kind of sound-proofed death chamber, wherein he lured young women and gassed them to death. Once safely dead, he then dissected and mutilated their bodies, after which he donated their skeletons “to science”.

It’s unreal. Here’s what the author has to say about it:

I started doing some research, and I came across the serial killer in this book, Dr. H. H. Holmes. I immediately dismissed him because he was so over-the-top bad, so luridly outrageous. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do a slasher book. It crossed the line into murder-porn.

The book is very interesting, but I didn’t really care for the style in which it was written. I’m not sure what it was that bothered me about it. Maybe I’m just not used to reading historical non-fiction. I think, if anything, it had more to with the way in which the story was presented. It seemed a bit haphazard. Or maybe it was too much of a stretch to find some kind of thematic link between the World’s Fair and this serial murderer.

There’s a nice panoramic photo of the Fair here, as well as more information about Holmes.

UPDATE: So, I found this graphic novel about HH Holmes.

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There is such a wealth of musical sites, everywhere. The amazing thing about the internet is that even when I only half-heartedly poke around for things, I always find much much more than I could ever hope to deal with.