Wax Banks

Eldritch MIT.

[Wrote this the other day. First, shaky, incomplete, rough, and altogether gleeful draft.]

Eldritch MIT

The Institvte has a long history of involvement in government programs, of course, and the government is still a major source of its funding. The noisy inrush of corporate money in the 1980's (centered on the Media Lab, at least - ha - in the media) earned the school negative publicity, but this was very much in MIT's interest - after all, the public would be a good deal less understanding about the school's spectrum of government-sponsored research initiatives. Indeed, military involvement in the school is the most run-of-the-mill form of government investment in MIT; less money has been spent in the Eldritch Science and Engineering program, but the impact of the program has been more far-reaching than that of even the splashiest military systems.

FOR INSTANCE: thought exists in the brain as electricity and passes through suspensions of complex, largely unknown media to affect physical matter. Human thoughts can of course be amplified and transmitted by normal electrical means, but it is well-known by eldritch scientists (and understood practically to the dismay of their counterparts in engineering) that eldritch media respond to qualities of thought understood discernible by few humans. Indeed it is speculated that the sense/translation capacity of eldritch media could enable a kind of eldritch computation, likely not directly adaptable to mundane human display/interface but able to characterize and untangle metaphysical (supernatural) systems and relations. Optimists in the field of eldritch studies project that a prototype eldritch computer could be functional inside of a decade. MIT scientists do know that other groups are dong similar experiments, though it's not known whether such progress has been made.

The difference between amplified and unamplified thought-signals, from the perspective of a medium of eldritch transmission, is analogous to the difference between a piercingly loud upper-register musical note and the burnished sound of a lower-register tone; if you can imagine remapping amplitude to frequency, think of eldritch matter and media as responding to chordal tuning rather than the content of a single neural signal. 'Second sight' has long been understood as a matter of 'seeing differently,' which noninitiates take to mean 'seeing more.' Again, this is to mistake volume for purity.

Devices to amplify and reconfigure eldritch stimuli are essentially mood organs, which alter the nature of thought, its contours, its musicality. Ritalin is a stimulant that speeds up the brain, syncs the rate of mental processing to the information throughput rate, and so enables deliberate thought - it slows down thought by speeding up the brain, and so focuses the user. Eldritch tuning is analogous to this cognitive reconfiguration; eldritch computation, when it arrives, will systematize the application of tuning methods to the human (and superhuman) brain.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE: One of the more controversial initiatives to come out of MIT's eldritch sciences program in the last decade recharacterizes lycanthropy not as a blood disease of a single organism but as heightened receptivity to an atmospheric transformation, which induces something like a bit flip in the organism - actually removing the human self from this plane and replacing it with another creature via a metaphysical conservation law. In this framework, vampirism can also be rethought as serving not the human host but an extraplanar entity for which the human 'vampire' is himself nothing more than a vessel - with blood serving not as food but as a kind of interdimensional lubricant. In these terms vampirism isn't a disease but an unwanted responsibility to an unwelcome third party. This links up the 'demonic soul' and 'bloodthirsty lost human' theories of vampirism - the vampire's loss of moral compass is a form of eldritch Stockholm Syndrome, eliding the barrier between the host (the human 'vampire') and the rapacious vampiric entity and giving rise to a hybrid creature. In line with normal principles of eldritch embodiment, this elision manifests physically (and simultaneously!) as unnaturally extended youth and physical decrepitude within the most convenient physical framework, i.e. the vampire's (former) physical appearance, bone structure, etc. Study of the 'mysteries of the universe' - supernatural laws in other words - makes certain modes of physical transformation available to the supplicant, whether she's a psychically-sensitive human or a vampiric host, of course. But vampires are known to have easier access to these methods of transmutation, and can indeed suffer induced lycanthropy under controlled, amplified conditions (one of the key findings of the MIT lycanthropy initiative, though the lycan/vampire relationship fell outside the project's original ambit).

ELDRITCH GEOGRAPHY OF MIT: The Institvte's location across the Charles River places it within Boston's paranormal penumbra, but certain physical features of the campus do increase its suitability for eldritch research. The steam tunnels that crisscross the campus are laid out such that certain weather patterns, particularly certain confluences of coastal climate and lunar phase, yield much greater than normal amounts of eldritch gusting and pooling; the concrete superstructure of the tunnels masks a substructure of rare ferromagnetic substances not fully characterized by mundane chemistry.

(Yet another case of 'no such thing as bad publicity': media attention to BU's supercollider plan for south Boston handily drew media focus from an MIT plan to expand its subterranean extent by 150% over ten years, largely at the behest of the only-unofficially-titled Dean for Eldritch Studies. The Mayor of Boston is a powerful man with a good deal of influence over local comings and goings; the Mayor of Cambridge has long served at the pleasure of MIT and its larger neighbour to the northwest Harvard University, de facto co-regents of Boston's younger, smaller sister city. Eldritch Harvard is a subject for another day; suffice it to say that Harvard's focus has always been on more traditional arcane studies - alchemy, astrology, invocation, necrography, necrohistory, diabolism, etc. - and its more traditional scholarly scholarly has much in common with that of the great Oxford/Cambridge magical societies, whose members tend to dislike the rationalist approach of MIT's eldritch research programs.)

The tallest buildings in Boston (the new Hancock Tower) and Cambridge (MIT's Green Building, geographic center of campus) were designed by world-famous MIT graduate (and secret eldritch adept) I.M. Pei, who customarily produced two separate sets of plans for each building. The public documents are available from the respective municipal planning offices, while the secret and of course more accurate plans are open only to MIT adepts. The proper plans for the Harvard Bridge are open only to Harvard's arcanists, though MIT engineers determined in the 1920's that the Bridge serves as a walkway for the dead among other things.

HACKING: MIT's hacking community has always straddled fields of mundane and eldritch inquiry, and the best-known MIT hacker signs (Jack Florey, Irving Q Mojo, J Arthur Random) unwittingly honour arcane adepts of the late 19th century. Jack Florey in particular is well-known to lovers of fairy tales, though in mundane tales he goes by a different surname. Abstract 'hacker signs' spotted throughout MIT have historically been attributed to old-time tunnel hackers; their true purpose is magical and their provenance dates back, in the strangest cases, to before the founding of MIT itself in Boston in the 1860's. Of course MIT's present-day main campus in Cambridge wasn't built and opened until 1916.

And yet there are the signs, clear as night.

('Nevertheless, it moves.' --Galileo)

Like all brainy college students, MIT undergrads hold on to fanciful numerological traditions - Random Hall's 17, Tep's 22, the Discordian fives at East Campus, various fraternity signs, etc. But the hidden numerology of the campus is a good deal more interesting, and largely unknown among students, except to the research apprentices who generally end up bound to the campus all their lives in some semi-official capacity. What do you think drove Stallman mad, for instance? Or drove Lebling and Blank to reimagine the Colossal Cave as the Great Underground Empire? Or prompted Marvin Minsky - a madman and former prodigy who could allegedly play complex piano pieces backward after a single listen - to imagine his emotion machine, his Artificial (emotional) Intelligence, which is nothing if not a cosmic mood organ, an Overmind embodied only in hypothetical computational devices beyond the capacity of silicon and electricity?

Do you imagine that the symmetry of MIT's campus is accidental, or worse - ornamental? And do you suppose that the school's tradition of numbering its buildings is really just a navigational aid, when studies have long shown that humans typically retain lexical schemata more readily than numeric? Do you suppose the main lobby of MIT is numbered twice-five for...convenience?

No, of course not. You would never be so naive. Nor would MIT's hackers, crafty engineers that they are. Even among mundane MIT students there's long been a suspicion, an imaginative motive, that part of the campus remains hidden. 'Zork' is of course an encoding of this fancy, as is the 1980's fiction of 'Miskatonic Institvte of Technology.' The truth - that part of the campus exists outside the visible realm - can compel student hackers but is unlikely to be revealed by them, though the astonishing incidence of mental illness and suicide among MIT students might reflect unwelcome, unfathomable knowledge as well as preexisting emotional instability or normal college jitters and self-selecting social maladaptation. The central artery for MIT foot traffic is, after all, a hallway called the Infinite Corridor; since the key fact about that hallway is its impressive but decidedly finite length, we can label its name a juvenile fancy, or credit it with identifying something true and yet unseen. 'Infinite,' for most (mundane) users of the word, may as well mean nothing more than 'Beyond the visible,' and we can suspect that MIT's famous Corridor - the aorta of a hallway-network larger than any but the Pentagon's - might indeed stretch beyond normal sight.

The twice-yearly phenomenon of MIThenge sheds light (ahem) on the Corridor's true nature - two days on which the sun shines directly down the Corridor, blinding and bright and utterly breathtaking. The same phenomenon occurs in New York City, which naturally has its own arcane tradition. Like the odd structure and layout of MIT's tunnel network, the idiosyncratic lineation of MIT's aboveground Corridor refers to something other than itself. Built during the twentieth century's first great mechanical horrorshow, the 1914 outbreak of 'world war' which would give us chemical and trench warfare, MIT's campus layout reflects a common urge to rationalize and reorder the world, to stave off dark fancy that feeds on itself and the minds that give in to it. But the school's layout exists in dimensions beyond the merely spatial. Its physical array has metaphysical uses - serving a salad with a tuning fork misses the device's use but no one's stopping you doing it, and whatever the Corridor's purpose, it's not upended or subverted by women and men merely walking through it.

It is speculated that a system of complex formulae relates MIT's layout nomenclature (even-numbered buildings east of the campus center, rough increases as buildings radiate outward, mirrored pairs across the N-S axis of campus, etc.) to the absolute locations of buildings and certain eldritch-geographic characteristics. Inquiry into these matters would be aided by consideration of the design and construction history of MIT's campus, particularly in the years just prior to 1916. (Was the campus designed during WWI? What effect would that cataclysm have had on an American architect?) Special attention should be paid, in the course of such study, to the list of scientists' names which ring the inner green court of campus, and the layout of text on the walls of Lobbies 10 and 7 (and 10+7=?). The line connecting transmitters/receivers atop the Green Building and the Hancock Building should also be considered, as - (un)naturally - should the experiments that utilize the complex scientific apparatus atop Building 54, which location has long carried a ten-times greater fine for trespassing than the standard $50 for MIT's other rooftops. The sensitivity of the rooftop equipment explains the hefty fine, but 'sensitivity' refers in this case not to atmospheric phenomena but to something far less well understood...

There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.

[All this isn't about what it's about.]

If you want to understand contemporary fantasy gaming - and to a certain extent fantasy literature - it's important to remember that Dungeons & Dragons shares provenance with Zork (which is based on Crowther and Woods's Colossal Cave Adventure). The first version of D&D came out less than two years before Crowther's fantasy-free Mammoth Cave spelunking simulation; Don Woods's fantasy expansion (with elves and other silly bits) emerged about a year later, and the first Zork game took shape at MIT shortly thereafter. Lord of the Rings was published the 50's but burst into transatlantic college-campus popularity in the mid-60's, with the largest Tolkien fan groups founded in the late 60's and early 70's - just a single undergraduate cycle before Gygax/Arneson's D&D campaign entered print, and roughly one PhD's duration before the Troll appeared in the Colossal Cave.

Which is to say that D&D and Zork, two of the most influential (very) American games ever made, emerged at about the same time, in similar cultures, to explore a shared set of themes: excavating lost civilizations, living in a world where magic is dimly remembered (and possessed mainly by the Wrong Guys), burrowing into the earth for hidden treasure, mapping unexplored subterranean regions and charting their bizarre ecologies, and finding a way to make the nostalgic logic of Tolkien's grand novel playable. Zork (which I take as synecdoche for the whole Adventure/Colossal Cave/Dungeon/Zork lineage) was the solitary, melancholy version of what D&D offered to gaming groups, but the games are marked by shared activities (thieving and trouble-avoiding, mainly), shared humour (spoofing the purple prose of a legion of Tolkien imitators and the man himself - even if D&D has more of a midcentury pulp feel than a Tolkienesque literary/elegiac one), and most importantly shared geography.

To wit: the dungeon.

Of course D&D dungeons have nothing to do with dungeons as they'd previously appeared in literature and architecture; the Gygaxian 'dungeon' is half labyrinth, half warren, a system of tunnels linking rough-hewn chambers far beneath the ground, while the ol' donjon is a castle tower and the Middle English dungeon is just an underground prison cell. But the implementors at Infocom (Zork's creators) happily adopted Gygax's 'dungeon' usage, and the term now means what the bearded midwestern nerd Gary G. took it to mean: a castle in the stone. Indeed the word's meaning has expanded to encompass all manner of mythical underground territories since then. Zork's setting is the justly famous Great Underground Empire (a GUE populated by GRUEs, 'naturally'), complete with a subterranean sea, gazebos in inexplicable underground gardens, and even something like an aboveground underground, grassy and sunlit levels atop dark hidden levels atop even deeper place - an entire lost social/physical topology, its roof the surface of our earth.

Leave aside that early D&D maps look like crude hand-drawn mazes and the official Zork maps very strongly resemble workplace flowcharts; these two families of games and their millions of players revolve obsessively around, and wander daringly through, dimly-lit caves in the dirt. The characteristic shape of Gygax/Crowther/et al's dungeons is partly a mechanical choice - it was (is) a hell of a lot easier to simulate discrete play areas bounded by right-angled walls than to believably render, on a tabletop or in paragraph's detailed description, an open-ended variegated space to be zoomed into. Modern interactive fiction has come a long way from Zork's narrative/descriptive methods, but the standard mode of IF description is still the same as it was 35 years ago: You're in a room. Here's what you see. Here's what you can use. And D&D has always operated on more or less the same scale.

But this scale isn't just mechanical. Gygaxian dungeon rooms, in both narrative and visual/spatial terms, represent tight spots - and in terms of structuring an adventure, it makes sense to think in terms of choke points and (narrative) passages. Mammoth Cave, initial inspiration for what would become Zork, is a maze of twisty passages all (more or less) alike - some wide enough to drive a tank through, some too narrow for any but the tiniest adventurers. Each passage is a problem, clearly defined; each DEX roll represents a physical/narrative inflection point or turnabout. The physical map is the psychic territory. And it's dark as hell like the inside of a computer terminal (those black screens and glowing green text are still the only way to play Nethack and Zork), and you can point to the line of code or hairpin turn or (sigh) a roll of '1' on the damn d6 where things went wrong...

Well, but maybe you've read yer Sherlock Holmes and yer 'Purloined Letter,' and you're familiar with this idea of the detective/adventurer's mind as a secret, biological topology imposed on self-ordering and increasingly geometric world, human response to the spatial and imaginative logics of industry and urbanization - parallel to paleontology and geology's array of rational(-izing) responses to the accumulating evidence that there was another world before ours, with feathered lizards and predators the size of houses, and as of 1858 we'd found the entire skeleton of a great dead creature, monsters dwelled here...And maybe you can imagine a bunch of college students in an America dealing simultaneously with Vietnam, Watergate, and the crash and collapse of the countercultural dreams of the Sixties, another cycle of realization that Our Shared Foundation is more or less a fantasy itself: not just Nixon and his fellas but the long line of all-but-kings who've run us across and occasionally into the ground over the centuries.

Maybe you know that 'Lucy' - our 3.5-million-year-old grandma - was pulled from the earth in 1974 too.

Maybe you're a computer programmer or a tabletop wargamer, you dream in processes and data structures, and the algorithmic logic of the dungeon appeals to you. As does the idea of a world hidden from ours, from all eyes but yours - in which you can return to something like innocence, revelation negotiated step by (numbered, measured) step: one solved problem rewarded by one miraculous vista, or failure marked with a sinister laugh from an unseen side passage. And you can't think of a better way to describe how you feel to walk through your world than to reward inquiry like so: 'A hollow voice says, "Fool."'

And you felt most alone in crowds, most at home wedged between stone walls (or the inside of a pillow fort or treehouse, lamplit, reading or even writing secret stories all your own), master of the imaginary dungeon you overlaid atop the visible world. The parking lot next to your family's apartment building was emptied of shapes and climbing places and then dug up, and an office building went up there; or the tract of undeveloped land behind your childhood home in the subdivision is a golf course now, the grass well-kept but dead to you, unreal. Or you awoke one day to realize that in ten years you hadn't seen a starfield, would never meet anyone who remembered the frontier, had no relatives who remembered a time before machine guns and tanks.

You looked at a photograph of the Crystal Cave, stalactites like icicles made of trapped smoke or seeping sand and ooze, and wondered what it would be like to hide there, get lost, not come when called.

You maybe wondered who your neighbours would be. Whether their eyes glowed or their teeth clicked. And what would they eat, what secrets were they keeping. Goofy little kid making up stories, grow up for god's sake, but you always wondered: among the stone bones did a heart beat? And does its blood flow - and taste - like mine?

Well I'm weirdly proud. Sort of.

Look at these guys!

Prestige architecture.

MIT's architecture is a mixed bag.

Filip Dujardin creates images of 'impossible structures' by piecing together photographs of existing buildings. Here's one:

Here's MIT's Simmons Hall:

Huh.

Well, here's another of Dujardin's images:

Here's MIT's Stata Center:

That's why you pay the big bucks for your MIT diploma, folks.

Coin of the realm.

I'm proud of this Harry Potter- and MIT-inspired phrase:

'Defense Against the Liberal Arts.'

And Google turns up no other hits for it. I'm a late-blooming genius I guess.

Irritating geek-English tic.

Throwing 'sort of' (smooshed into one word) into the middle of sentences. Ugh.

The financial crisis explained twice.

1) At length, by five MIT economists. [This panel happened last night in 10-250 and was superb.]

2) Succinctly, using Pokémon. [This blog post happened last week and is a blog post.]

Admit it: you'd ogle me in a skirt.

I hope this guy wins his case:

"A lot of people think I'm crazy," said [Dean] Peterson, 48, who became a mail carrier after retiring from the Air Force eight years ago. "This is important to me - I just want to be comfortable. I just want the option."

As some 10,000 mail carriers gather in Boston this week for the 66th biennial convention of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Peterson is on a one-man mission to persuade his colleagues to approve a change in their strictly regulated uniforms. He has proposed a resolution to allow mailmen to wear kilts, which he calls a Male Unbifurcated Garment, or MUG.

He spent $1,800 on flyers and letters to postal services around the country. And you know what? He's absolutely right - about comfort, sweat, genitals, all of it.

Bischoff knows what I'm talking about. Hell, I know what I'm talking about: freshman year I did most of my problem sets in a green flower-print muumuu, the most comfortable garment I've ever owned. Looked a right fool but the coin collection stayed cool as a glass of lemonade from Jesus. I don't know whether I ever wore it to class, but I was initiated into my fraternity in it (by choice - 'come as you are' was the standing invitation at that crazy house), and on that night stood on a chair and read an epic poem I had written the previous night over a bottle of Jack Daniels. Well it was - it remains - a complicated world.

In any case, I salute you, Dean Peterson, and I hope you get what you're after. It's a classy garment by the look of it, and if you win it, I'll wear one with you! That is Waximilian Banks-Mole's solemn vow to you, Boss Peterson!

Iron rat!

Tony Stark, a/k/a Iron Man (of the Marvel comic book series and forthcoming film), entered MIT at age 15. OK, what nonsense, get past it.

Robert Downey Jr. plays Stark in this summer's flick.

In promotional stills from the film, let us celebrate that...he is wearing a Brass Rat.

Is it weird that this makes me really, really happy?

Shorter reaction to the Star Simpson story.

Look, motherfuckers, just because you can't tell the difference between a circuit board and a waterboard doesn't mean the bomb squad is allowed to be equally ignorant. If you seriously think nearly gunning this girl down constitutes security then you're a big, big part of the reason this country is so fucked up right now.

Also:

Star, you're an engineer who builds real-world devices to empower people. Did it seriously not occur to you to consider the environment you'd be wearing this sweatshirt in? Christ. Please, please use your whole brain next time.

Lucky Star? Falling Star? The stupid headlines just write themselves.

Boston's police are in the news again, as is MIT; as it happens, some friends of mine are close to the 'hoax bomb at Logan' situation, and I find that some facts need to be set straight.

First of all: Building an LED-equipped sweatshirt to grab the attention of prospective employers on Career Day is a really good idea. Juvenile? A little, sure. But markedly less juvenile than comparing Star Simpson to the 2004 post-World Series Boston rioters (nor the presumably trained policemen who fired 'nonlethal' projectiles into a crowd of students, killing one). Less juvenile than persisting in referring to a light-up sweatshirt as a 'fake bomb,' clear evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Less juvenile than writing...

How much do you want to bet Star's got a trust fund, and that her parents are aging hippie types?

...in a major Boston newspaper. (Admittedly not one with any kind of reputation for journalistic seriousness - but check out those circulation numbers.)

Second: Yes it's a bit weird that Star was at Logan to meet her '42-year old boyfriend.' It's also none of any journalist's business, nor is it relevant to this ridiculous story how old Tim is.

Third: The real story is of course the fact that you can walk into Logan with (an object shaped like) a boombox and not even get noticed - indeed, that you're expected to walk around carrying unmarked pieces of luggage - effortlessly avoiding security, but a circuit board attached to a single 9-volt battery is enough to bring out the automatic weapons. Star embarrassed some cops, and the state is going to attempt to misapply this hoax-bomb law to punish her for it. The shirt obviously isn't meant to even look like a bomb; hell, I failed my Circuits class at MIT and even I can tell that it's nothing of the sort. Can I imagine a paranoid cop making a mistake? Absolutely.

But the paranoia is the problem, not the shirt.

When the Bad Guys want to blow up a major transportation hub, I guarantee you, they sure as hell won't send a 19-year-old Hawaiian girl to do so in broad daylight with a battery strapped to her chest.

Personally I think Star made a dumb mistake. But under no circumstances should that mistake ruin her future; the ignorant reactionaries braying for blood (c'mon, three fucking editorials in the Boston Herald?) are making things worse. The city looked foolish during last year's Mooninite 'crisis'; it looks foolish now. Let's not compound things by turning this into a threat-to-America issue. Only the dignity of Boston's security forces is being threatened this week, and the threat is entirely to itself.

Just so you know what it's like at the gym with me, Reader(s).

'We're not here for fitness or health,' I noted last night as we did our Military Presses. 'The ladies aren't going to want to get with us because we've got fucking fitness. They want hugeness, and we're here to attain and offer hugeness.' I then hurt my elbow somehow doing Bicep Curls and begged off the rest of the night. Later on, over burritos at Anna's, I helpfully clarified: 'Hugeness isn't a physical quality, it's not something that happens to your body at all. It's a spiritual state.' I accented the second syllable of 'spiritual,' knowing it was wrong. Jesse and Bo seemed to understand. I am willing to tell you friend that I did not understand.

Things get complex at the gym, no question. It's only the midsize guys who stand around pinching their biceps in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror; the small guys are reluctant to be seen looking and the big guys don't care. (I probably count as 'small' in this schema.) I've never seen a lady at the gym squeezing her biceps in front of a mirror, nor any other muscle. (But then I've never seen a guy reading US Weekly magazine on the exercise bike.) Last night the MIT Track & Field team was occupying (monopolizing?) half the gym; they understood muscles to one or another extent, sure, but they clearly were unaware of even the concept of hugeness. We watched as they fell one by one; we laid garlands and bouquets near their 'fit' and 'healthy' bodies, now gone cold; we sang encomia and then we continued to attain hugeness. No offense, but fuck those poseurs: you don't go to the gym to get muscles.

GF triumphant/GF tribute.

Would you deny this woman a PhD? I didn't think so. (Cute glasses, right?) A more personal tribute: "I'm the GF, and I approve this message." (Hard to believe.)

One thing about academic conferences...

...that bugs me, but apparently doesn't also bug enough academics is this: it's possible to sit on a panel in a room full of media scholars, educators, and producers and say (in regards to what and how children should be learning in the classroom) 'The idea of content is dead,' and not get a single criticism or response. Similarly, one can sit in a roomful of writers and artists and say that there are no original ideas left, then go on to imply that simplistic appropriation is therefore not only an appropriate aesthetic mode but a necessary and therefore valorous stance, and not raise a single eyebrow. This isn't a criticism of the beliefs themselves, but rather of a culture of 'respectful' nonresponsiveness, the appropriately-jaded attitude that if the occasional (or not so occasional, ahem) utterance in an academic context is divorced from reality, that's the price one pays for free discussion. I get the theory and can sympathize with the urge, but am stupefied by the practice.

I've really enjoyed this weekend's MiT5 conference, which finishes up today (I'm done, too worn out to continue after a late night of pleasant catching-up and boozing at Henry's, despite wanting to see a couple of talks at the awfully early first session today). The plenary sessions have been quite strong, and the overall tone of discussion has been invigorating (maybe I've been mostly lucky in my choice of panels). People always speak well of the Media in Transition conferences, and I suspect this one will be no different, the uncooperative weather and Building 4 fire alarm testing notwithstanding. It all made me miss academia a little, weird as that might seem. (Or not weird, of course.)

[Update: You should read more about the MiT5 conference: the agenda and list of speakers are at the main site. Rundowns of certain panels here, here, and here (Prof. Jason Mittell), here and here (Prof. Nick Montfort), and here (Prof. Jill Walker). It was a great time and will likely prompt strong ongoing discussions (read especially Prof. Mittell's first entry). The plenary sessions are going online in mp3 format already (see Henry's entry here for some links). I wish the first thing I wrote about the conference was less of a piss-take, but one can't escape one's nature. The foregoing links are strong tonic; I may as well endeavour to be strong gin.]

But I keep noticing, over and over, a tendency among the (particularly younger) scholars in attendance to get animated not by the content and relative provocativeness of the ideas on offer, but rather by the threat a given claim poses to the security of their own preexisting frameworks - disciplinary, ideological, political, fashionable, or otherwise. The most heated discussion I saw all weekend was basically about reputation and industrial encroachment on academic discourse, prompted by two communications-studies types dismissing scholarly references to an apparently monolithic 'industrial process' of filmmaking as an abstraction with no basis in the actual work of, um, the work, a position that I naïvely assumed would be considered helpful but which went over badly with the assembled humanists; earlier I sat in a room full of Big Theory Types and saw only nodded agreement and minor clarificatory questions (at an excellent panel on seriality and transmedia storytelling) until the discussion turned to whether a neologism was needed to refer to the topic of the discussion.

In grad school I found the border-patrolling tendencies of academics tiring, in part because the idea of scrabbling for tenure always bored and annoyed me; because vocabulary-coinage and -definition is a central intellectual activity for scholars but also a central disciplinary maneuver, it can be exhausting and irritating to parse such discussions if one doesn't have a professional stake in their outcome. What's seen purely as 'jargon' by observers outside a field (e.g. journalists writing their annual year-end MLA-bashing puff pieces) is really a vital step in determining what evaluative and critical frameworks will be utilized in a field going forward, a step with major implications for who gets what chair in what department and so forth. I feel sympathy for scholars who have to contend with such madness.

But the fact remains that the constant passive-aggressive jockeying for position among academics, which manifests as scholarly practice, is tied to both what's good and what's very, very bad about the present state of cultural/textual theory and criticism. It was ever so, yes. But whether or not anti-intellectual conservative critics say this too, it's true: the allegedly-analytic* frameworks that form the substance and structure of so many papers in (e.g.) media theory carry with them implied aesthetic/evaluative positions that (1) have tremendous cultural impact beyond the academy and (2) go entirely without scrutiny within the academy. Which is nowadays the thing that most tires me out when it comes to academic talk, aesthetically-serious places like The Valve and (in a less academic-professional way) The House Next Door and so forth notwithstanding. But OK listen, now you have a choice: if you skipped the footnote you can go ahead and read it now, it's a goddamn mess and bears only tangentially on this weekend's conference, which as I say was excellent and got me interested again in conversations I'd forgotten I ever loved, and which not incidentally introduced or re-introduced me to a number of scholars and students I'm really glad to have met (ivan and dkompare and sam and deb and so forth), and which (this is the most niggling thing but still) demonstrated that even though Prof. Mittell is grossly, absolutely, horrifyingly, systemically wrong about (ha ha, see footnote) whether Lost is a good text and if so why even if he's appropriately critical of Stephen Johnson's bad book Everything Bad Is Good For You, give it up: his work on copyright and fair use is awesome and his questions at the conference provocative and interesting, so I'll be less of a B-I-T-C-K in response to his writing from now on as I'm more able to credit where he's coming from with these errant, frankly fucking embarrassing aesthetic evaluations. [Insert self-deprecating emoticon here.] Yes, this is only an issue for me because I'm petty and small.

I'll do a separate post on the contents of a couple of talks, at which I took copious notes in the ol' Moleskine, Reader(s), and from which I learned a good deal, which bitcking aside is what it's all for, yeah yeah yeah.

* * *

* 'Allegedly' because I'm a jerk, and by the way this gets personal and tetchy and biographical so maybe you want to skip this footnote entirely, though I've set the important bit in boldface even if it's absolutely irrelevant to the fucking foregoing, sorry Reader(s): as I moved from computer science to literary and media studies I was stunned by the damage being done to the notion of 'analytic' thinking and expression. The word 'scientific' gets a similar drubbing in the humanities from people who've never had any experience of science in practice, in or out of the laboratory or shop, ever. Part of the reason the humanities at MIT comes in for a bad rap among students (despite the strength of the SHASS's programs) is that discursively speaking, taking humanities classes at a tech school doesn't (just) productively leaven one's technical education, it gets one hand laughing at the other. If you're told at age 18 that the productive, pragmatic modes of thinking and analysis - with their core assumption of predictive value - that you've learned in a technical class are equivalent epistemologically and functionally to the highly subjective, personal, historically (and fashionably, as any decent reflexive reflective humanistic scholar can tell you) contingent evaluative framework you're getting in Film Theory 101, that these two modes of 'analysis' are somehow equivalent at the level of algorithmicity or systematicity, you can be forgiven for calling bullshit and writing off your humanities work. Even if that's a terrible idea. One great failing of humanistic criticism of science and engineering practice is its overreach: at day's end, no matter how historically-freighted our notions of scientific expertise and so forth are, no matter how contingent and transient our technical practices and the modes of knowledge they produce, the body of knowledge and practice that can with total predictability land a small car on a ball of rock millions of miles away is not the same as the 'rigorous' theoretical framework unable to determine with finality whether (e.g.) Lost is a good TV show. Wow I'm in a bad mood, apparently. Can you blame me though? I drank a goddamn lot of wine last night at Henry's. Great reception it was - met some of the new kids, caught up with the oldbies, was reminded as ever by the presence of Professor Uricchio that baldness can be sexy, etc. But Christ I've got some resentments bubbling up here! It's almost embarrassing, and lemme tell you I'm not easily embarrassed. Let's leave it at this: as wonderful as this conference has been, as positive as my grad school experience mostly was, the suspension of disbelief required to make a go of it as a media scholar - to compete professionally with all the other PhD's in the field - would quite possibly drive me insane. I think I have it in me to do really good scholarly work; I don't know that I could do the dance necessary to be big in what was and in some vague sense ever will be 'my field.' Which realization only increases my admiration for people who (to my mind) stay creative and committed and sane in academia without uncritically buying into the enabling fantasies of the field-at-the-moment, y'all know who you are.

Marilee Jones was apparently forced to resign from MIT.

She's got a statement up at MIT's website that's somewhat more informative than MIT's press release:

"I have resigned as MIT's Dean of Admissions because very regrettably, I misled the Institute about my academic credentials.

"I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since.

"I am deeply sorry for this and for disappointing so many in the MIT community and beyond who supported me, believed in me, and who have given me extraordinary opportunities.

"I especially apologize to the Institute's leadership and to my extraordinary staff, whom I have every confidence will continue to deliver on the Institute's mission.

"This is the only public comment I wish to make at this personally difficult time and I hope my privacy will be respected."

Unfortunate. She seemed sensible (and her 'Millennials' article was a humdinger). The growing resemblance between MIT's student body and, say, Harvard's may well be cause for mild concern - the look of the place worries me sometimes, its increasing fashionability - but the consensus seems to be that Jones isn't to blame, that she's dealt quite ably with broader demographic issues and done as much for MIT's undergraduate population as could be expected. Indeed, the accidental admission of one Waximilian Banks, back in 1997, may well stand as her greatest mistake - even after this falsified credentials scandal.

Naturally I have mixed feelings about this news; it's been 28 years and she's done strong work since then, but it's also lying about academic credentials - totally unacceptable. Yet shouldn't exceptions be possible? At least now we know how personally she meant it when she wrote about résumé-padding impulses among today's youngsters and their (goddamn ridiculous!) parents. Go back to that Millennials piece: the biographical critic would have a field day. It makes her criticisms even more trenchant, I think.

Apparently there's a lot of hate for Jones on various student lists at MIT; I think it's largely undeserved. There's lots of reasons to believe she's dead right about the current generation of students. I saw a little of it teaching MIT and Tufts undergrads a couple years ago, and she of all people is in a position to know what students are (increasingly) like these days.

Poor woman. Shouldn't have lied - but that's past. Poor woman.

Overwrought prolegomewhatnot to wang-talk, part two: in which the spectre of death rears His head and reflexive narrative analysis is suggested, preemptively, risibly.

It's not like ball-and-stick injuries don't scare the shit out of you anyhow from like birth, of course, but like I needed goddamn reinforcement there was this awkwardness during the summer of 1999, look here: I'm caught up in a breakup and this great job, she's living in my house which is awkward and I'm making new friends, things are moving fast, and my dear friend is holed up in his own bedroom maybe on the third floor (I lived there but was never around) and not coming out, pretty much ever. Well the time comes to be a friend, belatedly, lamely, knock knock on the door he answers and he's like 'Wax,' (he was fond of the silly fraternity nicknames and his was 'Thexter' or 'DXDR' or 'Thexdex' or whatever), 'Wax' he says, 'this is what's happened.' And he drops his boxer shorts to reveal that one testicle is absolutely huge, I mean fucking A like you drop this thing on Nagasaki and they surrender huge is what I'm saying.

'Torsion,' he says, teaching me a new word.

Apparently the overwhelming majority of testicle pains reported by the menfolk are minor cases of torsion which means 'spinning' basically, yowza. Actually OK sidebar: my XGF and I once asked if he was interested in taking the not-for-public-consumption pictures of us, etc., and it was the friendliest thing in a way. We all hugged, it never happened. Better that way in a way, or maybe neutral that way.

Here's what a dickweed I was: shortly after dude killed himself I wrote a hypertext essay/poem about him for a new media narratives class and got an A on the project. Christicles. The professor liked my use of whitespace and iteration, repetition. You know I was proud of it and felt I was doing us both a service, him and me. But what I should've been saying was probably get to a doctor ya damn fool, yer ball is huge, like usher-in-the-atomic-era huge, like I should be afraid to sully the collective memory of the beloved dead but damn huge.

Which OK, we're around the barn here and have come to: like you're not terrified of the goddamn injuries-to-package motif, plus the familiar I'll-never-do-the-thing-again trope, there's gotta be the resonance with memories of friendships judged (at low moments) ill-served aspect. The literary term here is 'overdetermined.'

Which brings us to mid-March, and the sudden onset of shattering this-and-that in basically the Tiny Toon, about which more later when the mere thought does not crush my mind, plus y'know not drinking whiskey, thanks Reader(s). Wish you well, you have no idea.

Imperceptible Mutabilities and MIT's student theatres.

As part of our weekend about town, the GF and I saw MIT Dramashop's production of Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom by Suzan-Lori Parks on Friday night. Student theatre at MIT is idiosyncratic, specialized, hit-or-miss; a partial taxonomy goes a little something like this:

The Shakespeare Ensemble is entirely student-run with little or no faculty involvement, and consequently ranges in quality from the absolutely dire (a screeching Cleopatra in Spring 2003, devoid of that character's wisdom or erotic power) to the mixed or middling (1997's committed but overwrought actor-created Fuenteovejuna, the unevenly-toned but often funny 2004 Much Ado in which yours truly played a small role, 2002's moody Twelfth Night, and [notwithstanding its clumsy final reconciliation/revelation scene] the same year's intermittently riveting, dreamlike Winter's Tale) to the occasionally superb (a macabre, powerfully erotic Macbeth in 1998, the two lead performances in the Fall 2003 Anouilh Antigone). The Ensemble consists largely of theatre enthusiasts, only a few of whom undertake committed study of the medium outside of their productions. That's not a mark against them, just an explanatory note; nonetheless a certain perspective-loss can occur around difficult texts.

The Ensemble's biggest problem, it seems to me, is that there's nothing particularly 'Shakespearean' about the group's work: acting Shakespeare's blank verse is a craft unto itself, to an extent, but Ensemble members' recreational familiarity with his plays doesn't usually translate into heightened craft. Atop which it's hard to focus on such things at the closest thing America has to military school for engineers. Unsurprisingly, you often see members of the Ensemble give their best performances in non-Ensemble productions, which afford more opportunities to work with the text's meaning rather than its apparatus. Still, a hardworking group with no small number of skilled actors.

MIT's Musical Theatre Guild is equally hit-or-miss, and for similar reasons: the range of skills required to do even halfway decent musical theatre is hard to replicate, especially in busy MIT students. MTG's tech work tends to be superb; its 2001 City of Angels included a half-colour, half-black&white set that was, judging from the reviews, its most impressive feature. Without faculty doing quality-control, MTG productions often short-sheet either the singing or the acting, occasionally both, which isn't unexpected given their tough schedule (four shows a year atop classes etc.). The Summer 2005 Sweeney Todd, for instance, was imaginatively staged and performed with tremendous conviction - though the decision to play Anthony for (well-sung, well-acted) camp was a curious one. [Or let's say: I was surprised by the choice.] I enjoyed and admired the production in large part. Small problem: the actor playing Tobias couldn't really sing, which brought down the lovely 'Not While I'm Around' and potentially exciting bringing-in-Pirelli tune. Fair enough; it's not a huge part. Much, much bigger problem: neither could the actor playing Sweeney Todd. Sweeney's a demanding, complicated part, and he had no idea what to do with it.

The theatrical talent pool at MIT isn't large; you go with what you have, particularly in a Summer production. But be warned, MTG parts tend to go to exactly the unschooled Musical Theatre kids you desperately hated (or perhaps were) in high school. Sometimes that's fine (a daring, only a little ridiculous Cabaret in 2001 knocked me out). Other times it interferes somewhat with what could and should be one of America's great native art forms.

Leaving aside the Gilbert & Sullivan group and so forth, we come to Dramashop. As the performance arm of the Theatre Arts department, Dramashop gets access to (strong) faculty and visiting directors, professional set and costume design, and sometimes in-class text work. They premiere challenging works, do Shakespeare shows with aplomb and no small amount of directorial expertise, and often demonstrate admirable commitment to sides of theatre that other (avocational) ensembles at MIT don't spend much time on: the political, the purely physical, the experimental, the abstract.

Occasionally Dramashop puts on absolute fucking rubbish.

In recent years we've gotten the compelling, moving (and yet cloying, in places) The Company of Angels, written by MIT professor Alan Brody; an accomplished yet inexplicably unfunny School for Scandal; the stupendously pretentious timewaster Bhoma, which squandered several of MIT's best recent actors in their most committed, complex performances; a surprisingly capable production of the musical Grand Hotel by which I was too impressed to feel any pleasure at all; and the calamitous, massively unnecessary HAMLETS, an adaptation of That Long Complicated Shakespeare Play in which a troupe of talented, hardworking student actors gamely tried to convince the audience that Hamlet would actually benefit from a Psych-101 adaptation that recast all the action of the play as movements of the Prince of Denmark's subconscious. I feel a particular lack of fondness for that production, which robbed a famously enjoyable play of any enjoyment and hoped to get away with substituting 'cleverness.' The staging, we should note, was extraordinary - as was Every. Single. Performance.

(And of course Dramashop is responsible for the annual productions of student-written one-act plays, about which need be said only that they are, in every way, student-written one-act plays.)

All of which is to say, MIT student theatre is about what you'd expect: prone to academic pretension leavened by enthusiastic appreciation, powered by the supernatural intelligence and monomania of its participants, sometimes brilliant, sometimes audacious (but not too much so), rarely flat-out boring. It's smart theatre without quality control, in large part, and for MIT's sometimes aesthetically-impoverished students, it's an underexploited and worthwhile resource.

Which brings us to Friday, and Mutabilities.

Staying on.

Two more years of a working Athena login.

Praise.

(Likely only of interest to those I zephyr - a list that has shrunk to one name, really. Though it needn't be ever so, right?)

She says.

In a Zephyr conversation:

"not adorabl! oops. my spelling is adorable. i swear i almost wrote spellin"

"i am cutting letters off instead of balls"

My representatives south of the equator give their thanks.

Laura Kipnis, Diana Henderson: briefly.

Saw two interesting talks this week: Diana Henderson, giving a fleet, rollicking lecture at MIT based on her book Collaborations With the Past (about reinterpretations of and textual engagements with Shakespeare across media), and Laura Kipnis at the Harvard Bookstore, reading from The Female Thing and leaving the GF and me decidedly unimpressed. I think I might just read the book - why not? - but wasn't terribly fond of the presentation. She did warm up a great deal over the course of the 90 minutes or so, but seemed (in my companion's words) a little more prone to sound bites than deep analysis. And my question - if you can bloody well believe it - received no kind of answer at all; for once I asked a coherent enough question instead of rambling for ten minutes, and Kipnis kind of never got around to addressing it at all. So next time I'll just ask a better one, no problem. I need to remember to bring the ol' Moleskine next time, Reader(s).

Diana's talk reminded me what a magnificent lecturer she is; her postmodern theatre seminar (Stoppard/Churchill) was one of the high points (and turning points) in my academic career, but when she gets in front of a crowded lecture hall she puts on her Theatre cap and really lets fly. I miss that. The book looks interesting, and we'll have it at our household sometime relatively soon if the stars align properly. Go and get it! She writes clearly and elegantly, with a great allusive density and less than the usual amount of faux-cleverness that so often mars academic literary criticism. The tome is meant for a popular audience and gets around to a lot more than just Shakespeare (as if the Bard weren't enough).

Gone.

Nearly a year. A year nearly. Lost and gone.

The last thing I want to tell you in this part is about my desk. For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room - no more child's desk in a trailer laundry-closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rental house. In 1981 I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study (it's a converted stable loft at the rear of the house). For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship's captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere.

A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity and put in a living-room suite where it had been, picking out the pieces and a nice Turkish rug with my wife's help. In the early nineties, before they moved on to their own lives, my kids sometimes came up in the evening to watch a basketball game or a movie and eat pizza. They usually left a boxful of crusts behind when they moved on, but I didn't care. They came, they seemed to enjoy being with me, and I know I enjoyed being with them. I got another desk - it's handmade, beautiful, and half the size of the T. rex desk. I put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner under the eave. That eave is very like the one I slept under in Durham, but there are no rats in the walls and no senile grandmother downstairs yelling for someone to feed Dick the horse. I'm sitting under it now, a fifty-three-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover. I'm doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it. I came through all the stuff I told you about (and plenty more that I didn't), and now I'm going to tell you as much as I can about the job. As promised, it won't take long.

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

--Stephen King, On Writing

* * *

When I grow up I be going to be the first man to live for ever and ever. In my opinion, you don't have to die. Not unless you want to. And I byunt never going to want to. Not me. When I grow up I be going to leave the light on all night. I be! No matter bloody what. I be going to have books. I be going to have books. All over the - on shelves, mind. I be going to have a shelf just for books. When I grow up I'm - I be going to have a whole tin of evaporated milk on a whole tin of peaches I be! I bloody be, mind! I bloody buggering bloody damn buggering be! Oy. And I shall cuss. I'm going to - I'll tell tha what - When I grow up I'm - When I grow up -

Everything will be all right. When I grow up, everything - There'll be none of - there'll be no - Everything ool be all right. Won't it?

--Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective

* * *

The actual leavetaking of the company on the last night fiercely eschews sentimentality. The formula is that we'll meet again soon - as we very likely will, at Joe Allen's, or in the street, or at the dole. 'Have you got anything to go to?' we ask each other, quickly passing on if the answer's no. All the little jokes which have grown up around various members of the company are reiterated. Despite the pressing business of shoving boxes and bags into taxis there's a reluctance, a la Chekhov, to actually go. You feel the company should have got together more often, should have seen more of each other, and now it's all over...In fact, the whole thing's quite unreal. How can you conceive, there, inside the building that has been your focus for all these weeks or months, that on Monday life will be quite different. You can't; and it isn't till weeks later that you're aware of any loss.

--Simon Callow, Being an Actor

* * *

You look at lykens on a stoan its all them tiny manyings of it and may be each part of it myt think its sepert only we can see its all 1 thing. Thats how it is with what we are its all 1 girt big thing and divvyt up amongst the many. Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome. Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part.

--Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

* * *

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.

--J.J.

Dear. Thanks K. for saying so. We all together now:

Survival.

Last year several housemates and I took regular trips - twice weekly for a while - to the MIT Climbing Wall for indoor rock climbing. A friend - artist/scientist/bon vivant Solar O., which by the way if I'm an exotic dancer on a moonbase in the future my stage name will be 'Solar O' - anyhow Solar's one of the keepers of the Wall. He's in freakishly good physical condition for an MIT graduate student, all biceps and posture and so forth; his condition is made all the stranger by the fact that the only exercise he gets, apparently, is rock climbing. No aerobics as I recall. (He used to row for MIT's Crew team, but those days are gone.)

So we climbed the Wall, and while suspended from a horizontal surface a couple feet off the ground, I mulled over this state of affairs.

I could do it, you know. I'm not much of a climber - my form was horrible - but after only a couple of trips to the Wall I had noticed a tremendous increase in strength and dexterity, and in calm. Solar recommended traversals - horizontal trips around the 3-sided Wall, rather than up it - and his advice paid enormous dividends right away. Rock climbing, it would seem, is an activity at which rapid meaningful improvement is the norm. I loved it but haven't been back since doing something nasty to my lumbar region one day and taking a couple weeks off to recuperate. It's fine now; I should return. God knows I need the exercise. (But don't go too often; the pads on your fingers will thank you.)

Hanging there, my back to the earth, straining muscles I didn't know I possessed to reach a 'rock' large enough to fit three fingers half-bent, part of my (too-great) weight held up by the curve of one foot, knee hypercompressed, akimbo, off to one or another side - like a monkey in fuzzy still-frame - I had a flash of insight, among other things.

Months later I've had another. It has to do with near-death experiences, and the possibility of Heaven; tangentially it concerns National Novel Writing Month, and video games. This is to say, it is about the value of terror.

[Warning: uninformed airy speculation follows. Probably there's a 101-level CogSci textbook out there that'll clear all this up for me. But I like writing it and I have the time, so no matter.]

Too. Much. Information.

I recently wrote (in a long essay unlikely to see the light of day for some time) about a girl whom I taught in a pre-orientation program at MIT a few years ago. She was...odd. I wrote this about her:

I once had a writing student [...] who wrote dozens of stories - in a first-person voice that was a heightened version of her own - about powerful young female wizards, whose frustrated sexual urges (always repressed by foolish old authority figures) manifested in ranty monologues and acts of melodramatic (self-)mutilation. That’s actually fairly standard fantasy play for neurotic geeky intellectuals of a certain age; the impressive, slightly terrifying twist is that she composed these diaristic screeds in a runic alphabet of her own design. In class she once showed me one of her journals: page upon page of unreadable Tolkienesque gibberish. She was overflowing with pride and glee at that moment; in retrospect I believe that the act of creation was important to her, as was the therapeutic transference of the subject matter, but her biggest thrill might have been that she made something that no one else could understand. Revenge of a kind, I suppose, and escape into forcible privacy as well; her constant cheeriness was the negative image of the attitude of her writing, a kind of passive-aggressive rationalization of unresolved anger.

[...]

As if specifically for my amusement and disgust, my student also wore a velvet cape to class and carried a gnarled Gandalfian walking-stick. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Welllllll, tonight I found...her LiveJournal. Kill me.

In for a pound, in for a pair.

They're pajamas.

Portrait of the artist as Young Fraternity Man:

Used to do my homework in those pajamas.

(They replaced my freshman-year flower-print muumuu.)

I was beautiful once.

On the development of a personal writing method, or gestures in that direction anyhow.

[Wrote this this week, and wasn't sure it was appropriate for posting. It's an attempt to set down how I write, as much for the personal benefit of writing down such things as to share it. Mainly I'm just glad I'm finding out what methods work for me, and if you don't enjoy these navel-gazing posts, then (1) take away from this preface that I've learned to outline and skip to the next one, and (2) how the hell have you lasted this long read waxbanks.net?!]

In college I resisted my own best impulses as a writer - or in any case those I now judge to be or to have been best - because at the time I had no way of evaluating them as such. When you can toss off a 20-page undergrad seminar paper in a single afternoon and have a stern critic tell you it's worthy of a strong grad student (as happened on one glorious, bad-habit-affirming occasion), you sometimes let yourself slide a little in the area of method.

The perilous business of organizing one's library.

[Wrote this last week, am just now getting around to posting.]

The GF and I are now the lessees of a pleasant (if insufficiently lit) 2BR apartment in the friendly confines of Cambridgeport. There are two of us, but since we're not yet estranged from one another, we're going balls out and devoting one bedroom to fulltime use as a library.

You quite possibly have no idea how exciting this is.

I'm slightly fascist about the treatment of my books; though I have beloved copies of Riddley Walker (Leo!) and If on a winter's night a traveller (Nicole!) floating currently out in the ether, I tend to like to know where my babies are, and in what condition. I'm one of those assholes who insists that you read his books without opening them too widely, to preserve their spines. This seems sensible to me; I prefer paperback books, and that's one key aspect of their preservation. Also: no dog-eared pages, thanks, and if efforts can be made to prevent cat piss and the like from getting into the things, we would much appreciate those efforts. We are gentle people but our wrath spares no one. (Oy vey, I lost 2/3 of the His Dark Materials trilogy to some friend-lent mishap, and an ex-girlfriend collaborated with a friend to destroy my House of Leaves, since replaced. The Pullman volumes are apparently in Arizona or somesuch bullshit.)

The GF is also lightly fascist about book condition: another of the ways in which we're either totally compatible or utterly, utterly doomed. But she owns many, many fewer volumes, primarily because she doesn't fetishize book ownership and -browsing the way I do, but partly because humanities grad students buy 6-10 books per class, while materials scientist types seem to go with the textbook-plus-reader model by and large. As grad school is a good time for a cult-stud (ha!) scholar to build a personal library while haunting the used stacks of a university bookstore (or our own fantastic Harvard Book Store, or Davis Square's McIntyre and Moore), I started with class reading lists and went bananas. A tiny bit of disposable income will do that to a bibliophile, I suppose, and half.com is a friend/bane to such people as well.

All of which is to say that our study is going to be overrun by books, and most of them will be mine, and I need a way of organizing them. There are worse problems to have. I have never organized my books before. The playscripts are together, and I like to keep series in one place, but that's it. Time to start life anew.

Current notions:

• Organize by subject area (with fiction as its own area, story collections, etc. - bookstore style in other words), then by author. The default. Boooring! But also sensible and useful. The trouble is, I want my Joyce criticism (the most sizeable single-author critical collection here) with Joyce's works, but I don't particularly want to follow that paradigm for all authors. Hobgoblin, small minds, I know, but I'd feel like I'd perpetrated something of an injustice if I didn't give all these authors their due.
• Organize by colour. A friend organized his CD's this way and they looked fantastic. The concern, obviously, is misremembering the colour of a given book. Misremembering? Yep. Shouldn't be that hard to learn the colours of the whole lot of them. When you lust after bound volumes the way I do, you get to know their cover designs pretty well. It's a thing. Which is to say, this is a lot easier to deal with than you might thing, and it's a hell of a conversation piece. I saw pictures of a bookstore organized this way, as some kind of art project or something. That's untenable; this is quirky. Know the difference.
• Organize alphabetically by author, across subject. This is bad. Who the hell wrote Joyce and Critical Theory? I have no idea. I just know I want it when I want it. Which, y'know, isn't all that often. But it's been known to happen. Often when I need to sleep. Anyway: no.
• Dewey decimal system, or Library of Congress numbering. Get a life you goddamn loser.
• Just put the things on the shelves and forget where things are, forcing yourself to implement fun search algorithms like fengShuiSearch(title, roomRegion*) and bruteForceSearch(title, patienceRemaining, timeTilNextAppointment). Upside: this is how unexpected encounters with beloved texts happen. Downside: they happen every goddamn time you try to do anything. Bibliopriapism, homeboys, and we know that's a mixed bag. On the other hand it's worked for a couple of decades; why change horses in midstream?

[Geek apologia: I think that's C-style pointer syntax up in there. I don't know. Never really learned C, except for a couple of days freshman year when I decided it would be sexy to pick some up and it took just that long to realize that 'sexy' isn't a work in a C programmer's vocabulary, at least not in the sense normal people use it. i.e. I probably screwed it up for the sake of a joke, i.e. point to the part of the room you think it's in, see what's at that address, blah blah. Maybe an ampersand? Is that Perl subroutines? I dunno. As Pumbaa says, you gotta put your behind in the past. Or something.]

Right now I'm leaning toward the default, which is more work than the last thing but far less than the so-called 'colour' scheme (ha! Real festival of comedy here!). I wrote this post intending to ask you for guidance, Reader(s), but now I think I'll just feel it out. In the moment, real free improv and whatnot. The New Thing at Cambridgeport. (And if anyone knows the Trane album referred to in that last sentence fragment there, I've not heard it, and wonder: Awesome? Bollocks? Some word starting with 'C'? Now here we are with the reaching-out, hidden inside parentheses. It's tough, life is.)

Come to the Crock!

You Boston kidz, come to the Crock Opera!

Tomorrow (Sunday) at like 7:22pm at tEp. We'll try to be intermittently funny. I wrote a song about a spacegoing anus, you'll love it. Afterward there's ice cream.

Celebrate.

Ender's Game: fascist revenge fantasy? Nah, geek revenge fantasy.

Let's skip the conspiracy theories (e.g. Orson Scott Card didn't write the Ender stories) and more questionable accusations (e.g. Card intended Ender's Game as an explicit apology for Hitler). Here's a reading of Ender's Game that explains its popularity with Extropian and Objectivist types, and cuts to the heart of something I'd long felt about the book but was never able to articulate. It's not a very good essay overall but this is a sensible and compelling insight:

The abused child, when grown and given the power to act out his own suppressed rage, is unable to identify with the objects of his rage. In extreme cases, as Miller says about convicted child abusers, "Compulsively and without qualms, they inflicted the same suffering on [others] as they had been subjected to themselves." Yet to the abuser it still feels as if he is being abused, as if the sacrifice is his, and the effects of his actions on others take a secondary place to the emotions he feels himself.

This, I fear, is the appeal of Ender's Game: it models this scenario precisely and absolves the child of any doubt that his actions in response to such treatment are questionable. It offers revenge without guilt. If you ever as a child felt unloved, if you ever feared that at some level you might deserve any abuse you suffered, Ender's story tells you that you do not. In your soul, you are good. You are specially gifted, and better than anyone else. Your mistreatment is the evidence of your gifts. You are morally superior. Your turn will come, and then you may severely punish others, yet remain blameless. You are the hero.

I've felt for a long time now that Ender's Game is an overrated piece of hack fiction, appealing to a kind of pathetic egotism blended with a persecution complex. But the notion of Card's story as nothing more than a kind of cosmic revenge fantasy - in which the genocide of the Buggers is a kind of acting-out against Ender's litany of tormentors - is a strong one, and (I'm mildly embarrassed to say) new to me. I've tended to read the finale as Ender doing what he had to in order to get out of the Battle School; as little as I like the character, as laughably unbelievable as I find the language and 'psychology' of the story, I have been willing to credit Ender with the final motive of weariness. I almost love the Battle School simulated-combat scenes because of their abstractness and boys-at-play roughness - like summer camp with working guns. But this essay advances the claim that the weak psychology of Ender's Game is compelling to readers because all of Ender's actions are couched as guilt-free revenge.

Which makes the book more repellent, in my mind, and even sinister. The essay's author quotes Elaine Radford:

We would all like to believe that our suffering has made us special — especially if it gives us a righteous reason to destroy our enemies.

Take a beat to consider Card's religious beliefs and the Ender story makes a great deal of sense.

Personally I find the idea of Ender sailing the galaxy apologising for wiping out the Buggers to be kind of appealing. Certainly it's a lovely, evocative frame for metaphysical adventure stories. But the essay's implication is that Ender has nothing to feel bad about. His violent encounters with the sadistic swine at the Battle School all end in accidental death, just like his combat against the Buggers. The person most like him is Graff (to me, the only convincing character in the novel, largely because every character in the story speaks like a single grownup, and Graff happens to be him) - which, the author claims, is why Graff is exonerated at story's end.

In the Introduction to my edition of Ender's Game, Card quotes a handful of military men who've written to him to praise the book - and crows that it's taught at military school as a kind of military management textbook. That's always struck me as weird, but this essay has suggested an explanation for that feeling: these army guys like the book, sure, but not because it offers insight into military training, or tells a particularly good or realistic story about soldiers. Rather, it offers a moral justification for the abuse/reconciliation cycle of military psychology: a fantasy vision of bastard superiors who end up blameless (the abusive father with epaulettes), violent acts whitewashed of moral ambiguity, genocide shrugged off with a 'They told me to' shrug. It reads as the self-righteous defense of a soldier in God's army, and it's by no means wrong to be put off by such a thing.

Needless to say most of the people I know who Really Love the book aren't soldiers, they're socially-malformed geeks who're attracted to the 'meritocratic' vision of the genius freak, 'precociously' outwitting everyone around him, morally pure though his thoughts are bloody and selfish, who wins battles with his brain but secretly is almost superhumanly effective at physical tasks - which you'd never guess to look at him. Card's writing comes, I think, from a more plainly geeky wish-fulfillment urge, and is a way of placing the misunderstood genius/asshole at the center of the moral universe. It's no wonder that Ender spends most of his time lecturing his peers (moral/intellectual inferiors) and playing video games, and it's no wonder so many people at (e.g.) MIT, where Ender's Game is a kind of shared keystone text, live identical or very similarly narcissistic lives. The dominant social pathologies at MIT line up neatly with Ender's own. For such people, I think, the military side of the story functions on several levels: at once you (as Ender) can outwit the System, freak out the guys in uniform, and yet vicariously live through the quasi-military exploits of Battle School. The appeal of the book is then partly the faux-countercultural appeal of sticking it to the Man by listening to loud rock music while you work 60-hour weeks at the office, being cool rather than doing anything cool, or anything at all. Ender's moral purity has nothing to do with his actions; it's adversity that has blessed him. But he's an angry little cunt and always has been. The appeal of such a character is found in readerly anger, I think - the persecution complex by which (real or imagined) shunning or abuse or just plain conflict come to be understood as justifications for antisocial behaviour.

It's only a short step from there to 'Look at all these cool antidepressants I'm on': conflict with brain chemistry as proxy battle against social injustice, a moral-narrative setup by which self-pity is a totally reasonable reaction to the (dis)order of things. (Not coincidentally: you're the only person who can narrate your depression. The mechanism is self-supporting until you break with the cycle of indulgence-through-recapitulation. Trust me.) Ender's Game isn't narrated by Ender himself, but tellingly (or at least I think it's telling), I always forget that. It's so one-sided and singleminded a story that there's no place to invest sympathy but in Ender himself.

One suspects that, to a degree, the phrase we're looking for here is 'Mary Sue.'

For reasons of pettiness and poetry in hopefully equal measure, let's leave those two to be our last words on the subject of Orson Scott Card for the moment.

Frank Gehry's 'Miss Brooklyn.'

Oy gevalt! Frank Gehry's design for a huge developmental complex in Brooklyn is...is...well, I'm not an architectural critic, but his 'Miss Brooklyn' building (which he has apparently described as '[his] ego trip') looks like leftovers from the Stata Center. Does Brooklyn really want to stare at Cambridge's scraps for the rest of time (until the bomb drops, anyhow)? (Slate's slide show here.)

Lethem's open letter to Gehry is excellent, by the way. He really is a superbly controlled, evocative writer. 'Controlled' is not the first word to spring to mind when talking about Gehry.

Dylan has a blog.

I lived with this fool in college. Dylan was (if memory serves) one year my junior, and was good friends with a number of people in my house with whom I didn't do much consorting. For no good reason I never got very close to him as an undergrad, and then he pissed off to Stanford, where he's now a chemist, though apparently his day job is being the funniest person on California.

His nickname at tEp was 'Pfizer'. The reason for that is left as an exercise to the reader(s).

Milch at MIT: mp3.

I wrote before about the talk I went to at MIT on 20 April, between the two Davids, Thorburn and Milch. A kind soul has posted an mp3 of the talk here. For whatever reason the direct link wouldn't work on my Mac, but works fine on this rubbish machine running IE5 for Windows; just nose around at Calamity Dan's website if it doesn't work properly for you, and the mp3 should turn up.

The sound isn't perfect but it's more than good enough (which may be a very, very generous definition of 'perfect' anyhow), and Milch's oratory is extraordinary. During the first half of the session Thorburn ran clips from Deadwood and (if I remember correctly) Hill St. Blues, and the audio of the scenes from the Season One finale of Deadwood - in which Doc Cochran prays for the death of the minister, and Swearengen answers his prayer - may well be enough to reduce you to tears, if you remember those scenes from the show. Dourif's performance as Cochran is one of those unsung masterpieces, with his every scene shaded subtly around the edges, and the Season One finale is a showcase for the haunting extremity of his Method acting work. (His castmates on The Two Towers apparently didn't know he was American until he wrapped, as he supposedly stayed in character the entire time. I can't imagine what Cochran has done to him.) About Ian McShane's performance little need be said, but Milch's comments following the scene will bring it into stunning focus, particularly his words on the Apostle Paul and epilepsy.

For fans of the show and of Milch this talk is a treasure trove. Do me the kindness of fast-forwarding through my babbling, poorly-worded final question, if you would, but do listen to Milch's answer, which is illuminating.

Discretized complexity and the ongoing learning process.

Tell me, have you had the following experience? Say, in grade school?

You're working on a set of problems in a drill-and-kill homework exercise (i.e. large batches of isomorphic problems differing only in, say, the value of a single variable). You accelerate through one batch of questions such that by the end you feel confident in your ability to zip through that kind of problem. Then you come to the next section. It might be a slightly different form, or a word problem concealing the original form (i.e. the layout of a park is described only in words, and once you've deduced that it's laid out in an isoceles triangle the problem reduces to something out of the drill-and-kill exercise). And you're pulled up short. Suddenly you can't do the thing. You think the problem is much harder than the drill-and-kill stuff, and can't get your head around it.

Or:

Have you had the following experience in, say, an introductory college physics class?

You work for hours and hours throughout the semester learning the mechanics (no pun intended) of solving equations and drawing force diagrams. And then on the day of the final exam you're faced with a half-dozen complex problems or so, none of which obviously break down into drillable subproblems. And though you're capable of solving the problems once you recognise them, you're unable to see the form of the questions you're really being asked.

Or more positively:

An English teacher sees the glimmer of sudden recognition and excitement on the face of a student when the student realizes that 'text' doesnt' just mean 'book taught in English class' or 'textbook,' but can be generalized to all kinds of artifacts-which-can-be-interpreted.

So.

My 8.012 final at MIT, first semester, completely threw me. No problem on it was familiar. This is to say, I was defeated by what I perceived - misunderstood - to be a discontinuity between my training and its application. Part of this was my own laziness: I didn't work hard enough. Part of my failure stemmed from the actual complexity of the questions on the final (I wasn't alone in finding it a bitch of a test!). But I'd argue that part of the difficulty of the final - I would say the unnecessary difficulty - lay in the perversely discretized approach to teaching complex material that characterized, to my eyes, so many of my technical classes there. The worst example was 6.003, Signals and Systems. This is an extraordinary class if you actually do the work - the most conceptually broad class I took in Course 6 (EE/CS). I bombed it. On the last day of lecture the professor threw up a series of Powerpoint slides demonstrating, as he put it, the many applications of the material we'd supposedly just learned. It was riveting, and I realized too late my error and his: instead of teaching purely abstract material divorced from its context in application, he should have been presenting that material as the year went on (as Prof. Sadoway did in 3.091, the introductory chem class, materials focus), to provide a kind of cognitive 'glue' for students like me who couldn't instantly grok the math. And I should have sought out such connections myself.

By way of comparison, my 21L.451 class (Literary Theory), taught by Shankar Raman, was ordered conceptually but also chronologically, so that Shankar was able to bring out the way a given literary-theoretic (and later -Theoretic, for good or ill) movement responded to the reductions and aporias of its precursors. Because it was a seminar rather than a lecture, the discourse by nature blended and smeared the topics into one another (two discussants working at different speeds, at different levels of understanding, will naturally have to work toward one another). My own predilection for material of that kind certainly affected the outcome of the class for me, but it was very effectively taught - because at all times during the class, the stakes were clear, the applicability of the material was clear (OK maybe Lacan seemed pointless) (well for that matter Derrida and all the rest seemed a bit recreational but I tell you we knew it damned well and so there), and the material was presented as a continuum of ideas rather than a discrete collection. David Thorburn, of all my professors at MIT the one I'd first call 'mentor,' has a way of presenting material so that the light theoretical grounding of early lectures frames the history, which allows him to elaborate and expand the theoretical material in parallel, along with the history of the theory itself. He has a storyteller's understanding of such construction.

Broadly, we might say that a major obstacle for teachers is the creative challenge, in Vygotsky's illustrative terms, of scaffolding, of maintaining student presence and activity in what's called the Zone of Proximal Development. Vygotsky's ZPD theory is, in a tiny nutshell, this: we learn most lastingly and functionally when we're operating, along with a mentor, in a realm beyond what we're capable of on our own, but where we can rely on the mentor's expertise in a collaborative, fast-feedback way. 'Scaffolding' is the assistance - social interaction, tools, teacherly feedback - that aids the learner in the ZPD. (You spend most of your time in something like the ZPD when playing, for instance, a game like Super Mario Bros. - a well-structured game with rich multimodal feedback servres quite ably as both motivation and mentor.) The relevance of these terms should be clear: what's missing in the examples that opened this post is a recognition that activities like homework and tests aren't just opportunities for evaluation - they're learning experiences, 'teachable moments' you might say. My failure on my 8.012 test was my own fault, but my performance in the class also had something to do with (1) the impoverished feedback between me and the professor/TA; (2) the step-function of complexity over time that yielded much-increased challenge without proportionally increased motivation or engagement; and (3) a general attitude toward tests that holds that, even though many classes feature tests that are a leap in complexity beyond the exercises, containing wholly new problem-structures, students are supposed to be on their own at those times, and the teaching/learning stops entirely during that crucial hour (or those crucial three hours, or in the case of my take-home 6.046 (Algorithm Design & Analysis) midterm, those crucial 20+).

The principle bubbling under these comments is straightforward: we learn by analogy, by step-by-step extrapolation, by self-motivated investigation, by visceral involvement. Therefore it is incumbent upon those who teach to strike a balance between in situ testing - a necessary pressure and useful mechanism for motivating, when handled correctly - and contiguous challenges, which with any luck and plenty of skill will themselves be sufficiently generative to allow self-motivated bursts of energy and exploration by the learner. Andrea DiSessa, in his superb little book Changing Minds, talks about learning as the traversal of hilly ground, with hills representing challenges that, once surmounted, provide kinetic energy - pleasure and rich feedback - on the way down the other side, making the next climb easier, imparting a sense of confidence. What underpins this metaphor is a simple thing: when you're rolling around like a mad thing, the ground better not have any holes in it. For too many students, tests are holes. They break up momentum and provide an excuse for the curriculum designer/teacher to discretize the material in conceptually broken, artificial ways. John Gardner speaks of novel-writing as the creation and maintenance of a 'vivid, continuous dream'; I'd like to take that as the description of an idealized classroom as well.

There is much to learn from the strangest places.

What then happened with the booze and the noise and hands on hidden skin: everything, but nothing new.

I went through two periods of fairly heavy socializing in college - 'partying' to be more specific, though it wouldn't have occurred to me to say the words 'I'm partying all the time' at any point. I would have been, in a rare habit of honest lucidity, considerably more likely to say 'I'm drinking every weekend.' But then I was young, and it was a point of pride, as stupid things sometimes are. I would surely have added, too: 'All weekend.' In case you missed my point. I was quite the ersatz man-about-town in those days.

The first such period was right at the beginning of college. I'd been away from home on my own only once, during a summer program at Johns Hopkins, and I was always a Good Kid, never any trouble for anyone, much better-liked by parents than my fellow students. At MIT that changed - I came back home less likable overall. It wasn't the booze, of course. And let's be clear: as a young undergrad I drank almost nothing at all, getting drunk perhaps once or twice in my first year of college, once or twice more as a sophomore - most memorably on the night after my freshman girlfriend and I broke up for the first time. (She and I drank together, and staggered around together, and later had the kind of sex that you'd only really praise if you hadn't ever slept with anyone else. Sloppy and not particularly affectionate and (in retrospect) expedient. Which is not to say unappealing.)

Let's backtrack a bit. I can feel myself equating 'drinking' and 'socializing', and am not yet ready to look at myself as closely as this realization demands.

College parties are all more or less alike from my current vantage, at age 27: most crucially, they're full of college students, all of whom cluster much more tightly than they realize as they make the transition from high school cliques and teenage melodrama to productive, clarifying monomania (of work, of family, of creative exertion, and so forth). But eight or nine years ago I was an eager party taxonomist. It was obvious where the 'interesting' parties at MIT were, where you'd go to meet girls, who had the good booze selection (about which I knew nothing), where the backrub circles would form after the party, and so forth.

A note on backrub circles: there is a remedial sensuality to geek flirting, which stems in part from the socially/sexually somewhat stunted development of many high-achieving geek types, in part from the surprising crossover between theatre geeks and tech types. It's certainly possible to be a connoisseur of good backrubs, and there's a world of difference between good and bad ones, but it's hard to escape the sense, once you're finally getting laid, that there's something creepy about earnest black-clad Maglite-carrying self-identifying pagan engineers stroking one another's hair and kneading each other's backs and letting out noises of demonstrative faux-juvenile satisfaction in a grubby dormitory lounge at 4:30 on a Saturday morning. First term at MIT I was very much the type to stay up for such things, or the occasional pillow fight in a group of the sort of people who choose the names of pubescent anime characters as their network logins. I did this for two reasons, primarily: on the one hand, I desperately wanted girls to kiss me and touch my genitals, which happened very rarely in absolute terms and with about average frequency for MIT freshman males. On the other hand, I was so awkward and overenthusiastic around girls (now that there were new ones around, and not just the girls I'd been friends with in high school, about whom I knew too damned much) that backrubs and pillow fights and Serious Emotional Conversations About Reality were the closest I figured on getting to the parts of a girl not involved in a friendly handshake. I offer my 18-year-old self as a representative example of the pathetic dialectic of desire that marks many geek guys' entries into the world of flirting, dating, and the eventual death-by-a-thousand-cuts known as first love.

In any case, I went almost exclusively at that time to parties in 'east campus', which confusingly included both the East Campus dorm and several others - Senior Haus, Bexley, Random (though the latter only by a kind of Pigeonhole Principle; Random Hall at MIT is even more insular than any of the other places mentioned, and not just because it's a tiny dorm). East campus dorms tended to house the misfits, or so their residents flattered themselves to think; as anywhere else there was a diversity to each place, but the lines grow subtler the further away you get. The first full-on college party I went to was at EC itself; they served something called 'Florey Punch', which tasted like fruit juice gone rancid and drew few takers from the, oh, twenty people present at the event. It was in EC's Talbot Lounge, which right off you could tell was going to be a problem - the DJ put on a Nine Inch Nails song I didn't know I liked, and there were chairs stacked along the walls, and the whole thing had the unpleasant air of a high school dance.

Later I would turn up for the 'Reawakening of Krotus', an annual party centered around some kind of mock-sacrifice and Cthulhu references and....forget it, the explanation will bore you. (It bored me, and I was desperately seeking girls who'd kiss me and touch my genitals - so everything was exciting, or so I thought.) In any case, that party was a bit better: on a hall at EC, Fifth East, famous for its hacker culture and ostentatious anti-aesthetic decor (including a long stretch of hallway painted entirely black known as 'Black Bemis'). There were girls in corsets and guys in corsets and people wearing bunny slippers and even a few guys in flightsuits - I was with them, and my flightsuit has a little namestrip that says 'Minwax', thank you - and the whole thing seemed to be trying to hard but still came out tame, not least because by that time a girl or two had in fact kissed me and touched my genitals, more than once in fact, so the aforementioned remedial sensuality of the place didn't seem quite so debauched or dangerous. (Sci-fi theme parties thrown by actual sci-fi fans are a world unto themselves, as well they should be.) Moreover, at that point I was going regularly to parties elsewhere, and had discovered How The Other Half Drank. Not surprisingly I was well into my own personal period of greatest debauchery - or in any case, my personal highest Average Quantity of Bourbon Per Week, which for a certain kind of guy passes for debauchery. Some sex happened too, in a dissipated sort of way, about which nothing need be said.

The phrase my compatriots and I would use was 'G-cubed at Baker', where 'G-cubed' stood for go get girlfriends. The idea - which seemed sensible enough at the time - was that no right-thinking sorority-type girl could resist the allure of 'nonconformist' guys who lacked the feeling of entitlement possessed by frat-boy types and jocks (who after all know they'll eventually fall backwards into piles of sex if they just take off their shirts and mention the model of automobile they drive) (well not piles as such, though maybe sometimes). The first time I turned up at Baker House - the most clique-heavy and frat/sorority-like dorm on campus - as a first-term post-breakup junior, I was wearing the same purple flightsuit in which I would later help Reawaken Krotus and in which, that very summer, I'd driven with a group of other flightsuited fools from LA to San Francisco and across to Boston in a burgundy car (later two) known as the Violet Beauregard. My hair was seven inches long, thick and curly and ridiculous, my sideburns bushy (I'm a big Phish fan, what can I say?), my jawline then well-defined under pale, smooth skin. Eight girls came into my friend's room to sit down; I felt like I was being appraised. Apparently I came in a below market value, because not a one seemed impressed.

Days later I returned in a more heterosexual outfit, having shaved my head and let some stubble grow. My fortunes changed. I was invited to parties - in Baker they still use the quaint term 'kegger', though draconian alcohol regulations had forced a change at that time to sick-making boxed wine in light pink - and at those parties I drank staggering quantities of alcohol. I impressed people with my tolerance for the stuff. Under the influence of alcohol, my new boon companion, I somehow managed to insinuate myself into the dorm rooms and beds (and once, memorably, the bedroom floor) of girls who, when asked nicely, agreed to kiss me and touch my genitals. I mentioned at the outset that I would at this time drink all weekend; that was no exaggeration. From Thursday night until Sunday morning, every single weekend, I spent a substantial percentage of my time pleasantly intoxicated, making a manful effort to Go Get Girlfriends at whatever place I was. Of course I failed, but the failure had a poetic rite-of-passage quality to it. I aged a lot that semester. There were any number of compelling breasts and asses and midriffs but few singular personalities on display in those days, it seemed, and truth be told my own personality left much to be desired then as well. (It was easy enough to entertain people as status-conscious and normative as my newfound drinking buddies, but unsurprisingly my all-over-drinking time corresponded with a period of deep nihilism and self-loathing - I mentioned I was recently post-breakup, right? - so the one-on-one sessions were lacking in my full emotional participation, as I recall.) This isn't to say I didn't make friends and meet very good people - I did - but my criteria for companions had changed. You might say: you grow out of Krotus and into keggers, and then you grow further, and might even find yourself heading back the way you came, if only in appreciation.

Parties at Baker were exactly what I'd always figured college parties would be: loud, dumb, absolutely soaking in liquor, embarrassing (afterward), set to atrocious dance music and leading to regrettable hookups, kissing, the touching of standard-issue genitals. One girl had a poster on her bunk bed with a picture of (if I remember correctly) a kitten, and the word 'Heaven'. She was from Texas, and had the figure to prove it; I would never have gone to see the kitten poster on any other weekend, I suppose, but the ebb and flow of one's needs is a curious thing, and the boxed wine persuaded me. Damningly, she was a freshman, and my upperclassmen friends and fellow drunkards remonstrated against the awkward (but sweet-natured, I'd say) coupling rather loudly, as I recall. The whole episode neatly summed up the dual function of those parties: on the one hand, making out is a learned skill, and experience tells, so one may as well have a tussle if one is otherwise not busy; on the other hand, the need for alcohol to lubricate such exchanges pointed up an unappetizing repression that was akin to the geek asociality across campus, yet dealt with perhaps more sustainably at EC and the like. You don't get to do backrub circles for the rest of your life; it's booze for most people, so you may as well learn. And yet I'm fairly certain that sober most of my fellow Baker-partygoers would have shied away from such earnest physical contact, outside perhaps of the context of games like football and so forth. I dated a nice junior girl from Baker the next semester - she was Navy ROTC, very much so - and I was surprised all over again by the discreteness of her zones of personal intimacy, having come from a more continuous emotional/physical microculture. You might say: her softness and almost maternal side were only on display when we were alone, and by then I'd had the good (and also mixed) fortune to forget what such a stark division was like.

The parties were venues for drinking; the drinking enabled intimacy; the intimacy often found no venue for expression more serious or focused than the parties. People weaned themselves off boxed wine and dance music eventually, and after a few months of good solid undistinguised obligatory College Life - straight out of some kind of 50's-era boy's magazine, but with personal computers - I weaned myself off it too. I'd met the Navy girl, or become reacquainted (I'd chased her jogging on the Esplanade once, and asked her name, during my first Out Every Weekend period, the innocent one). And we fell maybe in love and then certainly out of it, but not before I'd enjoyed a private repeat of my Thursday-through-Sunday drinking schedule during the summer before my senior year. I filled a journal with handwritten bitterness then, the first time, and though I didn't know it I was learning to admit things to myself. The journal was the key in a lot of ways. Certain dreams you don't talk about. I wished she'd been around that summer, but she was on a boat, on a different ocean; perhaps it's better that I was alone. There's a quota of socializing too easily filled for those of us who tend to need absolute aloneness. Some things you can only learn to love on your own. I had a drink in my hand the first time she and I really spoke, and I don't know whether I finished it or put it aside, but the sun was on its way back by the time we parted with a hug hours later. We went to some parties together but it was pointless: I'd met someone willing to kiss me and touch my genitals, and as a Catholic I don't approve of dance music, so why drink? Which is to say, why 'party'? I never did grow my hair back out, and wore the flightsuit less often with each passing year, and I don't wear it anymore now. And now that I pay for my booze there are, curiously, fewer and fewer reasons to crack a bottle. Which makes no sense in one way, and in another way makes all the sense in the laughable world.

Two talks: Milch, Gelbspan.

In the last 36 hours or so we've seen two extraordinary talks at MIT: on Wednesday, journalist Ross Gelbspan spoke in 10-250 about climate change, and last night David Milch came to Bartos Theatre to talk about his show Deadwood and related matters.

Gelbspan

As Jonah Goldberg's latest imbecilic piece of punditry demonstrates, a large percentage of the U.S.'s population remains unwilling to believe in the dangers of climate change. Not surprising, really: long-term shifts in weather systems would be indistinguishable to human eyes from short-term anomalies, or in any case we think they would, because laypeople know no better. Ross Gelbspan's talk on Wednesday was a tour de force piece of rhetoric, in which he took a whirlwind tour through increasing signs of dangerous climate change (Goldberg talks about a 'one- or two-degree per century' average temperature change being a little good, a little bad; someone should mention that an Ice Age involves a global average temperature drop of about ten degrees) before outlining an ambitious economic plan geared toward slowing negative climate trends and encouraging sustainable energy use. Gelbspan read from a stack of paper for his speech, but when questions came around he spoke with remarkable fluency and vigour. His plan is more or less this: eliminate Federal oil and coal subsidies and instigate a national (and international) Marshall Plan for renewable energy development, calling on the private sector - even the old-guard energy companies themselves - to compete for dominance in what will surely be a cash cow of an industry. Tax international currency transactions - a tiny tax - and use the money to stimulate renewable energy development in the Third World. And enforce (however) a drop in emissions of 5% yearly for the next decade plus.

He spoke of democratizing and distributing energy production, avoiding nuclear (centralized) power in favour of local, site-specific energy - for various safety, command-and-control, and climate-friendly reasons. And his talk wrapped up with a surprising, moving discourse on long-term ethical shifts that might be brought about by a shared focus on sustainable development - an angle both more pragmatic and more poetic than I'd heard on the subject of earth's environment.

The upshot of the talk was straightforward: manmade climate change is real and practically irreversible, there's near scholarly consensus on the matter, and in order to address growing climatological problems an economic angle must be found to encourage involvement by all nations and peoples; Gelbspan's talk was a lucid, terrifying, optimistic exhortation to action (and he admitted, when pressed, that he's very pessimistic about people's willingness/ability to even care about such matters...but that simply not to think about these problems would be unacceptable and unforgivable).

I don't think about the built or natural environments much (though I do think the distinction is an artificial one, but whatever); I've long tended to see talk of global warming as fetishism and alarmism. I no longer do. Gelbspan's talk helped a number of realizations to sink in, not the least frightening of which is: the ecological comportment of the human race is much, much, much worse than we Americans are trained from birth to believe. Because ecological/economic sustainability is widely misunderstood (again I refer you to Goldberg's idiotic posturing) it is literally unbelievable, but that doesn't change its brute facts. The 'debate', like the 'debate' about the correctness of the (first-order) theory of evolution and natural selection, is illusory. Gelbspan sees the nature of this mass-media 'debate' as a huge failing on the news media's part, an abdication of journalistic responsibility, and because of the astonishing speed at which the earth and its atmosphere are said to be changing, the situation is one that must be fixed by a discontinuity - because a growing chorus of scientists argues that the window of opportunity for systemic change in energy use is shrinking quickly.

Writing these words I feel like the alarmists I've long caricatured and for whom I've long had juvenile, knee-jerk disdain. But the talk was extraordinary, and eye-opening. I haven't done its contents justice, but then I don't have to, no one should have to. Most of his claims were self-evident, merely factual. If you get a chance, if Gelbspan comes by your area, go see him. He's a pragmatist of an admirable, even heroic kind - imagine what an environmentalist Noam Chomsky would be like if he had a soul.

Milch

David Milch is, as I've written here on a number of occasions, one of my heroes. David Thorburn, my old mentor at MIT and one of two or three teachers who've had the greatest impact on me, held a public conversation with Milch at MIT's Bartos Theatre last night. They watched clips of Milch's work and discussed his creative process, talked about Milch's extraordinary, harrowing autobiography (and the way his relationship with his father directly informs the creation of his characters). They talked about the West and Westerns, and Milch gave his remarkable theory of the classical Western hero's origin: he's talked elsewhere about the language and myth-system of the Western as an outgrowth of the Hays production code, but he spoke last night concretely about the stoicism of the John Wayne cowboy type not as an expression of essential American toughness, but as a tool for avoiding the historical importance of obscenity and violence in the formation of the West as historical fact and myth. (The New Yorker piece on Milch covers that topic somewhat.)

Milch fielded questions from the audience for an hour or so, which ranged from a brief fannish question to moral inquiries, including the best question of the night, which (I know this is dorky but I can't help this stirring of pride) my girlfriend asked, and which was roughly: 'You're known and acclaimed for portraying monstrous characters in full, sympathetic humanity. But does empathy with some monsters reduce or endanger us in any way? Are (aren't) some people unforgivable?' Milch responded unequivocally: 'No.' And then launched into an astonishing disquisition about the Iraq War, and the need to stage a melodrama of retributive violence in a place sufficiently distant that its reality ('War is a terrible, terrible thing' - but people forget) could be ignored. He referred to it as the 'Iraq miniseries', a three-week production that has lost popular support because (a) its main character, its 'hero' George Bush, is a failed protagonist (we can posit disconnection from events and poverty of required nobility or learning as explanations for this failure, I think), and (b) once the immediate point had been made, the national trauma of 9/11 partially assuaged, the mere brutality and moral flimsiness of the war was all that remained - and viewers couldn't stomach anymore talk of roadside bombs. He said something that resonated with Gelbspan's talk the previous day: that supporting this narrative was a failure on the part of the national media to respond to factual imperatives even at the expense of inward, emotional continuity.

The politics of his answer seem in retrospect questionable - his spiritual belief in the interconnectedness of all consciousnesses, the status of humans as organs in a larger godly organism, has (I think) led him to discount the brutish pragmatism and selfish expedient greed (for money, for power) of small cabals of people. But the moral continuity of it, the emphasis on narrative satisfaction and the nature of readerly fantasies, appeals to me. His answer, several minutes long (as they all were), was stunning.

I felt like a goddamn schmuck asking the next and final question - in which I criticized his portrayals of women in comparison to his other work and wondered if, in 'going out to the consciousness of a character' and denying the ego in service of total empathy, he felt any kind of ineluctable distance between women's experiences and his own. He translated: 'Where are the women?' His answer didn't satisfy me exactly, but it satisfied me: he feels he has created a few complex women characters, but he tends to write about periods and milieus in which women's agency and totality of social consciousness are circumscribed, whether by bald subjugation or a protectiveness/worship that amounts to subjugation (to worship-object rather than governed-subject). I wanted to ask: what draws you to these milieus? What's your experience of writing these characters? But those are fannish questions too, and in any case we were out of time.

I loved every minute of it - I suppose that goes without saying.

Afterward I got to meet Milch and we talked for a little while about television and writing. It was terrifying; I'm a good speaker, articulate and confident off-the-cuff in most circumstances, but Milch has the rhetorical skills of an Oxbridge debater or porch-swing storyteller (delivering lines, however, with a weisenheimer style that instantly reminds you of Andy Sipowicz), a real scholarly pedigree, and a biography that reads like an intellectual version of a William S. Burroughs story crossed perhaps with the fanciful parts of A Million Little Pieces. I stammered and fawned too much, but I'm sure others have acquitted themselves even less admirably in conversation with people they idolize. I gave him a letter of thanks (with a not-terribly-sneaky request for an apprenticeship worked in there).

Equally importantly (for my mental wellbeing, perhaps moreso), I spoke at length to Thorburn, Jenkins, and Uricchio - three professors at MIT with whom I've not had contact in years. Checking in (hopefully for the first of many times) reminded me sharply of how little my life has changed since leaving grad school, but how much my personality has changed in that time; it also drove home how foolish I've been not to stay in touch. That'll change - it changed last night. As I walked out of Henry's apartment at Senior Haus I shook like a dead leaf in afternoon wind - and that close to breaking off and simply floating away, or crumbling into dust. Afterward Agi and I went for Tibetan dinner: lovely! I should never have resisted the suggestion, and know better for next time.

It was a good night. A good 36 hours in the main, the intervening filing-and-editing-and-typing that made up my bullshit workday notwithstanding. I wish I could tell you more what Milch said in his talk, or communicate in finger grain why Gelbspan's vision of sustainable ethics was so compelling. But chalk it up to the early hour (been up since before 6am, like some kind of fool!) and the difficulty of assessing a cathartic experience objectively.

Time to shower. The bath mat's clean and soft.

Milch.

Just saw Milch speak at MIT with Thorburn.

Awe-inspiring.

More later when the mind has settled a bit.

Liz Shin: accidental death settlement(?!).

The family of Elizabeth Shin has settled with MIT - presumably for an undisclosed sum - in the matter of that student's death. The (to me shocking) agreement involved a public statement by both parties to the suit that her death was accidental:

''We appreciate MIT's willingness to spare our family the ordeal of a trial and have come to understand that our daughter's death was likely a tragic accident," Cho Hyun Shin, Elizabeth's father, said in a statement released by MIT. ''This agreement will allow us to move forward in the healing process."

The Shins' lawyer, David DeLuca, said evidence presented during the early phases of the lawsuit shed new light on the circumstances of Elizabeth Shin's death. Toxicology tests indicated she had overdosed, he said. He declined to name the drugs involved, although he said they included nonprescription medications. The overdose was nonlethal, but may have made her unresponsive when the candles in her room sparked a fire.

That doesn't sound like a goddamn accident to me.

I thought the Shins were grotesque in seeking financial remuneration in the wake of their daughter's death - as were Scott Krueger's parents - but the statement by Liz Shin's dad strikes me as even more fucked up. 'Spare our family the ordeal of a trial'? You're the one suing the school! I'm curious now to hear what happened behind the scenes. If it wasn't just money and the satisfaction of punishment - which were certainly part of it, and not unreasonably - did the Shins somehow get wind that this might've been an accident? Does this ending make them feel better? Finding for the plaintiffs would have set a bad precedent, but with this talk of an accident, doesn't it seem like everyone just gets to feel a little less guilty? It wasn't our fault, say Mom and Dad, it could have happened to any depressed young girl. And MIT gets exculpated in public.

It all seems like a series of gestures, to me, and the coverage from the Globe makes me think a great deal is being left unsaid about the process. I wonder which side felt it couldn't win the trial. 'The ordeal of a trial' vs. the ordeal of dragging your child's memory through some behind-the-scenes courtroom drama? What's the fucking difference?

Then again: maybe the ludicrous sum of money the Shins wanted was just a method of forcing some kind of investigation and negotiation...I dunno. Again: it'd be interesting to find out who flinched, and why.

In any case, that's a sad chapter of recent MIT history drawn finally to a close. Of course there are more suits to come - Julie Carpenter's family is still suing the school - but this unexpected ending should hopefully help people rest easily. As I have no personal connection to either girl (except through friends) it continues to interest me in a non-traumatic way. Interesting to read other grads' blogs in the next few days, I should think.

Life, death, prison, and other small matters of taste.

At work today we talked over the course of the afternoon on a relatively straightforward question: would you rather spend life in prison without the possibility of parole, or die?

For me the choice required no meditation at all:

Prison.

I say this having no experience of prison, nor of sexual assault, nor indeed violence of any kind. The moral calculus struck me as simple: there's life, and death. Life of any kind, so long as I had my faculties, would be preferable to death. Of course for the purposes of the discussion I didn't consider the wellbeing of the other people in my life (and there was a tacit understanding that such considerations needn't play into our thinking on this hypothetical). 'As long as I have a pencil and paper,' I actually said at one point, 'I'm fine.'

Which strikes me now, after an episode of NYPD Blue and a small amount of rum and a conversation with my brother, as kind of sad. But I stand by it, as I must.

I don't believe in an afterlife. At least now I don't; I have before, and for all I know I may come to believe in Heaven or something like it later on. My mother believed strongly in Heaven, and though I can't rationalize this hypocrisy, I believe that in some sense that's where she is today: you get what you pay for, in a way, and my mother's belief in the eternal closeness of righteous souls to a forgiving God is a strong payment toward everlasting life. I know academically that this is, to me, ridiculous on face. But I take comfort from this filip in my personal belief system, and it's our imperfections in any case that render us human. Call them grace notes if that helps you understand: those that make a melody something other than an exercise in proportion. (I'm listening now to Wayne Shorter blowing over Miles Davis's 'Prince of Darkness'; it seems happenstance wants to help me make this final point. What else could it be? And now the rhythm section simmers and steams around Herbie Hancock's spacious, patient solo. We're such lucky creatures.)

Arthur Silber has written eloquently about suicide - the choice of a free actor to end his or her life - as a final expression of personal liberty and autonomy. I don't buy his argument, though I'm moved by it; I've moved away from my earlier feelings on the subject, that suicide is merely selfish, as I've learned (secondhand and at further remove) that some pain simply can't be endured, that some lives simply aren't worth seeing through. My roommate left MIT in late 1999, and on my 21st birthday I found out he had killed himself the previous week; at the time I thought he was a self-centered asshole for robbing his friends and loved ones of his life. I now see that he wasn't living for us, could not do so and be true to himself. But I still feel anger about his choice. I no longer feel it was merely selfish. But you'll never convince me it wasn't foolish, a mistake. He might have mastered himself. He might have reached out to someone new. Perhaps he didn't know how...

That thinking won't get me anywhere. In any case: my boy killed himself and now he simply isn't. That's part of the problem: what could possibly be worse than nothing? How can no-you be worse than any alternative, any positive being? How can you not want the world? How can you not lust after it? I don't know pain. But how can you not fear death and hate the motherfucker? What kind of spiritual poverty must you feel to embrace an end to everyone around you? Because that's what it is: death in your eyes to everything on your absent God's earth. Death is the renunciation of an accidental gift. That life is itself without some external gift of meaning is no reason to abandon it. No one's watching but your friends and family, and they'll die too (give it 60, 70 years - maybe less). You'll come to have meant something as nothing but text. But for fuck's sake, how can you fear life so much that you prefer emptiness to pain?

Here's the thing: of the nine or ten people talking on the subject, half chose death.

Maybe we just work in a boring office.

But that is to me unbelievable. Pen and paper. Sunlight on upturned shining face, the memory of Ella Fitzgerald singing, the taste of cremita remembered, the sound a lover made, the feel of your own feet striking the living ground, for Christ's sake! All of it! Who would trade this for anything? And we might add: there's nothing to trade it for, and no one to trade with, and nothing after this. Notwithstanding the moral imperative to treasure the life God gave you, and so forth - we have a thing in common. Only one thing.

- I can't go on like this.

- That's what you think.

Prison might be a kind of living death but let's stick with it, people, and with any luck some liberal governor will see to you it your ass gets streetside for good behaviour after 15-25 if you send him a nice letter and mention your dead Mom. That's how the world works, I hear, and the system is for gaming if you can't win the other way.

Love, W.

Nearly crying here.

Flashbacks from emails long, long, long past.

Something I wrote to a friend, the only line she quoted back to me:

p.p.s. given that, THIS CHICKEN'S NOT SO BAD A TYPICST.

From my brother, same month (12/99):

Here's a passage from Tropic of Cancer. I seriously suggest you read this book:

[...]

I think I told you I got my schedule for next semester and I got everything I wanted. For theology I have the really good priest who was the exorcist. We'll see what happens, my man.

My boy Paul once said:

I have a font called Zapf Chancery, but since it is a script font it is already italic, and by default I guess it would be medium. Do you need an exact match, or a font that looks similar?

A girl said:

I think I forgot to send you email about the Friday party. Sorry, J

Agi says this shit is so bullshit she can't believe it.

'Don't use my name, first of all. Second of all don't use my name.'

Sigh.

'Sweetie, do you understand what I'm saying about credibility?'

'First of all I don't speak that way. I don't say "Saying about credibility". [...] THIS IS FUN FOR YOU!!'

I remember thinking to myself, "If you were standing on the edge of the world, would you jump?"

Yes, I would. I think I most certainly would.

[The linked essay is just a little thing by someone I went to college with. Neither here nor there in a sense. I hope it's not irremediably crass to say: there are people, perhaps, that you've forgotten you ever knew, and how; she is one such, and since she's the VP of MIT's Class of 2001 and has emailed me asking for funds (on the class's behalf), her name sticks in my head.

Going back over very old emails to/from this woman I found myself writing the following:

You know, some days this place doesn't seem so bad. I should confess that I'm mulling over taking next term off, with some vaguely-stated goal of 'playing a lot of music, writing a LOT, getting a job, travelling a little maybe, in general enriching my soul'. At the same time, once in a while I can't help but wake up and think that MIT's not so bad, and maybe if I work a little harder I'll have time and energy to do what I really love.

Christ almighty. I had forgotten I'd even considered taking time off from school. Of course I know what time that was - December 1999, the tail end of a horrible term, and I was about to move into Room 22 at tEp, which we referred to as 'The Dropout Zone' - heh. Of course only one of us dropped out at that time...

I'm not actually in a reminiscing mood, just happened that way, aah well.]

Moods.

Looking over old email sometimes is a hazardous thing.

He sent me an email saying:

all of this is seasonal, of course. so give me three months and i'll be singing a different song.

Seven months later he was dead. I looked for later messages from him. Nothing, goddamnit.

Wow, some people are really miserable.

There was apparently a minor snafu with the early action mailings for MIT freshman applicants this year, so admitted students found out a few days before deferred/rejected students, and things came late, and so forth. Apparently there are a number of uptight miserable assholes out there who decided to take out their frustrations on the admissions officers.

Seriously - what the fuck do people get so worked up about? Sometimes things go wrong, sometimes documents don't arrive on time. If the school thinks you belong, you get in, else you don't. Are parents so childish and deluded that they can't counsel their children in patience and perspective? Do people really think their college choice is the final determining factor in the rest of their life?

Or to put it another way: do these people really suffer from such a total lack of self-confidence that they want to off themselves because of an empty mailbox?

The irony is that, in terms of communicativeness and transparency, I find it hard to imagine an admissions team that can better MIT's. Look at Ben's blogroll - 14 admissions-related blogs at the school, and people like Ben do extensive Q&A posts to deal with applicants. That's awesome.

The students who bitched at Ben et al. - and the parents who joined in - acquitted themselves in embarrassing fashion over the whole affair.

Take it from a fellow who spent six years as a student/inmate there, people: if you're the first cow in line for the slaughterhouse, you don't get a prize - you just get thwacked, shot, decapitated, and skinned faster. See? Careful what you wish for.

Clowns.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!!!!!

Goddamn sometimes I miss MIT.

(Though this girl's blog looks a little retarded. :)

This weekend in sexual/romantic/academic-labour history: late December 2003.

On NYE 2003 I was busy grading tests and papers all day (starting c.5am!) trying to make a deadline for the Tufts class I was TAing. Nonetheless, on that day I found time to email not one, not two or even three, but four past, present, and future sexual partners. Three of them I emailed in the span of less than eight minutes; I saved the fourth email for later in the morning after I'd gotten through the tests and was moving on to the papers. I also got pleasantly intoxicated when one of my correspondents stopped by for a little while, did not drink, and then pissed off to Somerville or something to have obviously less fun with her friends than she would have had with me and mine. Ha! Sucka!!

I didn't get a New Year's kiss that year but - brief aside - that's only happened to me once. Ever. And in circumstances only slightly more romantic than a prolonged medical examination.

(This whole blog is just an aside anyhow.)

This year's celebration should be a bit more vivacious. Ironically enough the co-smoocher from NYE 2002 will be present. She and I don't smooch these days so much. Nor talk, actually. Nor really acknowledge one another in any way. At some point I went from Really Nice Guy to something else; I'm annoyed by the possibility that I'm a typical guy and nothing more. Would like to think not. And she? She went away and changed a bit, and I want to say something bitchy like 'not as much as she thinks she did' but how would I know?

It's better without her in so many ways but that's not to say better because without her - just better, and she's gone, and that's life.

[Listening to a banjo/bass/acoustic guitar cover of 'Sweet Emotion' right now and I might throw my head back laughing and just die.]

[Ha ha I read that 'nor really acknowledge one another' passage again and for a moment couldn't figure out which former correspondent I was talking about ha ha isn't that a nice thing you ass.]

On this day in 2003 - the 29th of December - in the span of seven minutes I emailed two of the most attractive women I knew at school in reference to their plans for New Year's Eve. (I'm talking combination-cute-and-hot here. Not to mention like freaky smart, both talented beyond their school stuff...Jesus fuck I know the most amazing women.) A pleasant coincidence, nothing more, and innocent! Well, as innocent as these things can be I promise. One of them - the one with the lighter hair - responded with the quickness, and a semilively exchange on the subjects of life goals, Artmaking, and Jonathan Safran Foer ensued. (She dissed my boy Eggers and I found myself liking it.) The brunette got back to me days later, idly.

She's an intermittent redhead these days, by the way - the anti-Eggers partisan. I think she might have gotten a haircut this week, which may make spotting her at the airport tomorrow a little complicated.

That reminds me: I gotta pick up a pack of gum tomorrow at the store.

My first college XGF (she was just a GF at the time - my mates and I referred to her as 'Gee-prime' after some line from our Discrete Math class - but 'XGF' seems extra-appropriate) once asked me if her sexual history made me jealous. It did, of course. I was all philosophical-like and said no, and went on to explain: you're the sum of what you've done and been through blah blah blah, you're a whole and good person and I love you blah blah blah, so if I love you I should learn to love what and whom you've been. And a blah and a blah blah. I wasn't lying so much as thinking wishfully. More of a talent back then for giving myself over to hope. Call it naïvete, which it was. No point implicitly discrediting today's self on the subject of hope, which I find returning to me at odd times (in odd times yes), imbuing me lately with something not unlike contentment. I've got my addiction to melancholia under control baby.

No point wondering what I should have said to Gee-prime (think of it: G' - it's a symbol for something. Probability? Shit, I got a C in that class) but I can imagine what I'd say now. I seem to recall having a similar conversation lately with someone else entirely - the sometime-redhead actually - or maybe I didn't have it and wish I had. The extent of my personal/sexual progressivism: it's none of my business baby, and my pettiness isn't your problem baby, and I shouldn't be afraid of understand nor immersion baby, so baby yes it bothers me but yes baby I want to be stronger than I've ever been, fuckingfinallyforfuck'ssake - no joking that's the sort of thing I say when I get all tense, probably even Oscar Wilde went 'duh' once in a while or so I hope - and the more I learn to say yes yes yes to you the more I grow to bursting, and the past is past. I mean duh. If you can learn to live with mine I can learn to live with yours but let's give that a go. More than just 'can' is 'will'.

Plus as Jack Burton always says: 'What the hell.'

('Who?' 'Jack Burton. Me.')

(I mean it's a frickin' classic movie, people.)

Monday, start over, grudgingly.

Independent investigation has confirmed the results of the latest survey: the new glasses, softcore-hipster in disposition, definitely look better when set off by hair, even only a couple of inches long. Currently yours truly sports a short head shave, trusty and efficient, aerodynamic, but the shocking whiteness of the ol' noggin makes the glasses look stark. A bit like I'm Trying to Send a Message, if you know what I mean. It's 6:30am and thus far not a single idea has occurred to me today. I've also written myself through to the end of the two scenes I had thought a bit about in advance. So now what?

We saw Sarah Silverman's movie last night: Jesus Is Magic! It's pretty funny, but Silverman's onstage persona is that of a blithe narcissist prone to racial caricature, and nothing peeks through that persona to indicate she isn't an actual blithe narcissist prone to racial caricature; I almost argued (there was a Q&A session at the MIT screening we all attended) that the real object of satire in the show was smug liberal complacency, but by the time the Q&A was over I was convinced of the opposite: she's smart, sexy (and sexual), has an interestingly skewed perspective on everyday cliché, and is a big fan of liberal complacency - since it's the source of her material, her audience, and her worldview. Make no mistake: it's a funny film, a very funny film much of the time. But there's a bit of South Park syndrome happening: she'll start with a sharp spoof on Broadway 'me! Me! ME!' ingenue numbers, when proceed to a shock-tactic joke about fucking babies, and your laughter is of the 'is she really doing something like that?' variety. Perhaps it was the academic setting, but by the end of the film the shock had worn off, with one exceptional scene retaining its power. (If it means anything, I found myself really wanting to see a Spike Lee film.)

Her bit in The Aristocrats is extraordinary; if you've not seen it, grab that movie, which is stolen by black and female comedians who see that playing dirty is sometime just dirtily playing nice. Does that make any sense at all.

OK, they're calling me out of the bullpen. I find that I'm not even in my own audience at this point; pitching for a crowd of zero. It's a deeply weird feeling that I can't explain, on account of it's 6:43am and words fail me.

Burke on grad school.

Was thinking a little bit about graduate school today.

And so I took the tonic that I recommend to anyone doing similar thinking: Tim Burke's bracing post, 'Should You Go to Graduate School?'

Short answer: no.

Long answer: maybe...

The long answer is the rest of the post. Burke is a tenured history professor at Swarthmore; he loves his job, loves academia, and is very, very good at doing the academic thing (from the looks of it). My grad school experience, such as it was, didn't entirely line up with Burke's claims - after all, the people I went to grad school with were by and large not academic types (one of the reasons I felt slightly at odds with many of the people there), and the CMS program at MIT is an idiosyncratic one in a lot of ways. But the idiotic politicking, the pfrancing dilettantism, the halfwitted jargon-slinging...these things are real, nut just bogeymen for anti-intellectual conservative critics to flash whenever they're questioned by smart people (though they're that too).

I love teaching and I love doing research - and I love hashing out ideas with smart people who have nothing else to do. But after all this time, I'm really glad I did the Masters program - and kind of glad as well that I didn't do a PhD program instead. I don't know whether this is a resentful compensation on my part for what I perceive to be my failures in grad school (e.g. I wrote an interesting thesis on which I've capitalized professionally not at all - hey maybe I should read that sometime), but there it is: things could be a lot worse.

And as you can see from the cheesy little graphic in the previous post, NaNoWriMo is coming up, and it's like a Special Olympics for the logorrheic, and that's something to look forward to - oh but tell me why the hell does my weblog editor, ecto, recognize 'logorrheic' but not 'ecto'?

A brief clarificatory note on education.

I got a good education, by and large. And I've had many teachers who were very good at their jobs. But by and large, I believe I got a good education in spite of, not because of, the way the educational system in this country is constituted. I went to a tiny public school in Western New York, and most of what I learned I taught myself. I still wasn't ready for MIT, and to be honest, there's nothing my old high school teachers could've done to get me ready for MIT. It was just a different world, full of people coming in from schools I couldn't even imagine.

I sense that at MIT, the nature of my high school preparation was the exception and not the rule.

But I believe that in general, I had a fairly typical high school experience. The bits I remember as exciting didn't happen in the classroom; the deep learning I did was self-directed; my mind stretched, really stretched hard, for the first time when I took college classes, after which high school was never the same. My brother is more sanguine about high school than I am, and may say I'm being bitter and fatalistic, but frankly I think he doesn't give himself enough credit, while giving too much elsewhere: he is in a different league from everyone he went to school with (in several ways, actually), and his education happened almost entirely outside of the classroom as well, until he got to a school that was academically serious.

I think public education in this country is mostly broken. And I think it's hard to notice because the nigh-meaningless things we're supposed to learn in high school, we can pick up elsewhere - and it's not as if most people are suddenly called on to work their asses off in college either.

This isn't just sour grapes.

And in any case, it can change. It can all change. I suspect it will.

SICP soft and savory (and sentimental).

The paperback edition of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, the textbook for MIT's intro computer science course (6.001), is not normally available in the United States. However, via perfectly legal (accidental) methods, I have come by a lovely copy secondhand. I loved my old copy - the air of arcane wisdom around the book is palpable, especially in the class itself, which has a cultish air that seems to really click with MIT undergrads - but I gave it away to some younger student at tEp back in the day, and was glad to grab it back yesterday. Dirt cheap too!

I admit it: I really do buy into the whole silly geek-tradition vibe at MIT. Certainly less so now than as an undergrad, mainly because I have less patience for the massive social deformity of the place, but still. You can belittle Tech kids for being hidebound by pathetic nostalgia if you want, but it's not the mere fact of nostalgia that makes the place so obnoxious for outsiders (it's really the willful geek-chic socially oppositional air of superiority that pervades the place, about which volumes could probably be written, since that aggravating aesthetic walks hand in hand with a truly meritocratic intellectual atmosphere - but of that, more later perhaps). After all, your average LSU frat boy is steeped in traditions neither more nor less meaningful to him. 6.001 and its bestselling textbook are surrounded with a certain goofy aura, but - notwithstanding the constant (lame) CS punnery and (sly) wit that peppers the book - it's mainly because SICP and the class that spawned it are difficult, rigorous, and generative. SICP's 'coolness', unlike that of many other MIT traditions, is not a defense mechanism or an excuse for a certain kind of geek's grotesque inability to get socialized; it's just an accolade accorded a good book.

How often, after all, have you flipped through a computer science textbook with genuine pleasure at the writing, the expansiveness of the ideas? No, scratch that. How often have you flipped through any textbook, ever, with pleasure? Academic writing in general has its occasional moments of beauty (I picked up Terry Eagleton's lively, witty Literary Theory the other day and was reminded of why I fell in love with the subject in the first place - thanks in no small part to that very book!), but the between-hard-covers here's-how-you-do-it textbook is rarely the site of elegant prose or inspirational digression. My history textbooks in high school could have been generated by short computer programs (and quite possibly were); 'CLR', the 6.046 algorithms textbook at MIT - the initials are short for 'Cormen Leiserson Rivest', and yes, he's that Rivest - was jam-packed with information but demonstrated, as I recall, a certain flatness of affect, unlike the professors who wrote it. 'Expedience before elegance' is not a good code to live by - the two should walk hand in hand, no? (This is the Mac OSX design philosophy, from the looks of it.)

In any case, I spent a happy morning reliving my salad days as a mediocre, unmotivated student of computer science, and I plan to avail myself of the problem sets available online for some personal entertainment (and no doubt frustration) in the coming days. To revisit a metaphor from a long time ago: a humanist with a couple engineer outfits buried in the closet, gathering dust, ill-fitting, but serviceable (if nothing else) for the occasional morning-lit rendezvous with an old textal partner.

Gross generalization of the day.

Prompted, like everything else, by a conversation with the neighbour girls (and yes they remain all cute) (and no they don't read this blog, far as I know):

High school seniors aren't particularly well-equipped to choose the right college for themselves. Regardless, near as I can tell, people come to places like MIT because they want to do what is done there. They come to places like Harvard because they want to be there - since it can be so difficult to tell apart the Ivy League schools, and more generally the bastions of liberal education (such as they are). Much of their appeal and individual identity comes from who else is there. The static nature of this appeal is unsurprising given the Ivies' interest in (and not unreasonable trading on) status.

Yes perhaps this is an excessively bitter moment but I tell you it's for you and me, Reader(s), you and me, and no one can take that beauty away from us!!

Love,
Wa.

Quiet craft.

Tonight Shazam and I went to a class at MIT's Sailing Pavilion - the first of a three-part series in basic sailing (in the Tech Dinghy). I won't carry on about the class or the pavilion, but I did want to mention the guy who taught the class, Ted. He was slightly awkward at the beginning of the class, talking about administrivia and how to get a Sailing Card.

He was less awkward when talking about the parts of the sailboat. Even cracked a couple jokes.

He had really warmed up by the time he showed us how to rig the boat.

When he hopped into the dinghy to demonstrate tacking, I could've sworn he was Fred Astaire and Danny Kaye rolled into one, so smoothly did he move about the boat while keeping up a lightly hilarious patter. His deft touch in the boat was underscored when, after three student-helmed boats came skidding along the dock in reasonable but graceless landings, Ted guided his craft to a dead stop in total silence, as if he were placing an egg on a feather bed.

His love of his craft liberated both his movements and his subtle sense of humour, and even distracted me from my own preoccupations for a few minutes.

Bravo.

Metafilter kids are funny.

Ch-check it out.

(Of course the concept is funny too. But I got more laughs from the MeFi thread than from the original page, I gotta say.)