shiny things in messy little piles

Month: August 2016

It’s Still a Big Damn Country

Recent­ly I was look­ing for this pic­ture of an art­ful­ly rust­ed steam engine that I took dur­ing a cross-country trip in 2009.

not restorable

Por­tion of the Engines for the Wake Robin.

Rather than dig through the many thou­sands of pho­tographs on the back-up serv­er, I searched through the series of blog entries titled It’s a Big Dam Coun­try that I wrote while on that road trip. When I began that trip I was run­ning very hard, and very fast, and very much away. I was run­ning from myself and my itch­ing demons. I was run­ning on pro­fes­sion­al advice. I was mak­ing no progress while stand­ing in the mid­dle of the smok­ing crater that I had made of my life. My ther­a­pist — against all the rules of ther­a­py — actu­al­ly sug­gest­ed that I go ahead and run for a while, to see what it felt like to move again. So I did. I packed up my lit­tle blue car with a hand­ful of road snacks, my spe­cial pil­low, and every scrap of cam­era gear that I owned, then set out on the finest fool’s errand I could con­jure: To attend the grad­u­a­tion par­ty of my old­est niece two weeks hence in the city of Pitts­burgh and along the way to take as many pic­tures of as many dams as I could find. Con­tin­ue reading

The Books of July

July was a thin month for books. I had a week in Port Townsend for the Cen­trum writer’s con­fer­ence and some per­son­al issues to attend to. But I did get through a few things.

Books I Read:

The Hatred of Poetry — Ben Lerner (2016)

The most often quot­ed bit in the reviews of this book begins: ‘Many more peo­ple agree they hate poet­ry’ Ben Lern­er writes, ‘than can agree what poet­ry is.’
Lern­er goes on to read the prob­lem of poet­ry in neo-platonic terms. That poet­ry is always bound to fail because we are for­ev­er com­par­ing a writ­ten piece of poet­ry to some Ide­al that we hold. He goes on to par­tial­ly dis­man­tle this Ide­al by con­sid­er­ing the prob­lems of how we have set up the Ide­al in a world in which the Ide­al is nev­er has nev­er existed.
It takes about 2 hours to read this — and at $8.50 its over-priced for some­thing that runs less than a 100 pages. (List price is $12.) I’m not sor­ry that I bought it and cer­tain­ly not sor­ry that I read it. But I’m also not sure that I got my mon­ey’s worth. Must be the phi­los­o­phy degree that snuck up behind me and said “That’s just the Pla­ton­ic Ide­al and as an epis­te­mol­o­gy it’s pret­ty sim­plis­tic, sure­ly poet­ry is more com­plex that that.”
* Sur­pris­ing return to my orig­i­nal course of study *

Bukowski in a Sundress — Kim Addonizio (2016)

I was hop­ing to real­ly like this book of essays. There are a cou­ple — par­tic­u­lar­ly those that involve the end of her moth­er’s life — that strike me as deeply felt and filled with the great ambiva­lence that so many of us feel toward our moth­ers as we close in on the age that they were when we first knew them adult-to-adult and they con­tin­ue to advance into the future ahead of us.  Many of the oth­er essays are sim­ply about behav­ing bad­ly into your mid­dle age and don’t speak to me. I gave up eat­ing, drink­ing, and fuck­ing like one of the boys a long time ago.
Any­way. It has­n’t changed may opin­ion of her poet­ry, which I’ve always liked. Go read that if you want to see how well Kim can write.
* Maybe not worth the price of admis­sion for most of my readers. *

The Fran Leibowitz Reader — Fran Leibowitz (1994)

Fran holds up fair­ly well even though most of these pieces were writ­ten decades ago. Her cur­mud­geon­ly dis­re­gard for the niceties of soci­ety are uni­ver­sal and eter­nal. Chil­dren are still too often seen and heard in places that ought to be the province of adults. Smok­ing is still one of the joys of adult­hood — though I gave it up 10 years ago. A few of these essays are hope­less­ly dat­ed, but some stand up to the pas­sage of time even when the top­ic under dis­cus­sion is no longer in exis­tence. For exam­ple: How to be a Direc­to­ry Ser­vice. We may not have Direc­to­ry Assis­tance any more but we have Cus­tomer Sup­port call cen­ters and the lessons for the tru­ly gift­ed sup­port staff are the same.
* clas­sics of snark * 

Nightmare Stacks — Charles Stross (2016)

Each sto­ry in the Laun­dry Files series has upped the ante and the lev­el of hor­ror and the lev­el of threat. Until at this point it’s near­ly impos­si­ble to top the pre­vi­ous act. Giv­en Mr Stross’s pen­chant for burn­ing down the build­ing at the end of each book, just before the hero man­ages to save earth but bare­ly, there are not a lot of build­ings left. Alex (the genius mathematician/vampire) and Peter (the apoc­a­lyp­ti­cal­ly savvy vic­ar) are sent to Leeds. Because where else would the apoc­a­lypse hap­pen? The sto­ry goes on to become most­ly a satire with a twist of the goth girl/vampire urban romance. Except that there are, of course, ancient and vicious beings intent of destroy­ing the earth and enslav­ing it’s pop­u­la­tion. I gave up — it’s just too much of much­ness with the pre­vi­ous incar­na­tions. Once upon a time… know­ing that a book would deliv­ery the same sort of sto­ry and the same sort of char­ac­ters doing the same sorts of things with the same lev­el of humor appealed to me. (Ter­ry Pratch­ett, Piers Antho­ny, Spi­der Robin­son, et al) but late­ly I’ve begun to find it less enchanting.
* still a good yarn, but the same col­or as the last one * 

Books I Listened to:

Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen (1813/2015)

When I read this in high school I just did­n’t under­stand it. But now, oh my god, the car­i­ca­tures are price­less pieces of work. This ver­sion is nar­rat­ed by Rosamund Pike and her voic­es are dead­pan and reveal­ing, each one appro­pri­ate to the char­ac­ter. Even her Mr. Dar­cy is near to per­fec­tion; com­ing off as both proud and shy. The shy part being the one that most inter­preters of the role don’t convey.
* Maybe I now get the appeal of Austen? *

I also con­tin­ued to lis­ten to Sher­lock Holmes. It goes on forever…

Nuke and Pave…

… is an old com­put­er term for remov­ing all of the soft­ware from the hard­ware and start­ing over again. Back when we could rm ‑rf we would occa­sion­al­ly find that a sys­tem had got itself into a non-recoverable state and need to be rebuilt from the ground up in order to func­tion again. Or on a hap­pi­er note when a project fin­ished we often wiped the soft­ware off of the hard­ware and repur­posed it for the next project.
While sys­tems have become much more resilient than they used to be, and rm ‑rf is rarely avail­able to the aver­age user, a com­pete wipe down of the bug­gy sys­tem using rm ‑rf’s new­er rel­a­tive, reset to fac­to­ry set­tings, is still the only solu­tion to cer­tain prob­lems. My iPhone got into one of those states recent­ly. Slow to load apps and data for sev­er­al weeks it final­ly reached the point of being unable to load the App Store for updates.
Google has as many solu­tions for these sorts of prob­lems as there are ways of cre­at­ing them. Every­thing from killing the run­ning apps to ful­ly eras­ing the phone’s mem­o­ry and rebuild­ing it from “like new.” It’s a fraught process. There is a fris­son of dread and hope. You will def­i­nite­ly start with the sim­plest least destruc­tive options but there’s always the ques­tion: What if you have to go all the way?
I found and tried a num­ber of folk reme­dies. Kill all the run­ning apps and then restart the phone. Tap any but­ton at the bot­tom of the App Store app 10 times to clear the cache — that worked for about 10 min­utes. Remove all of your net­work set­tings and reboot your WAP — okay so the WAP was lit­tle wedged, etc. In the end none of these worked. The last non destruc­tive option was a full back­up and restore. And easy but lengthy process that could  leave the phone in exact­ly the same bare­ly func­tion­ing state that I had start­ed in. An hour and half lat­er that’s exact­ly what happened.
So there I was — faced with the option of last resort. The nuke and pave. Leav­ing me with a blank phone with­out a sin­gle bit of the per­son­al­i­ty that I’d giv­en it over the last two years. That at once won­der­ful and fright­en­ing prospect of a new start. There is dread. It’s a colos­sal has­sle. You lose every­thing. Every set­ting, every App, every bit of data. Your con­tacts, your text mes­sages, your fit­ness band data, your pho­tos of the dog act­ing idi­ot­ic. All of it. It’s like los­ing your phone only with­out the cost of new hard­ware. A total PITA.
And yet, and yet. It is also an excit­ing prospect. The new, vir­gin ter­rain. All of the mis­cel­la­neous cruft and crap and use­less apps and pass­words for wi-fi points in air­ports you’ll nev­er vis­it again, and oop­sie pic­tures of your feet are gone. You get to start again with a sim­pler, clean­er, less over­whelm­ing device. You will also spend the next week adding back the apps, pass­words, and data that it turns out you were using but had for­got­ten about. You will lose all of your deeply ingrained kinet­ic mem­o­ry, the auto­mat­ic fin­ger press­es and unthink­ing scrolling though the pages to reach the thing that you need.
Still.. new ter­rain. As an adult how often do you get enter new ter­rain for such a small price? Sure you can change jobs, change hous­es, change spous­es, all of which take up a lot more than a lazy Sun­day after­noon babysit­ting a hard­ware reset and a cou­ple of hours of soft­ware updates and restor­ing data and pass­words. And so I did it. Set­tings -> Gen­er­al -> Reset -> Reset All Set­tings and pressed the many pop-up but­tons that con­firmed that I did indeed intend to remake my phone into a pris­tine ver­sion of its now non-functioning self.
We all love the oppor­tu­ni­ty to rein­vent our­selves. Even if it’s only in terms of lit­tle bit of pris­tine elec­tron­ic wilder­ness that we can remake to suit our now two years old­er and wis­er self. New phone wall­pa­per, a clean slate of wi-fi set­tings, and some nifty new apps. — Even if you end up reim­port­ing all of the depress­ing fit­ness band data.