Topic: Posts

This post grows out of a sort of smoldering rant that I’ve been having for a while now. As I sit here at one of these synthetic moments when I’m trying to figure out how past interests and experiences build up to the future--how do the things that I loved so much in college affect life/me now?--the purpose of social/literary theory (“philosophy with a cause,") is one of these things.

The internet loves polemics, and so ‘theory has a venue here, but I’ve read a lot of blog posts and emails from people who seem to yield theory and critique like a baseball bat, rather than a toothbrush,¹ so it’s been even more on my mind.

What is critique? What separates “good” critique from “bad” critique, and what end does it serve?

I think if any of you are presently reading Stephen Greenblat or Elaine Scary--for instance--you might have a pretty good answer for this. But what about the internet? There’s a lot of critical work that’s out there on the internet, a lot of people working outside of the academy who contribute to a discourse that attempts to analyze the world and our culture, often with various kinds of political goals. This is also critique.

Now I don’t want to seem like (too much of) an ass, I read a lot of crap on the internet that, to my mind seems like either really bad critique or (more likely) critique that fails to really capture the spirit of what I think the critical mode is.

Feel free (and encouraged) to disagree, but lets do a little bit of brainstorming on what makes good critique or bad critique:

• Critique is synthetic. Critique really needs to draw together multiple perspectives and sources. You can’t critique something without consulting previous critical literature (this is why theory is necessary, without it, we are contextually adrift), without consulting similar and dissimilar works. Critique is the mode through which all of these perspectives come together.
• Critique is often positive. It’s very easy to assume that the purpose of critique is to go through some abominable text² and tear it to shreds, and often this is enjoyable, but it is not productive. “Bad” and otherwise objectionable content will either stand or fail on it’s own, and taking a positive approach to critique means, I think that critique can be more politically productive, because, critiques can say “this good thing is good,” which is more instructive to consumers and producers of content. This doesn’t mean that critique has to be unequivocally positive--far from it--but if there isn’t a substantial positive outlook, the critique suffers.
• Critique doesn’t pass judgement; critique that passes judgment is called “review” and I think “review” has a different role and mold. It’s unfortunate that people who produce in both modes are called “critics.”
• Critique is contextual: This is sort of an adjunct statement to the first, but I think it’s important to realize that critique that doesn’t contextualize both the works in question, and the moment of critique is useless. This is also, potentially controversial, but I don’t suspect we have very many New Critics in the audience. Texts and critics don’t exist in a vacuum, and criticism can’t either. From this principal springs a couple of subsidiary values:
• Paradoxically, readers of criticism need not be familiar with the texts your addressing, though they are likely familiar with the larger body of work that the texts belong to.
• Critics can’t hold individual works accountable for “their times,” nor can critics rise above the constraints of their times in criticism. Attempts to violate these rules are almost always tragic.
• Critique has an agenda: People don’t create texts or critique those texts without an agenda. Period.
• Critique has data, that is to say “texts.” One cannot critique abstract objects, or at least I doubt that it could do that very well. Particularly when specific texts are at the heart the critics’ work. For instance you can’t critique victorian gender norms, but you can critique the ways that legislation, and fashion standards vis a vis a sewing manual shaped gender norms during a period. You can’t critique a political campaign, but you can critique the marketing strategy vis a vis the advertising of various candidates.
  • Often the more specific the data is the better.
  • Often it’s hard to get all the data surrounding contemporary texts and phenomena. This requires special considerations.
• Critique is a pathway to understanding: Looking for and elucidating mechanisms behind particular literary/artistic/cultural phenomena is one of the most powerful and important goals of critique.

That’s enough for now, but I’m interested in seeing what you all have to contribute…

So I have a confession to make. I’m not writing longhand very much at all. Actually its insignificant the amount that I’m writing things out longhand any more. I was struck by this fact the other day, when, after a day where I felt like I didn’t get anything done, I opened a notebook and did some project planning/review on a sheet of paper. And I realized that my fountain pen was empty.

The interesting thing, I think is that I’m sort of a pen nut, and I’ve always loved having cool pens that made the act of writing a pleasure. So much so that since high school I’ve always had a Namiki Vanishing Point Fountain Pen around. These are heaty, but very usable fountain pens, that use a retracting nib (awesome!) and the grind on Pilot/Namiki nibs is great¹. I love writing by hand, and for a long time I’ve felt that I do my best planning and rough work long hand.

There two big reasons that I think this has worked so well for me. First of all, I have a great spatial memory, and having notes that are fixed on a page makes them easy to remember, particularly if they’re arranged sequentially, reading through the past archive can be a really power contextual memory aide. I haven’t tried it in a while, but I can take a notebook from the past, and flip through the pages and sometimes recall all sorts of stuff about the moment in my life that I was writing those notes².

But there’s a conflict here. I’m a geek so it makes sense to a digital system to keep track of these notes. After all, it’s just text. There are a score of reasons why this makes sense: digital text is searchable, it’s more enduring, its easier to read, there are search tools, and I type considerably faster than I can write long hand. But, there are of course downsides: digital text isn’t as portable for on the fly creation, the semantic/spacial “features” of notebooks are basically lost, and the truth is that search is only really useful if you’re looking “for” something, rather than browsing through³ taking system, because in order for search to be useable you need to be looking “for something” where as, if you’re looking at a notebook, it’s all browse and no search. Clearly there’s a place for search, but loosing “browsing cabibility,” is a huge downgrade.

At some point, about a year ago--as this was the inspiration for tychoish.com--I thought hey, “maybe a “blog” notebook could give linear context,” and still be digital. Well tychoish.com didn’t work out so well for this, but I’ve been using ikiwiki, which is mostly a wiki, but it has some useful blogging capabilities. Unfortunately, I’ve had a hard time getting it to work since I upgraded my computer, and switched to git.⁴

And the end result is, that without really trying to, exactly, I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not writing anything out, really, and I have, sort of, all the bases covered. I have a computer that is more portable than the last one. I have a flash drive with a couple of good ssh clients on it, I have web access to my repositories. It’s all there, and it’s all accessible (to me), and that’s something that I can already tell has been a good thing for my workflow. At the same time, as my little project planning session a few days ago with the notebook illustrated, there are times when the change of venue/context is enough to get things rolling if they’re stalled.

The moral? Digital is good, particularly once you find the right solution, but maybe it isn’t quite time to throw away all the notebooks. Also I write this I realize that I should probably write a post about backup, but that’s for another day.

Onward and Upward!

Backstory: For the past year I’ve been using source control management software to manage and version all of my text files (which is where I do all of my writing, and most of my “real work.") I started out using subversion, which is a good piece of software under some circumstances. This post is about my transition to a different system, that system, and a look at how my production is impacted by this switch. Only more interesting. ;)

Basically here’s how subversion works: it has a database, that collects file names and the content of the files, and then every time you tell it to, it takes a snapshot of your files, and stores in the database the difference between the current version and the previous version. Sounds great? It is, but here’s the problem: suppose you have two people working on the files at once, so the snapshots that both of them are sending back to the database become less and less alike as time goes on. Secondly, it relies on file names, rather than file content to distinguish between files.

So problems spring up when you have more than one copy in play, and when you have file names that can change, and while the program compensates for these problems, they are core problems which cannot be remedied. In truth, I think subversion is a great tool for people with one computer who are editing/refactoring code or text, but not particularly for people who are in the process of generating new code or text.

Enter stage left, git. Which rather than revising subversion or another system despite it’s flaws, attempts to solve the problem of tracking the history/changes of a given project in a completely different way. The system, is built around the idea of combining divergent codes/texts into a single whole, so the whole system is built around easily merging different copies of a given project, rather than storing the one true canonical version of a text.

This means, that you can build experimental branches, tell the program that “now I’m going to see what happens to the novel if I turn this character’s face blue,” and edit/write with that idea for a while without affecting the “main strand” of your story. This means you can have working copies of your novel on 3 different machines, at the same time, and painlessly merge them together at whim, and it just works. Also as an added benefit git is faster by several orders of magnitude, which means it’s completely viable to regularly and automatically back up using git over a network. This alone is an amazing feature.

The down side is that, whereas subversion, uses a very centralized and linear model that is easily grokable by most people, git works in a very different way that’s hard to grasp at first. Thankfully, these days at least, the documentation is much better. I watched a talk by the creator of the software, who also wrote something called Linux, you might have heard about it, where he was introduced as having written a piece of software “so complex only he could understand it.”

And that’s not very hard from the truth. Its a wonderful tool, and I like that it pushes me to think about my progress and work in a different, and productive way. All this by way of saying, some software--subversion, the world wide web, and windows, and os x--works in very predictable ways that fit with the way you think about information and data and ultimately the world. And then there’s software that requires a different perspective, that isn’t intuitive, but works in the most effective way to accomplish a given kind of task (like collaboration, or backup, in the case of git), or like efficient reading of websites (like say, RSS). And these paradigm shifting programs, are I think, terribly fascinating, both as a computer user, and I think also as a science fiction writer…

I’ll gather some resources that I’ve found useful regarding git, and post them up here soon.

In the mean time, think well!

A couple of weeks ago (wow, it’s been a couple of weeks!), a new twitter-like service called identi.ca started up. It’s open source, and incorporates a lot of “duh” features that twitter doesn’t yet have, so I’m a fan in general, but I think it’s doomed to fail ultimately because it doesn’t have the community that twitter has--yet, and I don’t think that it will, ever.

With another new 140-character micro blogging service I had a series of conversations with bear about these kids of sites, the social niche that they occupy and the technology that’s behind them.

I should start by saying that I really like twitter, and I think that the ultra-short form totally has a niche. I think the problem with identica, which it inherited from twitter, is that their social plan is out of sync with their technological plan.¹

Twitter has, of course, been plagued by horrible scaling problems. I think initially twitter expected everyone to actually answer the framing question “What are you doing?” So that each individual’s stream would be like a more or less isolated “microblog.” And their software was developed in this direction.

And then “the community,” happened, and it turns out that what people really want from their twitter-like services is not a place where they can record “what they’re doing,” but talk publicly with a group of friends.

Enter the “fail whale:” the problem with this usage model is that people check it much more regularly, they update more regularly, and with the site not really built for this kind of usage, there are a lot of error messages, lost messages, and the like. While it’s taken twitter a while to sort this out--and they are getting better--the problem remains that twitters users and twitters initial designers have/had two very different sites in mind. And because of the problems that twitter’s had (and because of it’s great success) there have been a lot of sites that basically duplicates twitters functionality.

This is all fine and good except that the fact that twitter is the wrong thing to copy. My conclusion from the post-identi.ca-launch discussion was that, “the next twitter-like service to make it isn’t going to get twitter right, for once and for all; but rather, the next twitter ‘killer’ will get IRC right, at last.”

IRC is the original internet chat platform. It’s not without it’s problems, both social and technical. Basically you have to have a live connection to use IRC, there’s no “offline.” It also doesn’t scale much more effectively than twitter, and there’s no way to filter/organize the community on IRC except through really route tools[^socirc]. The really interesting thing is that people are more prone to using twitter like IRC, and less like blogger or live journal (which you have to imagine is what they thought that it would be like.) [^socirc]: The issue is that if a channel on IRC gets overridden with spam, or annoying people, or just volume, the only option is to start kicking people out, or to start a new channel, which can be sort of draconian.

So what would “a better IRC be?” I don’t know, I’m just a guy, right, but here’s what I’d like to see:

1. Integration with the web in a way that doesn’t suck. There have always been webapplets for IRC, but they have always sucked. This can’t continue. 2. You shouldn’t have to be online to record a conversation. 3. Unlike twitter, the offline apps need to be as good if not better than the web site. 4. Arbitrary rooms, “moments” and streams need to be constructed on the fly by users. The randomness of twitter is something new, that--now that we know it’s there--is something we want. 5. Everyone should be able to intuitively construct filtering mechanisms. 6. Chat “moments” and cork-board “moments” should both be possible to construct, but 7. No one should have to think about the infrastructure (this is a problem for both IRC and twitter.) 8. Identity needs to be managed coherently. Jabber/XMPP seems like an ideal tool for this project. 9. Also identitiy management and community organization seems like the “niche” for private enterprise to fill, rather than infrastructure, which I think can be decentralized. 10. Threaded conversations. It’s a must.

Anyone have anything to add to this?

Onward and Upward!

Trailing Edge, the story that I’m writing (and that I posted the first part of on Monday to kick of Critical Futures) is at least nominally a space opera.¹ It’s funny then, that after about a month of active writing on the project, I’ve begun writing the first part of the story that occurs in space. and I’ve written a respectable amount in this world so far.

Now it’ll be a while before this gets to CF, as I have a lot of stuff that I want to get to first, and I’m going to try and post a number of different stories. So I’m not going to spoil anything, but in honor of this, I’m just going to talk about space opera, and why I like it, and why I write it.

Basically, I like space opera because it takes an optimistic view of the future. Either we blow ourselves up on Earth, or we leave and see what’s out there. On a fundamental level those are the options. This is why, I think, science fiction writers and futurists (not necessarily overlapping categories) are so interested in maintaining and supporting an active space program, even when it seems to contradict their other political positions: the alternative is too frightening.

Given this, you can bicker about the details of what’s going to logically happen in the next 20 to 50 years, and you can write dystopias of various stripes. Everything else, is space opera of some flavor or another, and I guess that’s the core that I write too.

Now Trailing Edge is sort of weird space opera, I will grant you that, but I always find myself entertained by stories that are “about/set in a particular place” that take way to long to get to that place. Like in the Knowing Mars Story it took a long time for the narrator to actually get to Mars, in the story. Sort of, it’s complicated, and you’ll see in time, but it’s an interesting problem.

I guess the ultimate question that I’m asking is a follow up to this post, but does genre and sub-genre fiction need signposts early on to tell you that “this is going to be space opera,” or “this is going to be cyberpunk,” or can you do genre more subtly? I guess this is in part a technical question and in part a taste one.

So, don’t delay. What do you think?

As I am, apparently, entering into a new blogging niche, I’ve been trying to get the word out about Critical Futures and looking around at the field. Here’s a link dump with what I’ve found, if you’re interested.

• Space Haggis - Great name and it has an interactive element which I think is really clever, though it’s not my piece of cake, I can totally see why this project is so popular.
• BlogFiction Blog - Good meta site/community. Good resource.
• Sound of the Void - Fairly straightforward “blog-novel,” but it’s there.
• flogalicious given my readership, I think the term “flog” for fiction blog is likely to cause more confusion than it’s worth, but this is a great directory, though I’d love to be able to offer some advice for folks as they write their blurbs.
• fiction volante - Though it’s almost over, the concept is really cool, and my hat’s off to the author for a successful year.
• Horton’s Folly - This blog is more of a fictional blog, that is, not a blog of someone’s fiction project, but rather a blog by a fictional character. Interesting idea, and I do like the way that it toys with identity, and narration. I’m clearly pretty fond of this kind of play.
• A Change and Weather this is another single project blog, fantasy (there seems to be an abundance of fantasy in the blog fiction world,) and it looks pretty nifty.
• The Wikipedia article is also a great resource, though I think it’s not a particularly good exemplar of wikipedia.
• ETA: tor.com - I just got my beta invite from the new tor website. It’s very nice. I’m excited. In some respects this is just a traditional formed venue online, so we’ll see how it works out, but the truth is that there aren’t many of these types of publications either, so it’s welcome.

There’s also a multitude of original (and otherwise) fiction on livejournal, I’m not going to pretend to catalogue that in anyway. Do people have other favorites?

There’s a Catholic church not very far from our house, that has a very good rummage sale every year. Actually there are, I think at least three Catholic churches that are closer, but thats a geographical quirk, and is neither here nor there.

So, of course, we went.

We have the theory, that for the best rummage sale experience, go to rummage sales in neighborhoods where the mean household income is greater than your household income. As crap is relative, this has proven to be a good rule of thumb.

The corollary to this rule is that you shouldn’t go to sales in places that are too much better of than your neighborhood, as the likelihood of those people overpricing their crap relative to your means is too high.

Anyway, in accordance with these rules, we have always been fond of this sale, and this year didn’t disapoint. Here are the highlights.

• Worsted Weight Wool in good shape from the 50s and 60s. I’m going to make socks and hats.
• About ten old science fiction magazines. I going to start with a F&SF from October 1978 that has a Thomas M. Disch story in it, though most of what I picked up are from the last 10-12 years. Including some older Cory Doctorow stuff that I think will be interesting to read.
• A basket for holding spinning stuff while I’m spinning.
• A couple books and maybe some other stuff that I’m forgetting, but odds and ends.

I’m pretty pleased with this, on the whole. Reading the fiction will be a lot of fun. I’m doing better with the reading, but I think supporting the magazines more, and reading that material is something that I hope will be good for me as a writer. I’ll report on it here of course.

Onward and Upward!

I don’t tend to write a lot about the music that I listen to/participate in, I have sort of obscure tastes by contemporary standards, and have been known to go on somewhat eccentrically. In any case, I wanted to write briefly about two different kinds of “good music:” the great song, and the “desert island album.”

Great songs are songs that I love to listen to on endless repeat. I’ve spent, literally days listening to a single song, they’re songs that I know most of the lyrics to (though interestingly the songs I like to sing with other people aren’t always the same “great songs.") Here’s a tentative list, in no particular order:

• Louis Killen’s singing of “The Leaving of Liverpool.”
• Finest Kind’s singing of “The Rose in June” (My dad, by contrast hates this song because it’s too religious and it “takes him too long to drown,” I think it’s a good song in any case.)
• Martin Simpson’s “Love Never Dies,” from the Righteousness and Humidity Album.
• Joni Mitchell’s “Case of You” (though “For Free” is a close second).
• Richard Thompson’s “Andalus/Radio Marrakesh” (The first tune on this list, and though I like a lot of tunes, this one is amazing.)
• Rufus Wainwright’s “Hallelujah” (with due respects to Jeff Buckely, actually it’s a tie, and Wainright, very rightly cribs from Bukley.) This song shares a brain cell with Josh Ritter’s “Harrisburg,” thanks to an old roommate, and I think I might like this song more, but in any case.
• Michelle Shocked’s “Come a Long Way,”
• The Kippling/Bellamy (by anyone) “A Pilgrim’s Way”

Desert Island Albums are something completely different, Judy and some other people started playing around with the question “what’s the album you’d take to a desert island, if you could only take 1?” I think we decided that it couldn’t be done in less than three, but never the less, there are some albums which are just divine as complete entities in themselves, and this doesn’t necessarily overlap with the great song category very much. Here’s a tentative list of my desert island albums (order not important):

• Nic Jones' The Noah’s Arc Trap (this is Judy’s suggestion, and I agree completely.)
• Eliza Carthy’s Rough Music (It’s her latest)
• Jethro Tull’s Thick as A Brick
• Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run
• Martin Simpson’s The Bramble Briar
• Brian McNeil’s Back of the North Wind
• Fairport Convention’s What we did on our Holidays

I think the former category is more subjective than the later, albeit only slightly. Do you have any good suggestions that I might have left off.