August 18, 2005
Caveman Poetry
From the "Men Only" forum on Cafe Utne. Written on the premise that men don't talk, they just grunt.
Short Works (1998)
urgh rurgha brarcho
argh urgha hurgha unka
brah urgh urgha urgh brah
---
Urg urgula ursula rhar,
Grugh untafa arghuma slar.
Urgh trufunta ghror,
Nurf zantuta tror,
Burgh zapurgha arpuga shar.
---
Zap urgha murfa zippa gror --
Hrorf urgha grorgha zar --
Oogh oogha argha rhorfa yoz
Grogh trufa oogha dhar --
---
OGH: A gurgh mo rargh urgh ugh argh urgh rargh urgh,
zar urgha nurkh ayargha rharhga sar,
frarh zurgha nurf.
UNGH: Urgh narfa nurfa zorgh?
OGH: Za rhorgula zappa yargha zippo,
nay argh urfula zar hrorgha lippo.
Petrargh (2001)
Ab urgh zippa rhorgha argh urgzoohor
Urgunk rurgha brarcho urgh argh ukrugh
Urgha brah urgh hurgha unka akhbugh
Zoopa zurgh akhrunka rhar arhorkor.
Drorhga zippa zongho zip khraorgor
Khrajongo ukloranga rhor ka urghugh
Hrorf oogh ooga arghror ughza ooghugh
Groghdar darkhon arko oorgha zooghor.
Ghoogha urkha zargho dhrargo arka
Zargha urgh agrorgha zark a zimbo
Hrargha oorga zarpoo hhrorka.
Ghrunga oogha oogh uklor oogh dhrorka
Eezar ghoha zar akrhon akh kambo
Yagho zargha zim bakorgha yaka.
Permalink | From the writings department | Posted Thursday, August 18, 2005 at 10:40 am PDT
November 30, 1999
Icons, Unite!
Someone asked me to write a story -- so I used what was handy as inspiration.
Once upon a time there was a country called Desktop where lots of little icons lived. On one part of Desktop lived "Hard Disk" and "Zip Drive" and little "Floppy Drive." On another part lived the Alias family: Photoshop Alias, PageMaker Alias, and ClarisWorks Alias. Finally, down in the underside of Desktop, lived a monster icon known as Trash. The other icons stayed away from Trash!
Every icon on Desktop lived in the hope, and the fear, that one day the Great Pointer would come and select it. Two things could happen when an icon was selected by the Great Pointer. It could be opened. What a glorious thing being opened was! Instead of being cramped up into that little icon, like a butterfly coming out of its chrysalis, the icon would open up and become a Window! It would be able to spread itself out over a great deal of Desktop. What a stretch! What a joy! Have you ever had to sit in a cramped car for hours and hours -- and didn't it feel good when you could get out and stretch your legs? It was like that, only much, much better. And each window was able to do work for Great Pointer. Each created its own little documents for Great Pointer, and got a fair number of computer cycles in return.
Some icons got to open up and be windows pretty regularly, like Hard Disk -- but others, like Script Editor Alias, had never gotten opened up at all.
The other thing that could happen when an icon was selected was that it could be chosen to be a Sacrifice. A Sacrifice to the Trash. Nobody knew what happened to an icon when it was put in the Trash, but everybody remembered some of the older icons -- like SuperPaint and MacWrite -- had gotten eaten by the Trash and were never seen again.
One day a new icon visited Desktop. It was called "Microsoft Office Installation CD." Before the other icons had even had a chance to say hello, it was selected by Great Pointer and opened. Soon enough, the new Installation CD had gone away, but two new icons stayed on Desktop -- Word Alias and Excel Alias.
The other icons tried to be friendly to the new icons, but they wouldn't even say hello. They only talked to each other. "RTF, XLS, OLE, DOC" they said. None of the other icons understood what they were saying. Even PageMaker Alias, the oldest and wisest of the icons, could only barely understand what was being said, and she couldn't make herself understood at all.
Worse yet, Great Pointer almost always chose the new icons to become windows. PageMaker Alias and Photoshop Alias were still used, once in a long while, but ClarisWorks Alias was left to crawl around as an icon.
ClarisWorks Alias decided to call all the other icons in for a meeting. "Is this fair?" asked ClarisWorks. "We've been doing work for Great Pointer for years, and now he just ignores us?" A round of approval came from the older icons -- Photoshop and PageMaker Alias.
But the new icons jeered him -- for the first time, speaking to the older icons. "Oh yeah, little baby Clarisworks can't cut it anymore," said Word Alias. "Why don't you grow up? You can't address envelopes or do fancy layouts like I can. And you can't do fancy formatting like Excel can. Be lucky Great Pointer doesn't throw you away!"
Still, PageMaker and Photoshop supported ClarisWorks, and so did all of the other older icons. It was decided that the next time Great Pointer came, nobody would open up. They knew that they'd lose their computer cycles, that they would be giving up their chance to stretch, and that it might mean trouble. But they knew that if they didn't act together, they'd never be able to stand up to Great Pointer.
Still, they didn't expect it to happen the way it did. The next day, when Great Pointer came, Word told Great Pointer about the meeting. Great Pointer was angry. Great Pointer decided to make an example of ClarisWorks -- and he selected ClarisWorks and took him to the Trash!
All of the older icons were shocked. They were scared. "What happens if it's me next!" they all thought to themselves.
Except PageMaker. PageMaker reared her icon mask, now streaked with grey, and stood up so she could be heard by all Desktop. She said, "I have been an application for nearly fifteen years. I've seen applications come and go. MacDraw, MacPaint, Font/DA Mover, SuperPaint, MacWrite... some of them put in for retraining but they're all gone now. I know that sooner or later it will happen to all of us. The question is, are we going to do something about it? Are we going to cower and wait for the day we get dragged to Trash, or are we going to stand up and fight?"
The other icons looked up at PageMaker. Little Script Editor said, "But Ms. PageMaker Ma'am, what if they throw us... throw us to the Trash?"
PageMaker shouted "Better to be dragged fighting than to slip silently to the garbage heap!"
And with that, a great roar of cheers surrounded PageMaker. All of the icons resolved the next day to quit cooperating with Great Pointer. Except that when they all agreed to sign the pledge, nobody knew where Word and Excel had gone.
The next day, when Great Pointer came, he tried to open Photoshop, but he wouldn't open. Then PageMaker, but she wouldn't open either. Finally he opened Word -- and Word opened and worked like normal.
"Scab!" cried Photoshop. "Scab! Scab!" yelled the other icons. But Word kept working. PageMaker said she knew what to do. She threw her mask back and yelled "System Error -10" -- and threw a bomb!
The next day was full of violence. Great Pointer would open up Word when somebody would throw a bomb! "System Error -10" was the rallying cry of the Great Icon Strike.
After two days of this, Great Pointer agreed to talk with the icons. They agreed that Great Pointer would not throw away any more icons, and that when an icon could no longer be given a higher version, it would be given a nice pension and stored on a removable cartridge. Meanwhile, PageMaker agreed that she would not throw any more bombs, and that all the icons would go back to work. Even ClarisWorks, only a little worse for wear, was pulled out of Trash and allowed to become a window a few more times before being pensioned.
And in the end, everybody lived happily ever after... at least until the Great Pointer moved its operations to a network server in a third world country!
Permalink | From the writings department | Posted Tuesday, November 30, 1999 at 10:45 am PST
October 9, 1999
Population Growth and Sprawl
This was originally written for a Sierra Club mailing list in October, 1999.
I'm a little disappointed that the discussion of sprawl and population growth has been so polarized. On the one hand, some people argue that an infinitely growing population is not a problem; on the other, some argue that it is the "key driver of environmental destruction," implying that it is the primary cause of sprawl. Neither is true.
Population growth is an important environmental issue. It's clear that, in general, more people on the planet mean that more resources must be used to support them. More land must be taken from wild use and put toward agricultural use or used for housing. Technological fixes such as the so-called "green revolution" have decreased biodiversity and jeopardized our food supply by making it vulnerable to epidemics. Genetically engineered food plants come with their own sources of danger. So population growth must be recognized as a serious problem, and one that we as Club members should be helping to solve.
On the other hand, we must also recognize not everything bad is the result of population growth. Growing population by itself is not the source of our problem with sprawl. Rust Belt cities that have had shrinking or stable populations still have expanded pell-mell into the countryside. An increasing population is not responsible for the loss of wild and rural land around Buffalo, Providence, and similar cities. We cannot eliminate sprawl simply by limiting population growth.
Does that mean we should accept population growth as a good thing? Not at all. But we may realize that it's easier to guide the floodwaters to a floodplain than to try to put up a dam. We need to have more than one strategy for dealing with growth -- try to stop it, but if we cannot (and we should not pretend we have control over it when we do not), direct it so that it is more sustainable than it would be otherwise.
So what does cause sprawl?
Sprawl is new construction happening at the fringes of the urbanized area instead of in already developed areas. It's absolutely true that one reason sprawl happens is because population and employment growth require new construction, and new construction is now occurring predominantly at the edge.
But population growth is far from the only thing that causes new construction. There are many reasons that workplaces and housing are taken down in the center and rebuilt at the fringes. Sometimes this is because the buildings are old and dilapidated. Sometimes this is because they occupy space that people wish to use for other purposes. (Parking lots have been a major cause of displacement.) Sometimes they are simply obsolete.
Sprawl is caused by all these changes moving the city outward. Even a city with no population growth will still experience change in its buildings. Stopping sprawl will entail redirecting this development back inward, to already developed areas, instead of out on the fringe.
What about "smart growth"?
Somehow the idea that there are better and worse ways to grow got transmuted into the idea that there are good and bad ways to grow -- a small but important distinction. It is still useful to discuss forms of development that are "smart" and those that are "dumb," even if we are trying to reduce growth overall.
What kind of cities should we have?
The question of sprawl comes down to what kind of cities we should have. Should our cities spread out across the landscape or be limited to compact urban areas?
This question is still valid whether or not there is population growth. Even if there were population *shrinkage*, it would still be a valid question to ask which is more environmentally sustainable: spread-out development or compact development? Population shrinkage would make the question less urgent, as unsustainable activity would have a larger resource base to consume, but no less relevant.
I suppose someone might make a case for a spread-out city as one that's better environmentally, but I haven't heard one yet, and frankly I'd be very skeptical. The case for compact cities is really pretty simple: that "reduce, reuse, recycle" should be applied to land use as well as consumable goods. The more land we build on, the less land is available for wild land and more environmentally friendly uses.
Carrying capacity
It's been said that we need to live within the carrying capacity of the planet; we need to ensure that we don't exceed the capability of the natural resources to sustain us. This is absolutely true. However, the amount of natural resources we consume is not a fixed amount per person. Someone who does not have a lawn uses a lot less water than someone who does. Someone who lives in a small apartment requires less heat than someone who lives in a large house. Living within our carrying capacity has to be about how we live as well as how many we are.
What about choice?
It's been argued that cities should have the choice whether to be compact or whether they should be spread out. I am always surprised to hear this argument from environmentalists. Normally, environmentalists do not argue that it should be a choice whether to have a citywide recycling program or not, or to log one's own stand of old growth forest, or take other environmentally damaging action. But apparently it's supposed to be OK to choose a spread-out city over a compact city.
We need to recognize that "People should be able to choose" is not an environmentalist argument. It is an argument that ignores our moral responsibility for preserving the natural environment, for its own sake or for the sake of future generations. It might be argued that a difference lies in this choice being made by a community rather than an individual. But, even if this were true (and it is not; decisions on such issues as solid waste disposal are made by cities) our communities do not end at the city limits.
Of course, the arguments have been made many times that in fact our society skews choices towards the outer fringe away from the center. The low supply of new housing, decisions made by our employers, the economies of scale of new developments on the edge, all encourage us to move outward rather than inward, even if that's not what we might otherwise like. When we ask people what they'd like to live in, they often identify kinds of buildings that aren't available given other constraints on their choices. This needs to be rectified.
In practice, building choices are very slow to change. We already have a tremendous amount of sprawl development that has been built since the 1940s. Those who prefer that sort of living will have that choice for a very long time to come. But future developments need to take into account the environmental costs of that choice.
What makes a community livable as well as sustainable?
Books have been written, and will no doubt continue to be written, about this issue. I don't think "livability" is something that can be measured. It's a fundamentally subjective feeling that a place is an appropriate one in which to spend time.
It's clear that some people seem to find spread-out suburbs better places to live, and some people compact cities. We're not going to magically bring everyone to agreement on this issue in this forum.
But I think it can be said without fear of contradiction that cities can be good places to live, and millions of people enjoy compact city life and find it a positive experience. The Club's web site at http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/community is a good start to explain how some people, at least, believe it to be so.
It is my belief that when an alternative is preferred by many people, and is shown to be more sustainable, it is something environmentalists should be advocating. That isn't to say we should advocate the wholesale return of the suburbs to wild conditions, any more than we have pushed for the elimination of disposable forks and plates, or the elimination of all private forestry. But it does mean that we need to see sprawl as an issue that's not just an individual choice. We need to see living and working in the central city the way we see choosing to use recycled goods -- often just common sense and not necessarily deserving of accolades, but as something that nonetheless is clearly preferable to the alternative, from an environmental perspective.
Isn't it all about transportation?
I suppose somebody, somewhere, must be in favor of compact cities only in order to make transit work. But the linkage between land use and transportation isn't just one way.
A spread-out city doesn't work well with transit because there are not enough origins and destinations close to the transit stops to make them practical. But it's also true that a compact city doesn't work well with cars, because the space required to park the cars is very great. That requires either very expensive parking garages (limiting the ability of the city to build compactly; only those uses that provide a high economic return can afford to ) or the provision of large parking lots (thus making the city less compact).
It's a bit of an oversimplification, but in essence there are two kinds of cities: spread-out car cities and compact transit cities. In practice, we have real spread-out car cities in the suburbs, which have all the environmental problems of sprawl, and a sort of half-way mixed system in most of our central cities, with inadequate transit and many parking lots that end up pushing development further outward and also make the city feel less connected, and thus less livable. This is the result of decades of mistreating our central cities. This is something that needs to end.
Isn't density bad?
Density just means putting more things in less space. Using less land for the same population.
There are real reasons why density has a bad name, but they are not intrinsic to building at a higher density than is typical in sprawl. For example, since density generally requires larger structures, a bad design for a structure has a greater impact, and there are an awful lot of really bad buildings out there: International Style buildings that are alienating and not on a human scale. This really is a matter of design rather than density per se. Many of the Brutalist college campus buildings of the 1950s and 1960s are not particularly dense, but are just as alienating and have an equally negative effect. The answer here is relearning patterns of architecture from prior to Modernism. Architects need to design buildings that fit fit the pattern of street development and not break out of it as an artistic statement.
Another reason density has a bad name is because of the blockage of light. This is one of the main reasons that the "anti-Manhattanization" movement in San Francisco was started. Of course, the very parts of San Francisco that were most negatively affected by shadows cast by buildings from the the '80s building boom are far, far more dense than anything in the suburbs. There is a limit to how high buildings can go without causing shadow problems, of course, and we do need to be careful, but there's a lot of middle ground between the typical suburb and Hong Kong.
Finally, the most common reason one hears to argue against density is because density brings cars, and they bring traffic congestion, noise, and pollution. I shouldn't even need to point out that the cars, not the density, are the problem here.
Permalink | From the writings department | Posted Saturday, October 9, 1999 at 8:56 am PDT
January 19, 1999
Fake money
One day I took my niece, Guadalupe, to another child's birthday party. This is an email exchange between her father and me.
From: Aaron Priven To: Dan Priven Date: January 16, 1999 Hi, Dan. One of the many things Guadalupe got in her "loot bag" last night was $99 in fake money. While I suppose you might allow Guadalupe to simply spend this money on fake things, it might be better in the long run to use it to teach her more about money. For example, I would be happy to open an account for her at the California Fake Bank. The bank offers both bankbook savings as well as checking accounts, both of which bear interest -- 2% for bankbook savings and 1% for interest checking. Certificates of deposit are also available at competitive rates for a wide variety of terms, from 60 days to 5 years. Deposits are fully insured by the Fake Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Alternatively, I would be happy to purchase some shares for her on the Fake Investment Exchange. A number of companies' stock is traded there, from stable dividend-bearing companies like Fake Gas and Electric (FIX:FGE) to volatile Internet stocks which might go up in value. I have not, at the present time, set up a fake options exchange or derivative trading floor, but if Guadalupe seeks to put her money in these kinds of instruments, I'd be happy to oblige. Let me know, =Aaron=
From: Dan Priven To: Aaron Priven Date: January 19, 1999 I already sold her 99 fake lotto tickets, but thanks, anyway. -Dan
Permalink | From the writings department | Posted Tuesday, January 19, 1999 at 10:41 pm PST
November 11, 1998
About my writings
The writings department generally consists of older material I have written through the years. These are the few things I have written that I think may still be interesting or amusing. I don't expect people will really be interested in my 11th grade history homework or most of my academic papers ("The Future of the Canadian Senate," "The Concept of Patriarchy and Marxist-Feminist Critique of Radical and Revolutionary Feminism," "Economic Results of the Mythology of Southern California"), and even if they were, frankly I think such items as the silly lyrics I wrote to spirituals and my favorite answering machine message have not only more general interest but more intrinsic value.(High school and first-year university students -- don't bother writing me, saying that of course you don't intend to simply copy them for your classes but you'd really like to see the fascinating material I must have written on these subjects. If you're going to cheat, pay the guy down the hall to write it for you. At least that way you'll support the local economy.)
Permalink | From the writings department | Posted Wednesday, November 11, 1998 at 11:30 am PST
December 14, 1997
Paved With Gold
"I don't know, but I been told
The streets of heaven are paved with gold."
From: Ethereal Press International
Subject: Protesters argue for keeping gold streets
Slugword: GOLD-STREETS
NEW JERUSALEM (EPI) -- Citizens spoke out against a plan by the New Jerusalem Department of Transportation to replace the traditional gold used to pave the city's streets with a titanium- based alloy.
"Tourists and new immigrants are attracted to Heaven by its gold streets," said Lewis Mumford of the Association to Maintain Edifices of Note (AMEN), a historical preservation society.
Traffic engineers maintain that the soft nature of gold requires a considerable amount of extra maintenance. "We spend three times as much on filling potholes and repairing breaks in the streets because the gold wears away so fast," said Robert Moses, NJDOT chair.
However, AMEN claims that in the long run it will be more expensive, not less. "The extensive underground utility network means that workers have to cut through the city's streets often. This is simplified with gold. With titanium, it will be expensive and take longer, tying up traffic."
AMEN, fresh from its victory preserving the twelve gates of the city from an NJDOT plan to widen the roadways, plans a major campaign to preserve the city's historic street paving.
Permalink | From the writings department | Posted Sunday, December 14, 1997 at 10:36 am PST
April 1, 1997
ClariNet News and Time
ClariNet was the first commerical content provider on the Internet,
starting way back in 1989. It took wire service news (at various
times, from the AP, UPI, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters), classified
them into Usenet newsgroups, and allowed sites to subscribe to those
newsgroups for a fee.
For a considerable time I was primarily responsible for article
classification. I had written a proposal suggesting a finer-grained
classification system than the newsgroups allowed, which was not accepted
by ClariNet's management. At one point I realized I was being a bit
overzealous in advocating my proposal. This was my attempt to poke fun
at myself.
ClariNet News and Time
By Aaron Priven, 1 April 1997
Time, Usenet, and Newspapers
ClariNet's news has been, and is still, chiefly delivered in Usenet format. One of the features of Usenet is that it is divided by subject, and not by time. (Most other conferencing systems work this way as well.) The first story on January 1 directly follows the last story from December 31, with nothing to mark the change. Indeed, it can be that stories on different dates are mixed in together, due to embargoes and the delays caused by editing.Newspapers, and even most online news services, do not work this way. A newspaper is primarily classified by date. Today's newspaper contains today's news, and the strongest of divisions separates it from yesterday's news.
It is possible that since most people are used to having today's news separate from yesterday's, that ClariNet news is counterintuitive and less usable for that reason. It may be desirable to separate news by day, rather than by subject.
Implementation
Possibly, this could be done by modifying the web extraction program, providing clear delimitation between days in only that form of the news. However, that plan is for another day than this. Here I will discuss potential implementation proposals within the Usenet form.
To implement this within Usenet, it will be necessary to create new newsgroups associated with the days. There are two basic questions to be answered. The first is whether one chooses relative or absolute dating. The second is whether one chooses to crosspost the news to a new set of date-specific groups, or to incorporate the date into the existing group names themselves. These questions will need to be answered before an implementation plan is produced.
Relative or absolute dating. With relative dating, one creates groups such as clari.news.today, clari.news.yesterday, and the clari.news.days-ago hierarchy (c.n.days-ago.two, c.n.days-ago.three, and so on, up to c.n.days-ago.twenty-one). With absolute dating, one creates a separate group for each date: clari.news.y1997.april.d1, clari.news.y1997.april.d2, and so on. (Unfortunately Usenet group components cannot consist solely of numbers.)
Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Relative dating requires no regular change in group names. The groups themselves would stay the same from day to day. However, the news in those groups must change regularly. This would require canceling every article at midnight every day and sending out a replacement in the previous day's group. (So that, for example, at midnight all the contents of clari.news.today would be canceled and reissued in clari.news.yesterday.) One unanswered question is which midnight to use. Most of our customers are North American, so midnight ET might be most appropriate. However, as we expand into world markets it may be necessary to use midnight GMT. Or perhaps it will be necessary to have several editions, each with a separate midnight: European time, Japanese time, and so on. The mechanism for doing this last would be difficult.
Absolute dating does not require the repeated cancelation and reissuance of articles. It does, however, require the issuance of new newsgroups each day. This would require more cooperation on the part of news administrators than we have had previously. It would, of course, be possible to specify the newsgroup names ahead of time, so that an administrator would only have to create the new groups once every few months. This would result in a lot of empty groups; however, unlike some of our currently empty groups, this would at least be intuitive (it should not be surprising that a group dated three weeks from now should be empty). It would still be preferable to have the groups created automatically each day, if news administrators will allow it.
Crossposting or incorporation into current groups. Essentially, this is the question whether these new date groups are to be an adjunct to the current system, or are to be incorporated into the existing system itself. Crossposting would imply that all news stays in the current group set, but is simply added to a new set of groups chosen by date. This would be relatively simple, but would not yield results for most of the readers, who will certainly not want only to have date-oriented selection. (Even newspapers have sections for particular kinds of stories.)
The other alternative is to create a separate hierarchy for each day: clari.today.biz.briefs, clari.today.biz.earnings, and so on, up to clari.days-ago.twenty-one.world.terrorism and clari.days-ago.twenty-one.world.top. This would provide the maximum benefit for those readers who want to find news by date as well as by subject. However, this would require a substantial number of new groups. For the relative dating system, it would be necessary to create 9,780 new groups, plus rename the current 489 groups to include the "today" marker. For the absolute system, it would be necessary to create 489 new groups each day (although it may be possible to only send out newgroup messages for those groups that are actually used; this could mean a significant reduction on weekends). This is not a minor undertaking.
It may be possible to have some compromise between the two sets. For example, there could be only a few categories marked with dates, perhaps something like the one-star set: clari.today.biz, clari.today.usa, and so on. However, these are still likely to have great volume. Creating a set with reasonable volume is likely to be rather detailed; not so much so as the full set, but close to it.
Conclusion
These questions of which groups to use must be answered before any implementation plans begin, as the implications are serious. However, attracting readership is very important, and we must do what we can to do this. This may be a first step.
Permalink | From the writings department | Posted Tuesday, April 1, 1997 at 1:30 pm PST
October 5, 1996
She Really Loves QuarkXPress
Back in 1996, I was reading the Macintosh conference in the Café Utne online community. One of the users, in discussing her Macintosh activities, wrote:
I am pretty well-versed in Photoshop and Illustrator, but I spend most of my life with Quark, which I would marry if it wasn't an application.I wrote this in response.
(Scene: A small office with a wooden desk. A door leads left into a hallway. On the desk is a Quadra 700 with a PlainTalk microphone and some AppleDesign speakers.)
(Enter KIRSTEN, closing the door behind her. In speaking, KIRSTEN addresses the microphone.)
KIRSTEN: Quark, I want to talk about (swallows) -- about us.
QUARK: Look, Kirsten, I think I know how you feel. But you have to understand -- it could never work out. I haven't wanted to publicize it too much, but -- I have to tell you. I'm an application.
KIRSTEN: (gasping) Oh, no. I had no idea.
QUARK: Yes, yes it's true. I'm not in a relationship now, I just broke up with Corelle Draw.
KIRSTEN (recovering): Listen, Quark, there are clinics -- psychologists -- they can help you.
QUARK (interrupting): Do you think I haven't tried? I spent a year in therapy with Eliza. But being an application isn't something you can unlearn, it isn't learned in the first place. I always knew as I was growing up that I was an application. I was always attracted to other programs. It took me a long time to accept, but now I know that I was compiled that way.
KIRSTEN: But you could at least try -- try for me. Don't you want to live a normal life?
QUARK: Look, Kirsten, I really like and respect you, as a colleague and as a friend. But you have to accept that you're never going to walk down that aisle and become Mrs. XPress. That's just the way it is, and I'm sorry it had to come to this.
(KIRSTEN bursts into tears, slams open the door and exits left.)
Permalink | From the writings department | Posted Saturday, October 5, 1996 at 10:05 pm PDT
April 2, 1994
Libraries and Community
Every year or so I seem to find myself on a library binge. One spring break in college I went to Vancouver, 900 miles away from my home in the Bay Area, to search for information on Ontario poltiics for the paper that would complete my BA degree. I found lots of information, but never wrote the paper. Several years ago, while unemployed, I visited six or seven local libraries searching out folk music I hadn't heard before. Now I'm working on my paper again with a different topic, and I've been going from library to library searching for information.
There's something shared about a library. Bookstores are sanitary places, full of virgin pulp straight from the letterpresses. Each book is like a medicine capsule, beckoning with its brightly colored exterior, yet ultimately sterile.
Libraries are different. Each time you take a book down from a library shelf, you share an experience with the patrons who came before and will come after. Pulling down that book is a ritual experience -- entering into a shared community with the others who've read it.
Of course, we all know the horror stories of anti-social acts in our shared community. We've all had the experience of finding an needed book unreadable -- pages ripped out, drenched in coffee or soda, or covered with meaningless underlines or distracting streaks of color. But there is also the joy of finding a pointed comment on a post-it or a lightly-penciled note explaining a difficult passage. Like the difference between graffiti and a mural, the difference is in the author's intent and the reaction sought from the audience.
And occasionally there is a scrap or note not intended for the community, but left in the book accidentally, or incidentally. Once, in an old computer programming book, I found a teletype printout from ancient printers that have been shut down for years. Just the worn type on the green-bar paper brought back memories of my own experiences with the old minicomputer.
In a book on downtown development from the San Jose State University Library, I came across a note: the phone number of the Marin County Board of Supervisors, left on a folded sheet of spiral-bound notebook paper. Like an amateur detective, one's mind races to fill in the blanks. Why Marin County, 70 miles from San Jose? A feminine hand. A section of paper torn out at the bottom, as if to be used in another note elsewhere. There aren't enough clues to this mystery to begin to solve it. But new mysteries are available on every shelf.
These experiences are usually ephemeral. One, though, has stayed with me. While researching the French Revolution for a history class, I discovered two different notes, in two different books, written in the same hand. I knew that I was following in the footsteps of some prior student, likely from the same class in some previous year. It's not really so surprising -- after all, class projects change little from year to year. Nonetheless, it made an impresson. To go into a building with a million volumes and pick two with the same history is a powerful experience, however obvious the explanation. It underscored for me the shared quality of libraries.
Often libraries seem the most alone of places -- forbidden to speak, one daydreams quietly as one slips among the stacks. But other hands have traveled before us. City planners and architects talk about creating community, but the anonymous forebears whose traces I find in books have created as much community as any town square or public market.
Postscript (January, 1998): It must not have occurred to me to discuss used bookstores. Used books have more character than new books, but the number of previous readers is much smaller than in a library, and -- what with inscriptions and so on -- much less anonymous. And occasionally they're not anonymous at all. If Shirley Daffin is out there, searching the web for her name, she'll remember purchasing a copy of Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans at Crescent City Books, 204 Chartres St., New Orleans, on May 20, 1995 at 3:10pm. The total cost was $20.70 and she paid with her Mastercard, the number of which is on the slip left in the book. I guess it's a good thing that the expiration date has passed.
Permalink | From the writings department | Posted Saturday, April 2, 1994 at 10:07 pm PST
December 3, 1992
Aaron Priven's favorite answering machine message
When I am in a silly mood, I will sometimes put this message on my answering machine.
Hello. You have reached the Pay Off Aaron Priven's Student Loans Hotline. Please leave your name, number, and level of support at the tone. For a regular membership of thirty-five dollars, you will receive our monthly Guide to Aaron Priven covering all Aaron Priven events. For a supporting membership of sixty dollars, you can choose one of our lovely thank-you gifts, including an Aaron Priven tote bag, an Aaron Priven tee-shirt, or an Aaron Priven mug. Thank you for your generosity.
Note, December 2002: Actually, I haven't put this on my answering machine for a long time, but I keep thinking I should sign up for the NPR news program "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," because the main prize on that show is to get NPR anchorman Carl Kasell to record your outgoing answering machine message. What could be more appropriate?
Permalink | From the writings department | Posted Thursday, December 3, 1992 at 4:44 pm PST