Author Archives: Alison

Plaints and laments, curses and maledictions

It took me a rather long time to switch from Mac OS 8.6, with which I was perfectly happy, to OS 10.2; of course, having vowed, upon one traumatic system upgrade, never to do another such thing again, that meant I didn’t upgrade until I bought a new system. But I upgraded, and aside from the delights of the built in apache server, all the goodies of open source software, and a system that allowed software to crash gracefully without bringing the system down with it (Netscape 3.75, I am NOT thinking of you), there was another pleasurable discovery: I didn’t have to use AppleTalk any more.

Now, it may just have been me on whom the AppleTalk gods frowned, but I found AppleTalk an unmitigated nuisance. I had a Lexmark printer cabled to the G3 with one of those split cables – pre USB, it all was, back when no self-respecting company ever produced any such thing as a Mac driver for its own products, so it was all third party patchwork. And the printer needed AppleTalk – or didn’t need AppleTalk, I think I’ve repressed the memory – and if I dared change that setting then I’d be half an hour getting the chooser to recognize the printer again. It interfered with printing, it interfered with the internet settings, and in general, it interfered with user satisfaction.

Why the peroration? Because I have spent the evening trying to transfer my old mail archives from the G3 to my latest system (running 10.4), via a cross-wired cable, with all the file-sharing functions, invoking that curs-ed AppleTalk, and it will not work. I couldn’t remember how to work OS 8.6, though I did succeed in finding the archives. It took me two Babylon5 episodes to get the computers to recognize each other, and then they decided they were using incompatible profiles. So I’ve gone back to USB-and-pray, because the computer has no USB port of its own, the USB port is on a PC card, and the USB-PC card destabilizes a system that works very well. It’s not even responding to Venusian curses and bits of the Verdi Requiem – “Confutatis, maledictis”.

Oh the picture? An accident with the camera, one of those with some artistic merit. Seemed to suit.

Peering into the corners (The Sharing Knife)

One of the joys of a book by Lois McMaster Bujold, like a film by George Lucas, is that, once you’ve seen/read it through once or twice for the story, you can then start peering into the corners of the screen for all the lovely details. While The Sharing Knife, or at least the first 2 volumes, will probably not replace Barrayar and The Paladin of Souls in my list of favourites, the more I think about it, the more I find, and the more I find, the more I appreciate how the details of the worldbuilding undercut the apparently simple story and give the novels their elegaic feel.

To those who have not yet run across a review, Beguilement begins with an eighteen-year-old girl, Fawn Bluefield, in a very traditional fix, albeit for a reason entirely congruent with her character. She has fled her family farm and is heading, on foot, to a large town, to begin a new life. She is snatched from her road by the servants of a malice – a relict of a long-ago act of hubris by a powerful mage-king – and rescued by Dag Redwing Hickory, whose people, the Lakewalkers, have dedicated their lives to the slaying of malices as they appear. Between them, Fawn and Dag bring down the malice, but in such a way that they are bound together, and very shortly begin to fall in love. They’re an unlikely pairing, the naieve but clever young girl and the scarred, grim veteran three times her age. (And if you’re strongly averse to spoilers, do please go and read the book now, and then come back, because I can’t discuss details without getting into detail, though I try to tread lightly).

It’s-just-a-romance has been the tenor of some of the commentary on the novel, romance being generally disrespected. But this romance, and this is where the details come in, isn’t just-a-romance: it strikes at the very survival of the Lakewalkers, in particular. For the Lakewalker magic, the powers that allow them to slay malices, is inherited, and as Dag’s brother is not slow to point out, that means that at best Dag and Fawn’s children will inherit a half-portion of his considerable powers. They have strong prohibitions on intermarriage, and in reaction, Fawn’s people, called (disparagingly) farmers by the Lakewalkers, have developed their own prejudices. As Dag’s aunt Mari says, Lakewalkers have two duties: to kill malices, and to give birth to the next generation able to do the same. And because of the nature of their magic, for each malice killed, a Lakewalker has to die, even if not at the same moment. Their hope of victory resides in, as Dag reflects, running out of malices before they run out of Lakewalkers.

And the details, those lovely details, suggest that the Lakewalkers may be losing their war. Dag’s seniority puts him in contact – and conflict – with the patrol leaders, whose constant theme is how strained their resources are, how slender their reserves of manpower. Lakewalkers’ traditional means of finding malices involves walking in search patterns, designed for a certain number of men and women, now being walked by fewer. The great losses of Dag’s life occurred when a malice slipped through the search-patterns, twenty years ago. Whether because of their own declining numbers, or because of their expanding territories – as farmers push into new territory – the Lakewalkers are overextended. And any delay in finding a malice increases its dangerousness, since by consuming living creatures, including men, it learns and grows. During Legacy, Dag finds himself confronting a malice more highly developed than any he’s seen before, and is struck by its beauty, its realization, and its deadliness. Shortly thereafter, he falls victim to a new form of malice-magic, devised by a malice that has absorbed Lakewalker knowledge into itself. Malices learn – albeit only as individuals. Lakewalkers do not, as Dag acknowledges ruefully, when taken by surprise by one of Fawn’s inspirations. He thought he knew what he was doing, he says, but it may be that he was only doing the same thing, over and over.

It’s not circumstance that Fawn is the innovator. She’s farmer-born, and farmers have grown beyond their purely agrigarian roots and are continuing to develop technologically while Lakewalkers remain static. Part of that is Lakewalker dedication of resources towards their long war, but another part is their aversion to doing anything at all that might call a likeness to their mage ancestors, whose hubris ruined the world. That includes building permanent structures, practicing agriculture, or trying to enlist the support of the farmers they protect to extend their own resources. To Fawn’s eye, their lives are materially impoverished, and their diet – heavily dependent on the ubiquitous plunkin – monotonous. A farmer craftsman was responsible for Dag’s essential arm-harness. Dag’s fine wedding shirt, woven by Fawn’s blind aunt, is an object of covert fascination to the Lakewalker councilwomen (lovely detail). Farmers are responsible for the growth of towns, for agriculture, for glassmaking, and leatherwork. But, another undercutting, their concentration in towns and their skills and innovations, makes their vulnerability to the malices dangerous both to themselves and the Lakewalkers.

So all of this challenges the unquestioning validation of the relationship that a conventional romance offers, with the elegaic sense of a world threatened and in decline. Dag and Fawn are not the first Lakewalker-farmer pairing, but all the others they hear of have been driven apart. It’s more than simple prejudice, and convention, it’s the survival of their world that’s at stake. If one couple are allowed to stay together, the argument goes, how many others will follow suit. To anyone who’s thinking that LMB wouldn’t play it that way, I’ll ask: Who is proven right about the sharing knife? What does that say about the integrity of the world and its peoples’ understanding of it?

Can the two of them make a difference? Fawn at one point asserts, defiantly, that it’s not having the right answer that matter, it’s asking the right question. Her right question leads to a lifesaving action, although not for the reason that she, or the reader expect. Fawn is bright, innovative and learning, and Dag’s powers are expanding. Another undercutting: he is thoroughly spooked by the new manifestations, as are the people around him, fearing that it is too close to the magic practiced by the mages who ruined the world. He lives in a static, circumscribed, and defensive world. And so, as Fawn had to leave a family who undervalued her, Dag arrives at his own point of departure. Which gives the ending of the two books an agreeable symmetry and sets up books three and four.

Authorial mischief, and hollow dreams

Just been listening – with wicked snickers – to the last excerpt of The Uncommon Reader, British author Alan Bennett’s impish fictive speculation on the consequences, for monarch, court and constitution, of the Queen of England’s being bitten by the reading bug. It’s been on BBC4 arts, Afternoon Reading, for this last week.

I’m also waiting for the last part of the Book at Bedtime, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, about the hollowness of the American Dream for a young couple, Frank and April Wheeler, living in post-WWII suburbia. With their dream – or rather April’s dream – of escaping suburbia for Paris undone by her pregnancy, and Frank’s manipulation and prevarication named and shamed by their neighbours’ disturbed son, their marital battles have descended into primal cruelty. The climax of the last episode made for shuddersome listening.

The Cult of the Cheap: How today's culture is killing our Internet

Having read various reviews and responses to Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, I had already formed the impression that I would agree with the justice of the case, but irked at his failure to be true to his own argument.

And I did, and I was. I was in sympathy with his regret for the passing of standards in writing and reporting, and for the threat to established institutions. I have a traditional education, which inclines me to value standards in reasoning and expression, and to respect expertise. I’m also trying to succeed in as a writer according to the traditional publishing model. In short, I’ve got an investment in the traditional way of doing things.

However, Keen has written a polemic, a very Web approach, exemplifying some of the practices he pillories. He employs cheap insults. He piles anecdote upon anecdote in journalistic style without – this is a scientist beef – any sense of denominator, whether this is a rare instance, or a common practice. He does not explore what other forces might have contributed to, or might actually have been causing, the decline of traditional media and authorities. Misattribution of cause is no help.

In his paen to the objectivity and quality of mainstream media, he does not acknowledge the extent to which the newsworthy is the adworthy, with editors pressured to suppress or modify stories that will threaten the advertising revenue. He does not address the issue of bias, commercial and otherwise, in the mainstream media. He does not assess his benchmark, the quality of reporting. If the misrepresentations of subjects that I know enough to review primary sources on – scientific and medical literature – is anything to go by, then the mainstream media often fail to do their topic justice.

And this isn’t the first time that Culture has been deemed under threat from the Great Unwashed. In the mid nineteenth century, it was from the “mob of scribbling women” who had the temerity not only to write, but to have their ill-educated, uninformed, crass, and embarrassing effusions widely read. As a spiritual descendent of those scribbling women, I know that “standards” are remarkably malleable when used to dismiss the works of the non-PLU (“people like us”). Joanna Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing ennumerates the ways.

I also started wondering about which way the whodunnit went. And I propose the contrarian view: The internet began with the amateurs. The culture of cheap consumerism (on the WWW) is what’s killing it.

Mainstream media has been subsidized by advertising revenue, or by government. We’ve no sense of the true costs of high quality production, whether of journalism, broadcast arts, or published information. As consumers we’ve grown accustomed to cheap mass information and cheap mass entertainment. It’s not such a big step from demanding cheap to demanding free. The media are also responsible for the culture of celebrity which feeds into the culture of self-exhibition which Keen also deplores.

Keen does not question what seems to me to the flawed business model of mainstream media, nor consider that the real constituency of mainstream media is the advertisers, not the readers/viewers; when the advertisers go elsewhere, as onto the WWW, and the readership remains, it’s irrelevant. The WWW exposed the vulnerability in this business model. It did not create it.

A great many of the practices he criticizes are an expression not so much of the Internet, but to the application of commercial and criminal practices established well before the Internet,  much less the WWW. The selling of mailing lists. Prevalent, insulting and intrusive advertising. “Customer testimonials” that are bought and paid for by the manufacturer of the product. Con-men and women and fraud artists plying their trade. (Why don’t we abandon the fashionable neoligisms like ‘phishing’ and ‘social engineering’ and call them by the old-fashioned terms. More people might just understand enough to heed the warnings).

I’m not done with this topic, but I’m going to park it for now, and go paddling!

Moonlight paddle, August 28

(cross-post from Kayak Yak Yak)

Note to self: the time to work out the night settings on one’s camera is before one is in the middle of the water, trying to take a photograph of kayaks in the moonlight. Which on a night like Tuesday night, was something to see, if not photograph.

Courtesy of Saanich Recreation and Rush Adventures, I achieved another ambition: paddling by the moonlight. I signed up for a 3 hour moonlight paddle out of Cooper’s Cove on Sooke Basin, on a night that couldn’t have been more perfect. There were 8 kayaks in total, seven doubles and one single; three guides and 12 guests. We assembled, gradually, for around about 8:30 pm, several of our number having first eaten lunch at the adjacent restaurant and emerged hilarious. By the last light of the sun and by the light of our guides’ headlights, we kitted up, were assigned our boats, first by colour and then by number, trooped down to the dock, and one by one, launched. The night was dark and glassy-still, and as we paddled slowly out of Cooper’s Cove we could dip fingers and paddles into the water and see a wake of ghostly bioluminescence caused by dinoflagellates in the water. A hand trailed in the water would brush the bodies and tendrils of multiple unseen moon jellyfish (non-stinging); a torch shone in the water showed their dim clustered bodies. When we paddled clear of Cooper’s Cove it was into moonlight that was like a headlight, almost painful to look at with dark-adapted eyes, and bright enough for me to make out the other seven boats without effort. To the left were the lights of East Sooke, and all around the edge of the darkned cove, scattered lights. We paddled across the basin to the Goodrich Islands, a former Native Canadian burial ground. The entire vista was shades of black with a patina of silver on damp and pale surfaces, and the occasional sharp reflection of moonlight from a wet, turning paddle. Kayaks to the moonward side were dark shadows against moonlit water, and kayaks to the other side were picked out in light grey against the darker water, and fading to a mere suggestion in the distance. We then paddled towards Roche cove, more or less, looking for dark water and more bioluminescence, but the moon was well up, although a thin layer of cirrus cloud had come up over it, giving it a halo; our guide predicted a change in weather, both from that, and the distinct and persistent contrails still visible in the moonlight. We started some ducks or geese from night’s peace, an indistinct, pale fluttering. And then back around the shore, into Cooper’s cove, gliding past the moored yachts, come in one by one and climb out of the kayaks onto to the dock, return gear, gather up stuff, say thank you to Steve, Glen and Galia [sic], and climb in the car to drive back the winding Sooke road in the pale moonlight.