November 2007 Archives

Looks like a new MacBook Pro has left it's birthing center in China and is speeding it's way across the Pacific to its new, adopted parent (me):

I just started doing some contracting work in the evenings and on weekends, so my blogging time is going to be curtailed for the next couple weeks (until this semester is over and I get final papers taken care of and all that).

Until that time, I've got one more interview I did with agent Chip MacGregor to post and you can jump over to a friend of mine's blog, who is now an ex-pat in Taiwan. He and his wife are blogging about their experiences there.

Read it here: The offWhites

I'm probably going to run the risk of being misunderstood with this post, but I've been getting annoyed lately at people who think they know what they're talking about but who, in fact, don't have a well-rounded understanding of their sheer ignorance.

You've heard the phrase "it takes all kinds"? No, it doesn't. There just are.

I've always been fascinated by computer games. I remember playing Keystone Kapers on my cousin's Atari, I had an original Nintendo (my mom still has it), and I've been playing console and computer games since my Apple IIc days (with the green-tinted monitor, no less).

But Gamers sometimes make me want to smack them. Especially when they rant on about the only computer platform they've ever had any exposure to (Windows) and how Macs are for snobs and zealots.

I get irritated because they've only ever used a computer for fun. Computer makers design these weird-looking enclosures for them so these guys can have bright, shiny things on their computers that make them feel all high-techy and stuff. But they don't depend on a computer for productivity. They can afford to put up with idiosyncrasies in the operating system and software that actually slow you down and let you down. But some of us actually have to get stuff done on a computer.

Their knowledge and understanding of the depth and breadth of what can be done on a computer is fairly superficial. I'm not saying that Mac users aren't susceptible to the same dogmatic views on computers and that there aren't Mac users that don't really understand the inner workings of the computer they use to get stuff done, but if you take a random sample of gamers and compare them to a random sample of Mac users, you'll find that gamers tend to be myopic about their technology and Mac users actually understand the fundamentals of why they chose that platform. Gamers adamantly stick to what they know and deride anything else. They make fun of other technologies to which they have had no exposure.

I've used most of the major operating systems and I work all day within the confines of the computer world. I depend on my computer to do actual work and it's not an exaggeration to say that I know of what I speak when I espouse an opinion about it. Others, with louder and more dogmatic opinions also espouse their opinion, but it becomes immediately apparent that the more dogmatic the opinion, the less well-informed it is.

With this new release of Apple's operating system, Mac OS X Leopard, Apple has exposed itself to criticism for their unfounded anti-Windows attitudes. There are a number of issues to be fixed in OS X 10.5 that should have been caught before releasing it into the wild. One of the show-stoppers for developers like myself is the delaying of Java 1.6 on Leopard. But even then, it's still the best operating system on the planet and I get more work done on my Mac than I do in Windows or on my Linux workstation. I'm getting ready to upgrade my PowerBook G4 to a new MacBook Pro when Java 1.6 gets released and Apple has had a chance to release a few updates to 10.5 to fix some of the more outstanding issues.

If all you want to do is goof off and play games, then by all means, buy a crappy laptop at half the price (you get what you pay for) and laugh all the way to the service center about how much money you saved on your shiny toy. Just keep in mind that some of us have actual work to do. I don't want to brand all gamers as second-class computer citizens, but, at the very least, get a little more broadly informed about what's happening in the larger (and arguably, more important) "real world" of computing before you draw your ignorance in such sharp relief.

I wanted to "sit down" with Athol Dickson and discuss the craft of writing a little bit. He kindly agreed. This is our conversation.

J. Brisbin (J): One of the things that really interests me about your development as a writer is your (can I say "Fine"?) Art and Architecture background. I personally see myself as an "artist" even though I’m really not; not in a classical sense, anyway. I hope to demonstrate artistic merit in my writing, but I’m not Rembrandt, nor will I ever be able to execute the form at that level (though all writers probably think of themselves of at least being capable of having that level of mastery...if they wanted to...but of course the reason they’re not masters is because they don’t really want to be...but I digress). You’ve talked a lot about the "craft" of writing. Is your sense of what makes good writing informed by that artistic background? Is the study of Art helpful to writers, even though it may not seem directly related?
 
Athol Dickson (AD): The idea of "the craft of writing" can be unpacked in different ways. Not all of them relate to art. To me at least, it can call up thoughts of craftsmanship in the sense of correct structure, grammar, spelling and so forth. That is not what I mean by "art". It can be about communication in the sense of the accurate transfer of facts from mind to mind. That is not art, either. It can even imply a transfer of emotions, which are accurate to the extent that the reader ends up feeling exactly as the author hoped she would. But while we’re getting closer to art, we’re still not quite there. With the understanding that our discussion is limited to fiction, the craft of writing begins to be informed by art when it enters into something much less easily explained. For me, "art" is any form of expression that intentionally explores an ineffable aspect of the human condition. The word "ineffable" in my personal definition is the key that separates "art" from "craft." An articulate conversation or the numbers on a clock may involve correct and accurate communication, but they are not necessarily art. When one angry driver expresses his emotions by rudely cutting off another driver in traffic, he may transfer his emotion very precisely, but that too is not art. (These examples could be portals into artistic expression, but in the interest of communication we must draw the line somewhere, otherwise "art" becomes synonymous with "everything" and looses practical value as a concept. One cannot really think of "everything," nor can one apply it to one’s work in practical terms.)
 

Is our writing supposed to be a stew or a soup?

Stew is hearty, meaty goodness. It's seasoned and thick. Starches from the potatoes mix with the vegetables and the beef gets tender only after many hours of cooking. The longer you cook it, the better. It stands up well to being re-heated and tastes almost as good the second or third time as it did the first.

Soup is, by nature, lighter and less filling. It's mostly broth. Maybe some noodles or a few pieces of this and that. Maybe thick, like stew, but often thin, like broth. Soup doesn't always stand up to re-heating like stew does. It's usually best the first time around. While it might have some bits of meat, that's not the focus of the dish. It's not a meal in a bowl, but an appetizer, or the center of a light lunch.

Some authors write stew, some soup.

Which are you?

Is it acceptable to write material that is praised for its artistic achievement when obtaining that requires using techniques that go "over the head" of people who don't see reading as consumption of art, but as enjoyment?

Do we shoot the wounded so they won't be slowing us down?

If Art's purpose is to efficiently communicate ideas and abstract concepts that can't be communicated with the same fidelity and efficiency in any other form, and an artist creates work that doesn't effectively communicate, but (intentionally or unintentionally) obfuscates, is it really Art?

Does making a distinction between Art and Entertainment have any real, practical meaning?

Isn't the creation and consumption of Art one of the most Democratic and timeless of all human activities?

No matter the socio-political situation of the consumers of Art, democracy reigns when it comes to the consumption of Art. Even when Art's form and function was mandated by the Church, there was still an element of democracy in the consumers of Art deciding who gets to keep doing it and who doesn't.

There is no Arts Dictator who can force us to consume a kind of Art we don't like. Especially if that Art and our entertainment overlap. Neither can we put in place a non-democratic form of arts consumerism that supplants an individual's right to accept our Arts offering or to reject it.

We can't make people like and accept our work, or ourselves (for artists, the two are interminably intertwined), even if they should like it because—and of course we would know—it's better for them than that other drivel.

The painful part of this whole process is that the best we can do is do the best we can do. Then we put our work out in the marketplace and watch it succeed or fail on its own merits.

Sometimes our work isn't accepted. Sometimes we are not accepted.

So we try again.

Give the kids a beautiful fall afternoon and a rake...

I've been going back over some of the old posts and organizing things a little better now that I've converted the site over to MovableType 4. I ran across this little piece of creative non-fiction that I wrote as a posting on the school's bulletin board in our discussion of Herman Melville's story "Bartleby the Scrivener". I have to say, it's a work of pure brilliance! Or, something:

An Analysis of Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener'

I felt like I should fish it out of obscurity because I liked it so much. Sometimes, you just end up having a love affair with your own words...

So here it is! The new site design I've been laboring on for some time. It took me quite a while to get everything to look okay in Internet Exploder. I finally got most of the issues worked out--I think. If you have problems with the site, or stuff looks weird, please leave a comment on this message, or shoot me an email (my address is down under the photo, at the bottom).

I've also decided to break down and hang out a shingle. If you'd like help fixing up your blog or website (or want to start a new one), please send me an email and we can talk about it. I've been doing this a long time (10 years). I know most of the in's and out's. If I don't, I can at least tell you where to find out.

UPDATE: I'm still trying to track down the bug that's causing the white lines to appear in IE7. It works correctly in Safari and Firefox. Go figure.

UPDATE 2: The best I could do is turn off the rounded corners on the top of the page in IE7 until I can find a better way to go about this. Turns out IE has a bug in rounding that produces a 1-pixel gap sometimes, depending on how big your browser window is (IE users: if you see a white line on the gray at the bottom, that's what's causing this). I've tried quite a few things, but when you spend as much time tweaking little things here and there just to suit a buggy browser as you do to develop the entire thing, you have to ask yourself: "is it really worth it?" This page will definitely look weird in IE 6. But I've checked the stats and IE 6 users are a tiny fraction of the total users. I know I should try and accommodate all users, no matter what browser they come here with, but there comes a point when you have to start looking forward, instead of years into the past of web development. You have to prepare yourself for the future. I'll keep hacking at it until I get a workable solution. This little problem of one pixel is what took me so long to actually roll out the new design! I was holding off until I could get this problem fixed. I finally decided that I'd rather have it out there and tweak it later than sit on this design just because the folks at Microsoft decided, in their infinite wisdom, to disregard what everyone else was doing in web development because, after all, they know better what everyone needs. That's why they're doing the Silverlight project: because those mean folks at Adobe have a corner on the interactive web market and they were feeling left out. Don't get me started...

UPDATE 3: Okay, seems I found a solution. Just had to step away from it for a minute. Everything should work fine in IE 7 just like it does in Firefox and Safari.