I’m trying to enjoy Katherine May’s Wintering (2020) 📚 but I’m full instead of envy. I’ve carried that sin for years; it’s always close to the surface. What could she have that I envy? Colon cancer? No. Time and friends and baked goods and pickles. Living where she can walk to whatever she needs. And writing that makes me want to keep reading. No one reads mine, what little there is. And so I wallow in envy and despair. Why would they when I wallow in envy and despair?
Many others now work from home, since the pandemic started, and hearing the sounds of their homes behind them has brought moments of delight on the interminable conference calls. Those sounds of children, dogs, cats–even running water or dishes clattering. Except when someone apologized for a loud vacuum, and took a moment to reprimand her house cleaner. She can afford another to clean her house?
There, I did it again.
Perhaps there’s some enlightenment to be found in wallowing as well as wintering, because I certainly practice it enough. It’s not a practice I recommend. Being aware that one is, however, that’s useful. Noticing a feeling, recognizing it for what it is–and watching it, slowly, pass.
I have nothing productive to add here, yet. But first, some precepts:
A computer serves YOUR purposes, not the purposes of the vendor.
The way an operating system works SHOULD be, if not transparent, then, at the very least, predictable and consistent.
Commercial operating systems SHOULD come with extensive documentation for every function and tool provided by the operating system.
Updates to the operating system SHOULD come with documentation about its requirements, and specifically describe which functions and behaviors have changed.
Changes should be obviously distinguishable from each other.
Along those lines, my MacOS Catalina 10.15.7 needs to update to the MacOS 10.15.7 Supplemental Update 10.15.7 (see item #5 above). It has failed to do so on each attempt. The “solution” should not be delete everything and restore from the last backup. The “solution” should not be reinstall from scratch. The “solution” should not be buy a new computer.
But while clearing out some room on the disk to see if insufficient space were the problem, I noticed that the amount of available storage listed in the Finder, and in Terminal, and in the System Information storage panel were all different. By a lot: 90GB in Finder, 11GB in Terminal, and 54 GB in System Information different. After I’d thrown away files exceeding 100GB in size. (Item 2 above.)
After a couple of restarts now they’re almost the same, but none yet equal the amount of files tossed.
System Information thinks I have 35.28 GB available
Finder suggests 34.14 GB
Meanwhile, there’s this giant “Other” category of used space which MacOS claims to “automatically” control (also a problem on iOS), which seems entirely intended to use up storage so that one is tempted to purchase space on Apple’s iCloud (see item #1 above). The decisions made here on what to remove are strangely wrong: why does the OS preserve logs and application caches while asking the user to throw away personal files?
This isn’t VMS where one might forget to purge old versions of files, is it?
And, no, I’m not going to use that stupid lower-case m. I’m already annoyed that file operations on this iMac (27-inch, Late 2013) perform more poorly than on my LC-III (1993).
Went out for a brief walk in the woods in the rain. There, songbirds of some kind and woodpeckers flitted around, conversing and eating insects. Standing on my porch at home, I looked up and saw, instead of raindrops on my roof, tiny pebbles of hail, the size of dots, bouncing joyfully down to the gutter.
Rain was forecast. And snow fell overnight and softly falls this morning. The deer herd are up to their breakfast wandering each tree to tree, pine to pine for the grass beneath and the leaves.
Unlike the storm day earlier in the week when they hunkered down in the shelter of tree and brush, today is a quiet breakfast to the song of robins.
Waffle mixing here soon. I think perhaps coffee may be in order. I started reading Love in the Western World (1940). Twenty pages in the author is introducing his purpose: It’s about passionate love, adultery in contrast to marriage. He will be arguing for marriage.
Only hear crows this morning, and the cats suggesting I move.
Out beyond the house, beyond the debris pile, just past the compost, under the trees, I didn’t see the log was a deer until her ears moved. She’s cleaning herself.
The house is dry today, after yesterday’s bright blue wind, and the sky dawned ominous grey. My head aches from the low humidity, my sinuses from the change in air pressure. Has she chosen our tree for shelter from the coming storm?
Another log with an ear lies under the next tree over. The snow has melted there for breakfast–and here comes another from the yard next door. None are in such great hurry. It’s an early morning still.
This must be their plan for the day. Now there are five here where there is shelter, food, and water.
Shows that pretend to be realistic should not require the suspension of disbelief. That is, they should pay attention to detail and accuracy. Of course, few theatrical productions on the telly or in the movies have ever paid much attention to accuracy: just enough to convince folks who don’t know better, just enough to create an illusion. Historical dramas are worse; Camelot, the musical, was more historically accurate than anything by Zach Snyder will be.
Some errors are egregious, like the Gilmore girls never paying for their coffee or eating their meals or looking both ways when they cross the street, or how the shelves are stocked in Taylor’s grocery. Others are more subtle, like the color of the light: LEDs used in place of incandescent bulbs or either instead of fire.
We started watching All Creatures Great and Small (2020). I can’t speak to the veterinary details, but given other foibles those are probably as correct as a hospital scenes starring Leslie Nielsen. Attending to an infected hoof in a muddy yard? Getting dress shoes and a woolen suit muddy, and then putting one’s overcoat back on–and having miraculously clean shoes when leaving the mud? Opening a gate and not closing it?
Perhaps pints were served in mugs, but cocktail glasses in 1937 were not the over-sized Applebee’s monstrosities found in episode two.
Cricket, one of the cats, stands patiently next to my head. She’s purring quietly. I will notice her and remember she is /waiting/ for food. Luna, the other young one, runs in to say she is also up and oh good you are too look there is no food and ok I see you are moving now let’s go!
No. 2 Daughter made what she calls excellerated brownies yesterday. They start as brownies from a box mix, and then she adds more of everything. They are good: taste like brownies.
This box is strange. Betty Crocker makes her brownie mix in the United Arab Emirates. This makes no sense. All of the ingredients are imported. The box is imported. Somehow materials, transportation, and labor is so cheap that the supply chain moves everything to a small spot on the Persian Gulf, assembles it, ships it to New York, and General Mills and the grocer still make a profit on 18.5 oz. of sugar, flour, and cocoa sold for $2.00–8¢ in 1913 dollars, when a pound of flour was 3¢ and a pound of sugar was 5¢.
I’ve been reading a fair amount of space opera and political science fiction recently: The Expanse, Old Mans War, A Memory Called Empire, Too Like the Lightning. I’ve enjoyed them, but am a bit tired of reading books–and news–about wealthy, powerful people. I want to read stories about folks who aren’t high and mighty or on their way to being such. After all, most of us have no power over the wider direction of society, only over our immediate sphere.
China Mountain Zhang was well done in this regard. These small stories from everyday lives may not be the most dramatic or world historical in significance, but they are nonetheless critically important for those who live them.
Ursula K. LeGuin, writing in her foreword to the 2012 edition of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972) 📚, remarks
This use of ordinary people as the principal characters was fairly rare in science fiction when the book came out, and even now the genre slips easily into elitism–superbrilliant minds, extraordinary talents, officers not crew, the corridors of power not the working-class kitchen. Those who want the genre to remain specialized–“hard”–tend to prefer the elitist style. Those who see science fiction simply as a way of writing novels welcome the more Tolstoyan approach, in which a war is described not only from the generals’ point of view but also through the eyes of housewives, prisoners, and boys of sixteen, or an alien visitation is described not only by knowledgeable scientists but also by its effects on commonplace people.
What will I make for breakfast this morning? I had a thought last night before bed, but I didn’t write it down and now don’t remember. I’m reading China Mountain Zhang (1992) 📚 by Maureen F. McHugh. First edition, but the price bumped up 95¢ with a sticker on the fly leaf before it was bought. A printer’s error? The cover is familiar, as if I have read this or spent time with it in ’92, but it’s otherwise new to me and enjoyable.
A sometimes chameleon, I mimic the style of writers, the feel of their words. Or perhaps the ink rubs off when I rub my hands over the book enough. I’m not conscious I have this ink on my hands until I scribble, and then it gets messy all over the paper. Do all readers feel this? Oatmeal, that was it.
A songbird sings outside in the snow. I don’t recognize the song; I never learned their names.
My family has the strange habit of buying books whenever possible, so sometime in 1984 or so I read the 1983 edition of The White Rose: Munich, 1942-1943 (1952). What you do doesn’t need to be large or dramatic; everyone can do something.
I’ve just been playing the Trout Quintet on the phonograph. Listening to the andantino makes me want to be a trout myself. You can’t help rejoicing and laughing, however moved or sad at heart you feel, when you see the springtime clouds in the sky and the budding branches sway, stirred by the wind, in the bright young sunlight. I’m so much looking forward to the spring again. In that piece of Schubert’s you can positively feel and smell the breezes and scents and hear the birds and the whole of creation cry out for joy. And when the piano repeats the theme like cool, clear, sparkling water – oh, it’s sheer enchantment.
Sophie Scholl, to Lisa Remppis, Munich, February 17, 1943 (At the Heart of the White Rose, Inge Jens, ed., J. Maxwell Brownjohn, trans.)
Franz Schubert, Quintet in A Major, Op. 114 “Trout”
Intersectionality seems a very big word for the idea that people cannot be reduced to a single component part and need to be treated as an approximation of a whole. And the sort of thing that would only arise from initially treating people as being reducible to certain significant features: for example, that because I am a man, it automatically follows that I think such and such, do so and so, and have these other features. It’s the sort of error caused by over-classification, segmentation, and assumptions. One might also call this error stereotypical prejudice. Intersectionality attempts to correct the error, by adding other factors to the analysis.
Analysis, the breaking down of a thing to its component parts in order to understand it, is a useful diagnostic tool. Presuming from that analysis to predict and then control is a severely flawed presumption. Synthesis, the re-assemblage of those parts, does not always result in the original plaything.
And what significant categories would I be parsed into? White, middle-aged, college graduate, male. How many do you need to predict my buying patterns at Target or who I voted for in 1989?
But intersectionality still does not see a whole; the underlying error of fragmentation remains. Though a useful corrective, intersectionality, as now popularly applied, reinforces the error because it prevents knowing people as themselves. We combine multiple assumptions in our illusions. What results is some kind of Frankenstein’s monster assembled from leftover bits and pieces. One must ask if there’s a soul.
Monday morning dawned with new snow. I woke up with a hangover and a house with 16% humidity, and began simmering water to add some back to the air, and drinking to add some back to me. On dehydrated days like these I wonder
Are desert peoples perennially irritable and more violent than others because they are dehydrated?
Watched last week’s episode of WandaVision (2021) with my kids last night. In it the acting director of S.W.O.R.D., impatiently bothering the work to determine WTF is going on, hears then sees evidence of a little progress, yells at everyone that he wants the results now, and stomps off back to Washington. Miraculously enough, once he leaves, everyone starts moving faster and the plot moves ahead, because he focused attention on the good work being ignored.
Now, I suppose the writers think that this is how a leader in a quasi-military, business-suit-wearing organization should behave, but it isn’t. He could have brought coffee to the nice young lady discovering the solution, congratulated her, agreed that this was a promising Avenue of Investigation, and asked her what help she needed. Or, he could have productively added to the conversation by, again, the coffee, the congratulations, and a suggestion that [spoilers].
But he didn’t. Because he’s an aggressively whiny little prick.
Maybe he cares so much for [spoilers] that he has to personally oversee [spoilers], and yet has such little emotional awareness that he can only express himself in anger? It probably seems like I’m nitpicking, since the show itself is certainly more entertaining than the rest of the Marvel Universe, but do the authors have no experience with leaders behaving in a helpful fashion?
Since everything in the media is a made-up fantasy world, let’s try to improve it a bit, shall we?
Started Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) 📚 this morning.
Right away, I think: What do people think they will gain when society collapses? There’s much wrong with society now, but what do they think they will gain?
This book was written in 1993. In recent memory then, all of the ’70s and ’80s. Stagflation. New York Fear City. Carter. Reagan. Rodney King beaten by the LAPD. The Bloods and the Crips. Punk. Corporate raiders. The drug war. Gangsta rap. Grunge. Industrial. Falling Down (1993). Despair. I’m only on page 10. Science fiction is about the present, not the future.
And I suppose the answer to my earlier question is there: despair. We can’t kill the people at fault or those that profit from failure. We can’t even find them. They’re systems, not people. Society is collapsing all around us. Perhaps if we called the wealthy and powerful by titles of nobility we could see our situation better.
“Is that the way it’s going to be, I wonder? Is that the future: Large numbers of people stuck in either President-elect Donner’s version of slavery or Richard Moss’s.” (p. 37)
Sunday–a third of the way through Parable of the Talents (1998) 📚. Parable of the Sower ended on a hopeful note after all that pain. This one, this one is foreshadowing disaster. Sower started in 2023, but the collapse began earlier. Now it’s 2033, and America will be great again. Even so, it seems everyone turned to animals so quickly maybe they always were and I was just sheltered.
You know, for every dollar a man makes a woman makes 63 cents. Now, fifty years ago that was 62 cents. So, with that kind of luck, it’ll be the year 3,888 before we make a buck.
Jon Boeckenstedtmade this graph of the number of colleges awarding baccalaureate degrees, organized by which gender was awarded more degrees and the type of institution. Most college attendees have been women for some time now, which is not surprising considering that women are about 51% of the population. What is surprising, to me at least, is that there are so many more women than men in college, 57.5% to 42.5%, and that even more graduate, 58.5% to 41.5%–which is down from a high of 59.7% in 2005. The last year that women received bachelor’s degrees in close proportion to their share of the general population was when they finally reached that milestone: 1988, the year I entered college. Check out Mr. Boeckenstedt’s fuller discussion of the trend at Higher Ed Data Stories.
There’s a tiny outlier in the data: engineering schools.
Someone, I forget who, noted a while ago that a profession becomes less valued (less well compensated, that is–economists use compensation as a proxy for value) the more women enter it, such that overall wages go down to a greater degree than would be expected from an increase in the labor supply, and that the more highly-compensated and highly-thought-of a profession is is fairly directly related to how exclusively male it is. I’m not sure they included sanitation and transportation in their analysis; they may have focused on The Important Professions.
I’m curious as to whether there’s a relationship between the perceived value of college and the rather large difference in male and female attendance rates, or to co-education and the decline in single-gender colleges. That is, does college seem less valued because significantly more graduates are women? Or is my question rooted in invalid assumptions and anecdata?
I tend to think that the question of the value of education is more of a perversity in American thought: the one that sees everything in terms of dollars and cents, and wants colleges to be trade schools for the desk-bound class at the same time it spits on the trades. But I would not be surprised that at least some of the downward pressure on the wage differential accruing to college completion is due to who has a degree, not just to how many do.
What are the men doing while women attend college?
The other day, No. 2 Son (now 13) wanted me to explain colonial imperialism and neo-colonialism, in the context of the American Revolution and with reference to Haiti, the Bolivaran revolutions in South America, and the dissolution of the European empires in the 20th Century. The question, as he phrased it, was something along the lines of “Why did America and India rebel against English rule while Australia and Canada didn’t?” I don’t think he knows about Ireland yet.
Zoë Keating‘s cello loops and Imogen Heap‘s witchy gloves remind me that computers can also be playful extensions of human creativity, not just machines for the domination of human cattle.
Zoë Keating, “Possible” (2019)
Every now and then I wander through my memory following musical will-o-wisps: from my parents’ copies of Wendy Carlos‘s Switched on Bach (1968) and The Well-Tempered Synthesizer (1969) to music from the Hearts of Space, to Isao Tomita‘s Firebird (1976) and Kraftwerk‘s Autobahn (1974) borrowed from my friend Alex Levien, to Laurie Anderson‘s Big Science (1982), Depeche Mode‘s Some Great Reward (1984), and many others from the Staunton Public Library–all played from vinyl through a circa 1972 Heathkit tube amplifier built by my dad. And the Art of Noise‘s In Visible Silence (1986) on a cassette tape bought from, of all places, one of the small shops in Monterey. Somewhere along the way, Peter Gabriel (maybe) said our heart’s rhythm cannot be replaced with a drum machine.
Laurie Anderson, “O Superman” (1982)
The older memories have names associated with the music, I think from holding the album, reading the liner notes while the disc spun. Most of my newer memories don’t; I’ll recognize a tune as familiar but have no idea to whom it belongs. I suspect this has to do with how the memory was stored: constant listening over an extended period of time. While these days most of my encounters are transient, embedded in another work, dissociated from the artist, or brief passages in the night. Recently I’ve been listening to BBC Radio shows from Cerys Matthews, Elizabeth Alker, and Sara Mohr-Pietsch and Hannah Peel. BBC Sounds lets me see what’s playing, if I avail myself of the feature; most times I simply enjoy the soundscapes they present: the mix itself as art.
And, yet, the other day one of those mixes introduced me to Daphne Oram (1925-2003), composer, musician, inventor, co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. I love her humor.
Daphne Oram, Oramics (2007) [pieces recorded 1958-1977]
