Another data point in the wall.
Jim Henley, after touching on the issue of homeschooling in a shouts-and-murmurs entry, points us to this year-old column by Eve Tushnet, which spins a sort of anti-CW vortex about the whole phenomenon: Blam! Kapow! Homeschooling isn’t just for religious isolationist freaks anymore! —I’m being unfair. Her basic point—that homeschooling has the potential of involving kids far more and more healthily in the real world than the highly artificial madding crowds of American public schools—is sound; it’s muffled, though, by gauzy layers of op-ed hyperbole and impersonal generalization. Not her fault; it’s a limitation of the punditsprech form, one that palls rapidly once you’re accustomed to a varied diet of blogging, with its cranky, loopy unpredictability and its raw personal viewpoint, and this isn’t supposed to be an “Advantage: blogosphere!” piece, so I’ll cut that out right now.
I was homeschooled for a few years.
It started in Kentucky, where the local elementary school was small enough that there were two grades per classroom: while the sixth grade was having its English class, say, the fifth grade was free to do their homework, or read, or draw the really cool van they’d buy when they were an adult and a defense lawyer traveling from city to city saving desperate, innocent folks from wrongful accusations (it pulled a Dodge Charger on a trailer—the van was great for sleeping in, and office space, but you needed something with more get-up-and-go for the inevitable car chases), or scribbling a revolutionary sci fi magnum opus in a loose-leaf notebook (pseudonym of choice: Christopher Kyndyll. Don’t ask), or whatever, so long as you were quiet and not disruptive. —My mother, noticing my sister and I didn’t seem to bring any homework, you know, home, and maybe concerned we weren’t getting as much out of our day as we could be, picked up on something—I’m betting it was an ad in the Mother Earth News—and decided to give the Calvert School a try.
(Mom: feel free to pitch in. I wasn’t taking notes at the time—I started out with Art History [this is a Doric capital, and this an Ionic; I, of course, liked Corinthians best; and I just now remembered what entasis means], but was that all I took, that first year?)
—A brief digression, to frame the anecdote: we were living on a 70-acre farm on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. The nearest town was Ammons Bottom: a Baptist church and a post office with a gas pump out front and if my memory’s insisting on sticking one of those waist-high coolers full of old Coke in green glass bottles by the screen door, well, it might not be far wrong. The aforementioned school had a rule: if your driveway was more than a mile long, the bus had to drive down it and pick you up outside your house. Ours was three-quarters of a mile. We walked. There were hills. It snowed. —We leased most of the land to a couple of local farmers who planted corn and soy and tobacco, and we had an acre and a half of organic, pesticide-free garden, which I got mighty tired of hoeing. I used to duck chores by hiding in the tobacco barn: when the leaves are harvested, they’re hung on a grid of rafters in a big empty barn to dry. You could climb a good two storeys off the ground and be completely hidden between giant, fleshy leaves that smelled like really good, damp cigars; I read a lot of Ian Fleming up there, which seems only appropriate. We got a lot of our staples shipped to us from Walnut Acres, and between their old skool packaging and Calvert’s retro-Edwardian design sensibilities, I’ve got a Pavlovian thing for muted colors and clean, simple, strong typography: integrity, it says to me; purity. Authority. Whatever it is, it’s going to be good for me.
(Oh, and lest you get the wrong idea: Ford, Reagan, Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush—insofar as I can tell.)
In 1983, we upped and left Kentucky for the Carolinas. We first stopped in a thereless suburb of Charlotte (Quail Hollow, was it?), camping out in a cheap little rental while the folks went house-hunting. This was my first introduction to a really big school, where you went to a different room for each class: seventh grade. I wasn’t there long enough to be especially traumatized by any particular peer, but my revolutionary sci fi magnum opus—up to 300 loose-leaf pages at that point, grubby with old graphite—was stolen from its three-ring binder. The crime puzzles me to this day: weirdly particular, and yet no one knew me, and I didn’t know anyone; I was just this quiet kid who was there for, what, six weeks? Eight weeks? (All I remember learning for sure at this school were the names of the five Pythagorean solids and how to cheat a Rubik’s cube by popping a corner loose, taking it apart, and snapping it all back together again. Well, that, and the kid I sometimes hung out with from across the cul de sac, who ended up giving me his D&D books because his mother had decided they were tools of the devil or something, and didn’t that turn out well.) —When I discovered the crime, I did what anyone would do: I went immediately to the authorities to report it. I didn’t even make it past the receptionist in the administration office. Some kid’s notes had been stolen. Weren’t even anything to do with a class. Big whup. Next! (And if I have some sympathy for the other side, now—how big was that school? how many kids? how impossible to track down this particular needle? And if I can look back and realize now that it was nothing more than a kid’s pastiche of Brian Daley’s Han Solo books? It does me little good, standing in front of that desk, trying to get somebody, anybody to listen to what had just been done to me.)
I doubt the theft of my magnum opus had much to do with the decision to pull us out of the school system entirely, once we finally settled over the state line in Rock Hill, South Carolina; I think it had a lot more to do with the fact that the public schools in Rock Hill, South Carolina sucked. I’m not sure how much of a pioneer we were. There was some (testy) negotiation. A newspaper article or two was written, and a photographer dispatched. Local political races were scrutinized for the slightest hint of where they stood on homeschooling. It all worked out, in the end: we had to maintain an accredited curriculum (again, Calvert), and at least show up to take whatever standardized tests the state mandated for whatever grade we were in whenever they were scheduled. (I seem to recall we also had to have a formal name, to cross some t or dot some i; and so we were the Cherry Hill Academy. Mom had letterhead printed.) —We were off.
What was a day of homeschooling like?
Mostly, I sat in my room and read. Bliss.
Calvert’s curriculum, at the middle school level, was pretty much self-directed: you followed the guidelines, did the reading, and when you were ready you took a pretty thorough exam which was sent off to Baltimore, graded, and sent back. English, geography, math, history—Cathy, if you’re reading this, chime in with what you were up to; heck, Tim: I have only the vaguest of notions of what second or third grade were like. —It wasn’t entirely me up in my room: I had a Latin tutor, two or three times a week, and the folks picked up a huge chalkboard for five bucks at a college auction: it was set up in the back den, and I’d conjugate on it, or Dad would show us the dangers of dividing by zero by proving that 1 equaled 2. He brought home a TRS-80 Model III, and I learned BASIC so I could figure out how to mess around with computer games and I learned Scripsit so I wouldn’t have to scribble my various revolutionary sci fi opera in vulnerable notebooks anymore. I made soap as a combination craft and science project. Calvert didn’t have much of a high school program then, so I jumped to a new correspondence school (whose name escapes me) for my freshman year (though I kept with Calvert’s Latin course); one of my projects was to thoroughly research the town’s water-treatment system. Mom set up the appointments and we made family field trips of checking out pumping stations and filtering ponds.
But mostly, it was me, up in my room, reading.
We weren’t isolated, though. There was youth group at the church and handbell choir, and Cathy and I were on the YMCA swim team. There was summer camp—church-based trips to Washington, DC; YMCA camp at King’s Mountain. There were the neighborhood kids. We weren’t sitting with them at desks lined up neatly in small rooms for hours at a stretch, but that was fine by me: we had as much of a social life as I wanted, pretty much. I was a quiet kid. I stayed up in my head a lot. I liked sitting around reading, mostly.
Which, you’ll note, is mostly what I was doing.
—But that was a large part of what eventually became the problem, I think. The only regular benchmarks I had were those tests, which I took whenever I was ready; it was all too easy not to be ready, just yet. It didn’t help that the one class in which I did have regular contact with someone else was Latin, with my tutor, was the one I was not doing very well in. For just about the first time ever, I wasn’t skating to an easy A. Heck, I was having a hard time making the B. Sometimes, the C. For someone who’d matriculated at a number of Gifted ’n’ Talented programs, this was decidedly Not Good. My tutor sighed (gently, but he sighed); the red ink puddled; the malaise spread. It got easier to say, and not just about Latin: I’m not ready yet. I need to do some more reading. Go over it again. In a week. Maybe another week. (And of course what I was doing was reading other stuff, instead: John Varley; Julian May; Piers Anthony; Robert Heinlein; Blakely St. James; Ursula Le Guin; Orbit—anything but hic, hæc, hoc, huius huius huius. —Why would I need to hide my cheap genre trash behind a propped-up copy of Nations of the World? I had the whole room to myself! —Okay, every now and then Mom would check up on me. But otherwise.)
Anyway, what with all the me sitting up in my room reading, it took three calendar years to get through eighth and ninth grades. There was disappointment (more sighing); vituperations were imparted; the malaise spread further; my heels dragged ever deeper. My sister was having similar difficulties (though I do not wish to speak specifically to them—vide supra re: being in my room reading all the time; not taking notes—so maybe we should edit that to “my sister was similarly having difficulties”)—after another round of protracted negotiation, it was agreed that we would re-enter public school. The Cherry Hill Academy was closed.
Now, what we were negotiating was that me and Cathy wanted to go back to public school. Sitting up in my room reading all day was wonderful; fucking up course work and disappointing my parents wasn’t. I didn’t know whether I’d be happier in the day-to-day grind of Northwest High School, but I knew it was a system I could do well in. And doing well, or the appurtenances of having done well, were what was important. —Funnily enough, one of the arguments Cathy and I made was the one about social deprivation: we’re cut off from our peers, we said. We need to be shut up in small rooms with twenty or thirty of them every day. (Perhaps we didn’t phrase it quite like that.) I doubt that argument turned the tide—it was bullshit, pure and simple; we went to youth group, after all, and the YMCA swim team, and a lot of the kids we saw in these social circumstances would be shut up in those small rooms with us. So much so that my reputation as a quiet bookish weirdo preceded me: I was picked last for tennis and bowling in gym and picked on for whatever book I was reading at lunch and, well. But how was the education, in this school system that so notoriously sucked? I couldn’t take Latin—it wasn’t on the curriculum—and I couldn’t research the town’s water treatment facilities in-depth (instead of one frowning, serious sixteen-year-old asking you questions about charcoal filtration, imagine 30-some-odd vying for your attention). But I could go on a field trip to Bull Island; I could make a series of bizarre short videos with classmates based on some e.e. cummings poems; I could learn the time-honored techniques for making it out of American Lit without ever cracking the cover of Ethan Frome. And I was making As again. So.
That said.
Looking back, I didn’t do too well with the homeschooling thing, did I. —But did it do well by me? What would have happened had we not tried it? Well, I’d be different, but better? Worse? We’re talking a counterfactual here, so any variant outcome is as true as any other: my spirit might well have been ground into gloomy alienation by the massed cruelty of my peers, a fate that months of reading by myself spared me; knuckling under and working to meet the regular goals imposed by an inflexible system might have helped me develop my focus and persistence, two qualities I still have trouble with today. (What?) Heck, there’s nothing to say that both those outcomes wouldn’t have been the case, and more besides! Better? Worse? —Different. But it’s the road not taken, and the snow’s both dark and deep; all the little horses are starting to think it’s queer. Let’s see if we can wrap this up.
Blam! Kapow! Homeschooling isn’t just for religious isolationist freaks anymore!
Then, it never really was. Nor is it necessarily isolating or insulating in and of itself. Homeschooled kids have plenty of other options for a kid-based social life, and any family that turns to homeschooling as a means to keep their kids safe from the world will a) have lots of other techniques for blocking the quotidian and b) inevitably end up disappointed. I don’t worry so much about home school in this regard; I worry about tiny little towns in the middle of nowhere and thereless cul de sacced subdivisions and nothing but strip malls and frontage roads.
Homeschooling is hard!
And not just for me, suddenly bereft of all structure and left floating with my own inadequate devices. Dad worked, Mom stayed at home—with four kids, three of them school-aged. Even with an externally supplied, accredited curriculum, even with outsourced grading, even with a Latin tutor, we were a full-time job and then some. And without casting any aspersions whatsoever, there’s something to be said for making as clean a break as possible between familial expectations and scholastic expectations: the complications of the one can interfere with attempts at the other. Parents teach, and teachers act in loco parentis, but the role of teacher is very different from the role of parent, much as child differs from student. Which is not to say this is an insurmountable problem; just that it’s one more brick on the load.
Homeschooling is a viable option!
Of course it is, and more attractive now than ever, what with zero tolerance and all. Of all the responsibilities that a kid entails, figuring out the hows and whys of securing a school that won’t be an utter hellhole is the one that quails me the most. Why not chuck it all? Why not hand your kid a desk and a library card and tell her not to come down till dinner? It would have to be an improvement over officious vice-principals and obsolete teachers and cruel pranks and stultifying monkey-work. Right? —Seriously: Tushnet’s exemplar (taking chemistry and calculus classes at a local private high school, receiving instruction in English and history from his mother, participating in an all-homeschooler French class taught by a neighborhood father, having a tutor for oboe lessons, playing on a public school sports team) is an ideal, but it’s an attractive ideal. There’s something at once communitarian and DIY punk about it all. And it would have to be better than cruelly stultifying, officiously obsolete pricks. Right? It would take money, and a firmly stay-at-home parent, but it would be worth it. Right?
And yet.
It’s too easy to blame public education. It’s a shattered, crippled, dangerous wreck; it’s also one of the best ideas we ever came up with. Education is vital; opening it up as much as possible, making those opportunities available to every kid you can reach, is not only the morally right thing to do, it’s the best way possible to make sure you as a society can best capitalize on the potential of each of your members. Anything that fragments that ideal risks punishing kids for the ineptitude and bad choices of their parents (or guardians). No, we can’t protect everyone from everything bad, and no, we shouldn’t have schools where careless parents can drop their kids off and pick them up, well-rounded and ready for college, after 12 years. But we haven’t done right by our best idea in decades. It’s shattered and crippled and dangerous, but for every officious prick waving the zero-tolerance handbook around, there’s still a half-dozen smart administrators making the best of a very delicate juggling act; you never hear about them because they do their jobs well. For every obsolete teacher, there’s a dozen doing good, solid, thankless work, and a couple that are brilliant, in spite of every reason in the world not to be. For each piece of stultifying monkey-work, there’s also, here and there, inspiration and serendipity and joy that you couldn’t find anywhere else. The ideal of the American public school is one worth fighting for. Not giving up on. And homeschooling feels all too much like giving up.
(But: teaching to the test and No Child Left Behind and teachers buying their own paper because the school budget can’t afford the copies they need to make and for God’s sake the religious isolationist freaks are taking over the school boards and demolishing text books left and right! When is enough enough? When do you leave the sinking hulk and try to launch a brand new ship? Would I homeschool my own kid, in spite of all the hardship and shortcomings? Would I sacrifice them at the altar of a broken idea? Would I take it as it came, trusting in the basic resilience of kids and the power of reading to them every night from infancy to muddle us through, much as we’ve all managed to muddle through, one way or another, more or less? —Ask me when the time comes.)
This is what marriage looks like.
So I learn from the ineluctable Kevin that Larry Lewis, ad salesman extraordinaire for Just Out (and the tireless engine of commerce that drove Anodyne to its giddy heights), married Cshea Walker. They’ve been together for over eleven years. Congratulations, guys; it’s about time you made honest men of each other. —Here’s the photos.
Mars
or, Mappa Mundi (the vague direction thereof).
- There are striking differences between “Canal” Martians and “High” Martians. Putting it bluntly (which, you should remember, almost always is misleading), Canal Martians are much more like Earthlings than High Martians, who are rather, well, not. Some might call them two different species; it remains to be seen how true this is. There is some intermarriage, but it’s almost entirely of a ceremonial nature, and almost never results in offspring; when it does, said offspring are always venerated as near gods or hated and despised as demons incarnate. Or so the stories go, anyway. There aren’t all that many around these days for anyone to go and do some objective verification. Perhaps because intermarriage is almost unknown, these days. Population pressures have fallen off to the point that they just aren’t as necessary as they used to be, to secure alliances and formalize territorial claims. Perhaps.
- Then again, that could just be horseshit (or the nearest Martian equivalent), and those ghettoes of pie-bald untouchables by the abandoned canal sump are the result of what happens when High Martians rape and pillage a Canal Martian caravan or suburb or bazaar and then the kids are turned loose to fend for themselves. Who knows?
- Of course, it isn’t “Mars.” Or “Martian.” Or “Ares.” Depending on who you ask, it’s Melender, or Gheltok, or Lipirh, or Laskar. The first two are terribly old, and though they pop up all over the planet, one can trace them to High Martian languages if one is patient enough. “Lipirh” and “Laskar” are more recent coinages (as old as Babylon, say); found more commonly among the Canal Martians, especially where tensions between the new school monotheists and the old school pantheists are high. (Lipirh being the Widowed Mother, name of choice among the pantheists; Laskar, the Blood of God, and we know who likes to go for that kind of crap.) But most Canal Martians—to whom actively asserting a religion is either intellectually gauche or not really something they think about, from day to day—just call the planet Melender, or some derivation of same, more often than not; it’s the closest equivalent of “Earth” here on, well, Earth. (Erde. Myr. Terra. Etc.)
- Which begs the question: what do they call Earth?
- High Martians—those I’ve bothered to think about—speak a language rather remarkably like Cornish, or so a linguist might well note. Thus, I will call them by their “proper” name: the Gaurgathi. There are, of course, as many names for Gaurgathi as there are languages among them, and as many nasty little nicknames as there are nasty little imaginations to dream them up. (Koska and Plati leap to mind, for instance.) Similarly, the Canal Martians—at least that branch whose locus happens to be in and around the religious dispute alluded to earlier—speak a language which, remarkably enough, would seem to partake of Carolinian and a smattering of Indonesian; they are referred to (as a race, in these parts) as Gehelender, or Choltoc, or Opais, or Liannan. None of which came from either of the actual languages which I’ve pillaged. So sue me.
- Most Liannan (to pick one; we’re talking about the Canal Martians, here) are sallow: pale yellows, oranges, ochres and reds abound in skin tones. Eyes are typically gold, hazel, yellow; the occasional dark hazel, green, or exceptionally rare brown are named “mud-eyes” and are generally considered to be terribly lucky. Pupils are slit, like a cat’s. Most have a faint down on their skins, and what hair they have tends to grow close and tightly matted, like thick curly hair or short fur. (There’s a qualitative difference between hair and fur, or so I’m told. Damned if I know what it is.) Gaurgathi have low brows (criminal intelligences) and high-set ears and noses that tend towards the big flat squashed variety. They tend to be much more hirsute and actually grow long manes and facial hair (males and females). They tend to be slim (most inhabitants of Melender are ectomorphic) but with enormous, bellows-like chests to better breathe the thin, thin air.
- There are also some “blue” Melender. Mostly among the Gaurgathi, though they occasionally pop up among the Liannan—mostly far, far away. (From where we stand here and now, by this as yet unnamed canal, near this brewing religious conflict.) Their skin is a deep indigo black, the color of the sky at zenith; they are known as Bhel, Dulas, Sienni, Bwong’iit, and they tend to keep to themselves.
Elysium and the surrounding environs.
The inhabitants of the city-state of Ammwel follow a bizarre cult-like set of strictures: the Ocqotong. They must keep detailed journals of their daily transactions, and diaries of their innermost thoughts; these writings are gathered together, encoded and read through some sort of double-blind system (so that no one currently living can be identified with their writings—well, not easily), annotated, collated, cross-referenced, and shelved among the collective memory of the entire city for the past couple of millennia in the great Perpus Takaan, a magnificent example of Later Hy’attit design. These are used to examine recurring patterns in history and to correlate and attempt to identify reincarnations of previous Ammweli; once someone dies, their writings are released to whatever priestly hierarchy runs the Takaan (the Ppappalepal, perhaps, who are dour, and wear silly codpieces), and an attempt is made to fix their past identity, their place in yon Great Scheme of Things. (Since ancestor worship is a big deal, having a relative who just died turn out to have been the reincarnation of someone important from eleven hundred years ago—based on the similar style with which they composed their grocery lists—well. This can be quite prestigious, if not lucrative.)
The Hellas Basin.
The Ampaiya League— Comprising the city-states of Tokkotoomwo Leeimw, Out, Batta, Diiyo, Paanak, Hagun Magur, Schuul Moghur, Leehoralowah and Leehor Mwouguug, the Ampaiya League is one of the richest and most cosmopolitan on Mars, vying with the Schoorhugullang in industry and agricultural output. Its network of canals is also arguably the best maintained, counting among its number the Offriina, the Liibw, the Uumhaidasch, the Werefat and Ayuufat, the Ffranogh and Afittikka, and the mighty Talimaat corridor. Ampaiya is a major source of liftwood, and, through trading along the Werefat and Ayuufat canals, is one of the only outlets for the narcotic attigha, grown in the cool, dry foothills of the Kaahtch. Though Lisounguunguuppwu is these days considered more a member of the Schooyeelagh, thanks to the Duul Mennesch caravan trade, close ties are nonetheless maintained with Ampaiya, and the water pumped from the Ppilwaaihet along the Lisounloomw canal is another important factor in Ampaiya’s vitality.
The planet Mars, with major canal systems indicated.
Bells and whistles.
So. The new design. Still kicking the tires and working out the kinks; if you wander too deeply and fall into a morass of undigested code, just remember: the back button is your friend. Anyway. This is a lot closer to what I’d wanted when I first decided I wanted a blog for myself: those who were around in the mad old bad old days might remember this little ditty, from back when the entries were few enough and far enough between that I could hand-roll the CMS without too much effort. When I made the switch to Movable Type—blessed be its name—I tweaked the style sheet and the templates just enough to look more like me than not, but as a temporary measure, see, with the ever-present intention of crawling under the chassis and tinkering under the hood and whipping it into shape. Any day now. Gonna get right on that. Yup.
Sixteen months later.
The important point to note right now is this: we’re in the middle of switching the accounts that host Long story; short pier. As I understand it, this means little packets of information are as we speak circling the globe, dropping in on DNS servers from here to Timbuktu for a little tea, some gossip, and oh, by the way, when you get around to it, could you change the pointer for longstoryshortpier.com? Thanks. —This, apparently, takes a few days.
So: for now, you can get here directly by using the subdirectory itself: thecityofroses.com/longstory/, much as you could (and still can) get to the old pier through jennworks.com/longstory/. But longstoryshortpier.com is the more robust link: it will always end you up at the pier, wherever the pier might be, while more specific subdirectory URLs might land you at old, outmoded, unupdated piers. So: use thecityofroses.com/longstory/ as an interim link; feel free to keep longstoryshortpier.com in your blogrolls and such; and if you had jennworks.com/longstory/ as your bookmark, you’ll want to update it. (Of course, longstoryshortpier.com is at the moment pointing to the Spouse’s site; the mysteries of what’s being discussed in those DNS kaffeeklatschen are beyond me.)
Bored yet? The rest gets numbingly technical. That was the important bit, so feel free to bail out.
The first thing I had to do was fix MT’s file-naming system. Straight out of the box, Movable Type uses a numerical key based on the entry’s place in the database as the name of the HTML file: the first entry made is 0001.html, the second 0002.html, and so forth and so on. Which is all well and good, until you delete the sixth entry because of a mistake and so 0006.html is scrubbed and now the sixth entry is 0007.html. And then you let your best friend run a blog off your MT install, and her first entry is seventh in the database, which means it’s 0008.html, and your seventh entry, posted right after hers, is 0009.html, and, well. —This works fine so far as it goes, because who pays attention to the actual file names when you’re following hyperlinks? But! Say you want to move your install. Say your best friend wants to host her blog herself. Say you got a better deal on bandwidth. Whatever. So you export all your entries and you install MT elsewhere and then you import your entries and rebuild—and all the links other people have made to you out there in the Islets of Bloggerhans are instantly rotted away. Because your new MT names all its files based on the order the entries were made to its database, not some other database you used on a server in another state that it never met before.
Luckily, there’s lots of ways to massage MT’s archiving system. I followed Mark Pilgrim’s recipe for cruft-free hyperlinks: now, every entry builds its file name out of the entry title itself, or keywords—if, as is frequently the case, my entry title is just a wee bit too long. Plus, I hacked off the .html extension: that way, I could (someday) upgrade to, oh, php or some other bite of alphabet soup. But: no matter where I move or what I use, the permalinks will stay just that: perma. No link rot!
(Unless, of course, one’s main URL points inexplicably to one’s Spouse’s index page, as little packets of vital information waste time tea-and-crumpeting with DNS servers. But we’ve been over that. It’s temporary. All will soon be back to normal.)
Of course, there’s the problem of the legacy archives—all the old permalinks out there that point to the old, entry-number-based file titles. Those links are rotten at the moment; those old entries are orphaned. I have an idea, though: the old MT install is still operative, with the old file names. If I were to change the individual entry template to nothing more than MT tags that would generate the new file name, then rebuild the old site, then copy the files generated and drop them onto my new host—that should work. Then, each old link would bring up a file that says, “Hey, the discussion moved, go here,” and link. —That, at any rate, is the plan. But it would involve a lot of typing of key words from the new install into the old install. So I might not get to it just yet. On the other hand: it really doesn’t pay to have Brad DeLong annoyed with you. So I might just prioritize that.
Next up: accessibility. I dove into Mark again (and I really need to add him to the colophon over yonder) with his clear and terribly helpful Dive Into Accessibility series. Some of this stuff is already bog-standard on MT, some of it isn’t, but if you run a website, you owe it to yourself to take it all to heart. —Most important: the simple and elegant liquid three-column display I gacked from Floatutorial requires the main content of the blog—this stuff you’re reading here—to be coded after the more nattery stuff in each of the two floating sidebars: pretty much ass-backwards from an accessibility standpoint. Mark’s hidden skip link was a lovely little solution that salved my conscience as I went for what passes for gusto hereabouts.
Also, I decided to add underlines to the links, after years of inveighing against them, and I decided it would be a good idea for the links in the main blog portion to be a different color if you’ve already visited them, after years of inveighing against that. It’s supposed to be a tiny discreet brown line that is easy to skip over if you’re reading, but still easy to see if you’re looking for a link, that changes to an even more discreet blue if it’s a link you’ve already visited—from Eschaton, or Making Light, probably. But different boxes and different monitors are rendering the simple CSS in very different ways; my Windows box at work wants to make all the lines thick and black, for some godawful reason. So while I’m warming to the theory, I may scrap the praxis. —Then, my Windows box is fucking up the CSS something awful in IE 6.0: it ignores all my calls for Georgia and (since it doesn’t have Lucida Grande) Verdana in favor of rendering the whole site in Times Roman. And let’s not get into what I had to do to get it to render the boxes right. It’s still fucking up the frame colors on the deltolographs to the right there.
Other niggling background stuff I did: I scrapped the MT code that opens comments and trackbacks in new, little windows; I always hated that, and try never to click on those links on other people’s MT blogs unless I have to. If I want the content opened in a new window, I’ll bloody well use a new window. Otherwise, just use the one I’ve already got open. Oy.
I also added permalinks to comments: not that there’s a lot of traffic hereabouts, but there’s the occasional meaty addendum, and it’s nice to point to it specifically. There’s a little graphic ding at the end of each comment that serves as the handle for the permalink, and bad me: there’s no text backup for it yet. So I’ll be adding the word “link” there shortly, that will also serve as the handle for the comment’s permalink. Oh, and I scrapped the catalog archive pages—since MT doesn’t yet have a handy pagination function, each category page just kept getting longer and longer and more and more difficult to browse. Monthly archives are much more user-friendly. Feel free to graze.
Other stuff: I’m using an MT sideblog to maintain the linchinography, since the lack of ability to meaningfully alphabetize the stuff coming out of blogrolling.com—a great little service otherwise—was really getting to me. Basically, I set up a new blog in Movable Type, then stripped out all the archiving functions, and set up the main index to look like this:
<ul>
<MTEntries sort_by=”title” sort_order=”ascend” lastn=”999”>
<li><$MTEntryBody$></li>
</MTEntries>
</ul>
Each link is entered as an entry in the blog, and given a title that lays out how it should be alphabetized (“Wilson, Trish” for Trish Wilson’s Blog; “Rittenhouse Review” for The Rittenhouse Review). MT then builds an index page (called linkroll.html) that’s really just a bare-bones snippet of HTML: a UL list of each entry in the linchinography. Then, on the main index template for the pier, I stick
<$MTInclude file=”<$MTBlogURL$>linkroll.html”$></>where I want the linchinography to go, and voila!
I’m using a similar technique to maintain the Deltiolography sideblog to the right there.
And otherwise: there’s some rough bits to file off the comments preview page, for instance, and the trackback ping report, and some of the links on the monthly archive page are wonky, and there’s content and links to be added to the right, there; I’m still mulling over the suggestions in this handy sketch of semantic markup—I want to be better about using <cite> properly, say, but then I need to make sure I have a .noitalic class when I want to cite short stories or plays, and I still don’t know for sure how I want to set up blockquotes, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum. But the work progresses. One is never done with anything, after all.
What’s that? Entries? You want me to actually make entries, too?
Oy.
How fast?
Yeah, I know Atrios has his finger on the pulse of the Islets of Bloggerhans. He’s a superstar, man, the Beatles of blogging, he’s the first and last stop on my hourly must-read list.
But: when the RSS feed for his entry pointing to the announcement of the Koufax winners shows up a good ten minutes before the RSS feed for the Koufax announcement itself?
Well, you just gotta wonder, is all.
(Congratulations to all and sundry; no always-the-good-friend-of-a-bridesmaid-who-helps-her-into-her-awful-sea-foam-taffetta-gown-but-never-a-bridesmaid bitterness here. Nossir.)
Not really back just yet, but.
I spent an hour I don’t have clearing 400-some-odd pieces of comment spam off the pier. We run Jay Allen’s invaluable MT-Blacklist hereabouts, but this stuff all got past it. —I’m wondering if we have some smarter monkeys in the house.
The comment text was all scraped out of an article on how memory stacks work. The names were all first names, common enough to have been lifted off a popular baby name list. The email addresses and IP addresses were all different. And there were dozens of URLs linked, none of which had made it onto the MT-Blacklist master list yet. Some of them were misspellings or variant spellings of others. I didn’t bother trying to visit any, but I’m thinking most of the URLs were the equivalent of chaff, thrown up to waste time and effort so that maybe somebody would sigh and throw up their hands and just leave the 400-some-odd links up till tomorrow, maybe, giving Google enough time to register the link.
Jay’s currently travelling, and anyway I’m not too sure how to verify which of my entries aren’t on his master list yet to submit them officially. (I could figure it out, but there’s work yet to do, and sleep.) I haven’t seen anyone else hit with a chaff attack yet—at least, no one on my short list of usual suspects who’ve shared spam attacks with me in the past—but if you do suddenly find yourself with 400-some-odd new pieces of comment spam full of chaff, here’s my updated blacklist.
Oy.
Oh, while I’ve got your attention: the Fiery Furnaces and the Books.
Might as well make it official.
So the computer died, and then the transmission decided going in reverse was too much of a bother, and then there was the car crash (different car), and then the 103-degree fever, and then the flying to Newark with a head cold, and the resulting black eye from the sinus pressure, and the Christmas spent mostly unconscious, and the Rockettes I didn’t in the end get to see, and, well. It’s been a couple of weeks.
(When you die, and you end up in hell—as we all will, of course—and they get around to offering you your choice of torments, and one of them is taking off and landing for an eternity with a head cold pulling a nastily proxigean spring tide through every single one of your sinuses, take whatever the hell else they offer. It can’t be worse. Trust me.)
I’m trying to put everything back together again, or at least the bits I can find and scrape together and recollect, on Jenn’s old iBook. It’s a sweet little machine, and I’m finally getting to play in the wonderful world of OSX, but it’s still got Jenn’s old filing structure kicking around and a bunch of Jenn’s old files to boot and it doesn’t even have a name yet. And I’ve been meaning to revamp Long story; short pier as it is—the look, but also the structure, and maybe even the how and the why. And I’m trying not to think about the work that’s been lost on City of Roses—less than you might think, but still: there’s a lot to be done before I can get it back on track. And the rest of me, which is long past overdue a thorough dusting and reorganizing. And. And.
I don’t so much heave as lob a sigh at the thought of it all.
It’s going to be quiet around my various web enterprises for about a month or so, is the basic point, except for the sounds of pounding and splintering and hammering and drilling and sweeping and cursing when a thumb gets pounded instead of a nail, or a line of CSS fails to work as advertised. Surf your way through the linchinography to the right there in the meanwhile. I mean, all I can say for myself at the moment is that I finally got to see Eddie Izzard (canned, but), who is as brilliant as everyone (who is anyone) says, and I got to see enough of the American Queer as Folk to wonder why on earth they bothered, and it was cool meeting up with Paul and Scott even if we did end up missing Julia and HM, and New York City is still pretty much New York City. Not that I was all that worried, but I still shudder to remember when Unique New York got ripped out and replaced by a Nobody Beats the Wiz™ (long since gone), so my cockles were nicely if trivially warmed to see that the Sock Guy is still on St. Marks Place. (But when on earth did Forbidden Planet jump across the street and lose all its books? Management does not approve.) —Other than that? It’s snowing, and I’ve got a malingering cough and a cat in my lap, and my feet are cold, and there’s a lot of work to be done. So.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
I’m a moirologist, not a miracle worker.
It’s dead, Jim. —Still not funny, though. Pardon me, there’s something in my eye—
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego walk into a bar—
As I’m still waiting to hear and all, here’s what’s doubtlessly the strangest and most particular Google request to come over the transom in a while:
read stories about people getting naked then still alive getting into a furnace without surviving
The irony I did not need.
So I’ve been bad about backups, yeah. I have an old tangerine iBook. I have a 250 meg Zip drive and some disks. I have 14 or 15 gigs of music and writing and graphics work and freelance stuff on it. It’s a relatively new 20 gig drive. I’m cocky and careless. You do the math.
But, cockiness and carlessness aside, it was eating at me. So. I found a lovely LaCie 40 gig external drive. Ordered it. Loaded the driver for OS 9.2. (My tangerine doesn’t quite have enough oomph to run OSX. Sigh.) Plugged in the drive. Watched the arrow go all wonky when I tried to move it about the screen to close windows. Pulled the USB plug to the drive. Restarted.
Whir-click!whirr-click!whirr-click!whirr-click!whirr-click!
Oh, fuck.
I think in a couple of days I’ll find it terribly funny, and we’ll have a jolly laugh at the irony and the folly of it all, ha ha, and the speed with which the potential loss of what in the grand scheme of things is really little more than prettily patterned 1s and 0s has reduced me to a blubbering supplicant desperately bargaining with whatever Powers might possibly be that if everything turns out to be okay or at least salvageable then I’ll mend my ways, I’ll back up religiously every night and say my prayers, I’ll floss, I’ll stop wasting so much time on the internet with egosurfing and troll-baiting and “research” and googling for unmentionables and—
And—
It will be funny. Someday. Right?
Right? Ha ha? Someday?
But. This moment here. Right now, as I’m typing on the Windows box at work and staring at the blank black screen of the tangerine iBook I’ve used as an outboard brain since 1999. That I write on. That I design on. That I read the news on. That I keep track of friends with. That holds all of my prettily patterened 1s and 0s.
Right now, not so much.
Now why didn’t I think of that before?
On this long night of unexpected work at the “day” job, on a weekend which was to have been devoted to catching up on totally buggered deadlines and procrastinated household chores, I at least have this simple idea to console me:
A gin martini softened with single-malt Laphroaig rather than the more typical vermouth. A couple of olives, and—
Well. Two of ’em set me up quite nicely on the dinner break.
The life you save could be your own.
Look, I like a Weetzie Bat book as much as the next fellow, but I’m not about to start waxing rhapsodic over the City of Quartz. There’s a place for it in the collective unconscious, I suppose—gracelessly aging screen queens of whatever gender still need shady bungalows where Nancy Drews and Walter Neffs can tumble headlong into stories they won’t suss out till the final moments of a posthumous voiceover, and the world would be a poorer place without the Dude. But (what little I’ve seen of) the there that’s there all too often leaves me wretched, retching on all fours.
In a metaphorical sense, anyway.
There’s the heat and the sun and the fact that you’re driving for hours to get anywhere and the sheer number of movie billboards makes getting around the city feel like those obnoxious DVDs where you can’t fast-forward past the coming attractions. There’s the prefab megaburbs, fœtal Neal Stephenson atopias that spring forth fully paved from the knotted foreheads of urban planning committees, settling the Mandlebrot fronds of their culs-de-sac around big-box nuclei of Home Depots and Bed Bath & Beyonds, and if you think it’s tacky to blame Venice for the sins of Thousand Oaks, well, tough. There’s more than enough to go around. And sure there’s wonder there, and beauty—you can’t put that many people in one place without some deliriously amazing things being done and said and built—but it takes too much money and gas to enjoy them properly. I am a callow, petty, cruel man, and for these sins: heat; sun; annoyance; urban blight; profligacy; bad planning; and one of the worst cups of coffee I’ve ever had in my life, I could easily write the whole festering mess off without a backward glance—Bats and bungalows, screen queens, Dudes and all. Except—
We were in this minivan, Scott and Ivy and Winter and Sky and Jenn and me, and we were somewhere between Thousand Oaks and Culver City and having a hard time getting any closer to either of them, and it was hot, and the sun was flinging daggers off the chrome and glass all around us, and even though there’s something to be said about improvising Pythonesque skits with a couple of disarmingly precocious kids in the back seat of an elderly minivan on the 101, you’re still stuck in the back of an elderly minivan on the 101, and even disarmingly precocious kids can get squallingly cranky. (Hence the Pythonesque skits.) Are we there yet?
Eventually whatever was blocking the traffic popped free and it began sluggishly to move, down out of the dry, scrubby hills through cool green suburbs toward the apocalyptic orange haze at the bottom. Somewhere off thataway, that grey mass that wasn’t quite sky and yet wasn’t quite anything else? That has something to do with an ocean, apparently. And for all the skyscraping high-rises jutting up at alarmingly random intervals, none of them quite stick in the mind’s eye, you know? (Quick! Draw LA’s skyline!) —We didn’t go quite that far; we found instead a nondescript corner with only a couple of movie billboards looming over it and parked. (Climbing out, I discovered I had suffered a Sartorial Indignity; I do not want it to be said that I blame anyone, as any fool knows one shouldn’t wear white pants in an elderly minivan frequented by disarmingly precocious children. But: nonetheless: I had, and it was.) One door down from that corner was a nondescript storefront. Scott leaned on the nondescript buzzer. The door opened. And, ladies and gentlemen, as God is my witness: all of Los Angeles was redeemed.
We were in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
For one thing, it was cool and dim. But! I don’t know that I have ever spent any two hours more totally immersed in awe, stumbling about through such a lovely, druggy haze of presque vu. I— I—
Trailer parks! Rotting luck! Athanasius Kircher! Mice on toast! —Aw, fuck. Words fail me.
(There was a book. Words kinda failed him, too.)
Which makes this part of the post mildly moot: it has come to my attention that, like so many other enterprises which depend upon the kindness of strangers, the Museum of Jurassic Technology could use a little more help than usual, these days. Memberships start at $35 per year ($25 for seniors and students), and you get stuff and discounts and free admission and so on. And if you know about the Museum then you know, but if you don’t—my inability to articulate the hows and the whys and wherefores does none of us any good, now, does it.
Think of it this way: one day, you, too, will be in Los Angeles. And you, too, will be hot and sun-stricken and stuck in traffic. When you finally pull off the 101 into the City of Culver City, well—you’re gonna want a there to still be there. Know what I mean?
No one may ever have the same knowledge again.
What happened, you mooks.
Oh, there were circumstances. (There are always circumstances.) There was that holiday. (I made my usual goyishe challah and a black bean and chocolate chili.) I’ve been so distracted from other writing tasks that I can’t work up the gumption to procrastinate those by tossing off something here. (They ought to come first, which means this usually does, unless I’m over some other rainbow entirely.) I’m going through another one of those periods where my normally fecund outrage lies fallow; overwhelmed by the effort to keep my head above this river of shit, for some perspective, I’ve instead curled up in a little ball and sunk to the bottom, where at least it’s cool and dim and quiet—pleasant, really, as long as you don’t try to breathe. (It’s a heartsickness. I read the news and I sigh and shrug and turn away to burrow deep within the flannel sheets we just bought and I turn out the light.) We lost a cat we never really got to know all that well. (She reached out for something as the shot went home, the most she’d moved in hours, and then she stopped breathing. We got a paw print and a clip of fur in the mail from the clinic and I suddenly found it hard to speak. Chris ’shopped a silly composite image from these silly snaps that Jenn took, and now I have a mental image of Kitty Heaven that’s going to be hard to shake. But at least it makes me laugh.) And of course, there’s the day job—
I don’t talk much about the day job, do I?
I work in litigation support, basically, a field I never even knew existed until Aaron, the Demented Lawyer, snagged me a part-time job here. When the freelance writing and graphic design market started drying up, I stepped up to full time; now, I’m a Project Manager, with a corner office and everything. —Basically, when two companies hate each other very much, they come together in a lawsuit. And the lawyers for each side want to see all the pieces of paper the other side has in its filing cabinets and desk drawers and bankers’ boxes stashed away in the unused office space on the sixth floor, memos and financials and correspondence and telephone messages and test results and printouts of every half-baked Excel spreadsheet and ill-conceived Power Point presentation stuffed onto the harddrive of that laptop Bob hasn’t used since the ill-fated trip to Nova Scotia. And they argue back and forth about what’s pertinent and what’s privileged, but in the end all this paperwork is boxed up and dropped off at our offices, where we scan it all in, number every page in sequence, print (“blow back,” in the parlance) a fresh, numbered set, break that up into discrete documents, code the particulars of each document into a database, and then hand the whole shebang back, neatly boxed up and easily and quickly searchable in any of a number of ways. —We sort haystacks, in other words, so that needles—howsomever defined—might more easily be found. And on the one hand, this is cool: if a lawyer is getting ready to depose Bob about that trip to Nova Scotia, and she wants to see every memo he wrote before he went, she doesn’t have to send her paralegal scurrying down to the sixth floor office to search all those bankers’ boxes for any memo that he might have written before the date of the trip; instead, the harried paralegal can scurry over to the computer, run a simple database search, and print out all the corresponding documents. Time and money are saved! The invisible hand of commerce lubricates the exceeding fine if slowly grinding mills of justice! Huzzah!
On the other hand, you also have clients who get a mite peevish when you try to tell them it’s a wee bit difficult to print 60,000 pages in chronological order in 12 hours.
I think I’m figuring out why I don’t talk about the day job much. —Oh, there’s something new to learn with every project, and there’s scads of fun terminology (blowbacks, Bates numbers, redwelds, bankers’ boxes [which, thanks to my days in comics retail, I can assemble with alacrity], etc. etc.), and I get to see all sorts of juicy behind-the-scenes stuff, going through other companies’ dirty laundry every day, but since I sign a non-disclosure agreement with most of the projects I take on, well.
So: day job. We work for lawyers; there’s the concomitant stress level that that entails. —November was a month, in other words; still, peevish clients and appalling actions taken in my name and good food with friends I haven’t seen in years notwithstanding, I’m most rattled here on the other side by the death of a cat I knew, what, two months? Less?
Stupid death. It’s a really dumb way to run things, you know? —Oh, sure, “They will come back—come back again, as long as the red Earth rolls. He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Why should He squander souls?” If it floats your boat, I guess. But rake my yard, first. Then talk to me about squandering.
The incredibly strange referrers who stopped living and became mixed-up zombie-blogs.
So I’ve been getting these weird pings over at City of Roses. A blog of nothing but airplane news. A blog of LA news. Technical something-or-other blogging. —They’re each of them nothing but simple links with a brief summary scraped off a newsfeed, each laid out differently, each with a not-entirely-random, vaguely evocative name. Each of them linking, under “Referrers” or “Incoming links,” www.thecityofroses.com, along with a bunch of other sites, with almost nothing in common except—like City of Roses—they don’t actually have a link to the blog in question.
And each of them has, at the bottom of the page, the following code:
“Zombieblog.com,” of course, being the URL of the blog in question.
Sebbo did the detective work. —Me, I’m puzzled, too. I’m not seeing how this is driving traffic to “adult-webcam”; certainly not enough to justify the effort that went into setting up these templates and newsfeeds.
Anyone?
Stable’s gettin’ kinda full, ain’t it?
As Horsemen go, it’s a small one, but a tinny echo of the Last Trump blatted through my bus this morning. —I’m sitting there puzzling out a bit of dialogue when some strap-hanger clinging behind me gets into it with an underling on his cell phone. I missed the particulars, but then he got agitated: “Yeah, well,” he says, “hurry it up! You’re late as it is.” And then he’s listening to whatever the underling is saying about how my car won’t start or the bus blew me off or the idiot at Kinko’s used the wrong foam-core or what am I supposed to do about how IT misunderstood the email and rebuilt the database for Lotus and I can’t get anybody to tell me where the backup tapes are or maybe my cat that’s been the family companion for fourteen happy years is walking funny and leaking something and I can’t put off taking her to the vet it would kill my kids, I’ve just got to fix this one little thing, that’s all, and then I can, and in the middle of it all this guy snaps with no hint whatsoever of self-consciousness: “There is no I in team.” And then he slaps his phone shut and shoves it in a pocket.
Ah, well. At least I got to snicker to myself at how his utter lack of irony made the whole thing rather ironic.
(Confidential to, oh, just about everyone: yes, there’s been a dearth of posts and less back-and-forth than usual and missed emails and I’m really sorry I didn’t get around to installing MT-Blacklist until last night, Barry, but I’m glad it’s going gangbusters for you now. —There’s been stuff. In the interests of reducing my workload, then, I’ll mention that I want to do something with the stuff dredged up by Jeremy’s meanderings, prompted by the infamous Messr. du Toit: the short answer, Mr. Pinkham, is you’re wrong, but. The problem being I’m finding it really hard to pontificate breezily on pop culture without access to what passes for it on the cable channels, and I’m not about to let that beast back into my house for nothing more than a blog entry, and yeah, world’s smallest violin, cry me a fuckin’ river, suck it up, close your eyes and think of the children, what would your mother say, and anyway, you see an I in this team, shithead?
(In the meanwhile, a non sequitur: Mark Lakeman!)
Shipbreaking.
The most recent edition of Granta has an arresting cover, one which takes some close examination before you’re convinced: no, that isn’t a false color trick, a Photoshop filter effect, an art director’s whim. (At least, not much.) Those are nickel tailings—waste material from the mining industry: “As ore bodies are extracted the valuable mineral is surrounded by gangue (uneconomic material) that needs to be separated in a concentrating process. Crushing and grinding methods are used to reduce the mined ore to sand and silt sizes, and then the concentrating process can begin. The most common technique used today is ‘flotation’ which has been used to separate minerals since the early 1920s. The process treats the ground ore in a bubbling mixture of water and chemical constituents which the sort metallic minerals stick to and rise to the surface of the flotation tank.” —The river really is that ghastly, gorgeous color. (Just about.)
The photo’s the work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer who specializes in industrial landscapes—“the industrial sublime,” he says. The brief article by Noah Richler introducing his gallery inside opens like this:
In 2001, I travelled with Edward Burtynsky to the beaches of Chittagong, in Bangladesh, where many of the world’s old freighters go to die.
He’s talking about shipbreaking.
On his first trip, briefer than he would have liked, he had photographed the Bangladeshi workers cutting up the ships, some as large as 60,000 tons, with little more than hammers, and acetylene torches—remarkable, Lilliputian, work.
I didn’t know shipbreaking existed until I read this introduction. I know a little more, now: the appalling labor conditions, the sheet metal dorms scavenged from ship parts, the constant din, the fumes and chemicals, the waste, the miles of beach churned into sludge. That it will affect England perhaps not as much as it affects India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Viet Nam and China, but still: $17 million to scrap 13 US Navy ships, a bid that undercut American firms despite the expense of towing them across the Atlantic (and the legal battles to determine their seaworthiness). That the second-largest ship ever built, the Sea Giant, 10 storeys high, longer than an Eiffel Tower is tall, was just run aground on the shipbreaking “yards” of Gadani to be whittled by hand into scrap. That the ILO is doing what it can to promote guideines for responsible ship-dismantling, but.
I live in a working port city; there’s four very active terminals loading timber and grain and unloading cars and electronics even as I sit here typing. There’s been some industry up and down the river along the way, and ship construction and ship repair, but nothing so appallingly messy as whittling a disused oil tanker down to scrap by hand. Nonetheless, in December of 2000, the Willamette River was designated a Superfund site.
As he worked with his camera in Chittagong, a line of shipbreaking workers walked past us barefoot in the oily muck. Burtynsky pointed out that the beach was rife with toxic waste.
Just about every day bussing over this bridge or that I can look out and see one of these monster freighters, so big that the crew keeps bicycles to ride from stem to stern. From all over the word, and in every sort of condition. I might give them a second thought from time to time; they’re big, and there’s enough of the kid left in me to marvel at their size, and wonder what it’s like to drive one of those things across the ocean.
Now I know where they go to die, and how.
Isn’t the internet wonderful?
Snarking at Lars Von Trier aside.
Maybe it’s my mood and maybe it’s the bourbon, but right here, right now, that particular song called “Unison,” being the last track of Björk’s Vespertine, is without a drunken doubt the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. —Oh, wait: now iTunes has started “Lift Yr. Skinny Fists, Like Antennas to Heaven…” Oh—oh, my—
