Arts & Letters

The Unglamorous March of Technology

5 Comments / Best Entries, Culture, Neal Stephenson, Science & Technology / /

We live in a truly wondrous world. The technological advances over just the past 100 years are astounding, but, in their own way, they’re also absurd and even somewhat misleading, especially when you consider how these advances are discovered. More often than not, we stumble onto something profound by dumb luck or by brute force. When you look at how a major technological feat was accomplished, you’d be surprised by how unglamorous it really is. That doesn’t make the discovery any less important or impressive, but we often take the results of such discoveries for granted.

For instance, how was Pi originally calculated? Chris Wenham provides a brief history:

So according to the Bible it’s an even 3. The Egyptians thought it was 3.16 in 1650 B.C.. Ptolemy figured it was 3.1416 in 150 AD. And on the other side of the world, probably oblivious to Ptolemy’s work, Zu Chongzhi calculated it to 355/113. In Bagdad, circa 800 AD, al-Khwarizmi agreed with Ptolemy; 3.1416 it was, until James Gregory begged to differ in the late 1600s.

Part of the reason why it was so hard to find the true value of Pi (π) was the lack of a good way to precisely measure a circle’s circumference when your piece of twine would stretch and deform in the process of taking it. When Archimedes tried, he inscribed two polygons in a circle, one fitting inside and the other outside, so he could calculate the average of their boundaries (he calculated ? to be 3.1418). Others found you didn’t necessarily need to draw a circle: Georges Buffon found that if you drew a grid of parallel lines, each 1 unit apart, and dropped a pin on it that was also 1 unit in length, then the probability that the pin would fall across a line was 2/π. In 1901, someone dropped a pin 34080 times and got an average of 3.1415929.

π is an important number and being able to figure out what it is has played a significant factor in the advance of technology. While all of these numbers are pretty much the same (to varying degrees of precision), isn’t it absurd that someone figured out π by dropping 34,000 pins on a grid? We take π for granted today; we don’t have to go about finding the value of π, we just use it in our calculations.

In Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson portrays several experiments performed by some of the greatest minds in history, and many of the things they did struck me as especially unglamorous. Most would point to the dog and bellows scene as a prime example of how unglamorous the unprecedented age of discovery recounted in the book really was (and they’d be right), but I’ll choose something more mundane (page 141 in my edition):

“Help me measure out three hundred feet of thread,” Hooke said, no longer amused.

They did it by pulling the thread off of a reel, and stretching it alongside a one-fathom-long rod, and counting off fifty fathoms. One end of the thread, Hooke tied to a heavy brass slug. He set the scale up on the platform that Daniel had improvised over the mouth of the well, and put the slug, along with its long bundle of thread, on the pan. He weighed the slug and thread carefully – a seemingly endless procedure disturbed over and over by light gusts of wind. To get a reliable measurement, they had to devote a couple of hours to setting up a canvas wind-screen. Then Hooke spent another half hour peering at the scale’s needle through a magnifying lens while adding or subtracting bits of gold foil, no heavier than snowflakes. Every change caused the scale to teeter back and forth for several minutes before settling into a new position. Finally, Hooke called out a weight in pounds, ounces, grains, and fractions of grains, and Daniel noted it down. Then Hooke tied the free end of the thread to a little eye he had screwed on the bottom of the pan, and he and Daniel took turns lowering the weight into the well, letting it drop a few inches at a time – if it got to swinging, and scraped against the chalky sides of the hole, it would pick up a bit of extra weight, and ruin the experiment. When all three hundred feet had been let out, Hooke went for a stroll, because the weight was swinging a little bit, and its movements would disturb the scale. Finally, it settled down enough that he could go back to work with his magnifying glass and his tweezers.

And, of course, the experiment was a failure. Why? The scale was not precise enough! The book is filled with similar such experiments, some successful, some not.

Another example is telephones. Pick one up, enter a few numbers on the keypad and voila! you’re talking to someone halfway across the world. Pretty neat, right? But how does that system work, behind the scenes? Take a look at the photo on the right. This is a typical intersection in a typical American city, and it is absolutely absurd. Look at all those wires! Intersections like that are all over the world, which is the part of the reason I can pick up my phone and talk to someone so far away. One other part of the reason I can do that is that almost everyone has a phone. And yet, this system is perceived to be elegant.

Of course, the telephone system has grown over the years, and what we have now is elegant compared to what we used to have:

The engineers who collectively designed the beginnings of the modern phone system in the 1940’s and 1950’s only had mechanical technologies to work with. Vacuum tubes were too expensive and too unreliable to use in large numbers, so pretty much everything had to be done with physical switches. Their solution to the problem of “direct dial” with the old rotary phones was quite clever, actually, but by modern standards was also terribly crude; it was big, it was loud, it was expensive and used a lot of power and worst of all it didn’t really scale well. (A crossbar is an N� solution.) … The reason the phone system handles the modern load is that the modern telephone switch bears no resemblance whatever to those of 1950’s. Except for things like hard disks, they contain no moving parts, because they’re implemented entirely in digital electronics.

So we’ve managed to get rid of all the moving parts and make things run more smoothly and reliably, but isn’t it still an absurd system? It is, but we don’t really stop to think about it. Why? Because we’ve hidden the vast and complex backend of the phone system behind innocuous looking telephone numbers. All we need to know to use a telephone is how to operate it (i.e. how to punch in numbers) and what number we want to call. Wenham explains, in a different essay:

The numbers seem pretty simple in design, having an area code, exchange code and four digit number. The area code for Manhattan is 212, Queens is 718, Nassau County is 516, Suffolk County is 631 and so-on. Now let’s pretend it’s my job to build the phone routing system for Emergency 911 service in the New York City area, and I have to route incoming calls to the correct police department. At first it seems like I could use the area and exchange codes to figure out where someone’s coming from, but there’s a problem with that: cell phone owners can buy a phone in Manhattan and get a 212 number, and yet use it in Queens. If someone uses their cell phone to report an accident in Queens, then the Manhattan police department will waste precious time transferring the call.

Area codes are also used to determine the billing rate for each call, and this is another way the abstraction leaks. If you use your Manhattan-bought cell phone to call someone ten yards away while vacationing in Los Angeles, you’ll get charged long distance rates even though the call was handled by a local cell tower and local exchange. Try as you might, there is no way to completely abstract the physical nature of the network.

He also mentions cell phones, which are somewhat less absurd than plain old telephones, but when you think about it, all we’ve done with cell phones is abstract the telephone lines. We’re still connecting to a cell tower (which need to be placed with high frequency throughout the world) and from there, a call is often routed through the plain old telephone system. If we could see the RF layer in action, we’d be astounded; it would make the telephone wires look organized and downright pleasant by comparison.

The act of hiding the physical nature of a system behind an abstraction is very common, but it turns out that all major abstractions are leaky. But all leaks in an abstraction, to some degree, are useful.

One of the most glamorous technological advances of the past 50 years was the advent of space travel. Thinking of the heavens is indeed an awe-inspiring and humbling experience, to be sure, but when you start breaking things down to the point where we can put a man in space, things get very dicey indeed. When it comes to space travel, there is no more glamorous a person than the astronaut, but again, how does one become an astronaut? The need to pour through and memorize giant telephone-sized books filled with technical specifications and detailed schematics. Hardly a glamorous proposition.

Steven Den Beste recently wrote a series of articles concerning the critical characteristics of space warships, and it is fascinating reading, but one of the things that struck me about the whole concept was just how unglamorous space battles would be. It sounds like a battle using the weapons and defenses described would be punctuated by long periods of waiting followed by a short burst of activity in which one side was completely disabled. This is, perhaps, the reason so many science fiction movies and books seem to flaunt the rules of physics. As a side note, I think a spectacular film could be made while still obeying the rules of physics, but that is only because we’re so used to the absurd physics defying space battles.

None of this is to say that technological advances aren’t worthwhile or that those who discover new and exciting concepts are somehow not impressive. If anything, I’m more impressed at what we’ve achieved over the years. And yet, since we take these advances for granted, we marginalize the effort that went into their discovery. This is due in part to the necessary abstractions we make to implement various systems. But when abstractions hide the crude underpinnings of technology, we see that technology and its creation as glamorous, thus bestowing honors upon those who make the discovery (perhaps for the wrong reasons). It’s an almost paradoxal cycle. Perhaps because of this, we expect newer discoveries and innovations to somehow be less crude, but we must realize that all of our discoveries are inherently crude.

And while we’ve discovered a lot, it is still crude and could use improvements. Some technologies have stayed the same for thousands of years. Look at toilet paper. For all of our wondrous technological advances, we’re still wiping our ass with a piece of paper. The Japanese have the most advanced toilets in the world, but they’ve still not figured out a way to bypass the simple toilet paper (or, at least, abstract the process). We’ve got our work cut out for us. Luckily, we’re willing to go to absurd lengths to achieve our goals.

Pynchon : Stephenson :: Apples : Oranges

2 Comments / Arts & Letters, Best Entries / /

The publication of Cryptonomicon lead to lots of comparisons with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in reviews. This was mostly based on the rather flimsy convergences of WWII and technology in the two novels. There were also some thematic similarities, but given the breadth of themes in Gravity’s Rainbow, that isn’t really a surprise. They did not resemble each other stylistically, nor did the narratives really resemble one another. There was, I suppose, a certain amount of playfulness present in both works, but in the end, anyone who read one and then the other would be struck by the contrast.

However, having recently read Stephenson’s Quicksilver, I can see more of a resemblance to Pynchon. With Quicksilver, Stephenson displays a great deal more playfulness with style and narrative. He’s become more willing to cut loose, explore language, fit the style to the situation he is describing and even slip out of “novel” format, whether it be the laundry list compilation style of Royal Society meeting notes (for example, pages 182 – 186), the epistolatory exploits of Eliza (pages 636 – 659 among many others), or theater script format (pages 716 – 729). Stephenson isn’t quite as spastic as Pynchon, but the similarities between their styles are more than skin deep. In addition to this playfulness in the narrative style, Stephenson, like Pynchon, associates certain styles with specific characters (most notably the epistolatory style that is used for Eliza). Again, Stephenson is much less radical than Pynchon, and only applies a fraction of the techniques that Pynchon employs in his novel, but Stephenson has progressed nicely in his recent works.

Most of the time, Stephenson is considerably more prosaic than Pynchon, and even when he does branch out stylistically, it is done in service of the story. The Eliza letters again provide a good example. The epistolatory style allows Stephenson to write for a different audience. We know this, and thus Stephenson has a good time messing with us, especially towards the end of the novel where he takes it a step further and shows Eliza’s encrypted letters and journal entries as translated by Bonaventure Rossignol (in the form of a letter to Louis XIV). All of this serves to further the plot. Pynchon, on the other hand, is more concerned with playfully exploring the narrative by experimenting with the English language. The plot takes a secondary role to the style, and to a certain extent the style drives the plot (well, that might be a bit of a stretch) and while Pynchon is one of the few who can pull it off, Stephenson’s style doesn’t really compare. They’re two different things, really.

Nate has a great post on this very subject, and he shows that a comparison of Quicksilver with Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon is more apt:

The style of Mason Dixon is a synthesis of old and new that hews remarkably close to the old. Stephenson, on the other hand, writes in a much more modern style, only occasionally dotting his prose with historical flourishes … The distinction here is an old one; classical rhetoricians spoke of Asiatic versus Attic style – the former is ornate, lush, and detailed, while the latter is lean, clean, and direct. Stephenson is a master of Attic style – a fact that’s often obscured because, while his sentences are direct and elegant, their substance is often convoluted and complex. You can see it more clearly in his nonfiction – look at his explanation of the Metaweb for an excellent example. Pynchon, as an Asiatic writer, will elicit more “oohs” and “ahhs” for the power and grace of his prose, but will tend to lose his readers when he’s trying to be florid and tackling difficult material at the same time. Obviously, both authors will tend toward the Attic or the Asiatic at different points, but in general, Stephenson wants his language to transparently convey his message, while Pynchon demands a certain amount of attention for the language itself.

I haven’t read Mason & Dixon (it’s in the queue), but from what I’ve heard this sounds pretty accurate. Again, he makes the point that Pynchon and Stephenson are on different playing fields, appropriating their styles to serve different purposes… and it shows. Stephenson is a lot more fun to read for someone like me because I prefer storytelling to experimental narrative fiction.

I recently read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and was shocked by the clarity of the straightforward and yet still vibrant prose. In that respect, I think Stephenson’s work might resemble Crying more than the novels discussed in this post…

Update: As I write this, Pynchon is making his appearance on the Simpsons. Coincidence?

Each will have his personal Rocket

Arts & Letters, Best Entries / /

I finally finished my review of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. Since I blogged about the novel often, I figured I’d let everyone know it’s out there. Oddly, when writing the review, I wrote the last paragraph first:

If I were to meet Thomas Pynchon tomorrow, I wouldn’t know whether to shake his hand or sucker-punch him. Probably both. I’d extend my right arm, take his hand in mine, give one good pump, then yank him towards my swinging left fist. As he lay crumpled on the ground beneath me, gasping in pain, I’d point a bony finger right between his eyes and say “That was for Gravity’s Rainbow.” I think he’d understand.

Heh. I also wrote up a rather lengthy selection of quotes from the novel, with some added commentary. And in case you missed the previous bloggery about Gravity’s Rainbow, here they are, in all their glory:

Update: Only marginally on-topic, but Pynchon is due to be on the Simpsons this season. Typical hermit-like behavior. Thanks to Nate for the link. Also, I recently completed Quicksilver and wanted to comment on the differences/similarities between Pynchon and Stephenson, but it turns out that Nate has already done so on his blog a while back. He does a great job, but I still think I’ll be posting something on that subject relatively soon…

Error, Calibration, and Defiant Posturing

3 Comments / Neal Stephenson / /

I’m still slogging my way through Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, and I recently came across a passage that I found particularly insightful (or, at least, that overlaps some of my interests). I’m tempted to reproduce the entire chapter, but will limit it for the sake of brevity. The two characters involved in the scene are an ambitious former-slave woman named Eliza, and famed astronomer, mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens. Huygens is observing the sun so as to correct any error in his clocks (even a well made clock drifts and must be calibrated from time to time) and this act is used as a metaphor to describe people. The quote is from pages 715-716 of my edition:

   “…Imagine my parents’ consternation. They had taught me Latin, Greek, French and other languages. They had taught me the lute, the viol, and the harpsichord. Of literature and history I had learned everything that was in their power to tech me. Mathematics and philosophy I learned from Descartes himself. But I built myself a lathe. Later I taught myself how to grind lenses. My parents feared that they had spawned a tradesman.”

   “No one is more pleased than I that matters turned out so well for you,” Eliza said, “but I am too thick to understand how your story is applicable to my case.”

   “It is all right for a clock to run fast or slow at times, so long as it is calibrated against the sun, and set right. The sun may come out only once in a fortnight. It is enough. A few minutes’ light around noon is all that you need to discover the error, and re-set the clock–provided that you bother to go up and make the observation. My parents somehow knew this, and did not become overly concerned at my strange enthusiasms. For they had confidence that they had taught me how to know when I was running awry and to calibrate my behavior.”

   “Now I think I understand,” Eliza said. “It remains only to apply this principle to me, I suppose.”

   “If I come down in the morning to find you copulating on my table with a foreign deserter, as if you were some sort of Vagabond,” Huygens said, “I am annoyed. I admit it. But that is not as important as what you do next. If you posture defiantly, it tells me that you have not learned the skill of recognizing when you are running awry, and correcting yourself. And you must leave my house in that case, for such people only go further and further astray until they find destruction. But if you take this opportunity to consider where you have gone wrong, and to adjust your course, it tells me that you shall do well enough in the end.”

I’ve written about this sort of thing before, only applied to systems rather than clocks or people. One of the things I left out of this quote is actually quite important: “Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.” And the same goes for systems, too. I’ve often commented on the intelligence community, and one of the truisms of intelligence is that when it is going well, it is transparent – you don’t know it is there. We don’t reveal intelligence successes, because to do so would prevent us from further exploiting an asset, and so on. But when there is an intelligence failure, it is quite obvious to all, even if it was debatably unavoidable.

One could go crazy applying this concept to the world of current events, but I suppose that it is such an interesting point precisely because it is so broadly applicable.

Update: Removed some of the specific current events originally referenced in this post, as they distracted from the general point and I wanted to be able to refer back to this without worrying about that.

Recent and Future Consumption

Arts & Letters / /

For reasons which are unclear to me, my recent movie viewing has been somewhat limited. I shall have to remedy that. I’ve seen the big blockbusters, but I have no offbeat recommendations (as I usually do) at this time. As far as the biggies go, Matrix Revolutions wasn’t that bad until the ending, which blew. It’s not so much that it didn’t make sense as that it was so poorly communicated. Up until then I was very entertained (unless I started thinking about it and nitpicking), which was pretty much all I expected. Brad Wardell apparently saw a different, much better, version of the film. Widge provides an alternate ending (pdf) (an overall treatment, actually), one of millions that frustrated fans have made up.

Master and Commander was beautifully shot and well done overall, but the entire middle section drags and could have benefitted from some judicious editing (so could both of the Matrix sequels, come to think of it). Elf was funny and suprisingly innocent. Could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what type of person you are…

Recent listening has also been curtailed, thanks to a rogue car stereo that is taking longer than expected to fix. Stupid car. Anyway, the latest Guster album has grown on me significantly (though I still don’t love it) since I last mentioned it, but the new A Perfect Circle album stinks and doesn’t show any signs of growing on me. A pity, that. Let’s hope Maynard doesn’t let this bleed through (no pun intended, see below) to Tool…

New NIN album, to be titled bleedthrough, is coming “soon.” I’ll let you know how it is when it comes out in 2006. As usual, Meathead weighs in on this news with his unique brand of NIN-oriented wit and insight.

The public’s reaction to BLEEDTHROUGH’s title has been mixed. While some fans love it because it sounds “goth” and “angsty,” others hate it because they feel it sounds “goth” and “angsty.”

A few song titles have been released, and his thoughts on their effectiveness, especially that of “My Dead Friend,” are hilarious. I don’t give a crap about album or song titles (and I don’t generally listen to the lyrics either) so I’ll have to wait until “soon” becomes “now” before I can pass any judgement…

The Kill Bill: Volume 1 soundtrack is twisted and groovy (kinda like the movie). From the kickass trailer music of Tomoyasu Hotei’s “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” to Isaac Hayes’ “Run Fay Run” to Santa Esmeralda’s crazed cover of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” it’s an interesting album to say the least…

A friend recently blessed me with two supposed classics of electronica, U.N.K.L.E.’s Psyence Fiction and Coldcut’s Journeys by DJ. Psyence Fiction has some great moments and several good songs, but wasn’t particularly brilliant. Journeys by DJ was ho-hum, but scored extra points for using the Doctor Who theme in a few tracks.

Speaking of which, it looks like the BBC will be bringing back Doctor Who, though the good doctor has yet to be cast. In the mean time, check out these animated episodes (which I had no idea even existed). [via Crooked Timber]

I’ve noticed that my recent television viewing has been mostly limited to cartoons. The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, and other Adult Swim type stuff. My friends force me to watch 24 and I’ll catch an occasional hockey game though, so it’s not all cartoons…

I recently purchased the NHL 2004 video game, and it has since eaten my soul. Sports games always cracked me up because they release a new one every year that is usually only marginally different than the previous year’s game (often the most significant change is to reflect current rosters). But the trend recently is to include some sort of General Management meta-game where you get to play General Manager and deal with contracts, trades, ticket-prices, etc… NHL 2004 is the first hockey game that I’ve played that has this feature, and it does put a whole new spin on what is otherwise not much different than NHL 1998. Then again, I’m not sure anything beats the halcyon days of the early 1990s NHL games… the player control in 2004 is a little disorienting compared to previous games, but we have still come a long way…

As for reading, I’m still chugging away at Quicksilver, which bogged down for a bit and is now picking up again. I’m not really sure what it’s about yet, and from what others have said, I’m not sure it is about anything. Yet. Still two more books coming where he’ll no doubt expand on that. For now it seems like nothing more than a ribald series of intellectual or picaresque adventures that are related but not oriented in any one direction. Yet.

Update 11.27.03 – DyRE informs me that I must have transposed a couple of numbers and that we should expect the new NIN album sometime around 2060, not 2006. My mistake.

The Iraqi Art Scene

Arts & Letters, Best Entries / /

Steve Mumford’s latest Baghdad Journal is up, and it is, as usual, excellent. In it, he actually focuses on the burgeoning Iraqi art scene (How dare he? I’ve become so accustomed to his other observations that I was somewhat surprised to see him talking about art. Then I remembered that he is an artist and that his articles are published in an internet art magazine. Duh.) Instead of showcasing Mumford’s art, as previous installments have done, this article exhibits the works of various Iraqi artists that Mumford was impressed with (and for good reason, at least according to my unrefined eyes). The artistic community is growing in Iraq, in no small part due to the newfound access they have to information from around the world…

Of the younger generation, Ahmed Al-Safi is a particularly talented painter and sculptor who’s managed to make a living selling his art. He paints simple, almost crudely rendered figures reminiscent of the German Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s (whose work he immediately investigated on the web when I told him about them). Ahmed has a wonderful studio in the slummy but picturesque part of town near Tarea Square, where he has bronze-casting facilities.

Emphasis mine. Change is coming to the Iraqi art scene, and while they are now soaking up that which is newly available to them, I find myself eager to see what the Iraqis contribute back to the world art scene…

One widely repeated observation here is that abstraction was a convenient technique for a time when all narrative content was suspect. Everyone expects art to change with the passing of Saddam’s regime, though at this point, no one I talked to is making any predictions about future trends in Iraqi art. I’ve seen no video art and practically no photography in Baghdad. Installation art is unknown. Indeed, few artists in Iraq have even heard of Andy Warhol. Now that communication with the rest of the world is starting to open up, Iraqi artists will discover just how large an ocean they’re swimming in.

I’m not an artist, but I know what I like and if the art that Mumford posted is any indication, I hope and believe we’ll find that the Iraqis will be strong swimmers in the large ocean of art. More on this subject later…

Update: I just thought I’d pick one of my favorite paintings to display here…

Muayad Muhsin

oil on canvas

2002

Mumford describes Muayad Muhsin as “a younger surrealist painter from Hilla” and I like this painting a lot. I don’t know art, but have some general knowledge of the visual medium from film, and while it may be foolish to apply film theory to art, I think it might provide some insight. The cool colors suggest an aloof tranquility, a calmness, but the oblique angle produces a sense of visual irresolution and unresolved anxiety. It suggests tension, transition, and impending change. The end result is a feeling of calm, but tense and unstable, transition. It seems appropriate…

Horror

1 Comment / Arts & Letters, Best Entries, Movies / /

Halloween has past* but since horror is one of my favorite genres, I figured I’d list out some good examples of horror books & movies because it’s always fun to scare yourself witless. When it comes to film, horror is one of the more difficult genres to execute effectively and, as such, the genuinely great horror films are few and far between. What’s left are a series of downright creepy, but flawed, films. Because of their flaws, many horror films are often overlooked and underrated and these are the films I’d like to mention here. Books, on the other hand, tend to be overlooked and underrated as a medium. Horror books doubly so.

Film

I’ve never been a fan of the classic 1950’s horror films like the Mummy, Dracula, or Frankenstein… They’re not without their charm, but when it comes to the classics, I prefer their source materiel to the films. For classics, I would mention Halloween (1978, it started the lackluster “slasher” sub-genre, but it is an excellent film, particularly it’s soundtrack), Jaws (1975, another excellent soundtrack here, but there was plenty else that made people afraid to go back into the water again…), Psycho (1960, the sudden shifts and feints coupled with, again, a distinctive and effective soundtrack, make for a brutally effective film), Alien (1979, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Director Ridley Scott really knew how to turn the screws with this one), The Exorcist (1973, The power of Christ compels you… to wet yourself in despair whilst watching this film) and The Shining (1980, Kubrick’s interpretation of King’s masterwork is significantly different, but it is also one of the few examples of an adaptation that works well in it’s own right).

But those are all films we know and love. What about the one’s we haven’t seen? Director John Carpenter built an impressive string of neglected horror films throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (a pity that he has since lost his touch). Aside from the classic Halloween, Carpenter directed the 1982 remake of The Thing, which was brilliantly updated and downright creepy. It has its fill of scary moments, not the least of which is the cryptic and ambiguous ending. He followed that with Christine. Adapted from the novel by Stephen King, Carpenter was able to make a silly story creepy with the sheer will of his technical mastery (not his best, but impressive nonetheless). His 1987 film Prince of Darkness was flawed but undeniably effective. Many have not heard of In the Mouth of Madness, but it has become one of my favorite horror films of the 1990s.

If you’re not scared away by subtitles or foreign films, check out Dario Argento‘s seminal 1977 gorefest Suspiria, which boasts opening and ending scenes amongst the best in the genre. Argento’s rival, Lucio Fulci, also has an impressive series of gory horror classics, such as the 1980 film The Gates of Hell. Both Argento and Fulci have an impressive body of work and are worth checking out if you don’t mind them being in Italian…

The 1970’s and early 1980’s were an excellent period in horror filmmaking. Excluding the films already mentioned (a significant portion of the classics are from the 1970s), you may want to check out the 1980 movie The Changeling, an excellent ghost story, or perhaps the disturbing 1981 film The Incubus. And how could I write about horror movies without mentioning my beloved 1979 cheesy creepfest Phantasm. Other 70s flicks to check out: The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Salem’s Lot (a 1979 TV miniseries based on Stephen King’s book), The Omen (1976), Carrie (1976), Blue Sunshine (1976, almost forgotten today), The Wicker Man (1973), The Legend of Hell House (1973, a personal favorite, adapted from a novel by Richard Matheson, who we’ll get to in a moment), and of course we can’t forget that lovable flesh-wearing cannibal, Leatherface, in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).

Ok, so I think I’ve inundated you with enough movies, hopefully many of which you’ve never heard of, for now so let’s move on to books (naturally, I could go on and on and on just listing out good horror flicks, but this is at least a good start).

Literature

My knowledge of Horror literature is less extensive than horror film, but I have a fair base to work from. We all know the classics, Dracula, Frankenstein, and the works of Edgar Allen Poe, but there are many overlooked horror stories floating around as well.

M.R. James (1862-1936) is one of the originators of the modern Ghost Story, and there are several exemplary examples of this sub-genre in his oeuvre. His works are public domain, so follow the link above for online versions… I especially enjoyed the creepy Count Magnus.

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a classic that is rightly praised as one of the finest horror novels ever written.

Richard Matheson’s brilliant I Am Legend is a study of isolation and grim irony that turns the traditional vampire story on its head. This might be one of the most influential novels you’ve never heard of, as there have been many derivatives, particularly in film.

H.P. Lovecraft is another fantastic short story author whose work has been tremendously influential to modern horror. His infamous Cthulhu Mythos and Necronomicon were ingenious creations, and many have seized on them and attempted to follow in his footsteps. Indeed, many even believe his fictional Necronomicon to be real!

You might have noticed Stephen King’s name mentioned a few times already, and there is a reason so many of his books are turned into movies. I’ve never been a huge King fan, but The Shining is among the best horror novels I’ve read. I’ve always preferred Dean Koontz (sadly he has absolutely no good film adaptations), who wrote such notable horror staples as Phantoms, Midnight, and The Servants of Twilight. Both Koontz and King can be hit-or-miss, but when they’re on, there’s no one better.

Other books of note: Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart (which was adapted into the 1987 film Hellraiser) is an excellent short read (about 120 pages), and some of his longer works, such as The Great and Secret Show and Imajica, are also good. F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep is one of the few books that has ever truly scared me while reading it. I’ve always found William Peter Blatty’s novel, The Exorcist, to be more effective than the movie (and that is saying a lot!). Brian Lumly’s Necroscope series is an interesting take on the vampire legend, and his Titus Crow series builds on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos nicely.

Well, there you have it. That should keep you busy for the next few years…

* One would think that this post should have been made last week, and one would be right, but then one would also not be too familiar with how we do things here at Kaedrin. Note that the best movies of 2001 is due sometime around mid-2004. Heh. This whole being timely with content thing is something I have always had difficulty with and need to work on, but that is another topic for another post…

Pynchon’s 1984

Arts & Letters, Best Entries, Politics / /

I stopped by the bookstore tonight to pick up Quicksilver and while I was there, I happened upon the new edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. This new edition contains a foreward by none other than Thomas Pynchon, vaunted author and recluse whose similarly prophetic novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, has been giving me headaches for the past year or so… Pynchon was a good choice; he’s able to place Orwell’s novel, including its conception and composition, in its proper cultural and historical context while at the same time applying the humanistic themes of the novel to current times (without, I might add, succumbing to the tempation to list out what Orwell did or didn’t “get right” – indeed, Pynchon even takes a humorous swipe at the tendency to do so – “Orwellian, dude!”). And to top that off, I’m a sucker for his style – whatever one he might be employing at the time (this time around it’s his nonfiction style, with an alternating elegance and brazenness that works so well).

It’s interesting reading, though I don’t agree with everything he says. Towards the beginning of the forward, he mentions this bit:

Now, those of fascistic disposition – or merely those among us who remain all too ready to justify any government action, whether right or wrong – will immediately point out that this is prewar thinking, and that the moment enemy bombs begin to fall on one’s homeland, altering the landscape and producing casualties among friends and neighbours, all this sort of thing, really, becomes irrelevant, if not indeed subversive. With the homeland in danger, strong leadership and effective measures become of the essence, and if you want to call that fascism, very well, call it whatever you please, no one is likely to be listening, unless it’s for the air raids to be over and the all clear to sound. But the unseemliness of an argument – let alone a prophecy – in the heat of some later emergency, does not necessarily make it wrong. One could certainly argue that Churchill’s war cabinet had behaved on occasion no differently from a fascist regime, censoring news, controlling wages and prices, restricting travel, subordinating civil liberties to self-defined wartime necessity.

Though he doesn’t clearly come out and say it and he is careful even with his historical example, Pynchon clearly fears for America’s future in the wake of the “war on terror” and sees Orwell’s work not only as a commentary on the perils of communism, but as a warning to democracy. As a general point, I can see that, but you could read Pynchon as believing that Orwell’s point equally applies to the policies of, say, the current administration, which I think is a bit of a stretch. For one thing, our system of limited governance already has mechanisms for self-examination and public debate, not to mention checks and balances between certain key elements of the government. For another, our primary enemies now are no longer the forces of progress.

As Pynchon himself notes, Orwell failed to see religious fundamentalism as a threat, and today this is the main enemy we face. It isn’t the progress of science and technology that threatens us (at least not in the way expected), but rather a reversion to fundamentalist religion, and Pynchon is hesitant to see that. He tends to be obsessed with the mechanics of paranoia and conspiracy when it comes to technology. This is exemplified by his attitude towards the internet:

…the internet, a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old 20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about.

As erich notes, perhaps someone should introduce Pynchon to the hacker subculture, where anarchists deface government and corporate websites, bored kids bring corporate websites to their knees with viruses or DDOS attacks, and bloggers aggregate and debate. Or perhaps our problem will be that with an increase in informational transparency, “Orwellian” scrutiny will to some extent become democratized; abuse of privacy will no longer limited to corporations and states. As William Gibson notes:

“1984” remains one of the quickest and most succinct routes to the core realities of 1948. If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don’t mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present.

We’ve missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems.

Stranger problems indeed. But Pynchon isn’t all frowns, he actually ends on a note of hope regarding the appendix, which provides an explanation of Newspeak:

why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?

The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, “The Principles of Newspeak” is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past – as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.

… In its hints of restoration and redemption, perhaps “The Principles of Newspeak” serves as a way to brighten an otherwise bleakly pessimistic ending – sending us back out into the streets of our own dystopia whistling a slightly happier tune than the end of the story by itself would have warranted.

Overall, Pynchon’s essay is excellent and thought-provoking, if a little paranoid. He tackles more than I have commented on, and he does so in affable style. A commentor at erich’s site concludes:

Orwell, to his everlasting credit, saw clearly the threat posed by communism, and spoke out forcefully against it. Unfortunately, as Pynchon’s new introduction reminds us, the same cannot be said for far too many on the Left, who remain incapable of making rational distinctions between our constitutional republic and the slavery over which we won a great triumph in the last century.

Indeed.

Update – Most of the text of Pynchon’s essay can be found here.


Another Update – Rodney Welch notices a that Pynchon’s theory regarding the appendix appears to have been lifted by Guardian columnist, Margaret Atwood. Dave Kipen comments that it’s possible that both are paraphrasing an old idea, but he doubts it. Any Orwellians care to shed some light on the originality of the “happy ending” theory?

Another Update: More here.

Stephenson Abound

Neal Stephenson / /

Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Quicksilver, is due to be released later this month. It is both a sequel to his brilliant novel Cryptonomicon, and the first in a trilogy of novels known collectively as The Baroque Cycle (to be published at six month intervals).

On the front page of the Baroque Cycle website is a rather interesting cryptographic puzzle (not quite up to the level of some other promotional games or puzzles, but an interesting foray nonetheless) which appeared without fanfare or instructions (well, sort of). Todd Garrison solved the puzzle, and how he did so makes for fascinating reading. Countless setbacks and dead ends eventually led the patient Mr. Garrison to a “Philosophical Language” invented by John Wilkins and expressed in what was called “Real Character.”

Also of note is a new Stephenson interview in Wired. Its short but its good:

During the information revolution, it became possible for those with an engineering mentality to control large amounts of capital. So people who, if they’d been born a generation or two earlier, would’ve ended up sitting in a little office at IBM pushing a T-square around ended up becoming captains of industry. From that point of view, it seems like there’s been this revolutionary change that’s occurred within our lifetimes, but there are precedents. The power of engineers and scientists waxes and wanes. In the ’90s, we went through a period when that influence became very large, but those times may be over, at least for a little while.

Good stuff.