Category: Theater of the Absurd

Warning: there is a bit of profanity.  I’m warning you because profanity is obviously worse than being compared to Adolf Hitler.  On the other hand, sometimes dirty words can be as funny as logical fallacies — and so can Hitler. 

This has been a whirlwind week at Magenic.  Monday night Rocky Lhotka (the ‘h’ is silent and the ‘o’ is short, by the way), a Magenic evangelist and Microsoft Regional Director came into town and presented at the Atlanta .NET User’s Group.  The developers at Magenic got a chance to throw questions at him before the event, and then got another chance to hear him at the User’s Group.  The ANUG presentation was extremely good, first of all because Rocky didn’t use his power point presentation as a crutch, but rather had a complete presentation in his head for which the MPP slides — and later the code snippets (see Coding is not a Spectator Sport) — were merely illustrative.  Second, in talking about how to put together an N-Layer application, he gave a great ten year history of application development, and the ways in which we continue to subscribe to architectures that were intended to solve yesterday’s problems. He spoke about N-Layer applications instead of N-Tier (even though it doesn’t roll off the tongue nearly as well)  in order to emphasize the point that, unlike the in COM+ days, these do not always mean the same thing, and in fact all the gains we used to ascribe to N-Tier application — and the reason we always tried so hard to get it onto our resumes — can in fact be accomplished with a logical, rather than a physical, decoupling of the application stack.  One part of the talk was actually interactive, as we tried to remember why we used to try to implement solutions using Microsoft Transaction Server and later COM+.  It was because that was the only way we used to be able to get an application to scale, since the DBMS in a client-server app could typically only serve about 30 concurrent users.  But back then, of course, we were running SQL Server 7 (after some polling, we audience agreed it was actually SQL Server 6.5 back in ’97) on a box with a Pentium 4 (after some polling, the audience concluded that it was a Pentium II) with 2 Gigs (it turned out to be 1 Gig or less) of RAM.  In ten years time, the hardware and software for databases have improved dramatically, and so the case for an N-tier architecture (as opposed to an N-Layer architecture) in which we use two different servers in order to access data simply is not there any more.  This is one example of how we continue to build applications to solve yesterday’s problems.

The reason we do this, of course, is that the technology is moving too fast to keep up with.  As developers, we generally work with rules of thumb — which we then turn around and call best practices — the reasons for which are unclear to us, or simply become forgotten.  Rocky is remarkable in being able to recall that history — and perhaps even for thinking of it as something worth remembering — and so is able to provide an interesting perspective on our tiger ride.  But of course it is only going to get worse.

This is the premise of Vernor Vinge’s concept of The Singularity.  Based loosely on Moore’s Law, Vinge (pronounced Vin-Jee) proposed that our ability to predict future technologies will collapse over time, so that if we could, say, predict technological innovation ten years in the future 50 years ago, today our prescience only extends some five years into the future.  We are working, then, toward some moment in which our ability to predict technological progress will be so short that it is practically nothing.  We won’t be able to tell what comes next.  This will turn out to be a sort of secular chilianism  in which AI’s happen, nanotechnology becomes commonplace, and many of the other plot devices of science fiction (excluding the ones that turn out to be physically impossible) become realities.  The Singularity is essentially progress on speed.

There was some good chatting around after the user group and I got a chance to ask Jim Wooley his opinion of LINQ to SQL vs Entity Framework vs Astoria, and he gave some eyebrow raising answers which I can’t actually blog about because of various NDA’s with Microsoft and my word to Jim that I wouldn’t breath a word of what I’d heard (actually, I’m just trying to sound important — I actually can’t remember exactly what he told me, except that it was very interesting and came down to that old saw, ‘all politics are local’).

Tuesday was the Microsoft 2008 Launch Event, subtitled "Heroes Happen Here" (who comes up with this stuff?).  I worked the Magenic kiosk, which turned out (from everything I heard) to be much more interesting that the talks.  I got a chance to meet with lots of developers and found out what people are building ‘out there’.  Turner Broadcasting just released a major internal app called Traffic, and is in the midst of implementing standards for WCF across the company.  Matria Healthcare is looking at putting in an SOA infrastructure for their healthcare line of products.  CCF – White Wolf, soon to be simply World of Darkness, apparently has the world’s largest SQL Server cluster with 120 blades servicing their Eve Online customers, and is preparing to release a new web site sometime next year for the World of Darkness line, with the possibility of using Silverlight in their storefront application.  In short, lots of people are doing lots of cool things.  I also finally got the chance to meet Bill Ryan at the launch, and he was as cool and as technically competent as I had imagined.

Tuesday night Rocky presented on WPF and Silverlight at the monthly Magenic tech night.  As far as I know, these are Magenic only events, which is a shame because lots of interesting and blunt questions get asked — due in some part to the free flowing beer.  Afterwards we stayed up playing Rock Band on the XBOX 360.  Realizing that we didn’t particularly want to do the first set of songs, various people fired up their browsers to find the cheat codes so we could unlock the advanced songs, and we finished the night with Rocky singing Rush and Metallica.  In all fairness, no one can really do Tom Sawyer justice.  Rocky’s rendition of Enter Sandman, on the other hand, was uncanny.

Wednesday was a sales call with Rocky in the morning, though pretty much I felt like a third wheel and spent my time drinking the client’s coffee and listening to Rocky explain things slightly over my head, followed by technical interviews at the Magenic offices.  Basically a full week, and I’m only now getting back to my Silverlight in Seven Days experiment — will I ever finish it?

Before he left, I did get a chance to ask Rocky the question I’ve always wanted to ask him.  By chance I’ve run into lots of smart people over the years — in philosophy, in government, and in technology — and I always work my way up to asking them this one thing.  Typically they ignore me or they change the subject.  Rocky was kind enough to let me complete my question at least, so I did.  I asked him if he thought I should make my retirement plans around the prospect of The Singularity.  Sadly he laughed, but at least he laughed heartily, and we moved on to talking about the works of Louis L’Amour.

Every family has its peculiar Christmas traditions.  My family’s holiday traditions are strongly influenced by a linguistic dispute back in A.D. 1054, one consequence of which is that we celebrate Christmas on January 7th, 13 days after almost everyone else we know does so.  This has its virtues and its vices.  One of the vices is that we clean up on holiday shopping, since we are afforded an extra 13 days to pick up last minute presents, which gets us well into the time zone of post-holiday sales.  Another is that we always wait until a period somewhere between December 23rd and December 26th to buy our Christmas tree.  We typically are able to pick up our trees for a song, and last year were even able to get a tall frosty spruce without even singing.

This history of vice has finally caught up with us, for this year, as we stalked forlornly through the suburbs of Atlanta, no Christmas trees were to be found.  Lacking foresight or preparation, we have found ourselves in the midst of a cut-tree shortage.  And what is a belated Christmas without a cut-tree shedding in the living room?

We are now in the position of pondering the unthinkable.  Should we purchase an artificial tree this year (currently fifty-percent off at Target)?  The thought fills us with a certain degree of inexplicable horror.  Perhaps this is owing to an uncanny wariness about the prospects of surrendering to technology, in some way.  While not tree-huggers, as such, we have a fondness for natural beauty, and there are few things so beautiful as a tree pruned over a year to produce the correct aesthetic form, then cut down, transported, and eventually deposited in one’s living room where it is affectionately adorned with trinkets and lighting.

Another potential source for the uneasiness my wife and I are experiencing is an association of these ersatz arboreals with memories of our childhoods in the late 70’s and early 80’s, which are festooned with cigarette smoke, various kinds of loaf for dinner, checkered suits, polyester shirts and, of course, artificial trees.  Is this the kind of life we want for our own children?

In the end, we have opted to get a three-foot, bright pink, pre-lit artificial tree.  Our thinking is that this tree will not offend so greatly if it knows its place and does not put forward pretensions of being real.

The linguistic ambiguity alluded to above has led to other traditions.  For instance, in Appalachia there are still people who cleave to the custom that on the midnight before January 6th, animals participate in a miracle in which they all hold concourse.  Briefly granted the opportunity to speak, all creatures great and small can be heard praying quietly and, one would imagine, discussing the events of the past year.  The significance of January 6th comes from the fact that the Church of England was late to adopt the Gregorian calendar, which changed the way leap years are calculated, and consequently so was America late.  Thus at the time that the Appalachian Mountains were first settled by English emigrants, the discrepancy between the Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar was about 12 days (the gap, as mentioned above, has grown to 13 days in recent years).  The mystery of the talking animals revolves around a holiday that was once celebrated on January 6th , but is celebrated no more — that is, Christmas.

According to this site, there is a similar tradition in Italy, itself.  On the day of the Epiphany, which commemorates the day the three magi brought gifts to the baby Jesus, the animals speak.

Italians believe that animals can talk on the night of Epiphany so owners feed them well. Fountains and rivers in Calabria run with olive oil and wine and everything turns briefly into something to eat: the walls into ricotta, the bedposts into sausages, and the sheets into lasagna.

The Epiphany is celebrated in Rome on January 6th of the Gregorian calendar.  It is possible, however, that even in Italy, older traditions have persisted under a different guise, and that the traditions of Old Christmas (as it is called in Appalachia) have simply refused to migrate 12 days back into December, and are now celebrated under a new name.  Such is the way that linguistic ambiguities give rise to ambiguities in custom, and ambiguities in custom give rise to anxiety over what to display in one’s living room, and when.

 

As translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, excerpted from Robert Graves’s The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth:

 

Discover what it is:

The strong creature from before the Flood

Without flesh, without bone,

Without vein, without blood,

Without head, without feet …

In field, in forest…

Without hand, without foot.

It is also as wide

As the surface of the earth,

And it was not born,

Nor was it seen …

 

[Answer: Ventus]

Why are gypsies commonly believed to be able to foretell the future?

This is the question that sets Pierce Moffett, the hero of John Crowley’s novel Aegypt, in search of the true origin of the Roma, and with it the true meaning of history.  In his novels about Moffett, Crowley unravels a world in which history not only can be broken into different periods (The Dark Ages, The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, et. al.), but in which the rules by which the world works shifts and ruptures between these eras. 

And there are in fact people who believe such things.  A friend once told me about a history professor of his who lectured on the prevalence of sightings of angels and spirits in Medieval and Renaissance literature, and questioned how so many people could believe such things.  His radical conclusion, which he believed irrefutable, was that such things must have once been real.

John Crowley himself is a skeptic on such matters, as people often are who play too much at pretending to believe.  At a certain point, one must choose either to cross the line into a possible madness, or draw back into a more definite epoche — a suspension of belief.

We, who have not stepped so deeply into these mysteries, are in a safer position to toy with possibilities, engaging in what Coleridge called the suspension of disbelief.  It is what allows us to understand and even share in Don Quixote’s delusions, without thereby succumbing to them ourselves.

When I lived in Prague a few years back, there were stories about a gypsy bar on the edge of the city where one could meet gypsy princes and sip absinthe, a concoction that is illegal in much of the developed world.  I never went of course, partly from a lack of courage, and partly out of a fear that confronting the thing itself would dispel for me the image I had already formed in my imagination of that magic place.

Over the years, I’ve privately enjoyed several fantasies about that bar.  In some of these, I drink the absinthe and am immediately transformed, through a sudden revelation, into a passionate artist who spends the rest of his life trying to paint something he cannot quite capture.  In others, I am accosted by a gypsy prince, and, defeating him in a bloody duel with knives, I leave with his gypsy bride.  In most, I simply am kidnapped by the gypsies while in the grips of an absinthe induced haze, and eventually learn their ways and join their tribe, traveling across Europe stealing from the rich and conning the gullible.

Such is my secret life, for what it is worth.  Inspired by this secret dream to be a gypsy, I have been listening to an album called Gypsy Groove, groove being the postpositional modifier that does in the 21st century what hooked-on did for us in the 20th.  The copywriting claims it is “a collection of Balkan beats, gypsy jams and other treats from the leaders of this vibrant music scene.”  I prefer the way my son (a natural poet, I believe) describes it: “it makes my ears sing and my butt dance.”  I am especially fond of the song Zsa Manca, by the Czech group !DelaDap.

According to Pierce Moffett, the gypsies are refugees from a time that no longer exists, from a country called, not Egypt, but rather its mythical homophone, Aegypt.  In order to explain this strange origin, Crowley builds a fictional story on top of a true story about how scholars in the Renaissance mistakenly projected the origins of certain texts, already ancient in their own time, to a pre-history even more ancient, and a provenance somewhere in the geographical Egypt.

If you don’t already know this story (either the false one or the real one), and you have the patience for it, here is John Crowley’s explanation of both, from Love & Sleep:

It was all true: there really had once been a country of wise priests whose magic worked, encoded in the picture-language of hieroglyphics.  That was what Pierce had learned in his recent researches.  It did lie far in the past, though not in the past of Egypt.  It had been constructed long after the actual Egypt had declined and been buried, its mouth stopped because its language could no longer be read.

And this magic Egypt really had been discovered or invented in Alexandria around the time of the Christianization of the Roman Empire, when a Greek-speaking theosophical cult had attributed some mystical writings of their own to ancient priests of an imaginary Egyptian past of temples and speaking statues, when the gods dwelt with men.   And then that imagined country really had disappeared again as those writings were lost in the course of the Christian centuries that followed.

And when they were rediscovered — during the Renaissance in Italy, along with an entire lost past — scholars believed them to be really as ancient as they purported to be.  And so a new Egypt, twice different from the original, had appeared: ancient source of knowledge, older than Moses, inspiring a wild syncretism of sun-worship, obelisks, pseudo-hieroglyphs, magic and semi-Christian mysticism, which may have powered that knowledge revolution called science, the same science that would eventually discredit imaginary Egypt and its magic.

And yet even when the real Egypt had come to light again, the tombs broken open and the language read, the other country had persisted, though becoming only a story, a story Pierce had come upon in his boyhood and later forgot, the country he had rediscovered in the City in the days of the great Parade, when he had set out to learn the hidden history of the universe: the story he was still inside of, it seemed, inescapably.

Aegypt.

Just this year, John Crowley finally published the fourth book in his Aegypt Quartet, bringing the series to a close.  It is called Endless Sleep.

 

A city seems like an awfully big thing to lose, and yet this occurs from time to time.  Some people search for cities that simply do not exist, like Shangri-la and El Dorado.  Some lost cities are transformed through legend and art into something else, so that the historical location is something different from the place we long to see.  Such is the case with places like Xanadu and Arcadia.  Camelot and Atlantis, on the other hand, fall somewhere in between, due to their tenuous connection to any sort of physical reality.  Our main evidence that a place called Atlantis ever existed, and later fell into the sea, comes from Plato’s account in the Timaeus, yet even at the time Plato wrote this, it already had a legendary quality about it. 

….[A]nd there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia … But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune … the island of Atlantis … disappeared in the depths of the sea.

— Timaeus

Camelot and Avalon, for reasons I don’t particularly understand, are alternately identified with Glastonbury, though there are also nay-sayers, of course.  Then there are cities like Troy, Carthage and Petra, which may have been legend but which we now know to have been real, if only because we have rediscovered them.  The locations of these cities became forgotten over time because of wars and mass migrations, sand storms and decay.  They were lost, as it were, through carelessness.

But is it possible to lose a city on purpose?  The lost city of Alesia was the site of Vercingetorix’s defeat at the hands of Julius Ceasar, which marked the end of Gallic Wars.  The failure of the Roman Senate to grant Caesar a triumph to honor his victory led to his decision to initiate the Roman Civil War, leading in turn to the end of the Republic and his own reign of power, which only later came to an abrupt end when he was assassinated by, among others, Brutus, his friend and one of his lieutenants at the Battle of Alesia.  Having achieved mastery of Rome in 46 BCE, Caesar finally was able to throw himself the triumph he wanted, which culminated with Vercingetorix — the legendary folk hero of the French nation, the symbol of defiance against one’s oppressors and an inspiration to freedom fighters everywhere –being strangled.

Meanwhile, back in Gaul, Alesia was forgotten, and eventually became a lost city.  It is as if the trauma of such a defeat, in which all the major Gallic tribes were defeated at one blow and brought to their knees, incited the Gauls to erase their past and make the site of their humiliation as if it had never been.  Ironically, when I went to the Internet Classics Archive to find Caesar’s description of this lost city, I found the chapters which cover Caesar’s siege of Alesia to be completely missing.  The online text ends Book Seven of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic and Civil Wars just before the action commences, and begins Book Eight just after the Gauls are subdued, while the intervening thirty chapters appear to have simply disappeared into the virtual ether.

In the 19th century, the French government commissioned archaeologists to rediscover Alesia, and they eventually selected a site near Dijon, today called Alise-Sainte-Reine, as the likely location.  The only problem with the site is that it does not match Caesars description of Alesia, and Caesar’s writings about Alesia is the main source for everything we know about the city and the battle.

I have rooted around in my basement in order to dig up an unredacted copy of Caesar’s Commentaries, containing everything we remember about the lost city of Alesia:

The town itself was situated on the top of a hill, in a very lofty position, so that it did not appear likely to be taken, except by a regular siege. Two rivers, on two different sides, washed the foot of the hill. Before the town lay a plain of about three miles in length; on every other side hills at a moderate distance, and of an equal degree of height, surrounded the town. The army of the Gauls had filled all the space under the wall, comprising a part of the hill which looked to the rising sun, and had drawn in front a trench and a stone wall six feet high. The circuit of that fortification, which was commenced by the Romans, comprised eleven miles. The camp was pitched in a strong position, and twenty-three redoubts were raised in it, in which sentinels were placed by day, lest any sally should be made suddenly; and by night the same were occupied by watches and strong guards.

— Commentaries, Book VII, Chapter 69

“The past is a foreign country,” as Leslie Poles Hartley pointed out, but they don’t always do things differently there.  It is a peculiar feeling, especially to one who views history through the dual prisms of Heidegger and Foucault, to find the distant past thoroughly familiar.  Such is my experience in reading Elizabethan poet John Cleveland’s Marc Antony, in which the refrain is both trite and profound, and perhaps only matched in this characteristic by Eliot’s refrain from The Lovesong of J. Alfred Proofrock, as well as a few of the better tracks off of Bob Dylan’s Desire.

Concerning history, Pascal wrote “Le nez de Cléopatre: s’il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé.”  Numistmatics have recently begun to challenge this precept, however, with the discovery of less flattering profiles of the Egyptian queen.  Earlier this year, academics at the University of Newcastle announced that by studying an ancient denarius, they arrived at the conclusion that the Queen of the Nile was rather thin-lipped and hook-nosed.  Looking at pictures of the denarius in question, however, one cannot help but feel that perhaps the coin itself has undergone a bit of distortion over the years.

Given that history distorts, it seems peculiar that we would place so much faith in the clarity of twenty-twenty hindsight.  Perhaps this is intended as a contrast with the propensity to error that befalls us when we attempt proclamations of foresight.  Yet even the clarity of hindsight regarding recent events is often, in turn, contrasted with the objectivity achieved when we put a few hundred years between ourselves and the events we wish to put under the investigative eye.  Is there an appropriate period of time after which we can say that clarity has been achieved, shortly before that counter-current of historical distortion takes over and befuddles the mind, like the last beer too many at the end of a long night?

Looking back is often a reflexive act that allows us to regret, and thus put away, our past choices.  Usually, as Tolstoy opines in his excursis to War and Peace, distance provides a viewpoint that demonstrates the insignificance of individual actions, and the illusory nature of choice.  It is only in the moment that Napolean appears to guide his armies over the battlefield to certain victory.  With the cool eye of recollection, he is seen to be a man merely standing amid the smoke of battle giving instructions that may or may not reach their destinations, while the battle itself is simply the aggregation of tens of thousands of individual struggles.

And yet, in the cross-currents of history looking forward and historians looking backward, one occassionally finds eddies in which the hand of history casts our collective fates with only a handful of lots.  Such an eddy occurred in late 2000, and, in retrospect, it changed the face of the world.  With an oracular — and possibly slightly tipsy — pen, the late Auberon Waugh was there to capture the moment for posterity: